Happy Monday everyone!

We thought we'd drill down a bit and discuss just how things are crafted (in general terms) - as a result, we found this question would be interesting for our community to learn about.

When a player crafts an item, will it be a drag and right-click from your inventory onto another component, or will you be required to go somewhere and use a machine. On top of that, will there be devices that you are required to have on you to craft, or anything that can make a job easier to complete (i.e. a screw drivers, analyzing devices, things not actually going into the crafting formula that can be reused)?

That said, let's take a look at this week's Question of the Week, with the answer straight from our developers.

Crafting in Earthrise will require players to visit factories in order to utilize modern manufacturing facilities, either aimed to the mass market or for industrial purposes. Factories will be secure places where crafters can either do their business or advertise their services to anyone interested in using someone else's already developed Technologies and Designs to acquire the item they want without using the global market auction. Factories also host number of production units, machinery specialized in creation of certain types of items. Each item requires at least two Production Units, and both should be present at the chosen Factory. Also, Production Units are ranked in their technological development, with the higher rank being capable of producing better quality items. Players will have to decide which factory to use in order to get the best out of the item they have to create. Aside from that choice and it's logistic solution - players might have to travel across the island, use vehicles to cut down the travel time or use instant teleportation for a price - players won't need special items to facilitate the crafting process. We are considering implementing options that will allow the crafter to use certain aspects of crafting anywhere he is located at, though the full spectrum of crafting services will be provided at factories only.

Feel free to comment and craft your thoughts below.
~ m.

Ranked on technological development?

Sounds like a fun thing for guilds, race to upgrade your factories and whatnot first!

Ok, lets upack this a bit.

a) Factories will be secure places - i.e.  plenty of NPC guards.
.. to anyone interested..  - sounds like a public place.

Hence factories are likely NPC owned and operated.

b) .. advertise their services..  - hmm, sounds like not everything will be salable via the market.
Can you say "Wow Enchanters?"

c) specialized in creation of certain types of items.. are ranked in their technological development.. might have to travel..
- OK, crafting optimization is going to be a scavenger hunt.  Red type items are built in to the west,  Yellow in the East. Blue to the south.  To make orange stuff (red and yellow) you will have to go North, but purple is in the East.

d) Each item requires at least two Production Units -
hmm, They probably don't want to charge an arm and a leg for renting a production unit.
I wonder how much it would cost to lock up all the highest rank Red slots for a month?

Kind of disappointing that players may need to go to factories to do something that should be as simple as disassembling a gun and replacing the bad components with good ones.  I'm hoping that this is talking about the production and manufacturing those components such as rolling and cutting a steel plate into a gun barrel.  And not actually putting the gun together.

Would be great to see some basic things doable in the field considering that equipment gets damaged.  Using a screwdriver and a hand held welder to remount a broken armor plate.  The job won't be perfect by any means but maybe enough to get you to a city and replace it.

Ok, lets say we have privately owned factories in bases.  Can they be attacked by enemies?  Taken over? destroyed?
What happens to the jobs inside the factory?  Do the people who took over the factory get the results? 

What about the warehouse of materials that is used to feed the factory jobs?  Is this secure too?
You want to keep your materials close to the factory (in order to build stuff)  But if your factory is vulnerable to attack, you will want to store your stuff in a place that is completely safe.  (house? bank?).   This means your warehouse isn't close to your factory.

Crafters do *not* want to lose everything they have built/acquired over their game lifetime.

I have a follow up question, will there be time delays as in you put x into be manufactured and you have to wait an hour for it to be ready or will they instantly appear out of the blue? Also you say that factories decide production quality, does this mean that an item crafted by a 'master craftsman' will be totally identical to the same item created by an 'apprentice' if they use the same facilities?

No, there will be both open NPC owned territories and player owned factories.

For the simple reason that factories to build are going to cost alot even for big corps, limiting it to corps only would actually hurt the economy. Big corps got an advantage as they can get resources easier then others, as those have to go deep into dangerous territory mob and playerwise to mine.

Factories are also build from the ground up and can also be destroyed and as mentioned before they are expensive. There has been no indication given that areas got caps on how advanced the structures can be therefor there's no reason to believe so.


Actually as stated before everything crafted can be sold and every crafted item can be broken down into components. I would not see this as enchants in the sense of being unable to sell it further, more or less as people needing to find a tradeskiller to combine and build items, for a fee ofcourse.


You're now putting it in class categories, while it could very well be that the quality level is in numbers at plant A you can get +0 quality levels based on the components, in plant B it's +1, C is +2 and so on..

They clearly said that production units will be "specialized in creation of certain types of items".
There is also a level.  The suggestion was that you would not have the highest level  units for all types of items in a single place.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it.