Artisan skill

Artisan skills are various trade skills that can be learned by player characters. They allow you to craft various things with a minor benefit over the normal items an individual might be able to find or purchase. Free-to-play characters do not have access to artisan skills.

The Skills

The currently available artisan skills are Fletching, Cobbling, and Forging. Mining and Smelting are planned artisan skills.

Fletching

Main article: Fletching

Fletching allows a character to produce arrows, crossbow bolts, and thrown darts. Fletchers can produce better arrows than one can buy (with both an attack strength (AS) bonus from a high fletching skill and from enchanted wood or arrowheads). The final product can be customized with colors, painted bands, and various fletchings, and merchants occasionally sell items that allow a fletcher to add flares to his or her arrows.

Cobbling

Main article: Cobbling

Cobbling allows the character to produce shoes, boots, sandals, and slippers. This footwear can be measured to fit the wearer and contain a pocket at high skill ranks. A master cobbler can craft an almost incomprehensible variety of shoes.

Forging

Main article: Forging

A character skilled in forging can produce weapons with a slightly higher AvD and damage factor than normal weapons of their type. Because these improvements do not interfere with blessing, enchanting, ensorcelling, or any merchant-offered weapon upgrade, artisan-forged weapons are sought-after.

Forging is actually broken down into six different artisan skills. The first is crafting, which is used for any part of a weapon that does not actually need to be put in the forge. This is generally used for the hilts and hafts of a weapon and allows the character to craft a forging-hammer.

Each of the other five skills is dedicated to a single weapon type, and allows the character to forge the business ends of:

• Edged Weapons
• Blunt Weapons
• Two-Handed Weapons
• Brawling weapons
• Polearms

Characters cannot forge thrown weapons, ranged weapons, or runestaves.

Artisan Skill Ranks

Each artisan skill has 500 individual ranks, each of which is harder to achieve than the previous. The character earns a new title as he or she advances in the skill.

Ranks	Title
0 - 99	Novice
100 - 199	Apprentice
200 - 299	Journeyman
300 - 399	Skilled laborer
400 - 499	Highly-skilled laborer
500	Master

There is a limit on how many artisan skills a character can learn. Currently, each character can have up to 1200 artisan ranks, which allows him or her to master two artisan skills. Forging is an exception: because two skills are needed to even make a weapon and because the system was designed to allow characters to master every weapon type, forging ranks count as only one-third of an artisan rank. Thus, forgers can choose to master crafting and two weapon types alongside a non-forging artisan skill, or they can master crafting and all five weapon types.

To learn a new artisan skill beyond this limit, previous ranks can be unlearned using the ARTISAN UNLEARN command.

Experience

Learning artisan skills grants experience alongside the ability to make items. Each time the character advances to the next rank of an artisan skill, he or she earns experience based on the rank achieved:

experience = (Rank Achieved) ÷ (1 + Number of other Artisan Skills at that rank or higher)

In other words, when a new artisan reaches rank 300 of cobbling, he would earn 300 experience. If he then took up fletching, upon earning rank 300 there, he would earn 300 ÷ (1 + 1) = 300 ÷ 2 = 150 experience. On the other hand, if an experienced forger had mastered crafting and each of the four non-brawling weapon types, she would earn only 300 ÷ (1 + 5) = 50 experience upon reaching rank 300 of brawling.

Resources

• Artisan Skill levels (saved post)
• Smelting (saved post)
• Artisan Skills Guides, on Play.net