Crafting turns materials into items. You stand at a machine, load a blueprint and the materials it requires, and click. It is the most repetitive activity in the game and the one most like running a production line.

Before anything else: crafting loses money against the trade terminal, structurally and for everyone. What you recover is the gap between what you paid other players for inputs and what other players pay you for output. Crafting is where this is most obvious, because both prices are visible. This is an economic game explains why that is the only frame in which the rest of this page makes sense.

The loop

  1. Acquire a blueprint for the item you want to make.
  2. Buy or gather the materials it requires.
  3. Click at a machine, consuming materials each attempt.
  4. Sell what comes out.

Each click is an attempt, and crafters count their activity in clicks the way hunters count kills.

Outcomes of a click

A crafting attempt does not simply succeed or fail. There are several outcomes:

  • Success. You get the item.
  • Near success. You do not get the item, but you get residue back, which recovers part of the material value and is itself usable.
  • Failure. The materials are consumed with minimal return.

Over many clicks these average out into a return, in the same way loot averages out for a hunter. See Reading a return figure.

There is also the possibility of a notably better outcome than a plain success, which is where the large crafting loots come from.

Residue

Residue is produced by near-successful attempts and is the mechanism that stops crafting failures from being total losses. It can be used in later crafting to reduce waste.

Because residue is both produced and consumed by crafting, it has its own market and its own price, and it is one of the standard things a crafter watches.

Quality rating

A blueprint has a quality rating, usually shortened to QR, which improves as you use that blueprint. A higher QR means better results from the same blueprint.

This is a second reason crafters specialise: your investment in a blueprint is partly in the blueprint's own progression, and switching to a different one starts that progression again.

Condition and attempt

Crafting comes in two modes, and the distinction matters:

  • Condition crafting produces items at less than full condition, which is cheaper per attempt.
  • Attempt crafting aims at full-condition items.

Which you use depends on what you are making and what the market for it wants.

Cost per click

The cost of a click is:

materials consumed + blueprint decay

Materials are the dominant term, and this is where crafting differs sharply from hunting and mining. Your cost is set almost entirely by what you paid for your inputs, which means buying well is most of the job.

A crafter who sources materials at a good price and a crafter who buys at whatever the auction is asking are running very different businesses with the same blueprint.

Where the profit is

Crafting profit comes from the gap between what the inputs cost and what the output sells for. Both sides are markets, both move, and the gap can be negative.

This is a genuinely different proposition from hunting and mining:

  • The outcome is more predictable over a run of clicks, because material cost is known in advance rather than being a distribution.
  • The margins are thinner, and they compress when other crafters notice the same opportunity.
  • The work is in the research, not in the clicking. Working out what to make, what it costs to make and what it sells for is the activity. The clicking is just execution.

Getting started

A reasonable first attempt at crafting:

  1. Pick something simple with materials you can buy easily.
  2. Work out the full input cost per click before you start, including markup on materials.
  3. Check what the output actually sells for, not what you hope it sells for.
  4. Do a modest run and record the result.
  5. Compare the two numbers honestly.

Step 3 catches most beginner crafting: plenty of blueprints produce items that nobody wants at a price that covers their inputs. Finding out before the run rather than after is the difference between crafting and donating.

The blueprints wiki has recipes with material requirements, which is where the arithmetic starts.