Crafting is the final artisan class of Ashes of Creation. This feature will compare crafting skills with similar ones in currently popular MMOs and discuss how their mechanics may translate into Ashes.
WHAT IS CRAFTING
Crafting in MMOs is the creation of items through the use of processed materials. Crafting comes in many forms across the MMOs we’ve had over the years. There’s a fair few which are repeated across all of them and Ashes of Creation is no exception to that. Intrepid are giving us the following crafting professions to satisfy our crafting fantasies:
Armor smithing
Weapon smithing
General Blacksmithing
Carpentry
Ship building
Siege Weapon
Jewelcrafting
Scribing
Alchemy
Cooking
CRAFTING STATIONS
In Ashes of Creation, all crafting is performed through the use of specific crafting stations. These stations will be located either at your own freehold in the form of the appropriate building, placed using a blueprint or in a node’s artisan district. It is currently unknown if Scientific nodes will have pure ownership over all the crafting stations or if any node can have their own crafting stations placed within them for convenience sake. Bear in mind though that placement of a crafting station will require a building slot. So that’s a choice the mayor and his citizens need to make when progressing their node.
Crafting stations will be categorized in tiers, with higher tier stations allowing for better quality of items being created. This is a feature unique to Ashes of Creation as our currently popular MMOs do not tend to have tiers related to their stations. It’s quite common to be done through the actual level of your skill instead. Guild War 2’s crafting hubs are located around all the major cities across the world and the stations themselves are just generic and interactable. World of Warcraft only has a crafting station in a form of an anvil and a forge. Being within the proximity of these in the world is the only requirement to crafting in a specific place. On top of that it’s only limited to blacksmithing for obvious reasons. Black Desert Online probably has the closest iteration of crafting stations we will be getting in Ashes of Creation. As their crafting is split into two types. First is Industrial Production, using your workers to craft certain armors, tools and weapons for you at the appropriate building within a node. Second is the use of Alchemy and Cooking stations within your home. These do come in multiple tiers however the higher tier does not allow you to craft higher quality items instead it increases the speed at which you craft potions and food.
Use of these higher tier crafting stations is mandatory if you want to level up your Alchemy and Cooking as it is very difficult to reach the one second cast timer without them. This makes the demand for these stations extremely high in turn inflating the material prices used to make them sky high.
An additional note I wanted to make about BDO’s Cooking and Alchemy stations is that they have a durability to them. Meaning you can only use them a certain number of times before they permanently break and need to be replaced. Whether this is going to be a thing in Ashes of Creation is not currently known but it is worth mentioning as needing to repair stations after long term use is a great way to keep materials in high demand similar to what BDO has done.
CRAFTING MECHANICS
Unfortunately we will not be seeing any special mini games featured for any of the crafting artisan skills in Ashes of Creation. It is unfortunate because that means Ashes will be going for a more mass production route of crafting like BDO and World of Warcraft has instead of the more intricate careful crafting that Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy 14 has. In Guild Wars 2, you craft an item by placing the appropriate materials into the slots available. And if they are compatible with each other, you learn a new recipe and gain a huge amount of experience for that discovery. Which means you’re looking to want to discover new recipes instead of spam the same thing over and over until you reach the level you are looking for. Final Fantasy 14 also has an extremely fleshed out crafting system. These two games have really specialized crafting systems in contrast to World of Warcraft and BDO. Especially in BDO, these games have set their crafting up so that you just spam mass amounts of the same item to level up your profession. Which really takes away from the personalized progression in my opinion. Sure, getting to the endpoint is important but the journey and how you progress to the top is also important too especially for a game like Ashes which is going to have a huge emphasis on the crafting side of the game. I hope Intrepid reconsider their decision to have mini games as part of their crafting even if it is something simple like Guild Wars 2’s one and it is still important to move away from the mass production side of crafting to keep it interesting.
THE SPECIFICS
Blacksmithing is going to consist of weapon and armor smithing. Additionally, general blacksmithing may involve the production of certain base materials used in other artisan skills like carpentry. Nails and hinges is one that comes to mind, buckles and pins is another. Meaning blacksmithing may end up being quite a profitable artisan skill to specialize in should these types of items exist. Especially when the master blacksmithing may craft these general items from a higher level material such as auricalcum and mithril.
Woodwork in Ashes of Creation is also broken into 3 different categories, similar to the blacksmithing. General Carpentry which will be crafting furniture for homes and possibly even weapons like staffs and boats. Ship building which is the crafting of various types of rafts, boats and warships. And Siege Weapon crafting which is the creation of many types of siege weaponry such as ballista, trebuchets and catapults to siege your rival nodes and castles with.
Jewelcrafting. Not enough information on this one yet.
Cooking is probably the profession that I am most personally interested in. You can specialize in brewing as part of the mastery tree. Meaning there may be multiple specializations for each of the artisan mastery trees across the whole artisan system.
Alchemy is another interesting and popular profession in MMOs. This will most likely feature the use of specialized healing potions, buff potions and flasks which is a mechanic commonly used in all of our currently popular MMOs. If the specialization tree does exist in the same form that it does for Cooking we may end up seeing specializations for either healing potions themselves, short term buff potions and long term buff flasks. Additionally we may even see the use of an item that was used in apocalypse, the potion launcher. It sounds interesting for it may open up alternate ways to play for classes that have no support abilities within their base kit.
Scribing is stated to be for scrolls and books but that description is a little vague. Let us assume, just for the Alpha state of the game, that Scribing will be for enchanted scrolls used to power up weapons and armor beyond their base level with the added risk of their destruction.
00:00 Intro
01:37 What is Crafting?
02:38 Crafting Stations
05:25 Crafting Mechanics
07:27 Specifics: Black Smithing
08:14 Specifics: Carpentry
08:52 Specifics: Jewelcrafting
09:17 Specifics: Cooking
09:58 Specifics: Alchemy
10:50 Scribing