I’ve designated this week as crafting week and will be doing a basic overview of crafting systems in: Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes, Free Realms, Runes of Magic and EVE Online. So, get those forges, invention tables and factories warmed up!
Starting with Lord of the Rings Online, we see a pretty basic and familiar system. Here it goes:
First, start by locating a Master of Apprentices — you can usually find one anywhere crafting trainers are. Check Bree-town or any of the second newbie towns. Talking to one gives you a set of options similar to this:
Master of Apprentices
My character here already has a vocation, but you can change your vocation at any time. Be warned, it will reset your crafting skills. Now, once you click on one of the vocations a window will appear like this:
Vocation
This tells you about the vocation and what three skills you’ll receive with it. Each skill will either be a gathering skill or a production skill (with Scholar being a bit of both) and will usually play off one another. For instance, here the Woodworker skill uses materials that the Forester gathering skill gathers. However, Woodworker can also use materials from Weapon-smiths, which in turn use materials gathered by Prospectors. In most cases, some of the items — or a lot — will require the skills of another to complete. Luckily you can have alts with different vocations or visit the auction house.
Once you select a vocation and get your new skills you’ll be able to head out and begin gathering resources. To do so you should use the resource tracking skill you gained. It’ll look something like:
Resource Tracking Skill
Using the skill you’ll be able to see blips on the mini-map that show where resources are located. Little blue arrows will allow you to see nearby resources that are off the mini-map’s viewing screen. You’ll know when a node is nearby since it’ll look like this:
Resource Node
A little green square with an axe and pick. All that’s left to do is run up to it before someone else does and harvest:
Harvesting Node
It’ll take a few seconds to complete, but once you do you’ll find some new resources in your inventory. It should be noted that nodes come in two varieties: the standard type like above and another ‘rich’ node that has more base resources than normal and special resources too. They tend to look similar so the only real way to tell is by the name.
Once you have an inventory full of resources it’s time to take them back to the crafting area and put them to use. Starting with refining and then any crafting that you might want to do. The window looks like this:
Refining and Crafting
As you can see, it’s a pretty simple “have resources, hit make” type crafting. A bit of what sets it apart here is the tiers — you can see three of them here — and ‘mastery’. Once you complete a tier it opens up the next, however it also opens up mastery of that tier. Mastery allows for mastery options which can add critical success chances to your crafting, which will result in much better materials or more materials. When completing mastery, you must work your way up — you can only open up mastery of a higher tier by completing the mastery of all previous tiers. It’s basically like re-leveling the tier, only a bit longer. Of note — when you complete a tier in a production profession you must talk to the profession’s trainer in order to get a quest to unlock the next tier. Gathering professions do not require this, the simply open the next tier automatically.
You’ll find many people partake in crafting in Lord of the Rings Online. Unline many other games where crafting is only really useful for a select few items (usually consumables), LotRO’s crafted items are almost always better than anything you could find in the world or through quests. The items are actually worth using and can go for a rather high price — resources as well. So, if you’re one of the new anniversary players starting out — take up a profession and make some money!
