Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: Casual gamer's Guide to Weaponsmith (V3.0)
so What seems to work good is this.
Get Engineering 4 obviously
Get Domestic Arts 1 (optional but helps).
Get Surveying 4, and you are going to need Business 3 later on but not required right now. From Experience it takes about 20 minutes to get business 3 once you know what you are doing so not a big deal.
You can probably drop domestic arts 1 later or get domestic arts 4 to make better generic items, foods, and clothing. But, it does clutter your schematics page which is important not to be cluttered and I’ll tell you why later. There is no easy way of getting novice weapon smith other than playing, grinding, or both. It is fairly easy to get that within a week however if you grind what time you do have to play.
Now that you obtain the engineering title, next step is to harvest a LOT of resources. Before to get engineering 4 you can get away with just sampling your resources. Not here guys for weapon smith you need a lot of resources and since you have no time to sit there and sample 20k of resources harvesters is the way to go. Find a spot with ~70% or higher of some metal and plot 4 or more small harvesters. At a 70% spot with a small harvester you can get 2.5k a day. With a mineral harvester (medium harvester) you can get 5k a day. With 4 small harvesters going 10k a day might sound like a lot to you but you can grind half that in less than an hour. Leaving you some extra to sell. If it is rare (which those usually have like 998 of some resource) don't grind that and halt your grinding and harvest the ge’bous out of it. To get Novice WS your going to want at least 5k to start of some metal, 2k fiberblast (optional), 2k gemstone (optional). These are typical resources for generic items.
Getting novice WS isn't fun. Nothing you can make that is fun besides powerups and that gets old fast. Just grind Mineral Surveys. Don't require much resources and you get ~57xp for each one with practice. It will take you about 2-3 days to get weapon smith if you are a casual gamer like me with standard manual crafting.
There is a neat little macro trick, that some people know about, some people do know but can't get it to work so gave up, and the rest don't even know about macro's. You will have to read the manual on macros then.
It's really easy ... Make 6 weapon, droid, generic crafting tools. You can add more or less it doesn’t matter. Get each one to be about a 9.4 or higher when experimenting. Make 6 corresponding macro's and link the 6 together. You can make them loop if you like. I found a nice trick to make the loop and then just stop when I want to with a macro. 6 tools seems to be good anyway. These ARE case sensitive so make sure you type it in exactly as how u see it here. Don't include anything in-between /* */ . Also the first 6 tools are on the top bar in the first 6 slots. The macros are on the second bar in the first 6 slots.
In each macro you have this:
/ui action toolbarSlotXX;
/*XX is a number, the toolbar slot number going from 00 - 11, then the bottom is from 12 - 23 */
/sel YY;
/* YY is a number, the craft schematic number */
/pause Z;
/*Z=5 for start and then just change it to your liking */
/next;
/next;
/next;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlotWW;
/*WW is a number that will start the next macro, not crafting tool, the macro. Do not add the last two lines on your last macro if you don't want to loop*/
my macro example's:
Craft01
/ui action toolbarSlot00; /*firstbar, first slot*/
/sel 73;
/pause 3;
/next;
/next;
/next;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot13; /*second bar, second slot*/
Craft02
/ui action toolbarSlot01; /*firstbar, second slot*/
/sel 73;
/pause 3;
/next;
/next;
/next;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot14; /*Second bar, third slot*/
Craft06
/ui action toolbarSlot05; /*you get the idea*/
/sel 73;
/pause 3;
/next;
/next;
/next;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/createp practice no item;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot12;
/*if you want it to loop add these 2 lines, this will loop forever*/
SelectSchematicTest
/ui action toolbarSlot00;
/sel 73;
/*change 73 to any number of the schematic you want to test*/
StopMacroLoop
/dump;
/*this will stop the macro*/
Now that you got the macro trick, this WILL work now doubt about it just make sure you type exactly how I have it, you can grind quicker then how most people do it manually. A lot quicker. So, now getting novice weapon smith may take you a day or two depending on how much time you have to play.
Once you get novice WS do the same thing when getting novice WS and grind weapon upgrade kits. These give you ~60xp and more with practice. Then get intermediate firearms crafting and grind projectile rifle barrels. These give you ~90xp and you should be set with grinding. 5,000 resources gives you 10,000xp when grinding projectile rifle barrels. Mine lots of steel.
This will be healthy for you. The only clicks you have to do is to add resources and start the macro. If your young you may think this isn't a big deal, but for the older folks you will like this macro a lot. This will work with both with being at a crafting station and not being by a crafting station because it will ignore the extra steps.
Now the annoying part is finding the craft Schematic. Make the 7th macro that I showed to test the schematic. To find out what the schematic is, go to your waypoint window, and select the schematics tab. Then, count from beginning to what item you want to make. See why cluttering your schematics page is not a good idea? you'll be sitting there counting to 200! As a novice WS, weapon upgrade kits are decent, they give you ~60xp. For me I counted from top to that item, it came to 60, so I put in 60 in the 7th macro that you make, click the macro and test. Is it your item you want to craft? add 1 try 61? no? try 59 .. and so on until you get the item you want to craft and then edit your macros and change each number to the one you want. If you cannot craft the item at all, meaning you can't find the schematic number; you need to be by a crafting station to make it.
Make the 8th macro if you are going to loop to stop the macro that I showed above.
The 8 macros seems to help a lot in trying to level so you can make something decent. Which starts when you get techniques 3. Until then forget it. Even playing for fun you can't make anything but artisan stuff. D18's you are limited to the resources (~26% max) and you cannot experiment. Everything is 35% - 50% failure rate and you will fail 8/10 times. So, you are forced to grind in the WS profession until you get master techniques. At least until you get firearms, or which ever intermediate arms you want, and the get techniques 4. Then and only then can you can play WS for fun. Get yourself a house and setup a vendor, which is why you need business 3, and then go about with your SWG life and have fun! I hope the devs will correct this major bug with WS. You really can't be a WS until you get techniques 3 at least.
This is not cheating, everything here is within the system as intended. No third party software is used and is not recommended since it breaks the rules of the game you might get banned. You still need to play and you cannot be AFK. Thats all this does is reduce the clicks required while crafting and speed up the crafting a bit. Probably by about 10 seconds. This also allows the WS and crafters alike to reduce Karpal Tunnal Syndrom symptoms. Such as a sharp pain in the hands since it reduces the mouse clicks or keyboard typing by about 2/3's or more.
Enjoy! 
*updated the grammer, spelling mistakes, and i added a new macro to stop the loop. I added more info from experience and corrected some logical mistakes- 9/15/03*
Great guide! I agree with you on all but one thing. It took me approximately one hour total to get surveying II, business III, engineering IV, and novice weaponsmith. How? You just build mineral and wind harvs when you can and the exp SKYROCKETS. I went through engineering III and IV like it was a joke....and business I-III within about 5 mins of each other. You do use more resources, but as you know with crafting the more resources you use the better (because its materials x 2 for xp I believe...plus a bonus if you just practice). Hope this helps anyone!
'Jobu'
I was building personal flora harvs and wind harvs and I was given general crafting exp. They must have changed it =) yay!
Yeah, they changed it. I ground out the last, oh, 5000XP for Novice WS in about 10 min just building (practicing) wind generators. I think they gave the best XP, and it IS Gen'l Crafting XP.
Oh, my own personal view, but if you intend to do any real crafting and want to produce quality goods, but don't want to buy a house, get a droid with the requisite crafting modules installed. I have an R2 Adv. with general/weapon/droid crafting, medical (as good as a med center), data, and storage modules. Data doesn't work (yet) and storage is pretty limited (8 items total), but it's still pretty cool just to have. Still no ability to customize paint jobs yet, so all you'll get is a "bondo and primer" droid.
I don't like sitting around harvestors to gain xp. Thats not very casual friendly so i don't really recommend that. If you got a lot of time then sure i guess you can just pop in the game and go afk and do osmething else i guess. That just seems really boreing to me. I have about 2 hours of gameplay a day if that. It varies on how much HW i have.
Maybe it only changed recently, but yeah, that's how I made it to novice when I only had about 5000 XP left to do. Worked for me!