CRAFTING: How it works!

http://dulfy.net/2012/03/16/tera-guide-to-general-crafting-na-edition-2/

Copied and pasted from the site:

Gathering
Gathering is the process of obtaining raw materials for crafting. To level up in a specific craft, you first need to be able to convert the raw material to an intermediate product (refined material). You can either buy these raw materials in the auction house or gather them yourself.

Unlike other games, there are no restrictions (i.e. only able to level a subset of gathering skills) on gathering (or crafting for that matter) and harvesting nodes often give you buffs that aid your combat skills (or gathering skills) for a short duration (great feature!). Another thing I love about TERA’s gathering is that there does not appear to be a hard coded skill restriction on gathering from nodes (I.e. you must have say mining skill 50 to mine from this rock). You have an increased rate of failure if you gather from high level resource nodes but if you try it many times, there is a chance you will succeed!

There are 4 types of gathering in TERA, 3 of which have a corresponding node while the 4th one is obtained via monster drops.

* Plants: These are used for tailoring and alchemy (Healing elixirs & potions, Holism elixirs & potions)

* Ores: These are used for armorsmith & weaponsmith and alchemy (Scrolls and Eclipse Potions)

* Essences: These are used for focus craft and alchemy (Mana elixirs & potions, Holism elixirs & potions)

* Hides: These are used for leatherwork. Obtained from monster drops (there is no skinning process, monsters have a chance to drop hides when they are killed). Btw, TERA seem to have a decrease drop rate penalty if you are a high level farming low level mobs. This means that you may need to gather these hides as you level up as farming low level hides when you are high level does not seem to work.

Use your minimap to find these nodes!

These nodes also come in tiers. There are 5 tiers of nodes– tier 1 nodes are scattered in leveling areas up to level 20, tier 2 are in areas up to 30, tier 3 are in areas up to 40 etc.

Party gathering – yes you can gather from nodes in groups! From what I have seen, if one person succeeds in gathering the node, everyone in the party gets the raw material like they would if they gathered alone. This encourages sharing and gets a +1 in my books!

Uncommon resources – Sometimes when gathering you will get those uncommon (green tag) raw materials like Pure Sun Essence or Fine Verdra Fibers. These are not used for crafting like the normal resources. These are used instead for alchemy crafting Unguents – these are used in some rare alchemy recipes that drops off mobs. Don’t make the same mistake as me and buy a whole bunch of Fine Vedra Fibers from the auction house and thinking that they can be used for tailoring!

Extraction
I want to clarify something here because there are many resources on the internet that confuses gathering with extraction. There is a 4 step process with crafting in TERA

Raw material –> Refined material –> Finished item –> Attuned item (can be enchanted).

Gathering will give you the raw material while extraction will give you refined material (i.e. gathering will give you Verdra Fiber while extraction will give you Verdracloth – the refined material made from Verdra Fiber. This means that to level up a crafting skill from 1 to 50, you cannot use anything obtained from extraction – you have to either gather the raw materials to convert them to refined materials (and level up in the process) or buy the raw materials from the auction house. Once you have a specific crafting skill at level 50, you can start using the refined materials to make stuff (i.e. Once you are have a skill of 50 in Tailoring, you can start using the Verdracloths you converted from the raw Verdra Fiber or extraction).

To extract an item, simply go to a general merchant and purchase the extraction scrolls. To learn extraction scrolls of a specific tier, you must have purchased and learned the extraction scrolls for that extraction type of the previous tiers (i.e. to extract a tier 4 clothing, you need to have purchased and learned clothing extraction tier 1-3). There does not seem to be a “leveling-up” process in the extraction process (i.e. to learn tier 4 clothing extraction, you do not need to extract X number of items of the previous tiers to “level up” to be eligible to extract tier 4 cloths). You just have to purchase & learn the corresponding extraction scrolls for that tier.

Items of different tiers when extracted will give you different refined materials back. There are 13 item tiers and 5 refined material grades. I currently do not have a chart telling you what grade of refined material you can expect when you extract an item of tier X but I will add this in the future.

Unless they have corrected it since CB1, you can extract anything with a specific extraction skill – i.e. you can extract leather from weapons. Leather extraction is more useful than other extraction skills since there are no nodes you can gather the raw materials from.

The extraction window can be opened by pressing the J button.

The 6 professions
There are 6 crafting professions in TERA- Armorsmith, Leatherwork, Tailoring, Weaponsmith, Focus Craft, and Alchemy.

Armorsmith makes Hauberks, Gauntlets, and Greaves for heavy armor classes (Lancer, Berserker)

Leatherwork makes Cuirasses, Gloves, and Boots for light armor classes (Warrior, Archer, Slayer)

Tailoring makes Robes, Sleeves, and Boots for robe wearing classes (Mystic, Priest, Sorcerer)

Weaponsmith makes Twin Swords, Lancers, Greatswords, and Axes – weapons for your melee classes

Focus Craft makes Bows, Staves, Discs and Scepters – weapons for your ranged classes



Ingredients
In addition to the raw/refined materials you have obtained, crafting also requires materials purchased from the appropriate tradeskill merchant near the workbench you are crafting the item from. If you are making items (armor/weapons) rather than simply refining raw materials, you will also need runes. These are covered in a section below.



Skillups
To level up from 1-250 in each crafting skill, your best bet is to convert the raw materials to the refined materials. You also gain skill up by making items with the refined materials but this takes more materials. After level 250, you will have to skill up by making items reach to the cap of 410. Everytime you successfully refines or crafts an item, you gain 2 points towards that crafting skill. It is rumored that it is possible for you to fail when you crafting an item but this is something I have not personally experienced.

Note: As an alternative to refining materials in the first 50 levels, you can also do the crafting quests on the Bulletin board before you get to Velika, they costs around 25k gold per quest and will level up your crafting professions to 50.

One interesting feature is that you often have the chance to do “exceptional crafting work” when you process raw materials into refined materials– this can be annoying or useful depending on what you are trying to do. When you exceptionally craft, you receive the raw material of the next tier rather than the refined material of the same tier (i.e. if you are making Sylvacloth from Sylva Fibers, you will create Shelta Fibers instead when you exceptionally craft). If you are trying to make an exact amount of refined materials using an exact amount of raw materials, this feature may be undesired. Hence it is always best to have more raw materials for situations like this.

Something to note is that while some crafting professions share the same raw and refined materials, their skillups are totally separate. So if you got to level 50 in armorsmith by making Krysteel Ingots, you will have to repeat the process to get to level 50 on your weaponsmith. For a profession like alchemy which shares many of the same raw & refined materials, this can be an advantage since you can level up in alchemy using any combination of mats from other professions except for leatherwork.

Raw and refined materials
Since all the crafting professions starts within refining raw materials to skill up, lets take a look at the 5 tiers of raw materials. They are categorized by resource type.



Runes
Runes can be a confusing thing. You see a lot of them drop from mobs and for a non-crafter they are really just a waste of space. However, if you are a crafter, you definitely want to save them up because pretty much every item you craftt will require these runes.

Note that armor here denote items made from armorsmith, leatherwork, and tailoring

There are 5 tiers of common runes, they have the following prefix

Paverune – Level 15

Silrune – level 25

Quoirune - level 35

Archrune – level

Keyrune – level 55

There are 3 suffixes being used as well Shara (weapons), Arun (armor), and Titan (both armor and weapons).

An example of a common rune would be Silrune of Titan. Titanic runes drops from BAMs (party 5 mobs) while Arun and Shara runes can drop off solo mobs as well. These common runes are required to craft items. Titanic is required on pretty much every item while the Arun/Shara ones will be replaced by the uncommon runes.

There are also 4 tiers of uncommon runes, these are used to craft some of the best armor within a level range (i.e. tailoring 100-150). For examples, here are two tailoring recipes, they both require tailoring 100 to learn but one crafts a much better item and therefore requires Geit rune to make rather than Silrune of Arun. These uncommon runes seems to be used starting at level 25 (or crafting level 100)

The names are different between the armors and weapons.

Armor Weapon
Geit Rune Doga Rune
Isthel Rune Sulfa Rune
Kran Rune Glora Rune
Zirc Rune Sikka Rune

Additionally, there are 4 tiers of boss runes. These are used for both weapons and armor. They are used to atune the items you have made. Atune is the process where you take an item and make it enchantable. The low grade armor within a crafting tier uses Titanic runes but the higher grades ones uses those boss runes.

There are called
Triz Rune–level 25
Emya Rune – level 35
Rowan Rune – level 45
Aeru Rune– level 55

As you can see on the items below, both requires Tailoring 100 but the higher grade armor requires Triz Rune to attune rather than Silrune of Titans.

So there you have it – thee types of runes: common, uncommon and boss runes.
One thing I would like to mention is that Alchemists can convert the common runes into the uncommon ones fairly easily via vendor brought recipes. Higher runes like the conversion from Keyrune of Arun to Zirc rune will require higher alchemy skills (250). Since there are 5 tiers of common runes and only 4 tiers of uncommon runes, the first two tiers of the common runes will convert into the first tier of the uncommon runes (i.e. both Paverune of Arun and Silrune of Arun will convert to Geit Rune)