Crafting
Alter Aeon features a robust crafting system to say the least. You can create everything from a humble wooden cup to legendary weapons and armor. Some crafting skills are learnable by any class, others are only the domain of experts of certain magics or martial skills.
Guilds
Joining a guild allows you to learn their skills, earn a living by taking on jobs, and sometimes exclusive resources provided only to members of that guild. Unlike class spells and skills, guild abilities generally do not require practices to learn and are taught directly by advancing through the ranks. To advance in a guild you may need to complete jobs, craft masterwork items, submit new discoveries to the archives, or help provide resources to the guilds' stockpiles.
General Guilds
These guilds provide access to important skills for your all characters' day-to-day activities.
- The Cartographers Guild
- Cartographers focus on exploring, navigating, and charting the world
- Newbie Note: The skills provided to members of this guild are crucial for traversing the world so you should seek out membership and advance as you level
Professional Guilds
These guilds teach and support the crafting and upgrading of equipment, spell scrolls, potions, and poisons
- The Smiths Guild
- Smiths get access to the secrets of crafting powerful weapons, armor, and jewelry from metal and stone
- The Rangers Guild
- Rangers focus on crafting armor and weapons from leather, chitin, and shells as well as providing meat for cooking
- The Lapidarists Guild
- By mining ore and cutting precious games lapidarists act as a vital complement to smiths and rangers
- The Woodwrights Guild
- Everything from mighty lances, bows, arrows, shields to canoes, fishing poles, and dishware, woodrights use the materials gathered right from the forest floor to craft beautiful works of art.
- The Haberdashers Guild
- Tailors and hatmakers allow the customization and creation of bespoke textile garments
- The Alchemists Guild
- By discovering and submitting recipes for potions alchemists get access to exclusive reagents
- The Assassins Guild
- The Alchemists Guild's seedy partner. Instead of potions, the Assassins Guild focuses on the creation of deadly poisons.
- The Scribes Guild
- Scribes maintain the archives of formulae for the most powerful spell scrolls
Supporting Skills
- Rune Carving
- The Druid ability to carve magical runes into wood, stone, and metal can powerfully enhance crafted equipment
- Cooking
- With a pinch of salt, a special blend of herbs and spices, and fresh nuts or meat provided by rangers and fishermen a skilled cook can boost the their regeneration
- Enchanting
- Mages, Clerics, and Necromancers all have their own twist on imbuing items with magical properties whether it be causing a weapon to burn its quarry, an item to glow with holy light, or binding a weapon to its owner by way of stolen souls
- Fishing
- Hauling in the day's catch for sale to the local market or simply reveling in the glory of the largest catch
Concepts
While each discipline has a different product in mind, e.g., Woodcrafted clubs, or Leathercrafted armor. Each crafting skill follows a similar model: gather materials which have different properties when crafted, craft the desired item, then improve the item with enchanting/rune carving/gems/inlaid metal. Most crafting disciplines have a cost associated whether it's gold, mana, or simply some energy.
Quality
Crafted items of types will have an Item Quality ranking which can be seen on the identify output. There are 5 tiers with each tier increasing the potential power of the item:
- WELL_CRAFTED
- EXPERTLY_CRAFTED
- MASTERCRAFT
- MASTERCRAFT 2
- MASTERCRAFT 3
In general you will want an item to be at least MASTERCRAFT quality before you spend the time, money, and resources required to fully enchant and improve an item. It's rumored that increasing your LUCK stat in addition to having high STR, INT, DEX, and CON can help with making MASTERCRAFT or better items. Additionally some materials are easier to craft with than others.
As you craft items you will earn Profession Points which you can spend to directly improve the quality of an item with the craft improve command
Composite
The "composite" of an item is its potential. Generally the more restrictive an item is to use in the form of required level, class flags, alignment flags, HUM/LIGHT/GLOW flags, the more powerful an item can become. See help enchanting howto and help composite in game for more details.
Profession Points
As you gather and craft you will earn profession points, these can be spent in a number of ways:
- Spent like combat points to increase the percent learned of a profession skill by 1%. See point value <skill name> for the cost and point buy <skill name> to raise the skill
- Used with craft quality <item> to increase the quality tier of a crafted item
- Used with the desc, rename, and label craft sub-commands
- Some improvements and enchantments will require a profession point to complete the process
Profession points, like combat points, are gained passively, cannot be bought, and cannot be targeted in any way besides just performing various gathering and crafting tasks.
