TERA Online Crafting Guide

TERA Online Crafting Guide by Ryan

Tera equipment can be obtained from drops, quests or crafting.

As you level up, drops of full items become less frequent and the quality (stats) may not be what you are looking for unless you are killing raid bosses. There is often a lot of competition for the bosses which drop good items and most players are simply not able to farm them enough to meet their equipment needs.

Quests which offer full items are usually one-time quests. The equipment offered is very usable but the equipment is often normal quality rather then the great gear most players desire.

Crafting offers players another alternative. Crafting requires both materials and designs for the item you are making. You also need to be at a crafting shop.

Material gathering is a process in itself and is best covered elsewhere. This thread will focus more directly on the crafting process.

Tera items are ranked with respect to quality. We are still awaiting the final terms for the English client but for now we will refer to them as follows: common (white), uncommon (green), rare (blue) and legendary (orange).

Why you should craft

The best gear is obtained from boss mob drops but crafted items are still very useful. You can craft rare items very early on. In theory, crafted items can be improved indefinitely. Improvements can fail, which may reduce the quality of the item. Upgrading is a gamble. Every attempt consumes resources. They better the quality of the item you are upgrading, the higher the risk.

Why you may not want to craft gear

The following review is from Steparu. He played on Korean Tera to level 50 and made numerous high quality movies. Prior to reading you should understand the crafting system is undergoing numerous adjustments as part of the Westernization process. Plans have been made to lower the difficulty and improve the rewards.

Crafting in Tera is a joke. Everyone can achieve the max level within few hours just as long as you have the materials ready. Heck, you can even do it while you’re watching TV or something. Since you are are able to queue up materials while you level up your crafting. And you only need to craft one item per 50 levels of crafting, which is one of the main component material you need for that current tier. So in total, if you have all the materials ready you can get level 200 crafting easy. Which means you would only need 4 different kinds of recipe to go from 1>50>100>200.

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed in the Tera crafting system. It’s kind of useless unless you want to make a white item, then use it as an upgrade material. Even if you are to craft a legendary item, the field boss items are much better. And the instance sets are way better than the ones crafted. The crafting dilemma can easily be fixed if the developers made it so that you can’t auction legendary sets from instances and at the same time making those bosses drop a rare material that you can use to craft a similar set, then you can sell that armor/weapon piece. Well, that’s just one of my lame theories on how it should be. The only time you would want to level up your crafting is when you want to enhance your equipment so that it may become upgradeable. However as of now, crafting in Tera is a waste of your time and is not really considered end game content.

Crafting – Where can I go to craft?

Crafting is permitted in major cities. In Velika there are two crafting shops.

There are three different crafts areas. The Alchemy area is for magic weapons. the Forge is for plate armor and weapons. The Loom is for leather and cloth armor.

The equipment

Tera offers each player the ability to learn five different equipment crafting professions. These professions can be learned upon reaching your first major city, Velika. They are: metal weapons, magic weapons, cloth armor, leather armor and plate armor.

Players learn these professions by speaking with a crafting NPC. The crafting profession NPCs also offer materials and recipes you can purchase. Once you have the materials needed for a recipe, you click a button to begin crafting.

Metal weapons manufacture includes lances, swords, axes, bows and twin swords

Magic weapons production includes the sorcerer’s disc, priest’s staff and mystic’s scepter.

In addition, Tera offers players the ability to break down items and recover materials from them.

The materials

Players can learn five professions related to the processing of raw materials. These professions are: sewing, alchemy, metal working, tanning and bone working.

But where do you get the materials? Materials can be purchased, gathered, traded with other players, exchanged with Pandora’s Box, or crafted.

There are three main components:

Collectible Materials: crystal, ore and fibers.

Stones for weapons and armor, and leather.

Some materials can be purchased from NPCs in town.

Of course the crafting process is not yet done. You have to process the materials. For example ores are melted into ingots. There is a process where raw ingredients are processed into other materials, which are then combined to craft the main item.

The process

You can purchase designs from the crafting studio in cities, although you need a certain proficiency in order to use each design.

Designs in red require a higher skill level than you currently have.

There are three levels of crafting proficiency. Level 1 is for 1-50 points. Level 2 is for 51-99 points. Level 3 is for 100 points. Every successful craft boosts your proficiency by 2 points. Every failed craft boosts your proficiency by 1 point.

The description for designs includes the skill level required to use it and the materials required to craft with it. By opening your inventory and right clicking on the design, you can learn to craft the design.

Crafting is done through this dialogue option. After opening the crafting menu click on the design for the item you want to create. This will show the ingredients needed for the item. You can set the number of items that you want to create, or just select to craft as many as possible.

Crafting items will increase your crafting skill, allowing you to acquire more advanced designs.

In the crafting menu it shows the designs and skill requirements.

After choosing to craft this will pop up, showing the progress on that craft.

Additional Crafting Info

On the one hand the production has about a 20% chance of failure and thus all materials would be lost. As the saying goes, no risk, no fun.

Pandora’s Box allows players to gamble crafting materials in a chance to win more (or lose) materials.
There are two (maybe more later) levels for each item produced.

Tera offers an item enchantment system which allows players to upgrade certain equipment with others of the same type. Crafted items can be used to enchant gear acquired as drops to improve the item. Enchanted items immediately receive improved stats, and additional bonuses are acquired when the item reaches +3, +6 and +9 respectively.

Tera Crafting Q&A; – official

Korean Tera patch notes Jan 25, 2011: Items acquired through crafting or Battlefield have been improved. Lowered the amount of ingredients needed to craft normal items.

Catherine Park: TERA’s crafting system is skill-based—one needs to be of a certain skill level to learn to craft different items. As you craft, your skill will go up whether you succeed or fail to craft the item, and once the skill reaches a specific level, more recipes will open up for you to learn them. And there is no need to pay a hefty “training” fee to trainers!

Catherine Park: There are no limits on how many gathering or crafting professions a character can have, making for an even playing field.

Q. Onlinewelten: Will the strongest crafted weapons and armors be as good as any other kind of items we can loot in-game? Or are they even better?
A. Jason Mical: The current plan is to make the highest-end items exclusive to raid boss drops, but crafted items can come very close to these high-end items. We’ll talk more about the crafting and enchanting systems soon, and get more in-depth about what exactly that means.

Q. Concerning equipment: will I be able to get the same high-end items from mobs/raid bosses and from crafting?
A. The current plan is to make the highest-end items exclusive to raid boss drops, but crafted items can come very close to these high-end items. We’ll talk more about the crafting and enchanting systems soon, and get more in-depth about what exactly that means.

Q. What are you offering for customization at endgame?
A. Players are developing their own factions, defining alliances themselves. In terms of actual customization, we’re doing a lot of things. Our gear, especially the crafting system you can take regular gear and kind of craft up the gear to be epic gear – the kind you’d get off dungeon monsters. It simplifies crafting a lot as well as the typical dungeon raiding as well.

Q. Crafting was very difficult. Gathering material is also difficult, it takes a lot of time and the crafted items were not worth their time and effort.
A. Crafting is an important part of TERA’s equipment system. We’re planning on making crafting more easily accessible to players, and make it so that the rewards will become better and better. Additionally, we’re going to make improvements such as random options being added to crafted items to making crafting more interesting.

Q. Crafting in TERA: What will it be like?
A. We’re still finalizing the balance of the crafting system in TERA. We want it to appeal to all users, even those who haven’t made crafting a major part of their MMO experience before, but to reward the hardcore crafters as well. We’ve got some pretty fun ideas that we hope will appeal to both audiences!

Tera Crafting Q&A; – unofficial

Q. What is the skill cap for a profession and how do you earn it (e.g. Aion had Work Orders; WOW had you craft usable gear that was often just disenchanted)?
A. Currently, the first level of mastery comes at 1,500 points.

Q. Can you train in multiple professions?
A. It appears all professions are automatically trained at 1 point and you simply increase the ones you want to work.

Q. Can you train all the professions to max (e.g. Aion allowed you to train all 6 crafts to 399, but only two to the cap of 449)?
A. Looking at the recent Korean videos, it appears to be “yes”, but that’s not confirmed.

Q. Is crafting only possible in a major town/capital (e.g. next to the loom, cauldron, stove, blacksmith fires, etc.) or can you craft anywhere?
A. Crafting appears to require a workbench.

Q. For crafted consumables (e.g. potions), how many can you put in a stack? In Aion, you could have a single stack of thousands for harvested materials (e.g. ores, plants) and stacks of hundreds for HP/MP potions.
A. Consumable stacks are at least 20 now.

Q. Will you be able to gain XP while crafting like in Aion? (from foxmaiden)
A. It does not appear you gain any XP while crafting.

Q. Will you need to craft separate, combinable materials just to craft one actual piece of gear (e.g. craft rods, chains, and plates separately, then use them all in a recipe to craft a chain chest piece)? (from foxmaiden)
A. Yes. You will need to craft recipe pieces to have the materials necessary to attempt the final product.

Q. Does this mean that once I hit gathering skill lvl 50-60, crafting lower lvl pots/armors/weapons is impossible(unless I buy the mats) since my gathering only gives a higher grade material? Seems like a big loophole since leatherworking is not affected because it requires skinning which uses different schematics. (from deathcoy)
A. No. The first kind of ore you can mine is copper, then comes iron at ~100 mining skill. At that point, mining copper ore won’t raise your skill level any more but you’ll still get copper ore.

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2 Responses

  1. Lo says:

    Lame, how do you melt ores into ingots? Havent found recipes for it in crafting area or at simple merchants..

  2. lu says:

    very expensive , the craft

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