Intro:

Being a Crafter in The Old Republic has it's similarities to other games, but isn't exactly like anything you'll have played before and can quickly be overwhelming for those who haven't gotten to grips with The Old Republic's tricks, or for those with little MMO experience at all.

Getting Started:

The first step of Crafting is to pick your crafting skills. This sounds straight forward, but even this is a challenge to begin with as they're not called 'crafting skills', they're Crew Skills. Why? Well because your character doesn't actually do much crafting, it's all down to the Companions that you'll acquire through your quests in the game.

For Imperial players, the first time you'll have access to your Crew Skills will be after you've finished your class quests on Korriban and docked with the Imperial Fleet. The Imperial Fleet can be a little overwhelming in it's self at first. The ship you're on-board has everything - and I mean everything - that an low-level character could want. Affording it is a different matter.

Head over to the Crew Skills Trainer section of the ship (bottom right on the map!) and get ready to make some tough decisions.



You can only select one Crafting skill and two Mission skills - three in total. This means you have to decided up front what you want to craft. Here's a brief overview:

Artifice: Lightsaber mods, Enhancements, Generators and Focii

Biochem: Stims, Health packs, Implants
Armormech: Armor for non-force users
Armstech: Blasters, Pistols, Weapon mods, Melee weapons
Synthweaving: Armor for force-users
Cybertech: Droid armor, earpieces, Grenades, Mods and misc gadgets

Once you've chosen what you want to craft, go to appropriate trainer and he'll set you up with the initial skills so you're ready to start crafting. If after a few days of playing with your new crafting skills you find you don't like what your crafting, don't panic. You can always switch over at a later date (at an extortionate cost!).
Don't run off just yet though, because you don't want to start paying for the highly expensive materials straight away, since crafting costs a fortune anyway. Instead, you'll want to pick up another Crew Skill or two to help provide the resources you'll need - this is where the mission-type Crew Skills come in. To pick up appropriate skills necessary to fund your new found crafting habit, check the Crafters Crew Skill Chart.

At this point, I'll assume you've not only picked up the right crafting Crew Skill, but you've also got the necessary skills to support your crafting habit's continual demands on resources. As a nice surprise, speak with every other crew skill trainer - these unlock Codex entries which each grant you a good lump of XP - just for talking to people. Nice eh?

Now you're stood in the middle of the Imperial Fleet, fingers itching to craft and nothing to create. First take a moment to familiarize yourself with the items you can create and their material requirements. Once you've got a feel for what you want to create, send out your companion on a mission to collect this material.

As a small pointer, each required material will have a unique name, such as "Fire Node". Below that name will be the material type & level, such as "Grade 1 Gemstone".

Every Mission will tell you a quick brief regarding the mission, with a small summary regarding what you'll get from the mission. Try and match up the right mission with the required material. The mission may not be available. This is OK, sometimes they're not immediately available. Send your companion on another mission for another required material and in time the desired mission will turn up.

Every time you complete a mission or craft an item, you'll gain Experience points towards that crew skill. As your experience in that Crew Skill increases, it'll unlock new, more difficult missions with greater rewards or unlock new items with greater stats. Every mission or craft item has a specific difficulty rating. This may not be immediately obvious however the color of the text of the mission title gives an indicator as to how hard the mission is and how likely you are to succeed. Orange are tough but have a high Experience output. Yellow are somewhat moderate in difficulty. Green are of course the easy missions with a substantially lower amount of Experience per success (most likely just 1xp) and those in White provide no experience at all as they're considered too far beneath your league.

In a similar manner, crafting items has a difficulty too, this being displayed in the form of a small colored circle at the right-hand side of each item in the list. The same color scale applies here, with White providing no experience and Orange providing the greater challenges with a chance of failure.

In addition to making your items and running errands, your companions will gain affection with you over time. This may hardly affect you early in the game, though later when you're striving for the best possible results, a companion who really likes you will always work harder to provide you with a better crafted item.

You can also drag the craft icons from the crew skill menu onto your hotbars, so you can quickly send your companions off on missions while your in groups or questing!

Soon you'll find that the handful of items you can craft are far below you in required skill and you want to make bigger, better items. You can do this in three ways. First, you can buy the basic schematics from the crafter trainer. These will provide you with 'Green' level - average quality items and you'll quickly out-grow these too. Next, you'll be able to pick up Schematics as loot while you quest. These are pretty rare but look on the Global Trade Network and you'll see them come up from time to time, usually for an extortionate price. The third and final way of getting those schematics is to reverse-engineer items you've already crafted or items you've picked up while questing (or even bought from the GTN!)

Reverse Engineering is an art-form in it's self, so the Reverse Engineering Guide is available to accompany this one.

Hopefully you'll be well on your way to crafting some of the finest quality disposable cameras and damaged cutlery this side of Coronet.