Shakkah's crafting guide, posted to JeuxOnLine in January 2007 across two threads — one for beginners, one added to through that month — with a section on levelling and work orders quoted from Datian. An English edition of both, merged, since the second is the first with more added. The screenshots it walked through are gone; what they showed is written out instead.
Work orders
Start at the right bench. A refining work order for an outfitter means an Outfitter Material Bench (Refining). Double-click it and your refining recipe book opens; your character puts its crafting clothes on by itself.
Pick the recipe. The window shows the utilities it wants — Cure, in his example, for Thickened Jute Hair Ties — the tools, here a ruler and a scraper, and the optional components, here a jute bale.
Then choose how many of each utility to bring. At his level he had three slots, which grows later. He took two of Cure and one of solvent, useful against certain complications.
The crafting window
Four things are on screen: the quality of the item so far; the action points remaining, which start at 2,000 and are spent by every action; the buttons that take an action; and the progress through the current stage.
Each action is described by the progress it makes, how much quality it adds, the tool it needs, its cost in points and its cost in utilities. The choices are real ones. In his examples: 75 points for medium progress against 100 for high; 75 for moderate progress against 100 for low progress but added quality; 75 points and one Cure for medium progress against 100 points and two Cure for no progress but a large gain in quality.
Choose carefully, because a grade D item gives no experience at all, and a grade A gives more than a C. But watch the points: run out before the last actions and you cannot finish the item, and you lose the utilities you spent — and, if this is not a work order, the components too.
That is the other difference. Crafting outside a work order means supplying the raw materials yourself, from mining, woodcutting and the rest. In exchange you get five slots on the bench instead of three.
Complications
Any stage can throw one. His example was a "small opportunity", which for 100 points would raise the item's quality, with its reduction shown as complete. Some complications need the same action several times, and so several helpings of points; some need a particular tool or utility before they can be answered at all.
Ignore a complication and you will either pay more points for your actions or lose quality on the item.
The last stage, like the first, never varies: you always get the same choice of actions.
Crafting for yourself
A crafted item pays crafting experience only the first time you make it, and you need every component, raw materials included.
Harvesting
His example again: an outfitter making a cloth bag needs cloth, so he went looking for jute. Harvest the jute plant, and remember to loot it. Twenty jute sheaves make one jute bale, which is what the recipe wants; his bag needed three jute cloths, and one bale becomes one cloth.
Harvest in a group. If you start gathering and the people with you have the gathering tool in their bags — whether or not they have the skill — they can help, and the same node yields far more. About twice as much with one helper, by his testing.
Refining, finishing, assembly
Refining turns raw material into finished material, at a refining bench. On a personal craft you have five slots. To keep it from becoming a chore the developers let you put in one, three or five raw materials and get one, three or five finished ones out in a single sitting. The crafting itself runs exactly as a work order does.
Quality carries forward. A grade D cloth is only worth selling to a vendor; the better your material, the better the quality your next item starts at. He finished with a grade B jute cloth, and the bag made from a grade A cloth started above where it otherwise would.
Where a recipe asks for the "something of blah" version of an item, you need a dust, earned from work order rewards or by deconstructing looted items, which you can do from crafting level 10. He had one, an intelligence dust, and it turned his jute cloth into a Charlatan's Jute Cloth.
Finishing follows refining at a finishing bench, and works the same way. For more advanced items there is a third stage, assembly: refine the materials, make the several parts at finishing, and put them together at an assembly bench — that is how a piece of armour is made.
What a dust calls the item it touches
| Attribute | Tier 1 name | Tier 2 name |
|---|---|---|
| Intelligence | Charlatan's | Grifter's |
| Wisdom | Mystic's | Oracle's |
| Strength | Sentry's | Protector's |
| Dexterity | Brigand's | Brute's |
| Vitality | Votary's | Fanatic's |
| Constitution | Drifter's | Wayfarer's |
How to level, after Datian
Three things give crafting experience: quests, ordinary recipes, and work orders.
Quests are few, and usually given by people standing near the crafting stations. Their flaw is that they carry the same yellow shield as an adventuring quest, so walking into a strange town you rarely think to check — it will just be another level 3 adventuring quest. That is a mistake: they are often easy, pay a great deal of experience, and give useful tools. Most ask you to make things, sometimes across several crafts, so you will need other people. Beware that the real recipes are tied to the continent: the quest at Shaletooth Tower near Bordinar's Cleft asks for items you can make at level 11, but in Thestran style, which is no help if you only know Kojani crafting.
Ordinary recipes pay experience the first time you master them. It is worth waiting a level or two after learning new ones, so that they are easy, and then making them.
Work orders are the crafter's main work. Each pays experience when you make it and a little more when you hand it in, modified by the difficulty, from trivial to downright impossible; by the grade, A to D, where 100% seems to pay no more than 75%; and by the action points left at the end, which give a small bonus if you finish with plenty.
The material reward depends on the grade and on the kind of order: individual, set of three, or batch of five. A set or batch pays a bag of materials whose contents are set by the worst piece in the series. Five A grades is a good bag, five B a decent one, five C a peanut, five D a mouldy peanut; four A and one B counts as B. So if you are three items into an easy batch and one came out B, the batch is already a B, and you may as well settle for B on the rest.
Which work orders to take
For experience, chain moderate orders. A moderate at grade B, or even C, pays better than an easy at grade A. Handing in a set or a batch does not change the experience, which is worked out on the lowest piece, so it is a waste of time.
For money, chain sets and batches, because of the bag. For tools, chain easy and very easy batches and take grade A, which pays good equipment; at level 18 he was finding tools and clothes with +6 and +8 on them. Rare recipes turn up in batch rewards too.