Crafting

You can turn the shards monsters drop into equipment. It takes four steps, and two of them are optional.

shards  →  a better shard   (optional)
shards  →  a material
materials → a better material (optional)
material →  equipment

Intelligence decides everything. Every step rolls your intelligence against the weight of what you are attempting, and the heavier the thing, the harder it is. A brilliant smith makes remarkable gear; a strong one mostly wastes materials.

Before you spend anything: look at the odds

The game will tell you the chance before you commit. Do this every time, because one of these steps takes everything when it fails.

Fusing shards — the risky one

Two to five shards go in, one better shard comes out. Every affinity adds up, including caloric, and the result can be stronger than anything that drops.

It costs a Binding Salt, which monsters drop and caches sometimes hold.

This is the only action in the game that leaves you with nothing when it fails. The shards and the salt are spent whether or not it works. Reaching for something heavy with low intelligence will cost you four shards most of the time — and the game will have told you so first.

Two warnings:

• Opposites destroy each other. A dense shard and a diffuse one of the same size cancel that axis out and both are still spent. Same for hot and cold.
• Extra axes only pay in some slots. Boots and gloves read one affinity each and ignore the rest. A weapon counts all four — so a shard carrying several is worth far more in a weapon than anywhere else.

Making a material

Shards go in as substance: kinetic, density and cohesion. Caloric goes in as fuel, and never counts toward how good the material is.

You need enough heat to melt what you are making — denser and more tightly bound things need more. Too little and the game refuses and costs you nothing, so a refusal here is free to learn from.

Quenching is optional and it is where the temper comes from. Add cold shards and the game rolls:

A quench needs heat and cold — cold on its own does nothing, because hardness comes from the change in temperature rather than from being cold.

Fusing materials

Several weak materials become one stronger one. Grade adds up.

But the temper is always lost. Whatever you put in, what comes out is annealed. This is how to salvage a handful of poor results — not a way to make something excellent.

Forging

You need a Fabrication Bay, and you need to be inside one, not in its doorway. Stand on one of its interior tiles and the forge panel opens on its own, the same way the Meditation Sanctum's does. It costs stamina, hunger and thirst, all scaled to the material.

Pick which slot you are making for. The material's grade buys stat points, and each stat line rolls separately against your intelligence.

• A poor material makes no stats at all. Below grade 3 there is nothing to give, and you get a piece of gear with a socket and nothing else.
• A great material is harder to forge well. Carrying an excellent material to a Bay with low intelligence usually wastes it.
• You always get the item, even when every roll misses.

Match the material to the slot. If the material's strongest affinity is one that slot actually reads, the stats come out the way you would expect. If not, the two stats swap round and you get something odd but not useless.

What crafted gear is for

Found equipment carries no stats and has up to two sockets you did not choose. Crafted equipment carries stats and has exactly one socket you chose.

Neither is better. Crafted gear is how you aim.

Materials are heavy

A material weighs what it is made of, not a fixed amount. Density is mass and cohesion binds it; kinetic weighs nothing at all.

So a dense material can be heavier than the shards you made it from. Melting things down is not a way to free up space, and a pack full of good materials is a pack that fills up.

Naming what you invent

There is no list of recipes in this game. Nothing is called "steel" until you call it that.

When you make a material it reports a signature — what it is made of and what the fire and water did to it. If you like it, name it. From then on every material like it carries the name, and so does the armour you forge from it: a Steel Cuirass instead of a Forged Cuirass.

Your names live in a book you were given when you were created. Nothing can take it from you — you cannot drop it, stash it, or put it in a bag. You can read from any book you are carrying, including one you took off somebody else, but you only ever write in your own.

Another player may have a different word for the same thing. That is fine. The name travels on the object, so their material arrives in your pack called what they called it.

Shapes you have to learn

You can forge the seven equipment slots from the start. Anything else — a satchel, for instance — needs a pattern, which is a book you find rather than a tool you buy. Carry it and you can make what it teaches. It never wears out.

Your name on it

Everything you make remembers you made it, and everything made from your materials remembers that too. A piece someone forged from your material carries both names.