Crafting: A Deep Dive¶

"Any fool can swing a hammer. It's knowing when the iron's ready, how hard to strike, and when to stop - that's the part that takes a lifetime. The dice just measure how much of that you've learned." - Reinhold Cassel, Iron-Scale Forge

The Crafting overview walks you through the loop: gather materials, stand at the right station, run craft. This article is the layer under that - what the dice are actually doing when you strike the anvil, why a rank-60 smith pulls a Fine blade out of the same recipe that hands a beginner a Crude one, and what waits at the top of each trade once you've earned it.

Read this once you've made a few things and want to understand why your crafts come out the way they do.

At a glance¶


The disciplines	Smithing, Alchemy, Herbalism, Cooking, Tailoring & Leatherwork, Woodcraft, Jewelcraft, Tinkering, Enchanting
Each needs	A station (forge / cookfire / workbench / alchemy bench / loom / pharmacy lab) - or none, for portable recipes
A recipe fixes	Station, sub-skill, difficulty, the contributing stat, exact ingredients, and the output
The check	A roll-over d100 - your rank and stat lower the bar you have to clear
Win or lose	Either way the sub-skill earns SP - failure trains you too
Quality	Crude → Standard → Fine → Masterwork, driven by your rank + the roll
Value floor	Crafting always beats buying the raw materials - guaranteed
Mastery	Rank 40 / 55 / 70 / 85 / 100 unlocks per trade; rank 70 is the signature

The disciplines and their stations¶

Every recipe is bound to a station - a piece of the world you have to be standing at. You can't brew a potion at a forge or hammer a blade at a loom. The stations are:

Forge - the anvil-and-fire work: weapons, armor, smelting ore into bars. The heavy end of Smithing.
Cookfire - food and drink. Most taverns let you use theirs; on a long rest you can build your own in the wild.
Workbench - the catch-all bench: leatherwork, woodcraft, jewelcraft, tinkering, and rune-inscription enchants all share it.
Alchemy bench - the volatile brews: potions, oils, tinctures, elixirs, and oil-imbued enchants.
Loom - spinning thread and weaving cloth, the fine-textile end of Tailoring.
Pharmacy lab - the clinical brews. A gated station: you need a Familiar grasp of Herbalism before the lab will obey you.

A handful of recipes carry no station at all - simple things you can put together anywhere, on the road with nothing but your hands and your pack.

The trades that run across those stations:

Smithing - weapons, armor, and turning ore into workable metal. Trained at the Iron-Scale Forge Bench under Reinhold Cassel.
Alchemy - brewing remedies, potions, elixirs and distilled oils. Trained at the Mortar & Leaf Brew Counter under Ilva Greenfinger.
Herbalism - the forage-identify-brew loop that feeds Alchemy; the pharmacy lab is its advanced wing.
Cooking - meals and feasts that restore and buff. Ungated - anyone with a recipe and a pot.
Tailoring & Leatherwork - tanning hides, stitching armor, spinning and weaving cloth into garments.
Woodcraft - whittling, fletching arrows, shaping bows, and the carpentry line.
Jewelcraft - settings, rings, and the finer metal-and-stone work.
Tinkering - gadgets, traps, and clockwork; its lockpicking and engineering siblings share the same bench.
Enchanting - adding magical properties to finished gear. Rare, ingredient-heavy, and gated behind the Arcane Collegium.

Each trade has its own sub-skill ladder underneath it - forging weapons, forging armor, tanning hide, brewing elixirs, carving, stone-setting, and so on are all tracked separately. The discipline is the family; the sub-skills are where your ranks actually live.

How a craft check resolves - the roll-over dice¶

This is the heart of the system. When you craft something and you have the station, the ingredients, and any required standing, the game rolls a roll-over d100 check - the same dice every skill in Ghelmyon uses.

Here's the shape of it. The recipe sets a difficulty, and the game works out a threshold - the number you have to beat. Then it rolls a d100, and you succeed if your roll comes out over the threshold.

The trick is what moves the threshold:

Your sub-skill rank lowers it - the better you are, the smaller the number you need to clear.
The contributing stat lowers it too. Each recipe names the attribute it leans on (Strength at the forge, Dexterity for fine handwork, Intelligence for the alchemy bench), and a high score there shaves the bar down further.
The recipe's difficulty raises it - that's what makes esoteric recipes hard even for a skilled hand.

So a rank-60 smith with strong arms is rolling against a low bar and clears it most days; a beginner faces a high one and fumbles a lot. Same recipe, same dice - different thresholds. The threshold is always clamped so that nothing is ever a guaranteed pass or fail: even a master can slip, and even a novice can get lucky.

Critical and fumble. A very high roll is a critical success - it overrides the threshold entirely and hands you a bonus: extra output, and a quality floor of Fine or better. A very low roll is a fumble - you lose the attempt and the materials with it. (Some of the lucky races get a once-a-day reroll on a fumble - small mercy, but it counts.)

The most important rule: you train either way. Win, lose, or fumble, the sub-skill earns its experience. A failed craft is not wasted effort - it's a rank toward the next one. This is why the right way to learn a trade is to keep crafting, not to wait until you're sure you'll succeed.

Skill versus difficulty - the climb¶

Because rank lowers your threshold and difficulty raises it, the two are in a tug-of-war. Early on, even an easy recipe is a coin-flip because you have no rank to offset the bar. As your sub-skill climbs, the easy recipes become near-certain and the standard ones become reliable - which is exactly when you should be reaching for the harder tier, because that's where the rank is.

Each venue lays its work out on a tier ladder: easy → standard → challenging → esoteric. New hands start at easy and earn the harder tickets by keeping the routine ones clean. Higher tiers pay more and unlock the rarer recipes, but they carry a higher difficulty - you want some rank behind you before you attempt them.

Some recipes also carry gates beyond raw difficulty:

A skill gate - the pharmacy lab won't work for you until your Herbalism reaches a Familiar grasp.
A faction gate - most enchanting recipes need standing with the Arcane Collegium before you can even attempt them.

Gates are checked before the dice roll. The game tells you plainly what you're short on.

Quality and value - why two of the same item differ¶

Run the same recipe twice and you can get two different items. The craft system mints output on a quality tier:

Crude → Standard → Fine → Masterwork

Quality is rolled from your rank plus the dice at the moment of the craft. A low-rank hand makes a lot of Crude work; a high-rank crafter pushes the odds toward Fine and, eventually, Masterwork. Quality is baked into the item - it shows in the name (a Fine Iron Sword, a Masterwork Leather Cuirass) and it scales the item's stats: Crude work is weaker than its base, Fine is a clear step up, Masterwork a substantial one. A critical craft guarantees at least Fine.

On top of the rolled quality there's a quieter, skill-level guarantee: the higher your rank, the more value your output carries regardless of how the quality die landed. Rank is rewarded two ways - once in the luck of the quality roll, once as a flat bump that climbs with your skill.

The value floor. Crafting is built so it always beats buying the raw materials. The output of a recipe is worth meaningfully more than the ingredients that went into it - there's a structural margin floor that holds even on recipes whose materials are pricey relative to the result. You will never grind a recipe that mints something worth less than what you fed it. That said, "worth more than its materials" isn't the same as "worth more than just buying the finished item from a vendor" - for a few recipes it's cheaper to buy than to craft from purchased reagents, and the game warns you the first time you'd lose coin that way (check the recipe detail in /cookbook). The way to actually profit is to craft from materials you gathered, not bought.

Rule of thumb: loot or forage your ingredients, craft them up a tier, sell the result. The Merchants Guild prices quality in - a Masterwork blade fetches far more than a Crude one.

Mastery - the top of a trade¶

Sub-skill ranks run to 100. The master NPCs at each venue will teach you up to rank 70 in their trades; beyond that, progress comes from rare scrolls, master-tier recipes, and the mastery unlocks each crafting tree earns at fixed ranks.

The trees light up at 40 / 55 / 70 / 85 / 100, and rank 70 is the signature - the "I'm a master at this" moment. A taste of what waits at the top of three of them:

Smithing - Keen Edge (40, your weapons hit harder) → Efficient Hammer (55, often save a material per craft) → Masterwork (70, your smithed items start at Fine quality or above - a permanent quality floor) → Reforger (85, upgrade an existing piece a tier once a day) → Legendary Smith (100).
Alchemy - Stable Mixtures (40, your low-rank brews stop failing) → Double Batch (55, a chance at double yield) → Potency Boost (70, your potions hit harder) → Transmutation (85, swap an ingredient on demand) → Philosopher's Touch (100).
Cooking - Hearty Portions (40, longer food buffs) → Leftovers (55, a free second serving) → Chef's Special (70, a chance at a bonus buff) → Feast (85, buff the whole party for a day) → Grand Feast (100).

Herbalism, and the other trades, run their own ladders in the same shape. The thread through all of them: the rank-70 signature is what turns a competent crafter into a master, and it changes how the trade plays - a master smith no longer fears Crude output, a master alchemist stops failing the small stuff, a master cook feeds a whole party.

Referral letters. Twenty clean shifts at a venue typically earn a referral letter the same trade honors in other cities - so you don't restart from apprentice tier when you travel. Master once; work everywhere.

Quick reference¶

You want to know	The answer
Where do I craft this?	Its station - `/recipes` at a station lists what works there
Why did my craft fail?	The roll-over check - low rank or a high-difficulty recipe means a high bar
Does failing waste my materials?	A fumble loses them; a plain miss usually doesn't - and either way you earn SP
How do I make better items?	Raise the sub-skill rank - it lowers your bar and lifts your quality odds
Why is one sword "Fine" and another "Crude"?	Quality is rolled from rank + the dice at craft time
Is crafting profitable?	Always beats your raw materials - best when you gathered them yourself
What's the point of rank 70?	The trade's signature mastery unlock - the master's edge
Can I craft the same trade in another city?	Yes, once you've earned a referral letter