Crafting & the Aether Economy

Most of your gear is found. Monsters drop it, and the very best rolls in the game come only from drops. Crafting is what you do with the rest: the near-miss, the good base with the wrong properties, the piece one slot short of perfect. This chapter covers the two halves of the work — crafting, which is spending Aether to remake an item, and the professions, the trades that make items from materials and sell the tools that steer a craft. Read it before you salvage your first stack of junk, because the junk is where the currency comes from.

The guide keeps these apart, and so should you. Crafting is what happens when you use an Aether on an item. A profession is a trade — Smithing, Tailoring, Cooking — and its work is called synthesis: raw materials in, a finished item out. Aether decides what an item becomes; professions decide what you start with and how much control you get along the way.

Aether Crafting

Aether is Vhael's crafting currency: crystallized soul-stuff, each kind tied to one way of remaking a piece of equipment. It drops as loot, and you pull it out of gear you don't want. Every Aether is random by nature — it does one kind of thing to an item, and the dice decide the details. That is on purpose. Control is something the trades sell, and the very best rolls are something you find.

Anything Magic or better drops Veiled. You can see its base item, rarity and item level, but its properties and its name stay hidden, and you can't equip it. One Aether of Revealing lifts the veil. It's the most common Aether in the game, because you'll need one for nearly every drop worth picking up. Common items have nothing hidden and never drop Veiled.

An item carries at most six properties — three prefixes and three suffixes — and its rarity decides how many it can hold. A Common item holds none. A Magic item holds one or two. A Rare fills out the rest. The growth Aethers walk an item up that ladder: Sprouting turns a Common item Magic, Budding gives a Magic item its second property, Ascension raises a Magic item to Rare and adds one more, and Expansion keeps adding to a Rare until all six slots are full. Blooming skips the middle entirely and turns a Common item straight into a Rare.

The rest of the line changes what's already there. Pruning removes one property at random. Cleansing strips every property and returns the item to Common, keeping its quality. Renewal leaves the properties alone and rerolls their numbers. Rebirth throws out a Rare's whole set and rolls a new one. None of these let you pick which property goes or which number moves — that choice is exactly what the trades' Grafts and Sparks are for.

TODO: exact drop rates per Aether. Numbers pending balance.

Every Aether follows the same rules. The item has to be Revealed first. Each use spends exactly one Aether, from your bag or your Aether drawer, and an item that can't take the effect is rejected without spending anything. Every roll is made by the server the moment you commit it.

Two Aethers sit apart from the rest. A Prophecy doesn't change an item; it lets you see. Use one, then hold any other Aether over the item, and you'll see exactly what that Aether would do — pick the one you like and spend it. Any change to the item ends the vision. Dedicated players will find a few. The Tear of Elysium is rarer still — most players never hold one. It makes a copy of an item, and the copy is Perfected: finished for good. No Aether, no Graft, no tool of any kind can change a Perfected item, ever — you can't salvage it or sell it either. If you're done with one, the only thing left is to throw it away. The original stays as it was. A Tear can't be used on a Unique or on something already Perfected.

Salvage & Shards

Salvage is how junk becomes currency. Use an Aether of Salvage on any Revealed item of Magic rarity or better and it breaks down into a few small stacks of Aether shards — a Magic item gives up to two stacks, a Rare or better up to three. Shards come in every common kind of Aether, and ten of a kind combine into the full Aether automatically. Prophecy and the Tear have no shards; you can only find those whole. Every salvage also yields one elemental shard, the fuel the professions burn. Common items are too plain to salvage.

The Professions

There are eight professions, one for each element. Each works one kind of material and burns shards of its own element as fuel.

Armour that mixes two defences — heavy and evasion, say — needs two trades: a main profession to make it and a second to finish it.

Learning a Trade

Any character can learn every profession, but only one of them goes all the way. Your chosen trade can climb as high as your character level can; every other trade stops far below it. That gap is the point. You are one real crafter, and the rest of your kit comes from other players — which is how a crafter's name ends up worth something on the market.

TODO: the profession cap and how far below it the other trades stop. The level cap is not set yet.

Skill & Advancement

TODO: how skill rises with synthesis, and what each stretch of the climb unlocks. Numbers pending balance.

Synthesis

Every synthesis burns elemental shards of its profession's element — Fire for Smithing, Ice for Cooking, and so on. You get them two ways. Monsters drop them, but only in the element of the day: on a Fire day, every monster drops Fire shards. And every salvage gives you one. A crafter keeps an eye on the calendar, and a smith who runs low waits for Fire day like everyone else (see The World of Vhael for how the days turn).

A synthesis can fail. When it does, the elemental shard is gone and some of your other materials may be lost with it. The better your skill against the recipe, the less often it happens, and the right gear lowers the odds further.

TODO: failure and loss rates. Numbers pending balance.

Sometimes a synthesis goes better than it should. A crit lifts the result into the top band of quality, and it comes more often the further your skill stands above the recipe.

Quality

Every base item carries a quality score from 0 to 15 — the craftsmanship of the thing itself. Quality makes the base stronger and makes every property on it stronger too, so the same roll is worth more on a better base. Dropped gear rolls up to 10, and an Aether of Tempering can raise any item as far as 10 but no further. Everything above that belongs to the trades: only a crafter's crit makes an 11 to 15. Those bases can't be dropped, bought up to with currency or mass-produced, which is exactly why a master crafter can name the price.

The two halves of the economy meet in the middle. A lucky drop with great properties on a poor base is a Tempering project; a pristine crafted base is a blank canvas for your Aether. Drops give you the properties and make you pay for the quality; crafters give you the quality and make you pay for the rolls.

TODO: how much each point of quality adds. Numbers pending balance.

Grafts & Sparks

Raw Aether is random. The trades sell the two tools that take some of the chance out — Grafts and Sparks — made from Aether and monster materials. Stronger ones cost rarer Aether. No single profession makes them all: each trade owns a few families, so a full toolkit means knowing crafters in every trade.

Grafts

A Graft puts one property of your choosing into an empty slot on an item. That can be an ordinary property — a Graft of Life, a Graft of Fire Resistance — always at a modest tier, never the best one. Or it can be a lock, which holds part of the item still while you gamble with the rest. Nothing an Aether does can touch a Graft or what it protects. The locks, from weakest to strongest:

The price of a Graft is the slot it takes: while it sits there, it is one of your six.

A Cleansing Graft removes every Graft on an item at once. It's cheap and every trade can make one from the start, because undoing a Graft should never be the hard part.

Sparks

A Spark is how you get into usable gear on purpose. Use one on any Common, Magic or Rare item that can take it, and the item rolls into a Rare with one property from the spark's family guaranteed — a Spark of Flame always leaves fire damage behind. It guarantees the family, never the very best tier of it: the top rolls remain something you find, not something you buy. Every trade can make an elemental Spark; the elemental shard you put in decides the element.

TODO: Graft and Spark recipes and prices. Numbers pending balance.

Three things are off the table for good, because each one turns a crafting game into a checklist. Nothing lets you remove a property you choose. Nothing rerolls the numbers on just one family you choose. And nothing a crafter makes guarantees the very top tier of a property. You can buy direction; you can't buy perfection.

Food

Cooking makes food, and food is a buff, not a meal to heal on — your health and mana recover on their own. One food at a time: eating something new replaces what you had. Every dish exists because someone wants it — fire-resistance food for a fire zone, ward food for a caster, crit food for a damage dealer — so the choice of what to eat is a choice about the fight ahead.

Materials Primer

TODO: monster materials by family. Not designed yet.

Other Ways to Earn

TODO: gathering, including fishing, which the moon affects. Not designed yet.

TODO: selling crafted goods and materials on the player market.