Last month, I created a beginner's crafting guide for our readers in an
attempt to aid those that were interested in creating equipment for
themselves or to sell to their fellow players. After spending some more
time in the crafting system (and receiving some requests), I've decided
to create a second guide, in order to cover some aspects of the
crafting system that I was unable to explore in the first.



NOTE:
Everything
contained within this guide comes with the assumption that you have
read href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/71016" target="_blank">A
Beginners Guide to Crafting in Aion.



Show Me the Money



The crafting system in Aion is very straightforward. Work orders are
the best (and only viable) method of increasing your skills. In theory,
you could indeed gather everything you needed to create enough items
from recipes you have found or bought to max out your skills. What may
appear to be doable on paper is a far cry from the reality of the
situation though. The amount of time it would take to gather everything
you needed just to get enough items to max out the first crafting tier
(a skill of 99), is literally incomprehensible.



In the first guide, I mentioned that it would cost you approximately
18,000 kinah to raise your skill above 99. I should have been more
specific. Your trainer will charge you that much when you get your
skill to 99. That's the cost to go into the "100 to 199" tier.
Depending on the frequency of skill-ups you get during your own quest
for crafting immortality your actual cost will vary. I spent over
80,000 kinah total on my crafting journey. This includes the exorbitant
cost to progress past a skill of 99. In other words, be prepared to do
a lot of hunting to make up the cost.



On the plus side, the lowest level item you can make in the second
crafting tier is level 18. By the time I had enough cash to do enough
work orders and pay the cost of the climbing the training ladder, I had
just hit level 18 and was able to make myself a very nice set of
equipment. It's for this reason that I say the crafting in Aion is
divided into two different areas: training and practical application.
Work orders will get you the skills, while you should never make any
piece of usable equipment unless you plan to either sell or wear them
yourself.


Scour the Skies



If you have any interest in crafting at all in Aion, there are a few
things you'll need to do to have any chance at success. The first is to
learn how to gather aether from the crystals in the sky. Gathering
aether is a different skill from gathering other materials in the
world. As such, there's no way to avoid starting off with a skill level
of zero after your ascension.




style="margin: 2px; width: 210px; float: left;">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/72484" target="_blank"> style="width: 200px; float: left;" src="/image/view/72484">

One
of the first quests you should have done after ascending granted you a
15-second time extender for your flight, bringing you up to a total of
60 seconds. To avoid any unnecessary deaths, I'd also advise you to
have a few in-flight time extending potions as well. There's nothing
worse than concentrating on extracting the aether from a crystal a
hundred feet above the ground and running out of flight time. In most
cases, you can hit your space bar to spread your wings and glide a bit
before hitting the ground, but sometimes you can't. The costs of
healing your soul can get expensive very quickly, so it's best to avoid
pointless deaths whenever possible.



Aether crystals can be found wherever there's a riftway. In the first
town your get sent to after your ascension (Altgard Fortress for the
Asmodians), you'll find void shards with a skill level of 1. Unlike
other items you've been collecting, items containing aether allow you
to extract more than a total of three items from each source. The most
I've extracted from a single source in the sky is five, so don't spin
around and leave after collecting just three.



The crystals available for a player with an aether gathering skill of
less than 25 are few in number to be sure. This can make gathering them
a little more than frustrating, especially if you’re
competing over them with other gatherers in the area. The best I can do
is to suggest some patience. It doesn't take too long to get your skill
level to 25 (skill-ups appear to come faster for aether than any ground
gathering items) so suck it up and remain nice. Hopefully, this
particular aspect of things will change when the game goes live. In any
case, be sure to gather all the aether you can because you're going to
need to when it comes time to make yourself a new set of equipment.


Refining Your Gathering Skills



Just like aether, you need to collect and hang onto every refinement
stone you can. Refinement stones drop off of mobs at random. You never
know when one is going to drop, or what it's going to drop off of. Each
crafting specialty requires different refinement stones. For example,
those pursuing the Sewing profession need to scoop up every armor and
accessory refining stone they can get their grubby little hands on,
while Weaponsmiths need weapon and accessory refining stones.



Even if you come across a stone you don't require, I would advise
selling them to players before dumping them off as trash to the
merchants. A merchant will barely give you 100 kinah for any refinement
stone, while they go for thousands in the auction house. I'm not
normally a proponent of high priced auction house items, but you're
quickly going to discover that everything in Aion quickly becomes
expensive. As such, I strongly suggest getting what you can for items
before selling them as vendor trash. You're going to need every kinah
you can scrape together if you plan on being a high-end crafter some
day.




style="margin: 2px; width: 210px; float: right;">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/72485" target="_blank"> style="width: 200px; float: right;" src="/image/view/72485">

Along with refinement stones, continue to collect every gatherable item
you come across (Angelica, Iron, Water Silk, etc) to keep your
gathering skill up. The higher your skill, the easier and faster you'll
be able to gather items. The crafting merchants sell everything you
need to make whatever your trainer requests in a work order, but for
actual usable equipment, you're going to have to gather everything
yourself or buy it from other players.



I can't recommend strongly enough that you collect everything yourself.
Crafting materials go for some pretty crazy prices early in the game
and it only continues to get worse from there. If you keep your gather
skill up, it only takes a few seconds to gather everything available
from any particular node you come across. What's better than saving
time and money?


Putting It All Together



You've suffered through reading everything you can about crafting.
You've taken the time to hunt the wilds for materials. You've fought
off hoards of brain eating monsters (because *all* monsters want to eat
your brain) to collect an assortment of refinement stones. You've
scoured the skies for far and wide for
aether crystals, extracting all the aether you could. Now it's finally
time to put it all together and create yourself a kick-ass set of
equipment for all to gawk and wonder at. So what do you do?



First, you'll need to make sure you not only have the necessary
equipment recipes from the crafting merchant of your choice (found near
your crafting trainer), but also some material recipes. To use Sewing
as an example again, to make anything from the first crafting tier,
you'll need waterthread silk sewing thread and bolts of waterthread
cloth. Unless you happen to have received those recipes as a
reward for a work order (which I did not), you'll need to purchase
them. Fortunately, they're very cheap. Considering the fact that you've
already spent an ungodly amount of cash already, a few hundred kinah is
nothing but a pittance at this point.



After the hell you went through breaking the bank, hunting until your
fingers were raw, and searching the skies for aether until your eyes
bled, the act of actually crafting itself is anticlimactic at best.
Once you have everything you need, go over to the crating station of
your choice (a loom for Sewing), click the recipe for the item you want
to make, determine how many you wish to create, and hit the craft
button. Either the Pass bar will fill up first, or the Fail bar will.
Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to determine the outcome one
way or another, so the best advice I can give you during this process
is to simply cross your fingers and hope.



If there's anything you feel I've missed in this guide and would like
to help your fellow crafters out, be sure to href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/index.php" target="_blank">post
a message in our
forums or href="mailto:[email protected]">send me an
email!






To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Aion Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

Comments