Basic Training: Crafting Guide

While there are a few other crafting guides out there for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, I didn’t feel that any of them answered all of my questions. So, I’ll attempt to do that for you here. If I’m missing anything, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or , and I’ll see if I can’t find an answer and add it in.

Firstly, there are two types of crafting skills. Gathering skills are just that. You gather stuff. Appropriately named, eh? Production skills are almost as blatantly obvious. You produce stuff. Right. Moving on. (The rest of this guide IS more informative, I swear.)

Here’s an outline of the crafting skills that are in the game so far:

• Gathering
  • Butchering
  • Cultivating
  • Magical Salvaging
  • Scavenging
• Production
  • Apothecary
  • Talisman Making

There are trainers for all of these in each of the Chapter 2 cities, for each race or army. Now, to break them down and give a description of each.

GATHERING

Butchering

Butchering allows you to butcher the corpses of animals and beasts to extract useful parts of their bodies. These parts will then be used in other crafting skills. So far, butchering seems to be giving Apothecary items.

It’s usage is simple. Kill a creature, loot it, and flies will appear around the corpse. Your icon will become a butcher’s axe. Right click on the corpse to butcher it and loot the item like you would anything else. Keep an eye out for other corpses with flies as you’re wandering about. Even though the creature may not have been your kill, whoever did kill it only has a certain amount of time for that corpse to remain “theirs” to butcher. After that time elapses, it becomes open to all before disappearing entirely. This also means that some random person can’t stand behind you waiting for you to kill stuff and then run up and butcher it before you get the chance (as happened in WoW with skinning sometimes).

Cultivating

cultivating window

Cultivating allows you plant a seed and grow it into a plant. Yes, that’s right. You too can be a WAR farmer! Who wants to RvR when you can grow flowers?! Alright, I’m only overdoing it a little because cultivating is a bit tedious. It’s extremely easy, but a bit more time consuming than I’d like. That being said, there are apparently several cultivating addons now available that surely make it more enjoyable. Cultivating is very useful for the Apothecary trade.

To use it, press “v” to bring up your abilities window, then click on the general tab. Drag the Cultivating icon into your bars for easier access if you so choose. Open the cultivating window by clicking on the icon. You will see four plots. You start out with access to only one, but you will gain access to the others as your skill progresses. First, place the seed that you’re planting in the upper left. You now have the option to add soil, then water, then a nutrient. It must be done in that order, and only when it is the proper step in the cultivating process. Each stage of the cultivating process has a timer, and adding the proper ingredient will lower the amount of time that it takes for that particular cultivating stage to complete. You can add one or all three, it is up to you. None are required. However, they will help make sure your seed grows successfully into a plant and give you a greater chance to get special types of successes. You can purchase the soil, water, and nutrients from a merchant, but you’ll have a greater success rate from those that you find elsewhere (looting, scavenging). Once the plant is done growing, click on “harvest” to receive your plant. You can also “uproot” the seed to start over anytime before the plant is finished growing, if you wish.

When done properly, you can have a regular success, which will give you the proper plant. You can have a critical success, which will usually give you a plant AND a seed. There are also “special moments,” which give you 3 plants/seeds, from what I’ve seen. And, of course, critical failures.

Magical Salvaging

Magical salvaging is a bit more complex. It allows you to take the magical essence from certain salvagable equipment and create fragments to be used in Talisman Making. Any uncommon (green) or above magical item that has some kind of bonus on it (+10 to wounds, +3 to intelligence, etc) can be used in magical salvaging to extract its magical properties. You can only extract one magical property from an item, however. For example, if an item has intelligence and willpower, you can only extract either the intelligence or the willpower. (The numbers don’t seem to correspond with the talismans created, by the way; that all comes from your Talisman Making skill.) The item is destroyed in the process.

To use magical salvaging for extracting magical properties, it is fairly straightforward. Click “v” to bring up your abilities window, then click on the general tab to find the Magical Salvaging icon. You may wish to drag it to your bars for easier usage. Left click on the magical salvaging icon to turn your cursor into a small hammer. You may now use it on those uncommon (or higher) items to extract a magical property by LEFT clicking on the item (not right clicking, like the tooltip proclaims, for now). A window will pop up asking you which property you want to extract.

To use magical salvaging on salvagable equipment, it works much the same way. First, you must find a salvagable item. You’ll get some from looting as you progress, no doubt. These items will state that it “requires salvaging.” Left click on the magical salvaging icon, then use the hammer cursor to left click on your salvagable item. Notice that there is no skill level listed on these items like on some other crafting items. These items will say “can be very easily salvaged,” “can be easily salvaged,” “can be salvaged,” etc. I will post skill level requirements for each here when I’m aware of them.

From this skill, you should be receiving both fragments and magical essences for the Talisman Making skill. Sometimes you’ll get a fragment, sometimes just some essence scraps, sometimes an essence, sometimes a little of each…it varies widely. Keep in mind that if you fail at your salvaging attempts, the item will still be destroyed and you won’t get a skillup or a fragment; you’ll just get some lousy essence scraps. These magical essence scraps must be combined to create actual essences. To do so is simple. It will say “by salvaging X of these scrap items, you can refine a single Y.” Once you have have X number of that item, right click on it within your backpack, and it will form a Y.

I might mention that there seems to be a few possible bugs with salvaging right now. I’ve found several items that were uncommon, had properties that should have been able to be extracted, and did absolutely nothing when I tried to salvage them. No failure message, even. So, there is either a bug with the salvaging of said equipment, or there is a bug that is causing there to be no error message explaining WHY it is not salvagable. Hopefully this will be fixed in the near future. The trade/craft is still quite usable as-is, however.

Scavenging

Scavenging is exactly the same as butchering, but it works on humanoids and sentient beings instead of creatures. It allows you to scavenge (or search) the corpses of humanoids to extract useful items from their bodies. These parts will then be used in other crafting skills. Scavenging gives a wide range of items, usable by the Apothecary, Talisman Making, Cultivating, and Magical Salvaging crafts.

It’s usage is simple. Kill a humanoid, loot it, and flies will appear around the corpse. Your icon will become a set of pliers. Right click on the corpse to scavenge items from it and loot the item like you would anything else. Keep an eye out for other corpses with flies as you’re wandering about. Even though the humanoid may not have been your kill, whoever did kill it only has a certain amount of time for that corpse to remain “theirs” to scavenge. After that time elapses, it becomes open to all before disappearing entirely. This also means that your own kills will remain your own to scavenge for a certain amount of time, as well, so that nobody can steal them from you.

PRODUCTION

Apothecary

apothecary window

The Apothecary crafting skill allows you to make potions for buffs (+ to stats, + to skills, the ability to breathe fire, etc.) and for healing. You can also use it to make dyes for fabrics and gold essences. (Tip: the gold dust for creating gold essences comes from scavenging, so make friends with a scavenger or shop in the AH for some.)

In order to use your apothecary skill, press “v” to bring up your abilities window, then click on the general tab to see your crafting skills. You may want to drag that icon into your bars for easier future usage. Click on the icon to open your Apothecary tab. The window is comprised of several parts. The container (which may be bought from a merchant), the main ingredient (these come from cultivating, scavenging, and butchering and will determine what type of potion you’ll be making), and 3 other ingredients (these will make the potion more stable or add special “oomph” to the potion in one way or another, and can come from various other crafting skills, looting, or merchants).

So the first step is the container. It will be consumed, success or fail. Then add your main ingredient based on whatever type of potion you’re wanting to create (the ingredients will explain what types of potions they create in their tooltips). Lastly, you’ll need to add some other ingredients to stabilize your potion. You can start out by using two Cloudy Waters (purchased from merchants) if you want to just work on skillups and get those potions made. Why two? Because one doesn’t stabilize your potion enough. Two will (notice that little meter over on the right side of the window).  If you have other items that are labeled “ingredient” and not “main ingredient,” you can add them here, as well - they will state what they do in their tooltips. Once you are satisfied with your concoction, you just brew the potion, and that’s it!

However, a few things to keep in mind. If you create potions using just the basic ingredients (and at low Apothecary skill levels, especially), you will most likely be making some “volatile” potions. This means that you’ll make your healing potion, sure… but it very well may be laced with some other damaging effect, as well. So, be careful!

This skill is like playing with a chemistry set. There are no real recipes, and things won’t always turn out the same way twice.

Making dyes and gold essences are much more straightforward. The ingredients can mostly be purchased from a vendor. Notice that there’s different types of containers, depending on whether you’re making a potion, dye, etc.

Talisman Making

talisman making window

Talisman Making is perhaps the most difficult of the crafting skill…or maybe it’s just the most expensive. It works a lot like Apothecary does, actually, but those fragments and essences are much harder to come by. As a Talisman Maker, you will be able to create talismans to insert into armor slots. You’ll notice sometimes when you get a new item that it says it has a talisman slot. That’s what these fill. Some talismans are time-based, others are not. They can be replaced, but not removed. Of course, the time-based ones will disappear when their time is up…but that timer is in-game time. It stops counting time whenever you log off and starts up again when you log back on.

In order to use your talisman making skill, press “v” to bring up your abilities window, then click on the general tab to see your crafting skills. You may want to drag that icon into your bars for easier future usage. Click on the icon to open your Talisman Making tab. You’ll see several parts. First, the fragment. This determines what type of talisman you’ll make. Whether it boosts an ability, skill, etc. You’ll also need a gold essence, a curio, and a magical essence. Gold essences and curios can be purchased from vendors or come from salvaging/looting. Magical essences and Fragments come from the Magical Salvaging skill. Combine the items when you’re done, and you’ll receive your talisman.

To apply a talisman, shift-right click on the item that you want to enhance, then drag your talisman into that slot.

Conclusion

Last but not least, I’d like to make some suggestions for which crafting skill to pair with what.  In my eyes, there are two very clear cut combinations to start with:

Apothecary <—> Cultivating
Talisman Making <—> Magical Salvaging

Some lesser obvious combinations are:

Apothecary <—> Butchering
Apothecary <—> Scavenging
Talisman Making <—> Scavenging

Keep in mind that you cannot combine things like Butchering and Scavenging. You can only take one gathering skill and one production skill.