Crafting & the Aether Economy

TODO: crafting chapter. Planned sections: learning a trade, one section per discipline with recipe tables rank by rank, Aether crafting, and other ways to earn (gathering, the market).

Learning a Trade

TODO: how a character picks up a discipline, whether trades are capped or freely multi-classed, and where training is offered.

Ranks & Advancement

TODO: what a rank means for a discipline, and the shape of the climb from novice to master.

The Disciplines

TODO: overview of the crafting disciplines before the per-discipline sections below.

[Discipline]

TODO: what this discipline makes and who wants its output.

[Discipline]

TODO: what this discipline makes and who wants its output.

[Discipline]

TODO: what this discipline makes and who wants its output.

Aether Crafting

Aether is Vhael's crafting currency, and it works differently from anything you buy or gather at a node. Gear progression runs through it: instead of chasing a perfect drop, you take an ordinary base item and use Aether to build it into something better. Each of the ten currencies reaches into a piece of equipment you already own and remakes it in a specific way — reveal what it can do, break it down for parts, or (once the rest of the line ships) reshape what's already rolled on it. You get Aether two ways: it drops directly as loot, or you disenchant gear you don't want and let the resulting shards stack automatically into the finished currency. Aether can be spent straight from your bag or from a dedicated Aether drawer, whichever's more convenient mid-hunt.

Two Aethers are live today, and you'll use both constantly. Everything Magic quality or better drops unidentified — you'll see the base item, rarity, and item level, but the rolled properties and the item's generated name stay hidden, and you can't equip it until that changes. One Aether of Divination reveals all of it; if your bags are backed up with unidentified drops, town vendors offer an identify-all that burns through the pile at one Divination per item. Aether of Disenchantment runs the other direction: feed it gear you don't want and it's destroyed for shards, which is both the economy's main junk sink and your main source of the shards that become every other Aether.

The remaining eight Aethers are catalogued but not yet in the game (see the table below for what each is meant to do). When they ship, they'll all follow the same shape: the target item has to be identified first, each operation consumes exactly one Aether, and an illegal target is rejected without spending anything. Raw Aether leans random rather than guaranteed — if you want to steer a roll instead of praying over it, that's what the crafter-made instruments below are for (see Refined Aether) — and every roll resolves on the server, never previewed or decided client-side.

Refined Aether

Raw Aether is the blunt instrument; the trades sell the precision tools. Crafters can refine an Aether — combining the raw currency with gathered materials — into an instrument that does the same kind of work with a steadier hand. Every instrument consumes its parent Aether in the making, so the refined line never replaces the raw one: it's the same magic, bottled with intent.

A lens guarantees the family of a modifier, never its highest tiers — the very top rolls remain something you find, not something you buy. Instruments are made in tiers; higher-tier seals need the matching higher-tier counterseal to remove. Most supply comes from crafters and trades on the market, with a thinner stream dropping through content mechanics.

Quality & the Crafter's Crit

Every base item carries a quality score from 0 to 15 — the craftsmanship of the thing itself, separate from its rolled modifiers. Dropped gear rolls up to 10, and an Aether of Enhancement can raise any item's quality as far as 10 but no further. The range above that belongs to the trades alone: a crafted base comes out at 5 or better, and on a critical success — more likely the further your skill stands above the recipe's difficulty — it lands somewhere from 11 to 15. Those crit bases can't be dropped, bought up to with currency, or mass-produced, which is exactly why they're worth a master crafter's signature price.

The two halves of the economy meet in the middle: a lucky drop with great modifiers on a shoddy base is an Enhancement project, and a pristine crafted base is a blank canvas waiting for your Aether. Drops give you the modifiers and make you pay for the quality; crafters give you the quality and make you pay for the rolls.

Materials Primer

Other Ways to Earn

TODO: gathering professions, node types, and how they feed the disciplines above.

TODO: gathering trade list undecided.

TODO: gathering trade list undecided.

TODO: gathering trade list undecided.

TODO: selling crafted goods and gathered materials on the player market.