Crafting Guide

There are several different crafts, each of which is governed by its own skill in the trade category.  Most are guildskills, which means that they can only be trained beyond rank 36 by being taught (via the teach command) or by being a member of the Merchants Guild. These guildskills include:

  • Blacksmithing makes things out of metal, such as armor and weapons. It uses the blacksmith command.
  • Chandlery makes candles, soaps, and perfumes. It uses wax and herbal concoctions, and the command is also chandlery.
  • Jeweling is the skill behind making both metal and glass jewelry. It uses the jewel command.
  • Leatherworking makes things like armor and clothing out of leather. It uses the leather command.
  • Tailoring produces fabric and clothing, using the tailor command.
  • Woodworking works with wood to an assortment of items like furniture, wooden weapons and instruments. It makes use of the woodwork command.

There are three more trades, cooking and brewing, that are not guildskills and can be trained to higher ranks by anyone:

  • Cooking makes food items, coffee, and tea.  It uses the cook command.
  • Brewing makes alcoholic beverages, such as wine, beer, and mead.  It uses the brew command.
  • Herbalism focuses on creating plant and herbal essences, as well as caring for plants. It uses the concoct command.
  • Artwork makes items like ledgers, packaging boxes, sketches and paintings. It uses the artwork command.

Medicine is an outlier in the world of crafting, being a minor craft with a limited number of recipes. Medicine is a Physician guildskill.

  • Medicine is a minor “crafting” skill that allows Physicians to prepare medicines, tinctures, and more.  It makes use of the medicine command.

Tools

Most crafts require the availability of tools. If you try to craft without the necessary tools, a message will display informing you what you’re missing. Tools may be portable or permanent. An example of a portable tool might be a blacksmithing hammer, while an example of a permanent tool might be a hearth.

The Merchants Guild has all of the necessary equipment in its guildhall, and you can buy tools for personal use. The University has similar public crafting rooms.

Materials

Each crafting recipe requires materials to make. Most crafts have several different materials which they can use, and each has a different difficulty. Better materials are generally more expensive and take more skill.

To determine what materials a craft can use, you can type the craft’s command on its own. It will list all of the different possibilities with the easier materials listed first. For example, if you type jewel, it will display a list of recipes you can make with the Jeweling skill.

Some equipment and materials you can get through the use of other skills, like a basket press from woodworking for brewing or a needle for tailoring from jeweling. However, you can get all materials from shops in game. You can find cloth and leather at Seamstress’ Delight, metals at the Gailiech Outpost, jewels at Daylin’s Gemstones, paper pulp at the Bookstore on King’s Concourse, wax at the Candle Shop, and wood at the Carpenter’s Shop. Type help business for a list of shops you can visit to look for materials, and look under the TYPE header for what the shop generally sells.

Crafted Items

To determine what items you can craft, you can type the craft’s command by itself. For the updated crafting skills, the command will show you a list of recipes that you can create. The help file for that craft will show you, in detail, what the commands are and how to use the system.

If a recipe doesn’t show up on this list, then you don’t have the skill to make it yet. If you are trying to see all of what jewelers can make at any skill, you could type jewel -all.

To see which materials are needed to craft a specific recipe, you would type jewel show vnum#. Using the jeweling example, if you wanted to see the materials for the Bronze Ring, you would enter jewel show 1010. Alternatively you can use keywords instead of vnum, but as you acquire more recipes it may be harder to pinpoint a specific recipe without the vnum.

Customization

Customization is done through the tool command (help tool). You can change the keywords that are used to reference an item, and set its short and long descriptions, as well as add any extra descriptions.

You can check the Customization Guide for further details on how to customize items.

Especially when crafting, you need to make sure that the way in which you customize items makes sense for the qualities that the item has. You shouldn’t describe an item as a hat when it’s actually a shoe, and you shouldn’t describe a wool item as silk.

Once you are done customizing an item, you then use the finalize command to make it usable (finish <keyword>). You can also use finalize all to finish all the items you are holding at once.

The Merchants Guild

Crafting is really the bailiwick of the Merchant’s Guild. As noted above, most crafting skills are merchant guildskills, which means that if you aren’t a member of the merchant’s guild, you need help to learn the first rank outside of chargen, or to learn past rank 36. The Merchant’s Guild also has control over selling crafted items. If you aren’t a guilded merchant, you either shouldn’t sell or trade the items you craft, or you should get a license from the merchants.

That said, you don’t have to be a merchant to do any crafting, but it makes sense if you want to be a professional crafter. If you don’t want to be, it can still be fun to make things for yourself or gifts for friends.

The Merchant’s Guild does have a couple of special features for crafters. One of these is the trademark, which is a bit of text you can put on the items you craft to easily mark them as your make. Merchants can also retool items cheaply, to represent the ability to make small adjustments, or contacts to custom order things in.