SWG crafting guide. - EverCrest Message Forums

Author

Topic: SWG crafting guide.

Khyron

Hello, my mushy friend...

posted 02-18-2004 01:45:08 AM

Okay, so people have been asking me in-game for some help, and crafting, it seems, is one of the tougher subjects for me to explain in /tells. So, I'm writing up a guide for it here.

Part 1 : Resources

Resources are the first important step in crafting. You need resources to craft.

There are two kinds of resources :

Creature Resources are harvested from creatures. These are the hides, bones, and meat of creatures. These are harvested from dead creatures by scouts.

Natural Resources are obtained via sampling or harvesting the land. These include : Wind/Solar power, Flora (Plants, wheats, etc), Minerals, Chemicals, Natural Gasses, and Water. Artisans can survey the area for these resources.

Obtaining resources as a scout is easy. Go fight a flying enemy to get avian meat / avian bones. Go fight a herbivore for herbivore meat. Fight a rabbit or an antelope for wooly hides, or fight a lion for carnivore meat.

Obtaining resources as an Artisan, is where it gets tricky. They have 2 methods of getting resources. First, they use a survey tool. The tool shows them the concentration of a resource in their area. They use the tool, move to the highest concentration, use it again, move to the highest again, etc, until they find a great spot. Then they have 2 choices. SAMPLING is manually getting resources. It uses up your action bar, and it takes forever. But it's free.

The alternative, is to find a good high concentration that is not in town, and place a harvester there. Harvesters are buildings that sit in one spot and mine minerals in huge quantities for you. They range from flora farms, to wind generators, to mineral extractors, to natural gas processors, to moisture evaporators (like luke's uncle owen owned and ran).

To use a harvester, however, you first need to get POWER. You do this by surveying for a spot with high wind currents, and putting down a wind harvester (generator). Give it some money, turn it on, wait a day or two, and out comes some wind power. Solar generators work the same way.

Once you have power, let's say you're getting iron. You plop down a mineral harvester, give it the power, give it some money for maintenance, pick the iron mineral, and turn it on. Come back in a while, and pick up your iron. Easy, no?

Bigger harvesters mine the stuff faster, but cost more power and money to maintain. They need to be built by architects. The smallest kind, personal extractors, are built by artisans.

Now, there are TONS of resource types, so it can be confusing. There's a heirarchal (sp?) classification system for it :

Gasses, Minerals, Chemicals, and Water are 'inorganics'.
Flora, Hides, Bones, and Meat are 'organic'.

Then the classification system is broken down a bit further.

Minerals is the 'broad' category.

It's then narrowed down into ORE, METALS, GEMSTONES, and RADIOACTIVES.

Then, for Metals (As an example), it's narrowed down further, into 'FERROUS METALS' and 'NON FERROUS METALS'.

Then, it gets narrowed down FURTHER. Iron and Steel for Ferrous metals, Copper and Aluminum for non-ferrous.

Then it gets narrowed down FURTHER, with different kinds of iron (Dolovite Iron, or whatever) and different kinds of metals (Link-Steel Aluminum).

This is the tricky part, because some recipes will require a 'mineral', where anything will work... some recipes will require a gemstone, so you can't use metals... some recipes call for 1300 units of Ferrous metal, and 6400 units of non-ferrous metal, so you can't JUST use aluminum... etc.

Also, all resources have STATS. Different resources, have different stats.

EVERY resource has an 'Overall Quality' stat. The higher it is, the better the resource.

FOODS (Flora, Meats) have 'Flavor', 'Potential Energy', and 'Decay Resistance', in addition to OQ. Flavor is an important stat for chefs for their food. Higher flavor means better food.

METALS have all sorts of stats, like heat resistance, malleability, cold resistance, shock resistance, etc. Since Metals are used for many things, including weapons and armor, different stats have different values. Malleability make your armor more durable, heat resistance is used when making flamethrowers so the thing doesn't explode in your hands, etc.

Stats always range from 0-1000, with 1000 being RARE. If you find a resource with over 900 in several stats, chances are that resource will be worth a lot, so stock up.

The final note in resources : they shift. Every so often, the resources will change. High concentrations of iron are eradicated, replaced with medium concentrations of aluminum. Some resources vanish, some new ones come into existence. This way, Crafters are always on the go, finding new spots for their harvesters, finding new resources with new stats, crafting better or worse items depending on what's in the economy, and what they have stored up.

Part 2 : Crafting

Okay, so let's assume we have a buncha resources stocked up. Time to craft.

We're going to make a CDEF rifle. These usually have stats at around 15-50 damage, and 3.5 speed.

To make one, we need 12 metal, 6 chemical, and 3 more metal.

The schematic says that the two stats that matter the most are Conductivity 50%, and Overall Quality 50%.

We have two metals :

Iron with 700 Overall quality and 200 Conductivity, and Steel with 700 overall quality and 700 Conductivity. We make two rifles, one with Iron, one with Steel.

The rifle made from iron, has 13-49 damage with a 3.7 speed.
The rifle made from steel has 25-70 damage with a 3.2 speed.

So the better resource nets us a better rifle, in the end.

However, there's one more important feature : EXPERIMENTATION.

Take the steel-made rifle. 25-70 damage, 3.2 speed.

We go out and buy a Weapons Crafting Kit. We run over to the Weapons Crafting station in the town. When we craft the rifle, we get a new option : Experimentation. When we go into it, we see we have 2 points, and 3 areas.

Experimental Durability,
Experimental Efficiency,
Experimental Range.

So, we put a point into durability, and a point into efficiency. On the right it says we have a 20% chance of failing. We hit 'experiment', and it says the experiment was a success. Now the rifle is 30-75 damage, 3.1 speed.

However, we try the same thing with the iron made rifle. The experiment was a BIG failure, and its stats have actually LOWERED. Now it's just a 10-45 damage, 3.7 speed rifle.

Experimentation can greatly improve your weapons and items. You get more points, and get more successful experiments, when you gain levels.

So a novice Artisan can use 2 experiment points to improve that rifle.

A MASTER artisan can use 10 experiment points. If we level to master, and craft that same CDEF rifle, now we may be able to make it a 50-100 damage, 2.5 speed damage through experimenting. Or we might botch the job and make crap.

When you make an item, after you experiment and whatnot, you can also make a SCHEMATIC. Let's say you do a FANTASTIC job experimenting that rifle. Now it's a 55 - 110 damage rifle, with only 2.0 speed. You want to make more, but you don't want to risk failing your experiments. What you can do, is after experimenting, it'll ask if you want to make a SCHEMATIC. If you make a schematic, you can then go buy a factory from an artisan, dump in a load of raw materials, put in the schematic, and the factory will manufacture a big crate of those. Now you have 25 of those great guns instead of 1.

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And that, my friends, is crafting. I've even SIMPLIFIED the process for you all. If you're like me, you probably started reading through it, got a brain cramp, and decided 'Okay, fuck all that, I'm just going to grab a blaster and shoot shit'.

Khrynn - Mage, Goon Squad, Mal'Ganis