Topic: How crafting works
This is a small description of the crafting system for those of you who don't want to do it yourself, but want to be useful by providing the crafters with materials. The system seems complicated at first, but it's easy once you've got the hang of it. That's pretty much game mechanics, so I'm not going to write it IC.
First of all, every material in the game (With a few exceptions) can be used as two components. For example, you can use fiber for clothing or gripping material in weapons. They also have a variety of stats that affect the stats of the finished item, a grade defining these stats (A fine material has higher stats than a basic one, but lower than a choice one) and a color.
To craft an item, you need all the components - for example, a light vest requires 3 "clothes" components, 3 "linings", 1 "stuffing" and 1 "armour clip".
When you craft an item, it has the stats of the materials (I.e if you used materials with a high protection factor but low durability to craft armour, it will have a high protection factor but few hitpoints), altered by the quality (I've noticed it affects absorption of the armour a lot). Note that you can't tell the exact stats of an item until you craft it - you know if it'll be high or low, but not more.
As far as I know (Although I'm not sure), every component has an equal effect on the item - in the example of the vest above, every component offers 1/8 of the stats, so all of them are equally important.
The quality of the item is capped by the lowest quality of the material used and the crafter's stanza. Even if one material out of 20 used is Q20, the resulting item will be Q20, no matter the rest of the materials are Q250. Same goes for the stanza: if the crafter can't make items above Q130, even if all the materials are Q200, the item will be Q130.
Higher grade items (Choice and up) always belong to an ecosystem and can only be used for items of "their" race. Lake materials for Tryker items, Forest for Matis and so on. Prime Roots materials can be used in any item.
The colour of the item (Only armours have colours) is defined by the majority of materials. Not sure how equal numbers behave though.
Also, items have requirements based off their quality and can have life, sap, stamina and focus bonuses based on their quality. Basically, the bonus the crafter can add is +5 points per 10 levels of quality. Note that these don't work so good if the crafted item's quality is not divided by 10 - so a Q50 item can have better bonuses than a Q59 one.
There are "medium quality" and "high quality" items available at higher levels: they require a bit more materials, tend to have higher stats then their simpler counterparts and look better. Aside from the higher material cost and the skillpoints spent, they don't have any drawbacks.
Hope that covers it. If I missed something or explained it not clear enough, feel free to correct me or ask about it.
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