How to maximize return on crafting

sanctuary-rpg

During crafting, there are four different actions available, and four different indicators that these actions manipulate.

At what levels of Heat, Durability, and Progress should each action be taken in order to maximize the final quality of the product, and what might the final stats of a product of a given quality be?

Note: This doesn't need to result in perfect items every time, or anything like that, even a pattern that will tend towards better quality goods would be helpful.

Best Answer

It's impossible to give a concrete answer to what steps should be taken in which order, as the effects of each kind of action are randomized unless they give an actual number.

The changes listed in the UI are a general guideline - but I've had times when choosing Strong twice would get immediately to the :WARNING: heat level, and times when choosing Strong three times didn't even get to WARNING.

One way to think about crafting is like this: Durability is a resource you spend in exchange for certain quantities of Quality, Heat and Progress depending on which option you pick; your ultimate goal is to maximize Quality before Durability reaches zero.

You have to time these two things together in order to reach the end of the Progress bar at exactly that point - an ideal crafting reaches the end of the Progress bar with Durability at 1 and Quality as high as you can get it.

Heat only matters insofar as too much of it will halve your Durability, which is obviously bad, and if you overheat an item while crafting you won't gain crafting skill.

Further, Progress can also be an enemy; after all, the crafting ends as soon as the progress bar fills up. If you still have more than 1 Durability at that point, it goes to waste.

Therefore, my preferred strategy for low-level crafting is as follows:

  1. Start out by choosing Strong, to gauge how much heat it will generate in this crafting
  2. Alternate Strong and couple of Light to build progress and keep heat down until I'm near the end of the Progress bar
  3. Once I'm close to the end of the Progress bar, start adding in Wait to keep Progress down
  4. Once Durability is low (20ish) start using Medium to finish the craft

Note that I mentioned "low-level" - you unlock other crafting options as you level up, and you can upgrade your hammer with gold. The new crafting options don't look particularly useful, but since an upgraded hammer produces more quality per strike there might be some interesting strategies for boosting quality in there.