Last month, I created a beginner's crafting guide for our readers in an attempt to aid those that were interested in creating equipment for themselves or to sell to their fellow players. After spending some more time in the crafting system (and receiving some requests), I've decided to create a second guide, in order to cover some aspects of the crafting system that I was unable to explore in the first.

 NOTE: Everything contained within this guide comes with the assumption that you have read A Beginners Crafting Guide of Aion.

Show Me the Money

The crafting system in Aion is very straightforward. Work orders are the best (and only viable) method of increasing your skills. In theory, you could indeed gather everything you needed to create enough items from recipes you have found or bought to max out your skills. What may appear to be doable on paper is a far cry from the reality of the situation though. The amount of time it would take to gather everything you needed just to get enough items to max out the first crafting tier (a skill of 99), is literally incomprehensible.

In the first guide, I mentioned that it would cost you approximately 18,000 kinah to raise your skill above 99. I should have been more specific. Your trainer will charge you that much when you get your skill to 99. That's the cost to go into the "100 to 199" tier. Depending on the frequency of skill-ups you get during your own quest for crafting immortality your actual cost will vary. I spent over 80,000 kinah total on my crafting journey. This includes the exorbitant cost to progress past a skill of 99. In other words, be prepared to do a lot of hunting to make up the cost.

On the plus side, the lowest level item you can make in the second crafting tier is level 18. By the time I had enough cash to do enough work orders and pay the cost of the climbing the training ladder, I had just hit level 18 and was able to make myself a very nice set of equipment. It's for this reason that I say the crafting in Aion is divided into two different areas: training and practical application. Work orders will get you the skills, while you should never make any piece of usable equipment unless you plan to either sell or wear them yourself.

Scour the Skies

If you have any interest in crafting at all in Aion, there are a few things you'll need to do to have any chance at success. The first is to learn how to gather aether from the crystals in the sky. Gathering aether is a different skill from gathering other materials in the world. As such, there's no way to avoid starting off with a skill level of zero after your ascension.

One of the first quests you should have done after ascending granted you a 15-second time extender for your flight, bringing you up to a total of 60 seconds. To avoid any unnecessary deaths, I'd also advise you to have a few in-flight time extending potions as well. There's nothing worse than concentrating on extracting the aether from a crystal a hundred feet above the ground and running out of flight time. In most cases, you can hit your space bar to spread your wings and glide a bit before hitting the ground, but sometimes you can't. The costs of healing your soul can get expensive very quickly, so it's best to avoid pointless deaths whenever possible.

Aether crystals can be found wherever there's a riftway. In the first town your get sent to after your ascension (Altgard Fortress for the Asmodians), you'll find void shards with a skill level of 1. Unlike other items you've been collecting, items containing aether allow you to extract more than a total of three items from each source. The most I've extracted from a single source in the sky is five, so don't spin around and leave after collecting just three.

The crystals available for a player with an aether gathering skill of less than 25 are few in number to be sure. This can make gathering them a little more than frustrating, especially if you’re competing over them with other gatherers in the area. The best I can do is to suggest some patience. It doesn't take too long to get your skill level to 25 (skill-ups appear to come faster for aether than any ground gathering items) so suck it up and remain nice. Hopefully, this particular aspect of things will change when the game goes live. In any case, be sure to gather all the aether you can because you're going to need to when it comes time to make yourself a new set of equipment.

Refining Your Gathering Skills

Just like aether, you need to collect and hang onto every refinement stone you can. Refinement stones drop off of mobs at random. You never know when one is going to drop, or what it's going to drop off of. Each crafting specialty requires different refinement stones. For example, those pursuing the Sewing profession need to scoop up every armor and accessory refining stone they can get their grubby little hands on, while Weaponsmiths need weapon and accessory refining stones.

Even if you come across a stone you don't require, I would advise selling them to players before dumping them off as trash to the merchants. A merchant will barely give you 100 kinah for any refinement stone, while they go for thousands in the auction house. I'm not normally a proponent of high priced auction house items, but you're quickly going to discover that everything in Aion quickly becomes expensive. As such, I strongly suggest getting what you can for items before selling them as vendor trash. You're going to need every kinah you can scrape together if you plan on being a high-end crafter some day.

Along with refinement stones, continue to collect every gatherable item you come across (Angelica, Iron, Water Silk, etc) to keep your gathering skill up. The higher your skill, the easier and faster you'll be able to gather items. The crafting merchants sell everything you need to make whatever your trainer requests in a work order, but for actual usable equipment, you're going to have to gather everything yourself or buy it from other players.

I can't recommend strongly enough that you collect everything yourself. Crafting materials go for some pretty crazy prices early in the game and it only continues to get worse from there. If you keep your gather skill up, it only takes a few seconds to gather everything available from any particular node you come across. What's better than saving time and money?

Putting It All Together

You've suffered through reading everything you can about crafting. You've taken the time to hunt the wilds for materials. You've fought off hoards of brain eating monsters (because *all* monsters want to eat your brain) to collect an assortment of refinement stones. You've scoured the skies for far and wide for aether crystals, extracting all the aether you could. Now it's finally time to put it all together and create yourself a kick-ass set of equipment for all to gawk and wonder at. So what do you do?

First, you'll need to make sure you not only have the necessary equipment recipes from the crafting merchant of your choice (found near your crafting trainer), but also some material recipes. To use Sewing as an example again, to make anything from the first crafting tier, you'll need waterthread silk sewing thread and bolts of waterthread cloth. Unless you happen to have received those recipes as a reward for a work order (which I did not), you'll need to purchase them. Fortunately, they're very cheap. Considering the fact that you've already spent an ungodly amount of cash already, a few hundred kinah is nothing but a pittance at this point.

After the hell you went through breaking the bank, hunting until your fingers were raw, and searching the skies for aether until your eyes bled, the act of actually crafting itself is anticlimactic at best. Once you have everything you need, go over to the crating station of your choice (a loom for Sewing), click the recipe for the item you want to make, determine how many you wish to create, and hit the craft button. Either the Pass bar will fill up first, or the Fail bar will. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to determine the outcome one way or another, so the best advice I can give you during this process is to simply cross your fingers and hope.

If there's anything you feel I've missed in this guide and would like to help your fellow crafters out, be sure to post a message in our forums or send me an email!