Editing Crafting (section)

== Crafting Recipes and Techniques ==
As with many other MMOs, Chronicles of Elyria allows the transfer of knowledge, specifically in the crafting skills, through recipes. Having a recipe and being able to read the language it is written in grants you the knowledge necessary to attempt to craft an item. If you also have sufficient skill, you'll be able to reproduce the item. Unlike other MMOs there's a synergy between crafting and the Scribing skills, as those who master [[Lore Skills#Scribing|scribing]] can create their own recipes to give to others in order to share the knowledge.

Whatever your crafting focus, your trade skill will require the use of one or more different crafting techniques to accomplish anything but the most basic crafting. Techniques are learned processes, or “tricks of the trade” for lack of a better term.

For example, in [[blacksmithing]], when it comes time to impart hardness into a blade, you quench a heated piece of metal to cool down and draw the internal structure of the metal together, making it harder, but potentially more brittle as well. Depending on what you’re making as a smith, this potential brittleness may or may not matter. But supposing it does, what do you do to try to mitigate it? To keep your blade, for example, both hard and flexible enough to block an incoming strike without snapping you will choose between several techniques.

A simple example of a technique might be to “edge quench” the blade when it comes time to quench the blade and lock in its hardness, so that you harden only the cutting edge of the blade, leaving its back soft and flexible. To do this you would use a quenching trough rather than the more typical upright quenching vessel you’d see for things like swords. You’d take your heated blade and you’d put only the edge into the trough. If you were a bit more sophisticated – if you knew a different technique – you might instead apply clay to the back of the blade when heating the weapon for quenching so that it doesn’t heat up at the same rate as the edge. In either case, whether you clay the blade or just edge quench it, you’d create a blade that had a softer spine than cutting edge, making the blade more resilient and less likely to snap or shatter. However, each of the methods have their own risks and impart different properties to the blade being quenched.

Techniques are both the way a crafter advances their ''knowledge'' of a craft and the way that  they can impart their own unique style to their work as a crafter. Many techniques are interchangeable within crafting recipes, allowing you to substitute one technique for another and still produce the item in question. It might be that you’re the master of the edge quench and so you never bother to learn the technique of applying clay to your blade. It might be that you know both techniques but prefer one over the other for the properties it passes on to the finished work. Why you use one technique over another is up to you.

Techniques aren’t just processes you can apply in the crafting experience, they’re knowledge that must be learned. So techniques also act as progress gates. It might be that a work product requires a specific technique. For example, to make most pattern-welded billets as a blacksmith you need to know how to forge weld. It might also be the case, however, that a technique isn’t required for a specific work product but is required to impart a property to a finished work. A smith might add a fuller to the blade to add the “lightened” property to the weapon, reducing its overall weight, for example.

In a small way, these properties take the place of stat bonuses given to you by gear in traditional MMOs. Properties can change the way a weapon or armor performs in combat, or alter the effect of eating food or drinking potions and other beverages. Techniques can be interchanged when they produce the same result. So for example, you might know several techniques for smelting iron ore into various grades of iron, such as for making steel. Which techniques you use as you complete a recipe will also change which properties are imparted to the resulting item. A smart craftsperson will want to learn as many techniques as they can, because their use is one way for the work to have its own identity and "speak for itself." A smith might use a particular set of techniques to create signature weapons, a baker may know the way to bake chocolate chip cookies that taste like home. Their secret is as likely to be a matter of which techniques they use as it is which ingredients were used.