Crafting and gathering can seem pretty daunting when you first take a look at the interface in Revelation Online. That's why today, I'm going to elucidate the finer features of the systems. If I miss anything or you're still confused by the end of the guide, let us know in the comments below and we'll do our best to clarify.

Starting Off

Crafting and gathering is not a feature you can spam all day. You have a limited number of Diligence and Inspiration points, located at the top of your screen in teeny-tiny font. Pay attention to these. The number of points you have determines how much crafting and gathering you can do. It regenerates slowly: a little bit every six minutes.

Which is why many guides suggest having two characters, one that gathers and one that crafts if you want to play optimally. Remember, if you do make two characters you'll have to trade items via in-game mail since there is no global bank.

You can make more than two characters if you're the ambitious type—maybe focus each character on a specific resource or craft. Then your only reagent is how much time you have in a day.

Social Level

Let's start with your Social Level. If you press C and navigate to the third tab from the left you will be on the crafting menu. On the right side of that tab you see your Social Level in fairly small font. It's the combination of all the experience you've earned by gathering and crafting.

Underneath that level is your Crafting Stats, a set of 7 stats that correspond to your crafting and gathering skills. As you level up your Social Level—just by crafting and gathering—you'll improve your Crafting Stats automatically and unlock the ability to harvest new resources. Increasing those stats also improves your success rate when crafting, and increases the likelihood that you'll create higher quality crafts.

Your attributes will also increasing every time you level up a corresponding profession. So, increasing my alchemy level will increase Erudition. Also, when we get to crafting trees, you'll notice that some nodes increase your stats, such as Fortune +2 along the Mineralogy tree.

To use an example of when stats come into play: Around the entrance to Darkfall you can find Antwood, which requires Forbearance 14 and Erudition 13 to mine. My own character couldn't harvest Antwood until I gathered a few more mushrooms, leveled up my Social Level, and improved my stats.

You also want to pay attention to Social Level because at Level 20 Social Rank you'll obtain a quest to earn a material warehouse, one that travels with you. So your already clogged bags wont be bogged down by the additional items you collect.

Crafting Overview

Press "V" to bring up your crafting menu, or you can access it by pressing C, navigating to the third tab and pressing the button labeled "Craft." From here you'll see five colored tabs (no labels) on the left. The top tab shows your general skill's level: the five crafting skills along with general gathering skills, fishing, and exploration.

The five main crafting spheres are:

Alchemy Woodwork Blacksmith Tailoring Cooking.

Every time you craft an item you'll gain experience within its corresponding sphere. So if I make Soothing Pastille (a healing potion) I'll earn experience in Alchemy, and with enough time I'll unlock additional recipes.

This is your general screen. The meat of Crafting is on the Crafting Tree.

The Crafting Tree

Jump down to the second tab, it's the only blue one on the crafting interface. This is the Crafting Tree, divided into Nine Books—think of them as levels on a vertical sheet if that helps. You should already be familiar with this screen if you've followed the Tutorial Quests, as you have to unlock the Utility Scroll to make the inventory agent accessible.

So this menu can seem overwhelming but, bear with me, it's simple when you lay it all out. As you increase your gathering and crafting levels you earn Experience Points, (at the top of the page underneath "Craft Book Chapter One") which you can then apply to the rectangles below.

On my screen I have over 300 points. So I can click on any of the Faded Boxes and exchange my Experience to unlock it. In the Second Row I click on Medicine Compendium I and spend 20 Experience Points to unlock it. Hovering over the box shows me that I've just learned how to make Common Strength Philter, which I can now find under Alchemy as one of my learned recipes (more about Actually Crafting below).

But wait there's more.

Most boxes have more than one ability that you can learn. Hovering over the box shows me that for an additional 10 Experience Points I can learn how to make Common Enlightenment Philter. You don't have to learn every secondary ability to advance, though it does unlock more opportunities to use resources when crafting, potentially increasing the amount of experience you earn.

Pages

There's a scroll bar at the bottom of the Crafting Tree page, which when slid to the right shows 9 pages, or Chapters as Revelation likes to call them. To unlock additional pages you have to level up your gathering and crafting levels until the green Curiosity Bar at the top is full. Then you can advance to the next page.

Here is where you realize how limited your options are on one character. If you spend all of your experience on a single page, you'll run out out of Experience Points. And as you unlock additional pages you'll realize how expensive unlocking additional abilities becomes. So you want to plan carefully how exactly you plan to play. It's advisable to focus on a particular skill tree, such as Herbalist so that you can unlock additional abilities quickly.

Pro Tip: You have to reach Chapter 4 to unlock Same Sex Kissing. It's called "Taboo Kiss."

Actually Crafting

So we've talked about navigating the interface but what about actually crafting? On the Fourth Tab from the top of our Life Skills menu ("V"), we can see our five primary crafting spheres. Clicking on any of the icons on the left will bring you to that sphere's crafting menu. So I'm going to use Alchemy again as my example.

I'm on the Alchemy sphere and I can see all of the recipes I know—You can also uncheck the box that says "Hide unlearned recipes," to view all of the possible combinations. Though there is a lot so I advise you keep that firmly checked. At the top we see that each sphere is further divided into subset craft. So Alchemy has both "Medicine" and "Alchemy," which is really just a way to triage the insurmountable number of recipes into smaller categories. Other spheres such as Woodwork have three spheres, i.e. "Woodwork," "Artificing," and "Structure."

Back to Alchemy. From here I can click on any recipe and see what I can craft. If you have materials all you do is click on the recipe, then click "Auto Create" or "Manually" on the bottom right of the screen to start the Craft. Auto Create will create 1 item of that given recipe. Whereas Manually lets you input how many of that item you want to create.

Notice that each craft has its own level, indicated by a color. Green and Orange means you can craft that item. Though you may fail crafting an Orange item as its crafting level is higher than your own. Red indicates that you're lacking Crafting Skill levels and Crafting Stats.

Harvesting

Harvesting is fairly straightforward. You'll find resources scattered across the map. They're easy to spot. You'll notice a sparkling cloud hovering around an object that you can interact with. You will have to be fairly close to the material for it spawn in your FOV.

There's an interactive map you can use to find scattered resources at http://map.revelationonline.co/. You can also hover your cursor over an item to read its description, which will tell you generally where it can be found. Though not all spawns are static, so you should use the map as a general area guide, not a pinpoint showing you exactly where nodes will appear.

*If you're on a highly populated server it can be difficult and competitive to find resources, such as Bamboo. So I recommend scouting an area while you're queued for a dungeon or any other activity.

Press V and click on the third colored tab to see your foraging skills. Anything that's Level 1 can be gathered almost immediately from the moment you make your character. Higher-leveled items require you to grind a bit before you're character has the required knowledge, as explained under the Social Level section above.

The Practical Start

So you've just read this entire guide and now you want to know how to actually get started. My recommendation, and what I've done, is find an area with easy access resources and do loops collecting them to boost up your Social Level and earn some stats. I recommend you get your first pair of wings before starting, as they make running around and spotting harvestable material much, much easier.

An easy place to start is to go to Amanita, the Mushroom village West of Sulan, and pick mushrooms. Then you can easily craft those using Alchemy. I did that for quite a bit to raise my skills. It's also an easy way to habituate yourself to the Crafting Interface, and not many players are typically there competing for resources.

Once you buff up your Stats a bit the area around the entrance to Darkfall is brimming with Argentum Ore and Felwood, which you can collect quickly to further your stats. From there, it's up to you to decide how you want to pursue Crafting and Gather, what professions interest you the most.