Dragon's
Prophet has a lot of interesting and unique systems
throughout the game, most of them focused on or around the dragons for
which the game is named. The great wyrms have their talons in pretty much
everything, including the crafting system.

The crafting system in Dragon's Prophet, while intricate and engaging, is
not well-documented. It can be difficult to figure out what you need to do
with all the stuff you're getting based on tooltips and absurdly unhelpful
"tutorial" missions. There is often no in-game indication on how to
perform relatively basic tasks.

Essentially, the base concept is pretty easy and familiar from any other
MMO ever: harvest materials from the wild, fashion them into usable items.
You don't need special tools to get started gathering materials - anything
you come across during your adventures is harvestable, regardless of
character class or level or whatever. 

There are six crafting disciplines:

• Weaponsmithing - make swords, axes, staves, bows,
  gunblades and other assorted weaponry.
• Armorsmithing - make personal armor and clothing.
• Tinkerer - make jewelery, accessories, saddles and
  beast armor.
• Alchemy - make potions.
• Cook - make buffing food.
• Carpenter - make housing items and Draconic Flutes.

You can master as many of these as you want, but they all tend to use the
same ingredients. Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing, for example, both use
ores, and Weaponsmithing and Carpentry both use wood. Sticking to one
discipline at a time means you will advance that one craft faster at the
expense of one or more others. 

Also be warned that there is a relatively low cap on the number of
recipes a character can learn in any given profession. This will be
especially restrictive for something like Armorsmithing, which has
automatic leveled recipes for all 4 classes for each piece of worn armor.
You will want to specialize for your character early on, and not bother
with some recipes that your character can't use.

Inventory Management

First things first: you are going to need a lot of inventory space to get
started with crafting. There are a lot of materials to be gathered, which
add up very quickly, and inventory space comes at a premium unless you pay
for unlocks. As a die-hard cheapskate, I found it was best to tackle
crafting separately from adventuring, because I ran out of bag space too
quickly to effectively do both at the same time. My bag would be too full
of crafting mats to pick up quest items, or too full of trash loot to
harvest nodes.

Also worth noting is the fact that you need several blank inventory spots
to harvest a node, even if you already have partial stacks of that
material type in your bag. Harvesting the node adds the new items to
existing stacks, but only after dropping them in blank inventory spots
first, and most resource nodes provide two or three different resources.
For example, I tried to harvest a tree while I had only one blank
inventory spot open, but couldn't because I didn't have enough room. I had
to dump some vendor trash loot to clear 3 spots, and those spots stayed
open after harvesting because the materials were added to existing
part-stacks.

Resource Gathering

For basic wilderness gathering, you'll need to keep your eyes open to
find your materials, and know where to look for them. Wild herbs grow in
grassy areas, like pastures or plains, usually out in the open.
Harvestable wood tends to grow next to large trees, in narrow saplings
that sprout up between the roots. Ores can most often be found clustered
up next to rock walls, in little nooks and crannies, and you may have to
do some serious hunting to find ore nodes. To harvest, just run up to the
node and click the F key. If the node doesn't immediately despawn after
harvesting, click F again - some nodes can be harvested 2 or 3 times
before they are tapped out. 

Another important resource you will find in the wilderness is recipes.
These drop as rare random loot from some mobs. You can use them in the
field to learn the recipes, but you won't be able to craft the item until
you reach the appropriate crafting level in that discipline.

Wilderness gathering is not the only way to collect resources, though.
Nor is it the most efficient. If you want to really accelerate your
resource-gathering without sacrificing questing time, snatch up a few
extra dragons for your lair. Dragons in your lair can be sent on
resource-gathering missions from the Dragon Process tab. These processes
take an hour apiece, but they bring back a good haul of materials, you can
do them while you're off adventuring or before you log off for the night,
and the materials are stored in the lair rather than taking up precious
inventory space. It's actually a fairly elegant system - you can focus on
gathering just the materials you want, and then you have a storehouse from
which you can make withdrawals. You can withdraw everything at once, or
you can take a few pieces at a time for a specific project. Lair storage
is withdraw-only; you can't add items to it (except through
resource-gathering processes), only take them out. For regular inventory
management, use the bank.

You can queue your lair-bound dragons for 5 processes at a time, and the
processes cost a bit of money. It's possible to expand their mission
capability, but that starts to cost Station Cash after the 5th process.
You can also spend Station Cash to increase production on a given run;
clicking the little star icon on the Processes tab and spending 30 SC will
gain you 3x the amount of materials you would normally get from a process.
It doesn't reduce the amount of time the process takes (it still takes an
hour per process), but it's like running several processes at once.

Hidden Prep Work

Your dragons will usually bring back weird unidentified items from their
gathering missions, and the tooltip tells you that these items need to be
broken down to figure out what they are and what they can be used for. To
extract them, use the little Extraction button on the bottom of the
inventory window. There's also a Bulk Extraction button, which opens up a
second window that grinds up whatever you place inside it. Extraction can
also be used on crafted gear to learn improved recipes, and obtain
Invocation Orbs which are used for enhancing your gear. Extraction also
has a chance of refunding some of the materials used, so if you're doing
some bulk crafting strictly for XP gain, Extraction is the disposal method
of choice. 

Another unexplained gem: independent of any crafting station or inventory
button, and completely ignored by any kind of introductory quest or
tooltip hint, is the Synthesis tab, mapped to the U key by default. You'll
be picking up a crapload of mystery items that mention "synthesis" in
bright blue letters, and this is how you use them: to make catalysts,
which can add additional properties to crafted items. You'll need some
Refinement Essence, and then a bunch of different synthesis materials to
combine. Different combinations will yield different catalysts, indicated
by the varying levels of the four colored test tubes in the middle.
Stacking more synthesis materials creates a purer catalyst, which results
in a greater chance of a crafted item having an additional property.

Don't get tied up on the word "catalyst," though. That word can
apparently have two meanings when you're crafting. More on that later.

Making Stuff

It takes quite a bit of raw material to make advancements in crafting.
Some of the low-level recipes eat up a lot of resources, so take your time
and gather a lot of stuff together. The actual crafting doesn't take much
time at all.

There are "tutorial" missions for each type of crafting, but these
tutorials teach you little more than how to stand next to a workbench and
click F. Do them if you must for the mitt-full of free 0-level mats and
the half-level crafting XP. You won't learn much about the system from
them. 

You'll start off by creating a bunch of nearly-worthless level 1
white-quality items, cranking them out in bulk for the XP. Stand next to
your chosen crafting station and click F to open that menu. This is
identical to the menu that is opened by the U key, but will be specific to
the crafting station you are standing near. Clicking on the drop-down menu
that says "Click here for more recipes" will show a list of item types
that you can potentially craft here, but setting it to the default (so it
reads "Click here...") will show you all the recipes you actually have the
materials for. If there are no recipes showing up in that list, you'll
need to go gather some more materials before you can do anything.
Hopefully, you have enough to get started with at least one white-quality
item. The right side of the window shows you what all is required to make
your item.

Technically, you don't need to make a whole lot of these items - just
enough to get a green recipe when you Extract them later. You could get an
improved recipe from the very first item you craft, or it may take a dozen
or more extractions. Make a few, but don't use up all your resources just
yet. 

Advanced Crafting

That right-hand window bears some closer inspection. Immediately below
the materials panel is the big circular progress window. To the left of
that is a small widget that has a little picture of rocks or something,
and +/- buttons on either side of a 0. This is a "catalyst" window, but
the tooltip description seems rather inaccurate at present. Clicking the +
button here adds the mystery item to the boiler, which increases your
chances of a critical success when crafting that item. With normal
white-quality items, you have a very slim chance of getting a
green-quality item (3.3% or so) without adding anything to this window.
Cranking in the maximum of 20 "catalysts" through this widget increases
the odds to 36.4% for a crit. These "catalysts" cost Station Cash.

Additionally, there is a second "catalyst" wiget, attached to the
three-paned results widget at the bottom, for the enhancement potions you
create with the Synthesis system. These second "catalysts" add additional
properties to the item being crafted. They cost nothing to use, but they
can be somewhat resource-intensive to make. Don't waste either type of
catalyst on a white-quality junker item. Save it for green or blue
recipes.

Once you have a passel of white junk, start the Extraction process. Grind
them all up for a small material refund, enhancement orbs and, most
importantly, those juicy improved recipes. Again, be aware that there is
currently a somewhat restrictive cap on the number of recipes you can
know, and that the auto-generated recipes you learn when gaining a new
crafting level count towards this cap, and cannot be unlearned to make
room for new ones later. You can unlearn green and blue recipes, but not
the crappy level 1 white ones that you will likely never use again.

Anyway, you should end up with a green-quality recipe of whatever you
just extracted. Green recipes have a chance of critting to blue or even
purple quality. Green recipes require refined ingredients from the
Processed Products category. Processed Products are rather
resource-intensive, so crafting a green-quality item can cost several
times the amount of ingredients of a white-quality item. 

This should be enough to get you on the right side of the learning curve.
There's plenty more to learn on your way to level 60 mastery, but it all
branches off of these basic ideas. So send your pack-dragon out
prospectin'! Dragon's Prophet goes live on September 18.