Crafting is one of the skills in The Age of Decadence.
A skilled craftsman has the knowledge to create and improve their own equipment. While many good items can be found or bought, nothing can match the quality of a balanced blade forged from rare ores.
Introduction to crafting
You can use the crafting system to create and/or improve weapons and armor using schematics (available from blacksmiths), material (metal ingots, wood, or leather) and techniques learned from NPC's or acquired through exploration. Armor and helmets can be crafted to increase DR, max AP, vsCritical, or lower penalties. Similarly with weapons to increase vsDR, decrease AP cost, or increase damage. Weapons, armor, helms, and shields can all be crafted in The Age of Decadence if the player has schematics. You can't fail in making the item and lose your ingredients.
Crafting and decomposing
To craft an item, open your inventory and go to the crafting tab. Select an item from the list of available schematics, apply any known technique(s), select a metal type or component, and click Forge. When the item is ready, drag it back to the inventory.
You can also decompose (melt) weapons and armor to get metal ingots or components. There is a material loss when you decompose, the higher the skill the less metal you lose.
For example, if you find a blue steel heavy armor that weighs 35 pounds, but you would rather forge yourself a blue steel sword and a lighter armor, you can melt the heavy armor, losing, for example, 20% of the metal and getting 28 pounds of blue steel ingots which you can use to craft yourself a broadsword (handar) - 3,5 pounds - and a culrass (lorica musculata) - 20 pounds.
Techniques
There are five different metal types: bronze, iron, steel, blue steel, meteor metal. Each "higher" metal increases the damage range or damage resistance by 1. So, whereas a bronze gladius does 2-9 points of damage, a iron gladius does 3-10, steel 4-11, and so on.
The masterwork technique can help you improve your weapons further by following the exact formulae to forge higher quality metal, thus increasing the damage range by up to 0-2 for each metal. For example, an iron masterwork gladius will do 3-12 points of damage, making it as good as bronze "long swords" like shamshir and handar, but faster.
The hardened technique allows you to harden the edge of your weapon, taking a point away from the enemy's DR. When applied to armor, these techniques lower penalties and increase DR respectively.