A blueprint is a recipe: a list of materials and an item they produce. Choosing which one to work on is the crafter's main decision, and it is an arithmetic problem before it is anything else.
Where blueprints come from
Blueprints are acquired in a few ways, and which ones are available shapes what a new crafter can realistically do.
- Bought from the trade terminal for the basic ones.
- Found as loot from hunting and mining.
- Bought from other players, which is how most specific blueprints change hands.
Blueprints for popular items carry markup, sometimes substantial, because they are the licence to run a profitable production line.
Reading a recipe
Every blueprint tells you what it consumes and what it produces. To turn that into a decision you need three numbers:
- Input cost per click. The materials, at the price you can actually buy them, including markup.
- Output value. What the produced item sells for, at the price you can actually sell it, not its TT value.
- Success rate. Not every click produces an item, so output per click is lower than output per success.
If input cost per click exceeds expected output per click, the blueprint loses money and no amount of clicking fixes it.
The blueprints wiki lists recipes with their material requirements, so you can do this before committing.
The materials market is the business
For a crafter, sourcing is not a chore before the real activity. It is the real activity.
- Buy in bulk when the price is good. Material prices move, and a crafter with a stock bought well has a margin their competitor does not.
- Know who produces your inputs. Standing arrangements with miners and hunters who loot what you need are how serious crafters supply themselves, and they beat the auction on both price and reliability.
- Watch for bottlenecks. A recipe with one scarce input is exposed: when that input's price moves, your whole margin moves with it.
Working backwards from demand
The instinct is to pick a blueprint and see if it is profitable. The better approach is to start from what people are buying and work back to what makes it.
- What items are in demand right now, and why?
- Which blueprint produces them?
- What does that blueprint consume, and can you get those materials at a price that works?
Demand shifts with game updates, with new content and with what the current popular activities consume. A blueprint that was excellent last year may be crowded now, precisely because it was excellent.
Chains
Many items are made from materials that are themselves crafted, producing chains several steps long. This creates opportunities and traps in equal measure.
The opportunity: capturing several steps of the chain yourself means capturing several margins instead of paying them to someone else.
The trap: a long chain multiplies your exposure. Every step has a success rate and a market, and a chain that is profitable on paper can be unprofitable in practice because the losses compound.
Start with single-step production. Extend the chain only where you have measured that the extra step actually pays.
Specialising
Two forces push crafters toward specialisation:
- Quality rating. A blueprint improves as you use it, and that progress does not transfer to a different blueprint. See How crafting works.
- Sourcing. Knowing one material market well is worth more than knowing five badly, because the margin lives in the buying.
The counterweight is that a crafter tied to one item is exposed to that item's market. The usual compromise is a main line plus one or two secondary ones, so a change in demand does not stop the business.
Before your first serious run
Write down, in advance:
- Input cost per click.
- Expected output value per click.
- The number of clicks you intend to do and what that totals.
- Where you will sell the output.
If any of those four is a guess, find out before you start. Crafting is the activity where research most directly converts into result, and it is the activity where guessing is most reliably punished.