Armorsmith Archive
Thread: Mastering Master AS, a young MAS’s guide... CU Edition!
It is now time for an upgraded guide to Mastering Master AS. I'm a master armorsmith, I've been one a very long time. And over all that time, I've learned a lot of valuable lessons I'd wish to share to you, so you can avoid repeating the same mistakes I have. It is very difficult to start up and become a successful Armorsmith these days, especially since the implementation of the combat upgrade. However if you have the dermination, and are willing to work you way into the field, you can squeeze your way up on top and become 'one of the big boys' of the server. And especially since a lot of armorsmiths have left, there is a growing need for new armorsmiths to pick up the torch and carry on the profession to keep us from fading into oblivian. Please note: This guide assumes you have mastered armorsmith, or know how to become a master armorsmith. This is not a guide on how to grind!
Chapter 1: Setting yourself up for success
There is a lot of settup involved in becoming any type of succesful crafter in SWG. There is a lot of infrastructure you will need. Storage space, a shop to sell goods, factories to produce goods, and the more of each you have the better off you'll be. Then you need resources to make everything, and you will need lots of resources, Mines, and preferably some hunters as well.
This may be a very daunting task if your character is relativly new and you haven't quired much starting capitol yet. This is why I suggest you try to find a good guild that will be willing to help you out and get you on your feet. Having a good guild to support you can make or break you during your infancy in the profession. You're going to need resources, some rare and expensive ones, and you're also going to need a lot of buildings. Try to make friends with an architect while you start up, you're going to need some specific buildings from him. At the very minimum, you'll need a house, 2-3 factories, and several mines, mostly minerals, a few chemicals, a handful of flora farms, and one gas should get you covered. Sounds like a lot of mines, but most of the time you will probably only use one or two at once.
Once you get your infrastructure organized and set up, I might suggest setting up an organization method for your resources. You're going to get lots of resources, tons of 'em. And all sorts of different kinds. Being able to keep them organized and sorted will save you tons of time and headaches down the road. There are a couple different methods people use for organizing. Some pile everything on the floor and keep similar stuff near each other. Others use backpacks or architect made containers (chests/dressers/ect.) for storage. I like to use the latter option as it is much much more easier to keep things organized for me. I have a tool chest labeled for each type of material I use: Petro, Fiberplast, Hides, Ores, Gemstones, Iron, Aluminum, Copper, and Steel. I then took my organization a step further and inside each type of container, I put in a satchel (a looted container that can be put inside another container) that is labeled for specific resources I use. Mainly I use these for keeping my layer and core resources seperate from my non specific resources. You can also switch this around and have containers marked for use rather then resource, and lump all your resources for each component together. Use whichever works for you, but keeping yourself organized is an absolute must.
Chapter 2: Resources! Resources! Resources!
I hope you like collecting resources, because you're going to need lots of them. Resources are the primary determination of your armor, so getting prime resources is an absolute must. As has been, and still is, Overall Quality and Shock Resistance is your primary concern. There is a small bit of Decay Resistance to look at also, but this only pertains to appearance schematics, and is not as much of a concern. You have a daunting task ahead of you, collecting the vast multitudes of resources to make three distinctly different types of armor, battle, recon, and assault.
Let's be honest with ourselves here, there is very little to no demand for basic armor. 99% of the players out there want the best they can get, which is advanced. Most will put up with encumberances just to have the best protection. This means you will need to aquire a lot of very specific types of materials to produce your armor. Let's break it down for you:
Every suit of Advanced Battle Armor will require (not including appearance materials):
11 Advanced Battle Cores:
-495 units of Naboo Bristley Hide
-495 units of Corellia Fiberplast
-495 units of Extrusive Ore
-440 units of Phrik Aluminum
-440 units of Beyrllius Copper
-385 units of Amorphous Gemstone
-3 Battle Segments (3 x [11 + 1] = 36 total battle segments)
--360 units of Steel
--180 units of Aluminum
--540 units of Polymer
--180 units of Wooly Hide
Every suit of Advanced Assault Armor will require (not including appearance materials):
11 Advanced Assault Cores:
-495 units of Dantooine Wooly Hide
-495 units of Dathomir Fiberplast
-495 units of Intrusive Ore
-440 units of Kammris Iron
-440 units of Mythra Copper
-385 units of Amorphous Gemstone
-3 Assault Segments (3 x [11 + 1] = 36 total battle segments)
--360 units of Steel
--180 units of Iron
--540 units of Polymer
--180 units of Scaley Hide
Every suit of Recon Battle Armor will require (not including appearance materials):
11 Advanced Recon Cores:
-495 units of Lokian Leathery Hide
-495 units of Naboo Fiberplast
-495 units of Polymer
-440 units of Carbonite Steel
-440 units of Link-Steel Aluminum
-385 units of Crystalline Gemstone
-3 Recon Segments (3 x [11 + 1] = 36 total battle segments)
--360 units of Steel
--180 units of Copper
--540 units of Fiberplast
--180 units of Leathery Hide
As you can see, that's a LOT of resources that you need to get. Your complete shopping (listed by amount of use) is:
-Polymer
-Steel
-Amorph Gemstone
-Fiberplast
-Naboo Bristley Hide
-Corellia Fiberplast
-Extrusive Ore
-Dant Wooly Hide
-Dath Fiberplast
-Intrusive Ore
-Lok Leathery Hide
-Naboo Fiberplast
-Phrik Aluminum
-Beyrllius Copper
-Kammris Iron
-Mytra Copper
-Carbonite Steel
-Link-Steel Aluminum
-Crystalline Gemstone
-Wooly Hide
-Aluminum
-Scaley Hide
-Iron
-Leathery Hide
-Copper
That is quite a shopping list! And we haven't even included layers (we'll cover that a lil later) This is why I make this suggestion to you: Concentrate on one specific type to begin with. Armor is NOT split up evenly amongst the professions. In fact Battle armor is the most common, and will be the most popular choice. It also has three rather good looking Appearances, Padded, Marauder, and the coveted RIS armor. This makes it a great choice to start out in, and get you off the ground. If you haven't gotten discouraged yet, and managed to collect enough resources to make armor, I congratulate you, and now prepare for the good part.
Chapter 3: Makin armor!
This is a pretty strait forward process really. Make you armor segments, once you've made them, make your armor cores, then make your armor appearances that you sell to your customers. The hard part along this, is making the right types of armor to stock a vendor. I manage to have the luxery of having a well known name, and can make profit soely off of custom orders. If you have enough friends (or are working for a guild) I may suggest you making a large portion of your buisness, if possibly not all, custom order. The reason? Because armorsmith has kinda become a lot like a glorified tailor because of the CU. Now you might be asking, why would he compare us to tailors? Surely there is more to armor then making a few bits of cloth and putting it over my body to look good. Well yeah there are, but stocking a vendor is pretty much as hard as keeping a tailor vendor well stocked. There's a million different color and appearance combinations with armor, but unlike in the past where each appearance was different, they're all pretty much the same now. While this is good from an asthetic perspective, it makes it a pain to keep a well rounded vendor stocked with a wide variety of armor. You can, of course, mass produce a handful of very popular colors (black, red, blue, white, and green, roughly in that order of popularity) or you can make it all by hand for a mixture of colorful combinations. The decision is up to you, and either way you are going to be making a lot of armor. And unless you have a huge infrastructure, you're going to be making them all by hand.
I have another suggestion you can try, setting up a mobile crafting set. A backpack laoded with materials and components, and a crafting droid, and you can go to popular areas and announce you're making armor by hand. If you make it reasonably prices, you are likely to have some good buisness, and help get name recognition started, especially if you label each piece of armor with something marking your identity. I have, just for organization reasons, a backpack that holds all the materials and components I need to craft literally any type of appearance in the game (including RIS and faction). It comes up to around 40 items all together, mostly a wide variety of resources. This is a very handy pack, and something I might suggest you make just to keep something readily accesable to grab when you're crafting. Luckily with inventory sizes at 80, it only sucks up half your inventory space (or if you equip it, then it sucks up none!) Throw in crafting kits and you're at an even 50.
One thing you will need to do, is get your factories chugging. There's a lot of components to be made. I suggest as you get started to make small runs of armor, because hopefilly you will be getting better resources over time, and you will throw away bad components when you replace them with better components. I usually go for 33 suits at a time. This is made by making one run of 1000 segments. And then using those segments to make 330 Advanced Armor Cores. Those 330 armor cores will make you 33 suits of armor, and can make you a good chunk of money. Expect your factories to take a while to make the components. It usually takes a few days to make a full run of components, so be patient, and keep your factories well fed.
Chapter 4: Armor made, now sell it!
This is one of the hardest steps to do. Sure collecting resources was a huge and costly pain, and, getting that infrastructure built with no starting captiol was also next to impossible, but selling armor, and more importantly, getting people to come to you for armor regularly, is a monumental task. Most servers have at least a small handful of armorsmiths for people to go to, and it is very hard to find ways for them to come to you instead, especially ways that don't involve slashing prices so lose your shirt in the process. As I said earlier, selling your armor out in a public place is a good way to get the ball rolling. Also I can't stress enough how important your vendor is. A clean, presentable shop is very important. You don't need anything super fancy, but nobody wants to have to search through piles of junk all over the palce to find a vendor. And even more important is keeping the vendor well stocked. It is a nightmare to some people to find a well stocked, reliable armor vendor. If you have the resoruces, and the willpower, to keep your vendor constantly stocked, people will recognize it, and start to keep coming back. It also helps to have a good location, preferably near a shuttle port in a player city, or near an NPC city, without too many other armorsmiths around.
Now also should be noted, the global vendor search is a great tool to help get people to see your stock. Make sure you get a vendor with your pieces listed on the global market if you can. Also this is a great tool to check out other people's merchandise and prices (hopefully the stats bug will be fixed eventually, to make window shopping a bit easier). Price your armor acording to the global market, take into acount your quality compared to others, if you have lower quality armor, price it according. Do not be ashamed you can't produce as good as someone else, just produce what you can, and sell to the lower market. Some players have 'wisened up' regarding armor and know a difference of a few hundred points isn't as huge of a deal as you'd think.
Chapter 5: Now that you're off the ground, soar!
Hopefully by now you have finally got yourself moving, and being able to get your armor moving. There are many things you will need to work on to keep up with demand, and to keep your buisness rolling. First and foremost is to try and continue to increase your quality. As your capitol increases, try buying up older resource spawns that are better then your own resources, or start grabbing 30k resource kits. While they are expensive, they can really help get your armor up a notch above the rest. Also continue to keep an eye out for new resource spawns. If something better then your stock spawns, jump on it as hard as you can! One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was thinking I had enough of something. Collect resources like you plan to be an armorsmith for years. Don't settle for 50k, not even 100k. If something really awesome spawns, get every last drop you can. Also, try to put aside a good fund for hides, whenever there is a good spawn. Unless you have an alt, you're going to end up having to pay people to hunt hide for you, and it can be very costly.
Also, while we're on money, keep an eye on how fast or slow your stock is moving. And at the same time keep an eye on the market. Try to adjust your prices as you need to, in order to both keep up with the market, and keep your sanity. If your armor is flying off the shelves faster then you can keep up with, it's either time to expand your infrastructure, or raise prices (or a lil bit of both). Raising prices is tricky buisness, and often times you may get more complaints then you'd like, but trust me, a few complaints are better then going insane because you can never keep your vendor stocked.
Also, as you begin to establish yourself, and get the money flowing, you may look to start doing 'projects' to help get your name better known. This could include auctioning off a few health enhanced suits (which hopefully gets fixed soon), or trying to get the resources to put together layered armor. If you thought unlayered armor was bad! Boy do you have a suprise waiting for you with layered armor. Not only do the new layers require very expensive rare resources, but they are used in BULK! This is why most people generally don't make layered armor, and layered armor is considered something for those with lots of money, layered armor can easily sell in the millions on the smallest and 'poorest' servers.
If you've managed to survive all that, and gotten your buisness off the ground, I congratulate you and welcome you to the ranks of those who have truely Mastered Master Armorsmith
Message Edited by Okram2k on 06-25-2005 09:36 PM
Jeez. I wish I had this when i first started. I just started crafting armor to sell about 2 weeks ago. I am doing well but this would have helped immensly. I had to learn everything by searching through forums and endless reading.. This pretty much sums everything up..
Might wanna add that 12 pts is a waste starting out unless you are using hella nice resources.
Resources! Resources! Resources! really cant be stressed enough.
If it wasnt for gathering resources for the past 2-3 months and dropping 20-30 ber 13's on any resource that was good for AS I would not be well off right now at all.. Also If i didnt already have alot of assets and credits before I started I couldn't even imagine trying to become a AS capable of producing decent armor. Grinding a new jedi from rerolling my toon would be quicker,
I VOTE STICKY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
new smiths can do quite well getting their own cores (looted) or buying them off bazaar and then making them into armor.
popular hunting treks are krayts and klicknick queens. These both drop advanced cores that have stats comparable to higher end unlayered armor.
If you have a guild of krayt hunters, or know some you can pick up those cores cheap. As long as the resell is higher than what you are paying, you should do good
LeviticusD wrote:
Fantastic guide Okram! I'm exactly in the position this guide is made for. Most of this stuff I've learned in these forums already, but man this would have saved me hours of reading! Really appreciate the work you(and Caile) do.
tha's for the appreciation