Dragon's

Prophet has a lot of interesting and unique systems

throughout the game, most of them focused on or around the dragons for

which the game is named. The great wyrms have their talons in pretty much

everything, including the crafting system.

The crafting system in Dragon's Prophet, while intricate and engaging, is

not well-documented. It can be difficult to figure out what you need to do

with all the stuff you're getting based on tooltips and absurdly unhelpful

"tutorial" missions. There is often no in-game indication on how to

perform relatively basic tasks.

Essentially, the base concept is pretty easy and familiar from any other

MMO ever: harvest materials from the wild, fashion them into usable items.

You don't need special tools to get started gathering materials - anything

you come across during your adventures is harvestable, regardless of

character class or level or whatever.

There are six crafting disciplines:

Weaponsmithing - make swords, axes, staves, bows,

gunblades and other assorted weaponry.

- make swords, axes, staves, bows, gunblades and other assorted weaponry. Armorsmithing - make personal armor and clothing.

- make personal armor and clothing. Tinkerer - make jewelery, accessories, saddles and

beast armor.

- make jewelery, accessories, saddles and beast armor. Alchemy - make potions.

- make potions. Cook - make buffing food.

- make buffing food. Carpenter - make housing items and Draconic Flutes.

You can master as many of these as you want, but they all tend to use the

same ingredients. Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing, for example, both use

ores, and Weaponsmithing and Carpentry both use wood. Sticking to one

discipline at a time means you will advance that one craft faster at the

expense of one or more others.

Also be warned that there is a relatively low cap on the number of

recipes a character can learn in any given profession. This will be

especially restrictive for something like Armorsmithing, which has

automatic leveled recipes for all 4 classes for each piece of worn armor.

You will want to specialize for your character early on, and not bother

with some recipes that your character can't use.

Inventory Management

First things first: you are going to need a lot of inventory space to get

started with crafting. There are a lot of materials to be gathered, which

add up very quickly, and inventory space comes at a premium unless you pay

for unlocks. As a die-hard cheapskate, I found it was best to tackle

crafting separately from adventuring, because I ran out of bag space too

quickly to effectively do both at the same time. My bag would be too full

of crafting mats to pick up quest items, or too full of trash loot to

harvest nodes.

Also worth noting is the fact that you need several blank inventory spots

to harvest a node, even if you already have partial stacks of that

material type in your bag. Harvesting the node adds the new items to

existing stacks, but only after dropping them in blank inventory spots

first, and most resource nodes provide two or three different resources.

For example, I tried to harvest a tree while I had only one blank

inventory spot open, but couldn't because I didn't have enough room. I had

to dump some vendor trash loot to clear 3 spots, and those spots stayed

open after harvesting because the materials were added to existing

part-stacks.

Resource Gathering

For basic wilderness gathering, you'll need to keep your eyes open to

find your materials, and know where to look for them. Wild herbs grow in

grassy areas, like pastures or plains, usually out in the open.

Harvestable wood tends to grow next to large trees, in narrow saplings

that sprout up between the roots. Ores can most often be found clustered

up next to rock walls, in little nooks and crannies, and you may have to

do some serious hunting to find ore nodes. To harvest, just run up to the

node and click the F key. If the node doesn't immediately despawn after

harvesting, click F again - some nodes can be harvested 2 or 3 times

before they are tapped out.

Another important resource you will find in the wilderness is recipes.

These drop as rare random loot from some mobs. You can use them in the

field to learn the recipes, but you won't be able to craft the item until

you reach the appropriate crafting level in that discipline.

Wilderness gathering is not the only way to collect resources, though.

Nor is it the most efficient. If you want to really accelerate your

resource-gathering without sacrificing questing time, snatch up a few

extra dragons for your lair. Dragons in your lair can be sent on

resource-gathering missions from the Dragon Process tab. These processes

take an hour apiece, but they bring back a good haul of materials, you can

do them while you're off adventuring or before you log off for the night,

and the materials are stored in the lair rather than taking up precious

inventory space. It's actually a fairly elegant system - you can focus on

gathering just the materials you want, and then you have a storehouse from

which you can make withdrawals. You can withdraw everything at once, or

you can take a few pieces at a time for a specific project. Lair storage

is withdraw-only; you can't add items to it (except through

resource-gathering processes), only take them out. For regular inventory

management, use the bank.

You can queue your lair-bound dragons for 5 processes at a time, and the

processes cost a bit of money. It's possible to expand their mission

capability, but that starts to cost Station Cash after the 5th process.

You can also spend Station Cash to increase production on a given run;

clicking the little star icon on the Processes tab and spending 30 SC will

gain you 3x the amount of materials you would normally get from a process.

It doesn't reduce the amount of time the process takes (it still takes an

hour per process), but it's like running several processes at once.

Hidden Prep Work

Your dragons will usually bring back weird unidentified items from their

gathering missions, and the tooltip tells you that these items need to be

broken down to figure out what they are and what they can be used for. To

extract them, use the little Extraction button on the bottom of the

inventory window. There's also a Bulk Extraction button, which opens up a

second window that grinds up whatever you place inside it. Extraction can

also be used on crafted gear to learn improved recipes, and obtain

Invocation Orbs which are used for enhancing your gear. Extraction also

has a chance of refunding some of the materials used, so if you're doing

some bulk crafting strictly for XP gain, Extraction is the disposal method

of choice.

Another unexplained gem: independent of any crafting station or inventory

button, and completely ignored by any kind of introductory quest or

tooltip hint, is the Synthesis tab, mapped to the U key by default. You'll

be picking up a crapload of mystery items that mention "synthesis" in

bright blue letters, and this is how you use them: to make catalysts,

which can add additional properties to crafted items. You'll need some

Refinement Essence, and then a bunch of different synthesis materials to

combine. Different combinations will yield different catalysts, indicated

by the varying levels of the four colored test tubes in the middle.

Stacking more synthesis materials creates a purer catalyst, which results

in a greater chance of a crafted item having an additional property.

Don't get tied up on the word "catalyst," though. That word can

apparently have two meanings when you're crafting. More on that later.

Making Stuff

It takes quite a bit of raw material to make advancements in crafting.

Some of the low-level recipes eat up a lot of resources, so take your time

and gather a lot of stuff together. The actual crafting doesn't take much

time at all.

There are "tutorial" missions for each type of crafting, but these

tutorials teach you little more than how to stand next to a workbench and

click F. Do them if you must for the mitt-full of free 0-level mats and

the half-level crafting XP. You won't learn much about the system from

them.

You'll start off by creating a bunch of nearly-worthless level 1

white-quality items, cranking them out in bulk for the XP. Stand next to

your chosen crafting station and click F to open that menu. This is

identical to the menu that is opened by the U key, but will be specific to

the crafting station you are standing near. Clicking on the drop-down menu

that says "Click here for more recipes" will show a list of item types

that you can potentially craft here, but setting it to the default (so it

reads "Click here...") will show you all the recipes you actually have the

materials for. If there are no recipes showing up in that list, you'll

need to go gather some more materials before you can do anything.

Hopefully, you have enough to get started with at least one white-quality

item. The right side of the window shows you what all is required to make

your item.

Technically, you don't need to make a whole lot of these items - just

enough to get a green recipe when you Extract them later. You could get an

improved recipe from the very first item you craft, or it may take a dozen

or more extractions. Make a few, but don't use up all your resources just

yet.

Advanced Crafting

That right-hand window bears some closer inspection. Immediately below

the materials panel is the big circular progress window. To the left of

that is a small widget that has a little picture of rocks or something,

and +/- buttons on either side of a 0. This is a "catalyst" window, but

the tooltip description seems rather inaccurate at present. Clicking the +

button here adds the mystery item to the boiler, which increases your

chances of a critical success when crafting that item. With normal

white-quality items, you have a very slim chance of getting a

green-quality item (3.3% or so) without adding anything to this window.

Cranking in the maximum of 20 "catalysts" through this widget increases

the odds to 36.4% for a crit. These "catalysts" cost Station Cash.

Additionally, there is a second "catalyst" wiget, attached to the

three-paned results widget at the bottom, for the enhancement potions you

create with the Synthesis system. These second "catalysts" add additional

properties to the item being crafted. They cost nothing to use, but they

can be somewhat resource-intensive to make. Don't waste either type of

catalyst on a white-quality junker item. Save it for green or blue

recipes.

Once you have a passel of white junk, start the Extraction process. Grind

them all up for a small material refund, enhancement orbs and, most

importantly, those juicy improved recipes. Again, be aware that there is

currently a somewhat restrictive cap on the number of recipes you can

know, and that the auto-generated recipes you learn when gaining a new

crafting level count towards this cap, and cannot be unlearned to make

room for new ones later. You can unlearn green and blue recipes, but not

the crappy level 1 white ones that you will likely never use again.

Anyway, you should end up with a green-quality recipe of whatever you

just extracted. Green recipes have a chance of critting to blue or even

purple quality. Green recipes require refined ingredients from the

Processed Products category. Processed Products are rather

resource-intensive, so crafting a green-quality item can cost several

times the amount of ingredients of a white-quality item.

This should be enough to get you on the right side of the learning curve.

There's plenty more to learn on your way to level 60 mastery, but it all

branches off of these basic ideas. So send your pack-dragon out

prospectin'! Dragon's Prophet goes live on September 18.