Craft Raw Materials
That's what adventurers call it; normal folks call this mining or logging.
Ask the DM if this is acceptable first, but the argument goes, though the game doesn't say raw materials can be crafted, raw materials must come from somewhere, and scrounging in the wilderness is as good a place as any to get them. All it takes is time.
The Pathfinder Craft skill says
- Find the item's price in silver pieces (1 gp = 10 sp).
- Find the item's DC from Table: Craft Skills.
- Pay 1/3 of the item's price for the raw material cost.
- Make an appropriate Craft check representing one week's worth of work. If the check succeeds, multiply your check result by the DC. If the result × the DC equals the price of the item in sp, then you have completed the item. (If the result × the DC equals double or triple the price of the item in silver pieces, then you've completed the task in one-half or one-third of the time. Other multiples of the DC reduce the time in the same manner.) If the result × the DC doesn't equal the price, then it represents the progress you've made this week. Record the result and make a new Craft check for the next week. Each week, you make more progress until your total reaches the price of the item in silver pieces.
If you fail a check by 4 or less, you make no progress this week. If you fail by 5 or more, you ruin half the raw materials and have to pay half the original raw material cost again.
Progress by the Day: You can make checks by the day instead of by the week. In this case your progress (check result × DC) should be divided by the number of days in a week.
Thus items costing less than 3 sp consume raw materials costing 0 sp. So the character crafts raw materials 2 sp at a time by spending 0 sp. The DM must determine the DC for crafting raw materials, but a reasonable house rule simply makes the DC equal to the DC of crafting the actual item (because were it easier folks wouldn't buy raw materials).
Example
Gulliver Robinson's ship sinks and he washes up on a deserted island. After a few years, he realizes he'd like not to be trapped on a deserted island any longer. He wants to craft a
rowboat. A rowboat costs 50 gp. The DM determines that a rowboat is a typical item as per the Craft skill, but as the island is deserted (except for Gulliver Robinson, obviously), no one is available to sell him raw materials. He must make his own.
Gulliver Robinson's tracking his progress by the day. He needs to craft the raw materials for his rowboat first. He spends 1 day trying to gather 2 sp of raw materials. He is saddled with improvised tools and but his Intelligence 14 gives him a Craft (shipbuilding) skill bonus of +2. He takes 10 on his Craft (shipbuilding) checks, as 10 guarantees success.
He spends day 1 taking to to make 1 Craft (shipbuilding) check. He spends 0 sp to purchase raw materials. He takes 10 on his Craft (shipbuilding) check. He multiplies his check result (10) by the check's DC (10) to get 100 and divides that 100 by 7 for progress by the day for 14 sp, so Gulliver Robinson can make 8 Craft (shipbuilding) checks per day, making 2 sp of raw materials each check, therefore making 16 sp of raw materials per day.
It'll take about 11 days to craft the raw materials for a rowboat, whose raw materials cost 166 sp.
(By the way, if Gulliver Robinson takes 10 on his Craft (shipbuilding) checks to craft the rowboat he'll be done in 5 weeks.)
2000gp/day
The feat only gives a very short description of the item creation rules, and then refers the reader to the actual rules:
Benefit: You can create a wide variety of magic wondrous items. Crafting a wondrous item takes 1 day for each 1,000 gp in its price. To create a wondrous item, you must use up raw materials costing half of its base price. See the magic item creation rules in Magic Items for more information.
The magic item creation rules are authorative and supersede the feat description. The "1 day per 1000 gp" rule is merely a convenient combination of the "8 hours per day", and "1 hour per 1000 gp" rules for the sake of brevity. Since the magic item creation rules state that accelerated crafting reduces the time spent to 4 hours per 1000 gp, but does not touch on the 8 hour daily limit, there is no reason to assume that the daily crafting time limit is suddenly reduced to 4 hours.
Best Answer
The quoted rules from the Player’s Handbook description of the Craft skill are near-literally the only rules I can find anywhere that touch upon how long it takes to craft anything non-magical. The only exceptions I can find are the Dungeon Master’s Guide rules for trapmaking, the Dungeon Master’s Guide II rules for item templates, and the Drow of the Underdark rules for poisonmaking.
Rules Compendium doesn’t even bother to repeat the Player’s Handbook rules, and doesn’t touch on the Craft skill at all, which is kind of astonishing. And despite the fact that the errata for both Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide explicitly label the Dungeon Master’s Guide the “primary source” on “special material construction rules,” it doesn’t have any. It only describes what the advantages are for something that was constructed with such materials, nothing about the process of something getting that way. The Rules of the Game articles don’t even cover Craft, which again seems bizarre since it’s a fairly major thing and the rules are really confusing.
Which means literally all we’ve got here is
No commentary, discussion, or caveats on “the item’s price.” Masterwork is a separate “component,” as are the DMG2 item templates, so we know those are worked out separately. Those also have separate Craft DCs, which special materials do not. And magical crafting, of course, is an entirely different system, and the rules specify that the costs and crafting of the magic part of an item are entirely independent. But nothing says that about special materials, or anything else. Rules-as-written, then, “the item’s price” is just that, whatever the item costs, however it got to cost that much, excepting masterwork, item template, or magic.
Which, yes, means that adamantine full-plate takes about half a year to craft.