Crafting Overview
Crafting on UO Sagas turns raw materials — ore, hides, wood, reagents — into finished goods using a crafting skill, a tool, and (for some crafts) a nearby station such as a forge or oven. Because the shard is Renaissance era, an item's power comes from the colored material it is made from (a Valorite weapon is Vanquishing, a Bronze one is Force) and from exceptional quality. There is no runic reforging, imbuing, or random item-property system — a craft simply succeeds or fails, and quality is either normal or exceptional.
Raw materials come from the four gathering skills; see the Resources page for a full material reference and Repairing for keeping your gear alive.
The crafting skills
Each craft has its own page with materials, recipes, skill ranges and a training path.
| Craft | Primary tool | Station required | What it makes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blacksmithy | Smith's hammer | Anvil and forge (within 2 tiles) | Metal armor, shields, melee weapons |
| Tailoring | Sewing kit | None | Cloth, leather and studded armor, bone armor |
| Carpentry | Saw | None | Furniture, instruments, wooden weapons, house add-ons |
| Bowcraft & Fletching | Fletcher's tools | None | Bows, crossbows, arrows and bolts |
| Tinkering | Tinker's tools | None | Every other craft's tools, jewelry, traps, clockwork |
| Alchemy | Mortar and pestle | None | Potions |
| Inscription | Scribe's pen | None | Magery scrolls, spellbooks, runebooks, songbooks |
| Cooking | Skillet | Heat source / oven / flour mill (per recipe) | Food |
| Cartography | Mapmaker's pen | None | Drawn maps; decoding treasure maps |
How a craft works
- Double-click your tool to open that craft's menu.
- Pick a material — the color/grade of ingot, leather, or wood to build from. Your choice is remembered.
- Pick an item. Each recipe has a minimum and maximum skill; the menu shows your success chance.
- Roll — success and exceptional quality are rolled. On success the item lands in your backpack, hued and empowered by its material, and the tool loses one use.
On a failed attempt you usually lose the materials (for batch-made items like arrows, only half). Your success chance rises linearly from the recipe's minimum skill to its maximum. Some crafts give you a 50% floor even at a recipe's minimum skill (Tailoring, Carpentry, Fletching); the others (Blacksmithy, Alchemy, Inscription, Cooking, Cartography, most of Tinkering) start at 0% at the minimum, so you need real skill above the floor to succeed.
Exceptional quality
Quality is binary: normal or exceptional. Exceptional gear gets:
- Armor — armor rating multiplied by ×1.15 and +20 maximum durability.
- Weapons — +10% damage and +20 maximum durability (the magic damage tier still comes from the colored material).
- Maker's mark — with 100+ skill in the craft, you may stamp your name on an exceptional weapon or armor piece.
The exceptional chance is derived from your success chance, roughly success chance minus 60% (Blacksmithy and Tailoring ease this penalty down to −45% as your skill climbs past 95; Fletching uses half your success chance minus 10%). Two things raise it further:
- A colored tool — a tool crafted from a higher-tier material adds +5% exceptional chance per tier (a Valorite smith's hammer adds +25%).
- Citizenship town bonuses — some towns grant increased exceptional chance for a matching craft while you work inside them.
Consumables — potions, spell scrolls, cooked food — carry no quality at all. Weapons, armor, shields, instruments, and even maps can all be exceptional.
Colored materials and magic levels
Most crafts let you choose a material grade from the menu. Colored materials hue the finished item and give weapons, armor, and bows a built-in magic level — this is where item power comes from on Sagas:
| Material tier | Level | Weapon name | Armor name | Skill to use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron / plain | 0 | (regular) | (regular) | 0 |
| Shadow (iron / wood / leather) | 1 | Ruin | Defense | 60 |
| Copper | 2 | Might | Guarding | 80 |
| Bronze | 3 | Force | Hardening | 100 |
| Verite | 4 | Power | Fortification | 110 |
| Valorite | 5 | Vanquishing | Invulnerability | 120 |
The "skill to use" column is the crafting skill needed just to select that material. The same six tiers apply to metal, leather, and wood alike. (Dull Copper, Gold, Agapite, and Frostwood do not exist as workable tiers on Sagas.)
There is no enhancement: you cannot upgrade an existing item with a better material. To get a higher-tier item, craft a new one from the colored resource.
Tools
Every crafting tool carries a limited number of uses; each successful craft (and each item repaired) consumes one, and the tool is destroyed when it runs out. Tools must be on your person, and if you have one equipped you must use that one.
Crafted tools get more uses the better their material — and a colored tool also boosts your exceptional chance:
| Tool material | Uses |
|---|---|
| Regular (iron/wood) | 50 |
| Shadow | 75 |
| Copper | 100 |
| Bronze | 125 |
| Verite | 150 |
| Valorite | 175 |
An exceptionally crafted tool gains +25 uses on top. Almost all crafting tools are made by Tinkers.
Stations
Some recipes require you to stand near a world object:
| Requirement | Qualifying objects |
|---|---|
| Heat source | Ovens, fireplaces, campfires, fire pits, forges, braziers |
| Oven | Stone/sandstone ovens |
| Flour mill | Flour mills |
| Anvil + forge | Blacksmithy only — both within 2 tiles and in line of sight |
Recipes
38 items are gated behind a learned recipe — without it the item never appears in your craft menu, no matter your skill. That covers the Daemon, Leaf and Woodland armor sets, both mempos, the special dye tubs, luck jewellery, the chef's feasts and more.
Recipe scrolls drop from champion spawns — three per champion, and the two in the reward pile are never scaled by attendance. Learning one is permanent and per character.
See Recipes for the full list of all 38 with their skill requirements and materials.