Overview
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.
Getting Started
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 might want to read the Advanced Crafting section too - but do remember to use this guide sparingly; half the fun is in figuring it out yourself.
So, what do you need to get started with crafting in Ryzom?
Stanzas and Plans
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:
- Armour crafting - including shield crafting at lvl 51+.
- Melee Weapon crafting - believe it or not, this includes magic amplifiers.
- Jewel crafting
- Range crafting - this is for crafting guns and ammo, and is not available on Silan.
In addition, there is one less obvious crafting type:
- Tool crafting - You cannot craft normal tools with tool crafting. Tool crafting is used to make special tools, as explained in Special Tools & Boosted Crafting. It is recommended that you don't buy tool crafting until you have the material to make a special tool in your hand - before that, it is a waste of skill points.
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.
Tools
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.
Materials
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!
Which materials?
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.
Where do I get materials?
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.
Important Things to Remember...
DO NOT craft in heavy or medium armour. Both of these increase your malus, which greatly increases the chances of the quality of your craft degrading.
If your items are coming out a lower quality than expected, but you're not getting degrades (partial failures); make sure you haven't used materials of a lower quality than you're trying to craft.
Crafting wears out equipment quite quickly. If you'd prefer to keep your gear in working order for as long as possible, craft nekkid. It's the Atysian way. ;)
The Crafting Window
The crafting window is reasonably intuitive, but just in case all those funky boxes confuse you, here's an outline of how it all works. With a crafting tool in hand, use a crafting action, and you'll see something like this - this is the crafting window of an armour crafter, but the differences are small:
- The Plan List: When you first open your crafting window, it will be blank. Use the plan list to select the crafting plan you're using, and thus enable the crafting options.
- The Success Rate: This is the probability of your successfully crafting the item, without its quality degrading. The success rate will be high if your crafting lvl is equal to or above the quality you are crafting, and lower if your lvl is lower than the item quality. Using higher grade materials (i.e. Excellent and Supreme materials) will also lower the success rate (See Material Grade).
- Material Selection: Clicking on any empty material box will give you a list of all the materials you have which are suitable for use in that material slot. This will include any materials in your bag, as well as materials on your pack animals if they are close by; it will not however allow you to craft directly from your apartment's storage.
- Mix'n'Match: You can use more than one type of material in a material slot - add your first material, then click it to choose how many of that material you want to use. If there is any room left in that material slot, another blank box will appear for you to select your second (and third, and fourth, and...) material.
- The Stats Preview (Precraft): This gives you a preview of the stats your item will have once crafted. There are two important things to remember about the precraft: it can be off by a tiny amount - decimal rounding, but sometimes enough to make or break a recipe; and the stats don't always start at 0. Take, for example, a medium armour vest: the highest parry modifier it can have is +1, so surely 100% in precraft = +1 parry, and 0% in precraft = 0 parry, right? No! The maximum parry for medium armour is +1, but the minimum is -1; so 0% in precraft will give you -1, not 0, parry. Somewhere between 0 and 100% are the magic numbers for 0 and +1 parry - have fun finding them. ;)
Advanced Crafting
This section won't explain all you could ever need to know about truly advanced crafting - learning all that can take years, and it's far too much info to be written down. It will, however, give you the bits of information that aren't so obvious, but are essential to becoming a competent crafter.
Stanzas and Plans
The basic functions of stanzas and plans are fairly simple to grasp, but there are a few FUNKY LLAMAS IN DA HOUSE!
Racial Crafting
You probably noticed that the crafting action you had when you started out on Silan was called <race> Armour Crafting 1, and that when you crafted using it all your crafts had the same background colour, although gear with different background colours on the icon was available. The colour denotes the race of the item (green for Matis works, orange for Fyros, purple for Zoraï, blue for Tryker); however, the race of the item is not dependent on the race of the homin who crafted it. Trykers can craft Fyros gear, Matisians can craft Zoraï gear, etc - all you need is the appropriate stanzas and plans, both of which can be bought from any Crafter Trainer on that race's home continent.
The most obvious difference between the crafting plans of different races is that they look different - you can see the different styles of armour, for example, in Ballistic Mystix' Dressing Room. However, there is a generally much more important distinction: racial materials (that is, all materials of grade Choice or higher) can only be used in their own race's crafting plans. This is why Silanites are advised to go to their own homeland upon leaving Silan - if you are, say, a Matis living in the Fyros desert; you won't be able to use any medium or high grade fyros materials for your crafting without spending a load of valuable skill points on getting fyros crafting stanzas and plans. This isn't the end of the world, as you can earn enough skill points eventually to buy every action or ability - but it does slow you down.
The exception to this rule is materials from the Prime Roots, which can always be used in crafting plans of any race.
Special Plans
All crafting types except armour crafting have special crafting plans, of two varieties.
The first type of special plan is racial specials; these are available at normal crafting trainers, and when used create items with special effects - the picture to the right shows a Zoraï Electric Kanka Mace and Kastu Buckler. These are prized because they look bloody awesome, but in practical terms are no different from any HQ plan (plans are available in three varieties - basic quality, medium quality, and high quality).
The second type of special plan is the OP plan. These plans require a piece of rare outpost material to craft, and have particular bonuses - OP plan weapons crafted using vedice, for example, have a certain percentage chance of healing the wielder during a fight. There is a different plan not only for each OP material, but also for modified OP material (drilled by an outpost with a karavan drill), and purified OP material (drilled by an outpost with a kami drill); and an OP plan can use any combination of materials of any race in its crafting. OP plan items will always have the name of the material and the faction from whence it came in their names, for example "Supreme Cheng-Duk Magic Amplifier". These plans, especially at quality 250, are often used to craft PvP gear; which may or may not be actually used for gleeful suicide runs into lairs full of giant, angry insects.
Overcrafting
Overcrafting is a simple idea, which can be very lucrative. Crafting at a quality more than 10 above your crafting lvl is considered overcrafting. Consider this situation: you've reached lvl 150 in your light armour crafting, and now you want to do some work on heavy armour crafting, which is at lvl 101. However, light and heavy armour crafting both use the armour crafting action - and you have your armour crafting action up to 16 because of your work on light armour. This means you can use your lvl 101 heavy armour crafting skill to craft quality 160 items - you'll get a load of failures and partial failures; but overcrafting can get you 10,000, even 14,000 xp per action. See the dappers floating past your eyes yet?
Bonuses
One very useful attribute of player crafted gear is the ability for crafters to add bonuses to the item - that is, to craft an item which, when equipped, will increase the homin's maximum HP, sap, stamina, or focus. This is incredibly useful - quality 250 gear can have bonuses on it of up to 125 in any given stat; which means a five piece set of light armour can, in total, boost your HP by 625 - imagine how useful 600 extra HP could be in a fight! Jewel and LA sets with focus boost are also used for digging, as they allow the wearer to spend more focus per source, and therefore harvest more materials of a higher quality - it may not seem like it when you're a newbie, but after about lvl 100 you will constantly wish you had more focus for digging.
Bonuses must first be bought, as stanzas, from a Crafter Trainer; once you've bought the bonus, simply edit your crafting action and add the bonus stanza, and all items crafted with that action will have the bonus. Do be aware, however, that using bonuses in crafting costs focus.
Special Tools & Boosted Crafting
One of the types of item which can be crafted using an OP plan and materials produced by an outpost is tools - this is what the Tool Crafting action is for. Crafting tools can be made either of Armilo or Rubbarn; the former gives a small chance of boosting the bonuses on the final crafted item (in addition to any bonuses the crafter has used), and the latter may boost the stats of the item. The frequency of boosts, and in the case of armilo the stat which will be boosted, is impossible to predict; rubbarn boosted gear in particular is in very high demand, and crafters often expend huge amounts of materials on crafting an item tens of times over, just in order to get one boosted item.
Armilo and rubbarn tools should only be used for crafting items for other players; using them on throwaway crafting just for xp is a hanging offence.