Crafting Economy

Fees and sinks

A healthy player economy needs coin leaving the world, and professions carry several of the drains. Learning a trainer recipe costs a one-time fee by its rung, every successful craft pays a small fee scaled to the piece's stat budget, and on top of those sit the unbind fees and the Market's cut.

None of this coin goes to another player: it leaves the game entirely, which is what keeps the coin the rest of you earn worth something.

Craft fee

2c per point of item budget

Market cut

5% of a completed sale

Listing deposit

None

Unbind fee

25s uncommon, 1g 0s rare, 4g 0s epic

Training fees

One flat fee per recipe rung, charged once when a master teaches it; every rung of the table below is in live use today, from the free starter recipes to the toolmaker's rod lessons at the top.

• Tier 0: Free
• Tier 1: 25s
• Tier 2: 1g 0s
• Tier 3: 4g 0s
• Tier 4: 16g 0s

What sells, and why

The steadiest business is consumables, because they are used up and bought again. Potions, cooked food, and enchants all vanish with use: a fighter who buys a sword once will buy healing potions forever, and every fresh piece of gear is a fresh chance to sell an enchant.

Masterwork pieces are the premium end. They cannot be made to order, so one of a wanted piece commands a real markup, and your signature on it is walking advertising. Reagents are the third pillar: arcane materials from disenchanting, typed Resonant secondaries flowing straight from breaker to enchanter, and signed gathered materials, which crafters chasing masterwork procs pay over the odds for.

The World Market and its cut

The World Market is the realm-wide exchange, kept by the Merchant in Eastbrook and Auctioneer Voss in Highwatch. Listing is free: there is no deposit, and an unsold listing simply comes back to you. The house takes its cut only when something actually sells: 5 percent of the sale price, and the rest waits for you to collect.

Special pieces are welcome too: a signed, masterwork, or enchanted copy goes up as its own single-copy listing that carries its identity onto the tooltip, signature and all, and it never mixes with a plain stack. The one refusal is a bound copy: a piece locked by the Maker's Bond, or still armed to bind, stays out of the Market and the mail alike, so a bond can never be laundered away. Price special work yourself; the plain listings only tell you what the plain version fetches.

Work orders

Each station master posts standing work orders, one per staple material: bring the stack an order asks for and get paid on the spot, plus a little quest experience. The pay is deliberately 50% of what a vendor would give you for the same stack, rounded down, so a work order is never the profitable way to sell materials, just a reason to swing by the station.

Every order runs on its own 30 minute clock per character: turn one in and that order is closed to you until the timer laps, while a master's other orders stay open. The marks over a master's head and on your maps keep the score for you: a bright blue ! is repeatable work you have handled before, and the same mark dimmed is repeatable work still inside its clock, offered again once the window laps. Treat them as a small bonus on materials you were gathering anyway, not a business.

The commission board

You do not have to find a crafter in chat. Open your crafting window and the commission board is one click away in its header. Anyone can post an order there: name the recipe you want made, then either leave it open for any crafter to take, or aim it at one named crafter, who is then the only person who can pick it up. A crafter browsing the board accepts an order, and accepting commits them, so a job is only ever worked by one person at a time.

Nothing is held back when you post: an order reserves no coin and no materials, so the price and who supplies the reagents stay between the two of you, agreed the way any commission is agreed. You can cancel your own order while it is still open, and an order nobody accepts expires by itself after a day. Once a crafter has accepted, delivery is what closes it.

Delivery happens face to face. The crafter makes the piece as a commission, comes to you, and hands it over, so keep a bag slot free to receive it. What arrives follows the ordinary commission rules below, binding to you through the Maker's Bond.

Commissions and the Maker's Bond

There are two ways into a commission: an order you post on the board above, which brings the work to a crafter, and a crafter simply choosing to make a piece for you. Both end in the same bond.

A commission is a craft made for someone. When crafting a weapon, armor piece, or held off-hand (a potion cannot carry a bond), the crafter can flag the craft as a commission: the finished piece behaves normally in the maker's own hands, but the moment it changes hands in a trade it binds to the person who received it. That is the Maker's Bond: the buyer gets their piece, and the piece cannot be passed on or resold.

Bonds are not forever, just expensive. Any station master will unbind a bound piece while you stand at their station (a mobile station never offers the service), for a fee set by the item's quality: 25 silver uncommon, 1 gold rare, 4 gold epic, with a legendary paying the epic rate and a commissioned common piece the uncommon one.

The fee buys a clean slate, not a cure: the piece is still a commission, so it binds again to whoever receives it in the next trade, and everything else about it, signature, masterwork, and enchants, survives untouched.

Signed work

Some items carry a name. A material's source lines say who collected each group of units, while a separate signed-by mark identifies the premium signer when there is one. Those facts are independent: ordinary gathered material records a collector without gaining a signature, and legacy signed stock can name its signer while honestly saying no gatherer was recorded. A finished piece instead says who crafted it. These records travel with the item through trades, the bank, the mail, the World Market, and even a vendor buyback, and never fade.

Gathering signs its best work automatically: any harvest that rolls rare or better arrives signed, and rare finds sign their entire five-fold windfall. A corpse harvest's lucky roll signs its yield where the family has no specimen to give, and where it does, keeps the yield plain and mints the signed pristine specimen beside it. Crafting signs along the same line: every copy of a rare or better output mints signed, and a masterwork always signs whatever its quality, so the finest version of any piece always names its maker. An ordinary material's signature rides the units themselves and cannot be lost merely because a compatible stack already contains another collector or signer. A distinct pristine specimen is a separate item and still needs room; if it cannot fit, the ordinary corpse yield remains but the specimen is lost.

Finished items keep one strict identity, so two copies merge only when every mark matches exactly: same item, same signer, same masterwork stats, same enchant, same bond. Compatible materials share a slot across collectors and signers while keeping a count for each source. The hover tooltip summarizes the sources; open Sources for the full list. Separate by gatherer keeps those stacks apart in your bags, and sorting respects that choice. Transferred material can stack normally with the recipient's materials.

Signatures pay crafters back: holding any signed copy of a needed reagent at the bench, whoever signed it, adds 2 percentage points of masterwork chance, and holding a reagent signed by your own hand cuts that reagent's required quantity by one (never below one), unless that reagent is marked undiscountable; raid cores always keep their full cost. Your own signed rare-or-better work even keeps teaching you, today through crafted potions alone: drink a rare draught you brewed and signed and a small trickle of skill flows back to the craft that made it, as long as that craft is one of your active majors. It really is the potion arm and nothing else, so an elixir, a scroll, or an apex flask teaches you nothing back however finely it was signed.

Collectors, trophies, and the price of a story

Vendors are blind to provenance: a signed item sells to an NPC for exactly its plain price. The premium on a signature exists only between players, which is precisely what makes it interesting: a stack of windfall ore signed by a famous gatherer, a Prime Cut from a lucky harvest, a masterwork blade naming a crafter who has since retired, all cost whatever someone's memory says they are worth.

The Book of Deeds leans into the same instinct: Pristine Vein, Ancient Heartwood, Moonlit Bloom, A Perfect Specimen, and Glimmer of Hope are zero-Renown collector's marks that exist purely to prove a moment happened to you. Keep the item that earned the deed and you hold the receipt. None of this is power; provenance buys no stats and wins no fights, it is the game's paper trail of good days.

Cast time and the gold sink

Profession actions take real cast time: recipes scale from just under two seconds for simple field work up to a few seconds at the top of the ladder, and disenchant, enchant, salvage, and tool-effect recharge each take a fixed short cast. Cancel mid-cast and you lose nothing. Every successful craft also pays a copper fee proportional to the item budget. Together with materials, stations, and skill ceilings, that pace keeps the Market honest without a separate action quota. The exact durations by skill band are listed below.

• Field recipes (no skill requirement): 1.75s cast
• Recipes up to skill 25: 2.5s cast
• Recipes up to skill 50: 3s cast
• Recipes up to skill 75: 3.5s cast
• Top-of-ladder and combo recipes: 4s cast
• Disenchant, enchant, and salvage: 1.5s cast
• Tool-effect recharge: 1.5s cast
• Batch crafting: up to 50 in one order, one cast each

Players trade with players

The crafting economy is built on one idea: players supply players. Gatherers feed crafters, crafters feed questers and raiders, and breakers feed enchanters, with vendors and station masters standing at the edges to absorb junk and coin rather than to compete with you. If you want to make money from a profession, your customer is a person: learn what other players burn through, price against the World Market, and treat the NPC systems as a floor under your prices, not as the market itself.

Ordinary crafted equipment supports the climb into endgame. The Crucible's raid-funded collections also offer an alternative to current raid drops: their materials come from raiding, while crafting turns those materials into a chosen armor and role profile. Their three slot choices and any-two bonus allow different combinations with raid gear. They still share the global two-piece Masterwrought cap, so crafting complements the rest of the raid kit without supplying an entire replacement set.