SWTOR Crafting Guide

You may have a maximum of three crew skills at any one time. Only one of those skills can be a crafting skill. You can however, pick any combination of crafting, gathering and mission skills provided you have no more than one crafting skill. This means you can have three Gathering skills or three Mission skills or any combination thereof. Judging from the beta, it appears you can drop a learned skill and pick up another at any time. You do lose all progress in the dropped skill though.

Crew skills come in three distinct flavors and getting a handle on which category a skill falls under is key to understanding the system as a whole.

Following are the Crew skills categories. All crew skills will fall under one of these three categories. You may pick up to three skills in any category, in any combination, with the exception being that you can only have one skill from the Crafting category. I'll detail the various skills a little further down.

• Crafting Skills


• Gathering Skills


• Mission Skills

Shortly after leaving your starter planet (somewhere around level 10) you will gain access to the Crew skills Trainers. There is a different trainer for each of the 14 Crew Skills.

Ideally, you would pick one Crafting skill and then two Gathering or Mission skills to support your chosen crafting skill. However, you could also pick three gathering skills and sell the materials, or pick three skills that provide credits, items or other rewards not related to crafting.

For example, you could pick Diplomacy and farm Ligthside/Darkside points, or chose Slicing and collect credits. Thats really the beauty of this system, nearly anyone can find something that benefits them, even non-crafters.

In any case, you'll visit the trainers, pick three skills that will provide what your looking for and then set about leveling them up.

Below we take a look at what skills fall under which category and then we'll get into skill descriptions and the recommended gathering/mission skills for each crafting skill.

There are 6 Crafting skills that allow you to make pretty much any item or piece of equipment that you might want for your characters. There is even a skill for making consumables such as health drinks and buffs. The only thing missing here is a cooking or brewing skill.

• Armortech


• Armstech


• Artifice


• Biochem


• Cybertech


• Synthweaving

There are 4 Gathering skills that when combined with the appropriate Mission skills allow you to gather all the materials you will need to practice your chosen Crafting skill. Slicing stands out here in that it doesn't provide crafting materials but yields credits and the occasional crafting schematic.

• Archeology


• Bioanalysis


• Scavenging


• Slicing

There are 4 Mission skills. Some of them provide crafting materials while others benefit you in other ways, such as providing Lightside/Darkside points or gifts for your companions.

• Diplomacy


• Investigation


• Treasure Hunting


• Underworld Trading

Each crafting skill has a relevant or suggested Gathering/Mission skill that provides resources and components for that particular skill. There is some overlap in collected materials between the gathering and mission skills. This may allow you to collect resources for alts or to sell un-needed resources at the auction house.

Armortech
Allows the crafting of Medium and Heavy armor for Troopers/Bounty Hunters and Agents/Smugglers

Armortech is supported by -

• Scavenging


• Underworld Trading

Armstech
Allows the crafter to make Weapons and Weapon Mods specifically for non-force users such as blasters and blaster rifles. Oddly enough, it also includes Vibroblades and Electrostaffs

Armstech is supported by -

• Investigation


• Scavenging

Artifice
Allows the crafter to craft Weapon and Armor Mods, Lightsaber Mods, and Relics. Artifice seems to be focused on equipment for force users but there may be more uses as one branches out and gains skill levels.

Artifice is supported by -

• Archeology


• Treasure hunting

Biochem
Allows the creation of Implants and Consumables along the lines of buffs and healing.

Biochem is supported by -

• Bioanalysis


• Diplomacy

Cybertech
Allows the crafting of Armor Mods, Droid Mods, Bombs, Earpieces, Grenades, Mounts and Vehicle Mods. This one seems pretty exciting given that it has a wide range of uses and looks to be the crafting field to make useful items for just about everything.

Cybertech is supported by -

• Scavenging


• Underworld Trading

Synthweaving
Allows crafting of Light, Medium and Heavy Armor for force wielding characters. (Jedi and Sith)

Synthweaving is supported by -

• Archeology


• Underworld Trading

You can have up to three gathering skills if you so choose. Just remember that if you pick three gathering skills you can't pick any crafting or mission skills.

Following is a list of Gathering skills and the associated crafting skills that use the resources collected by the gathering skill. Not all gathering skills provide crafting materials. They may instead provide credits, schematics, or other non-crafting related perks.

Archeology

• Artifice


• Synthweaving

Bioanalysis

• Biochem

Scavenging

• Armortech


• Armstech


• Cybertech

Slicing

• Augments


• Lockboxes

You may pick up to three Mission skills. For those of you not particularly interested in crafting, mission skills can be a great way to supplement your income, quickly raise Lightside/Darkside points, or to increase you companion's affection through gifts.

Diplomacy

• Biochem


• Lightside/Darkside bonus

Investigation

• Armstech

Treasure Hunting

• Artifice


• Companion Gifts


• Lockboxes

Underworld Trading

• Armortech


• Cybertech


• Synthweaving

Crafting materials can be collected in one of two ways. The first method, and probably the one familiar to most of you will be collecting materials from nodes as you go about your normal questing and activities. You can either collect the materials yourself, or order your companion to collect them from the node. By default, if you have a companion with you while adventuring, they will do the collection. This is a nice touch since it leaves you free to rearrange you inventory, explore a bit, or set up for your next battle.

The second method of gathering crafting materials involves sending your companions on missions. Don't confuse these missions with Mission Skills, as any of the Gathering or Mission Skills are available for you to send you companions on, not just the Mission Skills.

In short, you pull up the Crew Skills menu, select a companion and then select a Gathering or Mission skill. This will bring up another menu with a list of missions and the possible rewards for those missions. Select one and send you companion off to complete the mission.

The missions are time based and each of your companions has a specific bonus they get toward the successful completion of certain types of missions. This adds an element of strategy to the gathering process as some companions will be better at certain missions than others.

The mission times can range from just a few minutes for low end items all the way to 23 hours for top tier stuff. This pretty much assures that folks won't exactly be power leveling crafting by buying gold or supplying their alts with crafting materials from their mains. While those techniques may speed up the process, the folks that use such methods won't be instant overnight masters.

Crafting is done similar to gathering except that your crew will do all the crafting. Open your crew skills menu, select a crew member and then select a crafting skill. A window will open displaying all your known crafting recipes. Select a recipe and tell your companion to make it.

Your companions are smart enough to use materials available in your inventory or in your cargo hold and will deliver completed items straight to your inventory.

All items take a certain amount of time to make depending on their level. The creation times range from a few minutes up to 23 hours. During this time your companion will not be available to accompany you on missions or to run gathering missions.

It's worth noting that you can start this process from nearly anywhere while questing and adventuring, except for flashpoints, operations and PVP. presumably because of the instanced nature of those activities.

Reverse Engineering is the process of breaking down an item in your particular field of expertise into the material components the item was originally made from. Most of the time this results in you acquiring a handful of crafting materials but it also provides a chance of discovering a schematic of rarer quality than the item you reverse engineered. So reverse engineering a green quality item may result in the schematic for a blue quality item and a blue item may result in a purple schematic.

It's a great way to obtain extra crafting materials and also provides the added incentive of new schematics. Sort of like the crafting lottery if you will.

One of the ways that characters can upgrade their equipment is to slot the item with modifications. Many items include modification slots where you can drop a mod in to change the attributes of the base item. Depending on the quality of the item there may be 0 to 5 slots available for modifications.

Several of the crafting skills allow for modifications to be made. Mods can also be picked up as mob drops, quest rewards, or as the result of some of the Mission/Gathering skill missions.

This is a great way of making yourself a personalized set of armor or leet weapon with exactly the stats you want on it.

The Crew Skills in SWTOR offer a variety of benefits over and above simple crafting. They really go the extra mile in allowing the player to meet their goals and objectives in a versatile manner. Crew skills are unobtrusive yet valuable, allowing you to profit in several unique ways while remaining a fun and interesting activity.