Guides:Crafting

From Auto Assault Wiki

Crafting is an easy but essential element to Auto Assault, giving the player the ability to fix any number of broken items found in the game world, as well as reverse engineering existing items and the capability to create new, more powerful ones.

See also: Experimentation, Tinkering, Projectile Weapons, Commodities

Dragagon's Crafting Recipe Guide Spreadsheet Download Here

Getting Started

To get started in crafting, you'll first need to have an NPC show you how. Move to your race's major city (Tocado, Fort Logan, or Upside) and be sure to bring a bit of money.

Click on the Crafting Disciplines button on the QuickBar (it looks like a little gear). Scan over all your choices. Eventually you'll be able to choose four (4) Apprentice, two (2) Journeymen, and one (1) Master Disciplines, but to begin you'll need one or two Apprentice Disciplines to start crafting. Let’s choose Projectile Weapons as an example.

Locate the Projectile Weapons Trainer (the location varies, depending on the city) and click on the NPC to open the dialogue. It'll cost a little clink to learn how to craft Project Weapons at the first level. Once you’ve done this, it will take 50 rank points to advance to the next level of Projectile Weapons.

How do you gain rank? Easy. You gain rank points by crafting items in that discipline.

For the first group of Apprentice disciplines you use various training kits that you can craft to build up your rank. For Projectile Weapons, you have your basic Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit.

But how do you know how to make a Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit (or really anything else for that matter)? That’s where Reverse Engineering comes into play.

Reverse Engineering

Nearly all equippable inventory items in Auto Assault are made from individual parts, commodities and components which are base building blocks in the game. In order to learn how to build something, you’ll need to take it apart first. Find a vendor that sells Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit (they are pretty easy to find). Then open up the Research window (the Z key) and click on Reverse Engineer mode. Your inventory window should now pop up and you should have a little wrench cursor now. Find your newly purchased Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit and left-click on it. It’ll ask you if you are sure – hit “Accept.”

There is a chance that, depending on the complexity of the item, you may destroy it and not learn how it is constructed. For simple items your chances of Reverse Engineering is usually around 100% so it should not be an issue. Note that when you Reverse Engineer the kit it is now saying it is “broken” in your inventory. That’s okay. Right-click on the broken kit.

Now the Crafting window pops up. The Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit recipe should now appear in the “You Can Craft:” list and should show up at the little display window on the right. Below is a list of Commodities and/or Components required to build a Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit. You can move your mouse over each to see what it is.

The two items needed should be: Salvaged Plastic and Salvaged Glass. These kinds of components can easily be found out in the Central Wastelands; you can find glass quite easily when you destroy buildings or other structures. If you have both items, they should display in the “Required Commodities/Components” area in color (if you don’t, they are non-highlighted). There would also be a message at the bottom: “You don’t have the right components!”

Once you do have the right components, the “Assemble” button should now light up. Click on it and after a few seconds, voila! You’ve now reconstructed the Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit. You now have the option of Memorizing this item.

Memorization

When you successfully craft an item, you have a chance of memorizing how to craft it. If you memorize it, you can then directly craft that item instead of finding or reverse engineering broken items. All you would need are the proper commodities.

There are two drawbacks. You will only craft the same exact item you memorized, and you can only memorize a maximum of five (5) items at a time. To memorize new items, you will have to remove previously learned ones from your list.

To craft an item from memory, bring up your Research panel, and click the “Memory” tab at the bottom of the window. If you memorized the Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit from above, it should show up in the Memorization list. You can also move the mouse over the item to see what commodities it needs. When you've gathered and refined the proper commodities, the “Craft” button will now light up. Click on it and the Crafting window will pop back up, and you can quickly Assemble it. Once the item is crafted it goes straight into your inventory.

During normal crafting, if you memorize a new item but you already have five memorized items, it will ask you if you want to replace one of the old ones with the newly memorized one. If you hit yes, just left click on the memorized item you want to get rid of and it will be replaced.

Spending research points into memorization will allow you to increase the number of memorized weapons to a maximum of 10, and will increase your chance of memorizing an item.

Experimentation

Kit descriptions usually mention that you can enhance the item at a Fabrication Plant. If you go into your starting towns, you can find a fabrication plant not far from the exit of town. If you stand near the fabrication plant, then mouse over the kit, you will notice that the text is now white instead of red. This means that you can enhance the item now. Note you will need to have the Experimentation skill.

Experimentation allows you to improve an item while you're crafting it by adding new Commodities to the crafting process; however, not all items can undergo experimentation. When you hover your mouse over a broken item, there is a list on the right for Enhancements and Gadgets. If your broken item has empty enhancement slots, you can experiment on the item and try to improve the item when you craft it.

Take the item to the appropriate upgrade shop. To find out which shop you need to take it to, hover your mouse over the broken item and look for the line that says "Enhance at..." near the bottom. Most likely the text is in Red, which means you are out of range of the experiment shop. When you've taken it to the proper location, the text will be white. Right click it to bring up the Crafting window. You will now have a new Experimentation section. For each empty Enhancement slot you have, you will have a Complexity 0/10 line with a blue box.

To experiment on the item, drag various commodities into the blue box. Each item adds complexity, and lowers the chance of successfully crafting the item. You can only have one of each kind of commodity. This means, you can only have one Glass, whether it is Salvaged or Perfect. You cannot go above 10/10 complexity when experimenting.

When you are ready, hit “Assemble.” Whether you succeed or fail, you will lose both the commodities you initially needed to make the item, plus one of each commodity you added to the experiment. If you succeed, the new item (hopefully with enhancements!) will be in your inventory. You can find some recepies for experimenation enhancements at Guides:Crafting:Experimentation

Tinkering

Armor or weapons may sometimes have colored dots in the upper left corner of their icon. These are Gadget slots, which allow you to add gadgets you find or craft to improve the item.

A red dot indicates the slot is currently locked. An empty dot indicates the slot is open, but there is no gadget in it. A sold grey dot indicates the slot is open and currently has a gadget in it. Increased skill allows you to open more slots on an item. You do not have to have Tinkering skill to put a gadget into a slot, only to open closed slots.

Left click on the tinkering kit to pick it up, and then right click on the item on which you wish to open a gadget slot. There is a slight chance of destroying the item instead of opening up a gadget slot.

To add a gadget to an open slot, left click on the gadget to pick it up, and right click on the item with the open slot. Warning: This will almost assuredly raise the level of the item by one for each gadget, so be careful!

Getting Items

There are any number of ways you can acquire commodities, components, and other inventory items. Many are dropped as loot, left behind from destroyed enemies. Other items can be found by destroying buildings, towers, light posts, signs, and other objects in the wastelands. Junk yards and other stores in various towns also offer a variety of items. Finally, you can trade with other players if they have the items you need.

Gaining crafting levels

At some stage you may want to quickly increase your crafting level. Maybe because you want to fix a broken item beyond your current level, or maybe you want to reach the level requirement to continue to another crafting dicipline.

One thing to remember is that the harder an item is to craft the bigger tha chance of increasing a crafting level. If you are crafting only for the level increase you should try to craft only items that are hard or very hard. Once an item drops to trivial difficulty you will rarely get a level increase for crafting it. You may need to break this rule to cross gaps in the available item levels, this may pay off especially if the nessesary crafting materials are readily available.

To keep the component cost, and the need for hunting for rare components, down you should use unenhanced items when you want to increase your level. Item enhancements add to the cost of an item, while reducing your chance of memorizing it. If the item isn't going to be used after the crafting these resources are simply wasted. A good pice of advice is to only practice on enhanced items if nothing else is available. The exception to this rule is if the cost of the available enhanced items use less rare materials than the available unenhanced ones.