Carbine Studios' Wildstar has some pretty interesting professions, or what they call "Tradeskills." At around level ten you get a quest that leads you to where the trainers are so you don't need to go on a wild goose chase, and from there you learn your craft. While the selection may seem like a list of standard MMO crafting options, they are not as straight-forward as you might think. In fact, it took me quite a bit of time to figure some of them out. But my suffering is your gain, and I can now share with you my hard earned knowledge. Without any futher ado, here is what I have learned about tradeskills so far.

There are your Crafting Tradeskill options. You can choose two of these:

• mining

• survivalist

• relic hunter

• weaponsmith

• armorer

• outfitter

• technologist

• architect

• tailor

Hobbies do not count towards you two choices and are listed below:

• Cooking

• Farming

Do you hate having to pick which one you want? No worries! You can have them all, in a way. You are allowed to swap out tradeskills without losing the progression on the craft you just left. However, you can only switch off into whatever tradeskill once a week or you can pay one gold and recieve a six hour swap-lock. I learned the hard way about the long and painful six hour wait...

Just incase your confused, here's the breakdown:

Say you grabbed Weaponsmith as your primary crafting tradeskill but decided you want to do something else. Simply go back to the tradeskill guy, select your new craft, let's say Armorer, and viola! Now you are a new Armorer. You do not lose any of the progress you have made towards your Weaponsmith, but you do put it on a week long swap-lock.

But then you remember that your friend asked you to make him a weapon and you already told him that you would (Darn integrity!). You go back to the tradeskill guy, tell him you want to go back to Weaponsmith and pay the gold fee.  I am going to say that somewhere it warns you that it puts your other trade on lock for six hours. If you accept the terms, you now have just sold your soul to Carbine Studios'... I mean you, you are now a Weaponsmith again. However, you are locked out of other tradeskills for six hours, and there is no way to get around it. The tradeskill you removed is now also on a week lock, unless you pay your soul to Carbine Studios' again. Seems everything can be avoided for the right price. Ah, gold sinks.

Gathering Tradeskills

These allow you to go out into the world and collect crafting mats for your other tradeskill. While gathering, certain events can occur. These event, if done right, can lead to a higher output of what you are gathering. For example, while I was gathering ore, I mined up a node and it created a hole I can go down. Once inside the hole, there were a bunch of mining nodes that I could sink my axe into. In addition, there was a timer that was counting down. Once the timer hit zero, I was kick out and was back at where the hole was. Other events can lead to you having to kill things that spawn.

Mining

Mining is needed for both Armorer, Weaponsmith, and Architect. Its just like any other mining you do in any other MMO out there: you run around to find a node, use a pickaxe, in this case a laser pickaxe, to mine it up, collect the ore, and move to the next mining node. I don't know if it because Wildstar is in beta and mining nodes spawn faster or that no one around me was mining, but there seemed to be a lot of mining nodes in the world. I can go to one node, mine it up, open my map, and see three more mining nodes I can go to. No conflicts of interest between players.

One thing I thought was cool about mining, let alone using a the laser pickaxe to mine, is you can also attack the node with your abilities and the ore drops just like it would if normal. Though after doing it a couple times, I would consider it to be slightly slower, plus you have to keep hit keys to where if you use the laser pickaxe, you just use it once and it does all the work for you. I guess if mobs start attacking you, you can pull them on top of the node and just cleave it down with the mobs.

Survivalist

Survivalist gather materials from the wild. You can cut down tree to get wood for Architect. You can get skins, pelts, and bones for Outfitter. And lastly, get meat for Cooking.

Relic Hunter

Relic Hunter goes out into the world and "mine up" specials nodes to get relics and omniplasm. These are need in Outfitter, Tailor, and Technologist.

Crafting Tradeskills

There are levels of each tradeskill and they go in this order:

• Novice
• Apprentice
• Journeyman
• Artisan
• Expert
• Expert Research

The way you move up the level is by crafting items, doing work orders, or by completing tiers in the tech tree. Once you move up the levels, you unlock a new tech tree and new items to craft.

Each crafting tradeskill get its very own talent tree. By the looks of it, you need to unlock a certain amount of point to unlock a level in the talent tree, different with the level talk about above. These level give you boost to craft stronger items. This makes for a verity of the same tradeskills but that can make some item stronger than those of a different talent tree set up.

The way that crafting tradeskills work is that you have a tech tree that you move down by crafting the items that are asked in each tier list. Once you craft enough of that item, you unlock it and move down to the next tier in that section. These tiers are like check list that you have to do to advance. You do not have to do them all to move into the next tier.

Sometimes it asked you to salvage a certain number of items that it asks to unlock that tier. Also, once you unlock that tier, you get either a new item to craft, a talent point, or nothing, but the ones that give you nothing are needed to get to farther down tiers that give you something. In addition, some of the items need to craft or either a drop or come from dailies you can do.

Weaponsmith and Armorer

Weaponsmith and Armorer uses both ore that you get from mining plus mats that you buy from the vender. Weaponsmith makes weapons for every class. Armorer makes heavy armor and energy shields. These are best paired with Mining.

Outfitter

Outfitter craft medium armor and support systems. They need bones, pelts, and leather that all come from Survivalist, so it best to be paired with Survivalist.

Technologist

Technologist makes boosts, medishots, field tech, regents, and power cores. All armor types have power cores in the recipes. Boosts and medishots and like stats buff potion and heal potions. This is best paired with Relic Hunter.

Architect

Architect crafts housing item, like furniture. This is best paired up with Survivalist.

Tailor

Tailor can craft light armor and bags. Everyone needs bigger bags in the world. This mostly just uses items you get from salvaging, so there really isn't a thing this can be paired up with.

Crafting Customization Options:

Crafting in this game is fairly simple but it has a handful of options that enhance the customizability of it:

Power Core

Power Cores give your craft a charge capacity. Better power cores leads to a higher charge capacity.

Charge Capacity

Charge Capacity allows you to add more stats to your item.

Stats

You can pick and choose your stats you want on your craft. Some items already have a stat on it and sometimes, it is randomized. After choosing your stat or stats, you then you can add more of the stat or choose additional types of stats until you fill your charge capacity. You can slightly go over the charge capacity, but add a chance to fail. If you add too much, the chance to fail will go to 100%.

Signs

Also, adding more of that stat requires a signs of some sort. If you don't want to use that sign, you can add more or less of that stat to make none required.

Sometimes you can choose two or more stats and add different amount of each one, as long as the charge doesn't go over it capacity. This allows you to be able to make the same item, but with different stats, say one for dpsing and another for tanking. This is nice because every class has two roles in the game, either tank/dps or dps/heal.

Hobbies

Cooking

Cooking is one of the hobbies that does not count towards how many trade skills you can have. You use cooking to craft food to eat. You can gather the mats from killing creatures around the world. Some food, after eating it, gives you a buff like an increase of stats. Cooking tech tree is very big and only has the one level to it, as in there is no Apprentice, Artisan, Expert, ect. Most of the patterns are unlocked through the tech tree, but there are some that can be bought/dropped and some that are found within schematics. Now you ask yourself, “how are the pattern inside schematics”, well I will tell you that.

When you bring up the crafting window, in the middle, you will see food you want to make. Along the right you will see the shades blue area, then at the bottom, you will see a box with another food in it that I have already unlocked, this food gives different buff, and then at the far left, you will see a bunch of little boxes, ingredients, that are not inside the crafting graph.

These are use to move the indicator, which is right in the middle when you start making a schematic, around to try and hit the either the pattern you have already found or try to find the new pattern, which is inside the shaded blue area. The ingredients cost money to add and you can only use so many of them, here, three.

If you want to just make the base food, all you have to do is hit "Craft" and that will make you the base food. If you want to make the food that you have already found, you just need to add ingredients to mave the indicator over the box, this will then yield you the food that in the box.

If you want to try to find the new pattern, you will then have to move the indicator somewhere inside the shaded blue area and this is where the fun begins.

The pattern can be anywhere inside the area. It might take you a couple of try to find it.

Once you find it, the shaded blue are will disappear and the pattern will be in the place you found it.

Going to say about all the cooking pattern have this, where you have to find better pattern inside the base pattern. Technologist also uses this way to craft item.

Farming

I wasn't able to play around with this much in the beta. However, what I understood so far from it was that you gather seeds from plants in the world. You plant them, then gather then for herbs that can be used in Technologist and Cooking.

What I think about it?

It is a very complex crafting system that they have. It is not as complex as Final Fantasy XIV's mini game extravagenza, but it's not as simple as World of Warcraft's click-and-make crafting system. I do like the fact you can swap out tradeskills without losing progress on any of the ones you have already levelled. Though it does suck that you have to wait a week to be able to go back into it. Maybe this will be lowered before the game comes out. At first, it is hard to figure out what you are doing, but after you mess around a few times, you will get the hang of it.

Now for the big question, is it worth leveling up a tradeskill if you want to make money? The answer is Yes. You can also craft pvp gear that is going to be good which, if not for the hardcore, should sell well towards the newcomers. Then for PvE, crafting item would just be as good as the items you get from an instance of your level due to stat customization. It might take you more then once to get that one item you want from that instance, where as in crafting, it only takes that one try and the materials needed.

If you have any questions regarding the crafting system, comment below!