Crafting

Getting Started

Making a choice

To start crafting, you must first play through the initial series of quests and move out into the wider world. In various towns throughout Middle-earth, you will find a Master or Mistress of Apprentices who will help you select your vocation. Each vocation is made up of three professions, as shown below. At least one workplace of each type is near each Master or Mistress of Apprentices, so that you can immediately begin crafting. A Provisioner is also nearby, to sell you tools and some of the necessary ingredients.

Spend some time to carefully select your Vocation and its associated professions. Some Professions are very difficult and expensive to advance, while others are very easy. Perhaps the easiest vocation is Explorer because two of the professions (Prospector and Forester) allow gathering of resources and the third (Tailor) requires hides, which are readily available resources.

Easy Professions - Farmer, Prospector, Forester, Cook

Harder Professions - Tailor, Metalsmith, Weaponsmith, Woodworker

Very Hard Professions - Jeweller, Scholar.

Note: A character may change vocations at any time; however, you will lose ALL progress and recipes memorized in any profession that is not available in your new vocation.

Craft Training

Near each Master or Mistress of Apprentices, there is a Provisioner and Novice-level Crafting Trainers of all types. The Trainers are stationed at the assorted workplaces that are needed to engage in crafting tasks. Between the Provisioner and the Crafting Trainers of your chosen professions, you can acquire most of the items you need to begin crafting. All crafts require the correct tools, raw materials, and a workplace to perform the task. For instance, woodworking requires a set of woodworking tools, a supply of wood (which can be found throughout your travels in Middle-earth), and a workbench. (You receive your initial tools when you choose a profession.) Workbenches are found in many locations in most towns.

Crafting levels

Tier Level	Proficiency	Points Needed	Mastery	Points Needed
1	Apprentice	200	Master Apprentice	400
2	Journeyman	280	Master Journeyman	560
3	Expert *	360	Master Expert *	720
4	Artisan	440	Master Artisan	880
5	Master	520	Grand Master	1,040
6	Supreme	600	Supreme Master	1,200
7	Westfold	680	Westfold Master	1,360
* Once the Expert Proficiency is completed a crafting quest must be completed allowing further advancement towards Master Expert and opening the Artisan tier; find any trainer of the related profession. This hindrance do not apply to the gathering professions.

Each profession is broken up into tiers, and each tier has two requirements furthering your progression towards the higher crafting tiers. Creating an item in a given profession rewards you with an amount of Crafting Points, see the table for requirement per tier. Per requirement you earn a new crafting title which provides new abilities (notice the footnote attached to the table).

Proficiency: Completing the Proficiency part of a tier (denoted with a brown anvil) enables you to achieve critical successes while crafting items from that tier (see below), and, furthermore, it opens up the first part of next tier.

Mastery: Completing the Mastery part of a tier (denoted with a gold anvil) enables you to begin earning mastery points of the next tier. Until Mastery is completed you can just earn crafting points to complete Proficiency of the next tier, but not any further. Once Master of a tier you do not earn any more crafting points from crafting items of that tier.

The following explains the four levels of crafting progress per tier:

	An empty anvil: you are currently working towards Proficiency.
	A brown anvil: you have gained Proficiency.
	A brown anvil and an empty anvil: you are currently working towards Mastery.
	Two filled-in anvils: you have also gained Mastery.

Mastery and Critical Successes

After gaining Proficiency in any tier of a crafting profession, each time you craft an item for that tier, you have the chance to receive a Critical success. This is commonly referred to as "to crit" or "critting"; the resulting product of such a success is often called a "crit item".

Types of Critical Success

There are two different outcomes when you critically succeed while crafting:

• Producing a larger number of items. Example: Normally Bronze Ingots produces two ingots at a time, but a critical success yields six ingots.
• Produce a better quality item with improved statistics. Example: A normal outcome is Leather Armour but a critical success gives Tough Leather Armour which has increased stats.
• Notice that Weaponsmiths, Metalsmiths and Tailors also have a special feature attached to critical successes at Artisan level and above: they are given the option to Inscribe Item (allowing custom named items).

Achieving Critical Success

If a crafter is proficient in the crafting tier being used, and if the recipe allows critical success, the base chance of attaining a critical success is 5%. This base chance can be increased by using player-crafted Crafting Tools, special "mastery components", and Scholar-made crafting lore scrolls.

To see possible outcomes from critical successes, open a recipe in the crafting panel (at the page Critical success an example is included that illustrates this section). The lower area of the screen is commonly called the Mastery Component area. The special name of a critical success is displayed in this area, if one is possible. Hovering over the icon will display the improved stats and bonuses. Notice that if you have not yet attained proficiency for the tier of the recipe, the content of this area will be disabled.

The Mastery Component area of most recipes also displays a special ingredient slot for what is commonly called a "Mastery Component". If the crafter has the special ingredient available, he may select the "use" box and that way increase the likelihood for critical successes. In the example to the right Chunk of Grey Rock-salt may be used. Single-use recipes usually require "crafting scrolls" crafted by scholars, e.g. Master Artisan Metalsmith's Journal rather than standard mastery components.

• One mastery components is used per craft attempt.
• Mastery components are optional; also crafting without them may yield a critical success.
• Standard Mastery components are random loot but Farmers may by them from vendors.
• Not all recipes have an option for mastery components.
• The base chance stack with crit chance from crafting tool, mastery components, and scholar's lore.
• A critical success is never guaranteed as you may never reach 100% likelihood.
• The random outcome of critical successes is generated per crafting attempt, thus the mileage of a shorter crafting session may differ considerably. The average of longer sessions should be close to the expected likelihood.

At the page Critical success a hands-on example illustrates how the different improvements interact to a better likelihood for critical successes.

Recipes

The crafter must have learned the recipe for items he want to craft. Recipes are either given automatically when achieving a crafting tier, purchased, dropped from mobs, or obtained as treasure.

Type of Recipe	Description
Basic	Each tier has a number of basic recipes that are provided for you once that tier is available.
Vendor	This recipe can be purchased from a Novice or Expert profession NPC. Example: Heavy Quilted Armour Recipe can be purchased from Tailor trainers.
Dropped	Obtained as loot from various creatures or from treasure chest (or alike). These recipes are one of "vendor" or "single-use" type.
Single Use	A recipe can only be crafted once and then it is removed from your recipe list. Note: Quest recipes are generally single-use and do not offer crafting XP.

There are hundreds of recipes per profession and to list them all is crazy, but we tried our best!

Icon	Recipes	Recipe Indexes
	Cook Recipes	Cook Recipe Index
	Farmer Recipes	Farmer Recipe Index
	Forester Recipes	Forester Recipe Index
	Jeweller Recipes	Jeweller Recipe Index
	Metalsmith Recipes	Metalsmith Recipe Index
	Prospector Recipes	Prospector Recipe Index
	Scholar Recipes	Scholar Recipe Index
	Tailor Recipes	Tailor Recipe Index
	Weaponsmith Recipes	Weaponsmith Recipe Index
	Woodworker Recipes	Woodworker Recipe Index

Crafting Guilds

Crafting Guilds provide additional paths of advancement for many professions.

Membership in a crafting guild is exclusive - you may only be a member of one crafting guild at a time.

You may choose to join a different crafting guild, but bear in mind that you must abandon all guild recipes and progress gained from your current guild in order to join a new one.

Note that there is no guild for Farmers, Prospectors, or Foresters.

Locations

Crafting Guild Halls can be found in the following locations around Middle-earth:

Guild Name	Location	Region
Cook's Guild Hall	Michel Delving's Craft-fair	The Shire
Jeweller's Guild	Esteldin	North Downs
Metalsmith's Guild	Thorin's Hall	Ered Luin
Scholar's Guild	Rivendell	Trollshaws
Tailor's Guild	Esteldin	North Downs
Weaponsmith's Guild	Thorin's Hall	Ered Luin
Woodworker's Guild	Esteldin	North Downs
All guilds	Galtrev	Dunland

In each crafting guild hall you will find the crafting guild leader, the guild's recipe vendor, and the guild's reward vendor.

Within the Crafting Hall in Galtrev, opposite to the main entrance, there is an entrance into the Craftguilder's Hall.
In the Craftguilder's Hall can be found ALL of the various guilds represented as well as a "Master of Crafting Guilds."

The Craft

Recipes require ingredients in order to create items. These ingredients can range from cooking ingredients to mining ore to hides from animals. Some ingredients are used to make components for other item recipes or may be used directly for those items.

Gathering Resources

Crafting materials are found throughout Middle-earth from Vendors, as loot drops or ground spawns, or in the assorted chests and crates around the world. Raw materials for crafting consist of ores, woods, gems, seeds, cooking supplies, dye components, hides and lore items.

Crafting resources (Ingredient Packs) are also available for purchase from the LOTRO Store.

• Ores and woods are most commonly found as ground spawns, and if you have the gathering skill to collect them, you will have a tracking skill that you can activate to give you an indicator when you are near that resource. Ore nodes can also produce gems for Jewellers, minerals used as components for dyes and coal for converting iron ingots into steel ingots.
• Seeds and cooking components can be purchased from Provisioners or tradesmen.
• Hides are found as loot drops from many creatures.
• Lore items are found as loot drops on humanoid enemies or in and around ruins inside ancient Artifacts.

All of these assorted materials can also be found in chests scattered throughout the landscape and in dungeons.

Tools and Facilities

Once you have spoken to a Master or Mistress of Apprentices and chosen your vocation, they will give you a set set of appropriate inferior crafting tools and offer you a series of introductory quests. These quests include appropriate Ingredient Packs to begin your crafting career.

After completing this basic training, your next stop should be at the nearby Provisioner.

You begin your profession with a basic set of inferior crafting tools. These are "brittle" and should immediately be upgraded to "normal" tools at the nearest Provisioner. As your character progresses in level (not crafting rank) additional tool types are available from a friendly Metalsmith. (They are player-crafted items.) Or are often found at the Auction House at prices ranging from the sublime to the rediculos. For the gathering professions, these improved tools decrease the time necessary to gather a "resource node". Higher ranked tools also provide an increase in the "critical chance" associated with their use.

See: Crafting Tools for details on their availability and capabilities

In addition to the necessary tool that must be equipped on your character for use, every profession has an appropriate place to actually do the work. The gathering professions, Scholars, Prospector and Forester, primarily harvest "resource node," in the wild. Farmers also grow resources in Farmlands. However once harvested, these resources must then be "refined" in the same Crafting Facilities used to create crafted items.

The Cook and Scholar are the only two professions who can craft certain items anywhere.

External Links

Draznar's Crafting Guide and Links - Excellent guide

A beginner's guide to crafting -- Lord of the Rings Online Vault