Crafting House

EQ2, as a game, has a lot of depth.  One place where it really shines is tradeskills.  You can have toons that do nothing but tradeskills and have a full game.  There are tradeskill quests for every tier – some are better than others – and there are even signature lines as well as a tradeskill “epic” – plus daily and weekly quests you can do.  You can dive into the market and sell your wares, or work on decorating homes and dungeons – or both!

And there is no end to where you can craft.  You can go into a tradeskill society in each city and craft in the basement – or visit one of the many crafting stations throughout the cities, or Isle of Mara.  You can craft in your guild hall, your own home, or with portable stations and Prestige Stations, you can craft anywhere in the world.

My army of apprentices ready to research

But this post is about setting up your own crafting house.  A crafting house has several advantages – first, it’s your own space, decorated the way you want – surround yourself with the things you love.  You can put various amenities in your home to make crafting easier.  And it’s the only place you can put a tradeskill apprentice – so what better place to make your crafting hub.  You’ll have everything you need to not only do quests, encourage your apprentice, but also to craft amazing things for yourself or others.

Here’s what you need:

A place to call home

I suggest either a prestige home or a free home from an LON card if you can get one.  You can then place portals in your other homes and easily get to and from your crafting house, plus you never have to worry if the rent is paid.  But any player house will do – I use EQ2 Design Gallery to help me find just the right house when I’m in the real estate market.  It’s an up to date site with all the houses with pictures, item counts, how to obtain, etc.  Great site!

Tradeskill Apprentices

These NPC will reside in your home and provide additional recipes that they will research for you.  There is also a daily quest that gives you a chance at a variety of potions, harvests, and other tradeskill items – I like to call this playing the lottery – as you just never know what you are going to get.  They also give a little AA xp.  Read all about them at Zam’s.

Crafting Stations

I don’t do regular crafting in my house – I do that in the guild hall.  If you want to make stuff to sell,  you’ll need Elaborate work stations.  But if you just want to make the sturdy equipment for your apprentices, the Simple table will be good enough.  It’s a lot cheaper and faster.  The tradeskill stations can be purchased from city merchants and cost gold, status and you must have a good amount of tradeskill faction.  I would go with the simple stations if you have a guild hall with crafting stations available.

Crafting Stations

• Forge
• Woodworking Table
• Sewing Table
• Work Bench (optional – good for leveling tinkering)
• Frostfell Stations (optional – I mean, who doesn’t want frostfell stations???)

Depots

• Personal Fuel Depot
  • Place the following fuels for each tier  you’ll be working in
    • coal
    • filament
    • sandpaper
• Large Personal Harvest Depot – just go straight to the large one, that way you can put whatever you want in it.
  • Place the following harvests for each tier you’ll be working in
    • pelts
    • roots
    • ore
    • lumber

Amenities

• Guild Hall Door – purchased with status from city merchants – useful for hoping back and forth to your guild hall
• Portals to other Houses  you may own
• Crafting Buffs – several items will give you a buff to help with  your crafting.

 Tips!

• Read about “Hot Bar Crafting” for some info on putting recipes on  your hotbar.
• You can search for “Sturdy” in  your recipe book to bring up the apprentice items you need to keep replacing
• You can create as many “Sturdy” items as you want – put them in your house vault and the quest will pull them from the bank vault automagically
• You can dress up your tradeskill apprentices any way you want – they come with their own mannequin.
• Create a recipe filter to find all those recipes you are researching