When you arrive at Aeternum, you will immediately face challenges to overcome. You will assess your surrounding, find resources to harvest and gather, and begin crafting tools to ensure your survival. Trading and crafting skills in New World are powerful tools and progress endlessly. As you progress your trade and craft skills, you will eventually be able to gather, refine and craft many powerful things. We covered the way gathering and refining levels factor into crafting outcomes in the Character Progression article, and had a quick look on how consumables work in our Itemization Blog. You might want to go through them first, before diving deeper into the crafting system here.
Crafted Consumables and Resource Efficiency
Crafting skills that create consumables, such as Arcana and Cooking, gain additional resource efficiency as your skill increases. For example, as a beginner Arcanist, crafting Healing Tinctures crafts them at a 1:1 ratio, while an advanced Arcanist has a chance to produce extra Healing Tinctures. This might seem small initially, but when you start crafting in bulk you can see yields greater than 30% in efficiency.
Crafted Equipment and Gear Score
The better you become in crafting equipment, the better the equipment will be. As you progress a crafting skill that creates equipment with a scaling gear score (such as weapons or armor), the overall potential gear score outcome begins to expand. For instance, as a beginner Weaponsmith, your Iron Swords will be relatively narrow in their outcomes, with a span of 200-210 in gear score. As your Weaponsmithing skill increases, this range will also increase and eventually the minimum gear score of the crafted items will begin to raise as well.
Once you begin unlocking Steel or higher tier weapons, you will start again at the same low-end range (300-310, 400-410 etc.). As your skills continue to grow, it will rise similarly to the previous weapon tier before it. Eventually, you will be able to craft lower tier weapons, that will rival higher tier ones of less skilled Weaponsmiths. For example: a skilled Weaponsmith can craft an Iron Sword that is slightly more powerful than base Steel Sword, which can be a big help when it comes to gearing your lower-level friends and allies.
Crafted Equipment, Gemslots, and Perks
Any time you craft a piece of equipment, it has a small chance of gaining one or more perks during the crafting process. Occasionally, you may even get an item with a socket for a gemstone. These outcomes are random, but there are steps you can take during the crafting process to gain some control over the outcome.
Resource Maximization and Gem Slots
Each item has a primary material that determines the base Gear Score (i.e. iron, steel, etc.) that is equal to a certain tier or level. If you want to increase the possibility of higher Gear Score you can use a higher tier secondary material during the crafting process. For example, a Steel Sword uses steel (tier 3) as the primary material. If you want to increase the chance of rolling a higher gear score you can use a higher level of secondary material (wood and leather).
Azoth and Crafting Modifiers
You can also use Azoth to increase the chance of items rolling with either a perk, a gem slot, or both. The more you use per craft, the higher the chance (although there are no guarantees that you will get a perk, slot, or both). There is also a large amount of special resources that you can gather from the world that allow you to dictate exactly what perk is added to the item being crafted. Using one of these items guarantees the specific perk that is related to that resource will be part of your crafted item.
While you cannot control the total outcome of the item, you can guarantee that the one perk you want on the item is there. There is a wide variety of crafting modifiers; they are generally rare and come from a broad range of sources. Everything from trees and boulders to specific types of creatures have a small chance to drop a crafting modifier. Combine the maximum amount of Azoth with a crafting modifier to attempt the most powerful outcome when crafting.
Furnishing
In New World, we want your house to feel like a home. This means being able to decorate and furnish your house. Furnishing works a little bit differently than the other crafting skills. It is important to us to maximize the variety of furniture items that can be crafted, but we don’t want there to be a huge barrier for players who just want to decorate their house. As a result, decorations can be crafted from a low Furnishing level. In addition, Furnishers can also craft a selection of trophies and storage for houses. House trophies grant passive bonuses for things like combat and crafting, and are explained in depth in our article about Housing. Each house can have a number of storage chests. Adding a Storage Chest to your house increases you storage volume for that house’s Settlement. Recipes for trophies and storage unlock as your progress your furnishing skill. We’re excited to see all the ways you will decorate your home.
Crafted Items Versus Dropped Items
Highly skilled crafters can create items that are just as, and sometimes more, powerful as the items found in Aeternum. Battles will not be won based on whether an item was crafted or dropped from a powerful creature; they’ll be won based on the skill of the players involved and the thought they have put into their respective Attribute and Mastery builds.
There are many roles to play in New World. Whether you are exploring remote and dangerous places to gather resources, or mastering the forge to produce incredible weapons that change the course of a war, you can leave your mark on Aeternum.
*Some designs may change based on tester feedback. Screenshots are from alpha and subject to change.
**May 11, 2021: We've made minor updates to this article reflect recent development updates.