Professions FAQ

Finished items still follow the strict instance rule: two copies merge only when their signer, rolled properties, masterwork stats, enchant, bond, and other identity all match exactly. A signed blade therefore stays apart from a plain one.

Materials are the exception. Compatible stacks of the same material can merge even when their collectors or signers differ, because the stack keeps 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.

No. Every recipe is scored by how far it sits below your current bracket in that craft, the classic orange, yellow, green, gray reading: full gain at or above your bracket, half one tier below, a quarter two tiers below, and nothing three or more below. Brackets are every 25 skill, so the free skill 0 recipes stop teaching you anything at 75 skill.

The caps are also lower than the classic 300 you might expect: each of the ten earnable crafts caps at 125, Mining, Logging, and Herbalism cap at 100, and Fishing runs long at 200. Climbing means moving up to recipes at your own bracket, not grinding the cheapest one.

They are two separate actions on the same body. Everything a corpse holds, coin and drops plus any harvestable components, opens in the same loot window, but the interact key and Take Loot collect only the ordinary loot, which follows the normal loot rules. Harvesting is the professions side, stripping materials off the carcass itself: it needs a Field Kit in your bags, carried rather than spent, and its own Harvest command, a 1.5-second cast rather than an instant grant. What the cast extracts is your harvest preference, set from the kit, the Professions window, or the corpse's own Change option: it defaults to taking everything the body offers, and pressing Apply saves a choice to concentrate on one material instead, which can earn it a finer grade when doing so leaves the body's other workable materials ungathered. If the body does not carry your chosen material, the cast refuses rather than falling back to the rest, until you change your preference.

Harvesting is single use: each corpse can be harvested exactly once, online included. Whoever earned the kill, and their party if grouped, hold first claim on it for ten seconds; after that it opens to whoever starts the cast first, and that reservation locks out everyone else until it finishes, is cancelled, or the body expires. Your Town Focus shapes what you get regardless of preference: while standing in a town hub you can spread 10 focus points across the component types you care about, and each focused component rolls a better tier (every 5 points bumps it a step, at most two steps) and yields more (10 percent per point). Unfocused components are never made worse.

You hit a windfall. Roughly 1 harvest in 90 triggers a rare gather event (ancient heartwood on a tree, a pristine vein on ore, a moonlit bloom on herbs): it multiplies the yield five times, signs every unit with your name, and announces the find to the whole zone. A rare or better rarity roll on an ordinary harvest signs the yield too.

Signed materials are worth keeping or selling dear: holding any signed copy of a needed reagent at the bench adds 2 percentage points to the masterwork chance. They can share a compatible stack with plain material or units from other collectors and signers without losing any mark; the stack keeps each source and count separately.

Walk to any crafting station with the piece in your bags and pay the master. The fee follows the item's quality: 25 silver for an uncommon piece, 1 gold for a rare, 4 gold for an epic; a legendary pays the epic rate, and a commissioned common piece pays the uncommon rate. It must be a real station: a mobile station never offers the service.

A piece with any Perfecting rank or the Perfected stamp cannot be unbound. That includes a commissioned piece made with a masterwork head start. A failed first Perfecting attempt that leaves rank zero can still be unbound for the usual fee.

The piece remains a commission after unbinding, so it binds again to whoever receives it in the next trade. If several bound copies share a stack, one copy is peeled off and unbound per payment.

The nine common field recipes and the six crafted land-tool recipes are known to everyone from the start, and so are three station-bound recipes (the Kilnscale Mantle, the Wardweave Cowl, and the Duskhide Wraps), which need no trainer, only their station. Everything else is taught by the resident masters at their stations across the three hub towns: most stand in Eastbrook, the tanner keeps the tannery in Fenbridge, and the alchemist keeps the apothecary in Highwatch.

Trainer recipes run in rungs: skill 0, 25, and 50 for the gear and consumable crafts, priced free, 25 silver, and 1 gold as one-time fees, and every craft adds one 75-rung intermediate above them at its station (Enchanting's is the Lucent Reagent, beside its two charm recipes on the 25 rung); the toolmaker also teaches two of the three crafted fishing rods, at 75 and 125 for 4 and 16 gold (the apex rung is learned from a schematic instead, so no trainer quotes it a fee). A master teaches a recipe once your bracket in that craft has reached the recipe's own bracket, and you must be standing at their station to learn: a mobile station does not count.

The gather cast starts at 2.5 seconds and is shaved down two ways: 0.4 seconds for every tool tier you carry and can wield above the node's own tier, and 0.15 seconds once your trade's counter crosses its 100 band, with a floor of 1.5 seconds. Move from tier 1 nodes up to tier 3 nodes and your surplus vanishes, so the same pick swings slower again. Holding exactly the required tier buys no speed; it only opens the node.

Skill gain fades the same way crafting does: a node grays out as your proficiency climbs past its tier (tier 1 nodes teach nothing from proficiency 75 on), so the answer to slow gains is higher tier nodes. Those need a tool of at least their tier in your bags (no node is ever worked bare-handed, tier 1 included), and a land tool above tier 1 also wants its wield mark first, 40/70/85/100 in its own trade for tiers 2 through 5. Fishing follows its own taper: 0.08 per catch below 50 proficiency, 0.05 below 100, 0.04 below 150 and 0.03 below 200, junk catches teach nothing at all from 100 on, and the water itself caps the lesson (tier 1 waters stop teaching at 100, the marsh at 150), so a stalled counter can also mean you have outgrown the water.

Partly. The nine common field recipes (the starter weapon, armor, food, and potion staples) craft anywhere, any time, and so do the three combination recipes of the sworn pairs. Everything else above them is bound to a station type: forge, kitchens, apothecary, tannery, loom, or toolworks, and you must be within 20 yards of the station for the craft to go through.

At 75 skill in a craft you specialize, and along with a 20 percent material discount you gain a mobile station: place it in the field and it stands for 10 minutes, serving that craft's recipes as if you were at the real thing. The mobile station is for crafting only: learning recipes and unbinding commissions always require the true station in town.

Post it on the commission board. Open the crafting window, open the board from its header, and name the recipe you want made: leave the order open for any crafter to accept, or aim it at one crafter you already know. Accepting commits that crafter to the job, and an order is only ever held by one person at a time.

No coin and no materials are held when you post, so agree the price and who brings the reagents between yourselves, the way commissions have always been arranged. You can cancel your own order while it is still open, and an order nobody accepts expires after a day. Delivery is in person: stand near your crafter with a free bag slot when the piece is ready. It arrives bound to you through the Maker's Bond, which any station master will undo for the usual fee.

A charm is a slotted tool effect: an enchanter's work that sits in a gathering tool and improves what it brings up. A Gatherer's Cache adds a unit to a harvest, an Artisan's Eye raises its grade, and Tinker Gizzel teaches both at the Eastbrook toolworks at 25 Enchanting. A charge is spent only when the charm actually changed the outcome, so a harvest it could not improve costs you nothing, and a slot can be set to ask each use if you would rather decide charge by charge.

A fresh charm carries 20 charges on a common tool and 10 more for each rarity rung above it, so an epic tool starts at 50. Running out does not destroy the charm: the tool's owner refills the slot, 10 charges per arcane material, with the material following the better of the tool they are carrying and the best tool that slot has ever been filled by (Chime Dust for a common or uncommon tool, Chime Essence for a rare one, a Chime Shard for an epic). Banking the good tool before a refill never makes it cheaper, only smaller at the same price, and slotting a fresh charm while carrying the lesser tool is the way back down to a cheaper rung. The enchanter who signed the charm pays half to refill their own, and less again with an Enchanting specialization.

Craft or buy an apex Masterwrought piece, then perfect it: with 125 skill in the craft that made it, each attempt spends one Maker's Ember, one Sundered Essence, and one Prismglass Setting, succeeds four times in five, and never harms the piece when it misses. The first attempt binds the piece to you, and four successful ranks make it Perfected. Then spend one Deed of Making, an inscriptionist's skill-125 writ anyone can buy or commission, to promote the Perfected copy into a legendary named whatever you choose. The promotion is deterministic: no roll, stats unchanged, only the name and the color change.