In Ryzom, crafting is a fascinatingly complex system, with many little oddities and facets of interest for those willing to be constantly baffled in the name of science. Player-crafted equipment is, without doubt, the best equipment available ingame - equipment sold on the vendors by NPCs, and even Bandit Lord loot equipment, pale in comparison. As such, crafting is central to Ryzom; no warrior or mage can get by without a good player crafted weapon or set of amps; and materials used in crafting are the main currency of the Ryzom economy. Large guild battles are fought in the most perilous corners of Atys, for the privilege of having first pickings of the most valuable crafting materials.
Crafting in Ryzom is very different from crafting in most other games, so for many new players it entails a steep learning curve; there is much, much more to crafting than having the levels to craft high quality gear. Someone who has maxed their crafting tree can easily still be a shit crafter. However, the rewards are well worth the effort.
It is recommended that, in addition to reading this guide, new players do the tutorial missions for Sterga Hamla on Silan; as these provide an excellent hands-on crash course regarding the basics of crafting.
As crafting in Ryzom is so complex, the first section of this article addresses only the very basics. Once you've got a good grasp on these, you'll want to read the Advanced Crafting section too.
So, what do you need to get started with crafting in Ryzom?
Before you can craft anything, you need both a stanza for the type of crafting you want to do, and a plan for the particular item you wish to craft. Both of these can be bought from a Crafter Trainer.
There are four main crafting types, each of which is accompanied by a stanza set:
In addition, there are two less obvious crafting types:
For each crafting type, with the exception of tool crafting, there are 25 stanzas. Each different stanza allows you to craft at a different quality level - armour crafting 1 will allow you to craft armour of quality 10, whereas armour crafting 25 will allow you to craft armour of quality 250. The highest quality stanza you can buy is your level in that type of crafting + 10; so if you have a jewel crafting skill of lvl 60, then you can buy a quality 70 jewel crafting stanza, i.e. jewel crafting 7. When you start out in Atys, you will already have the armour crafting 1 stanza; you can buy others at any point from a Crafting Trainer.
Once you have your stanzas for the type of crafting you need, you'll also need a plan for the particular item. So, to craft a two handed sword of quality 20; you will need a weapon crafting 2 stanza, and a two handed sword crafting plan. These can also be bought at the Crafter Trainer.
The crafting plan, in RP terms, tells you two things - what crafting part materials you need, and how many of them you need. You can access all your plans for a particular crafting type through the crafting window you'll see when you use your crafting action.
The next thing you'll need for crafting is a crafting tool. These can be bought from a Tool Merchant; there is one in every city, and one in the Ranger Camp on Silan. Tools are fairly cheap, at around 1000 dappers each; and while they do wear out and eventually break, it takes quite a while for that to happen. Make sure you buy the correct tool for what you're crafting - it's pretty intuitive, really, as they're called imaginative names such as "Jewel Crafting Tool" and "Melee Weapon Crafting Tool".
To start out with, you'll just want the bog standard quality 1 tools. There are some other types of crafting tool, as explained in Special Tools & Boosted Crafting; but those aren't needed for normal, or experimental, crafting.
And of course the most important requirement for crafting: crafting materials. Materials are almost solely responsible for determining the characteristics of your crafted item, so pay attention!
Taking the simplest view possible, the materials you need are the materials your plan uses. If you select your plan in the crafting window (see The Crafting Window if you can't find it), you'll see that, above the empty boxes on the left, are several crafting part names. Let's say you're making light armour - the crafting window will tell you that you need Clothes, Lining, Stuffing, and Armour Clip.
However, these four are not names of specific materials - they are categories of materials. Lining materials, for example, include resin, animal teeth, and plant moss. You can use any combination of those three in the Lining box, but no other materials. You can check to see what crafting part categories a material belongs to by right-clicking it in your inventory or the vendor window and hitting Info - this will also show you what stats that particular material will give in crafting. If you're stuck trying to find a particular crafting part, try this handy Crafting Part Table - but beware of spoileriness!
There is more to selecting materials than that - after all, you want to use materials that will give your crafted item good stats, don't you? - but this is just the bare bones. Go and experiment with different materials and their stats.
There are two main sources for materials. The first, and most common, is to dig them. For more info on digging, see the Harvesting guide.
The second is looting. Although at higher levels killing and looting animals rarely yields enough materials for your needs (and they never drop what you want, of course), it is a useful source of material income at lower levels. In addition, the materials dropped by bosses and mini-bosses often have very good stats, and are in high demand for crafting.
You can also buy materials from the vendor; however these are usually very expensive, so most crafters only buy materials when they're desperate (or feeling desperately lazy). If you choose to buy materials from the vendor, beware - some diggers use the vendors to store their materials by selling them at a ridiculously high price, assuming no-one will buy them at such an extortionate value, and then removing them from the vendor when they need them. If you don't double-check the price before you buy materials, you could end up paying several million dappers for four or five pieces! If you do this by accident, you can try to contact the seller to see if they'd be willing to reverse the sale - make sure to note down exactly how much you paid, since they probably won't have a record of it.