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You'll gather loads of crafting materials just by playing The Secret World. While the game teaches you how to assemble new items, the secret is knowing what to craft, what to save, what to sell, what makes what, and what crafting possibilities are available to you. Our latest The Secret World guide addresses questions regarding the system known as transcribing, assembly, or simply just plain crafting.

The Least You Need to Know...

Time is short; you've got hoardes of zombies, insurgents, and vampires to slay. If you just want a list of do's and don'ts should you decide you might want to give crafting (or "transcribing") a shot someday, we've got you covered:

1. Press "Y" to bring up the crafting window. Pick up your stack of materials with a left mouse click. Drag the stack over to the assembly window, but do not release the stack. While continuing to hold down the left mouse button, right click once on each tile where you want a material deposited. [Thanks to a community member for sharing this handy tip for distributing materials. - Ed.]

2. Avoid selling weapons, talismans, and runes to a vendor. Yes, you could use the pax. Yes, your inventory will get sloppy. But with a downtiered refinement system that TSW uses, you'll need to disassemble 5 weapons to assemble one weapon of your choice of the same tier as the ones you disassembled. Since green drops don't exactly grow on trees.

3. Disassemble potions and animas for easy runes. Don't get me wrong: non-healers should always have an instant heal or heal-over-time handy, since these are decidedly cheaper than repairs. But when you're not running dungeons or content that's technically too difficult for you, odds are you'll have some potions and anima to turn into easy runes. Runes are the toughest material to refine, not because they're particularly valuable, but because there's so many of them that it's hard to build up enough to refine.

4. Gadgets work much like potions, but aren't consumed, making them (in a word) awesome, and one of the primary early benefits of crafting in The Secret World.

5. The game lets you preview the outcome of your assembly before you commit, so always, always double check the result before you click assemble.

5. To get a good grounding in TSW crafting, be sure to do the...

Crafting Missions

Two Kingsmouth missions will serve as an orientation to crafting in The Secret World: 'Zen and the Art of Weapon Maintenance' found just outside of the Sheriff's station introduces you to weapon crafting, while Sonya in the Raven's Nook will teach you about glyphs through the mission titled 'The Occultist's Cookbook'. The missions walk you through the steps below, are easy to do, and offer you fast experience besides, so they're very much worth doing.

Crafting Basics and Diagrams

The Secret World uses a Minecraft-style crafting system that requires you to arrange materials in certain shapes to create different items. These shapes are somewhat intuitive, and you'll likely memorize the ones needed for your class, but for your reference here are most of the diagrams needed for crafting in The Secret World.

Weapon Assembly Diagrams (each requires 7 metal)

Talisman Assembly Diagrams (requires fire, dust, or water)

Potions and Glyphs (requires runes)