Item Crafting Guide

Item Crafting 101

This is a simple guide to follow for all aspiring crafters. The point of this guide is to help others understand the difference between devices and artifacts, how to plan out an item, the prerequisite abilites to create items, and how to price your items after you create them.

The Two Types of Craftable Items

Artifacts

Artifacts are expensive types of items that a character can construct. The reason for this is anyone may use an artifact, and an artifact's abilities are based on the Potential Level of the character that created it.

Example: Vor crafts a wand artifact that fires a blast of flame at an enemy that can do 50% of his Potential Level in fire damage and moves at 100% of his Potential level in speed.  Vor's PL when he crafts this item is 5,000. Vor gives this item to a new potential buddy of his, Mike, who is relatively weak, with only 500 PL.  Mike gets in trouble and waves the wand Vor gave him, releasing the fireball.  This fireball will do 2,500 damage to whatever it hits, and moves at a speed of 5,000 (5,000 x 0.5 / 5,000 x 1), rather than 250 damage at 500 speed.

Obviously, this gives Mike a huge advantage for a long time. For this reason, in order to make an artifact, it always costs the full price of the original ability to make a new one. More than likely, until your character gets a few tiers under their belt (tier 3 or 4), they probably won't be looking at making this type of item.

Devices

Devices tend to be less expensive than their artifact counterparts. The reason for this is there are many automatic limitations on whom may use a device, and how that device is used. The first, most important thing to remember is that a device may only be used by one potential category (Technic/Perfector/Summoner). If your character is a Technic crafter, only other Technics can use their devices. On top of that, if your character's category is the same as the user, but the Motifs aren't very similar, they take a 1 tier penalty when using it! You might think that makes these items all but useless, but with some clever tricks, some use may still be found in them.

Example: Vor makes a frost grenade.  Since it's a thrown weapon it can be delivered by the user throwing it.  Since throwing isn't part of the function of the device, the speed of throwing the grenade isn't affected by any tier penalty.  The ability of the grenade is that if its explosion hits its target, it lowers the speed of that person by the amount of energy put into it.  So, Vor gives Abe (PL 5,000, Tier 4) the frost grenade.  Abe tosses it at a bad guy @ 2500 speed (5,000 x 0.5), but can only put 1,750 points of energy into it.  Why? Because Abe's Motif is too different from Vor's. That reduces his effective PL with the grenade to the maximum PL of one tier lower (Tier 3, PL 3,500). His 50% energy generation at 3,500 PL would be 1,750 points.

In that example, the grenade isn't as strong as if Abe had the ability to slow like that himself, but maybe that isn't Abe's thing. Also, it's likely he bought that grenade for much cheaper than he would have paid to develop his own ability to do so. There are other ways to make devices useful, even to those that might not share your Motif. I hope you explore them.