Crafting is unlocked at level 3, and it’s when you bash reagents (and sometimes items) together on a crafting station with the press of a button to get something new.
How do I do that?
You do that with crafting stations and reagents. Reagents are the cards that have things on them, like Mist Wood or Stone Blocks. The crafting stations are numerous and have individualized purposes, i.e. Equipment, Card, Basic, Jewel, and Housing Crafting Stations.
When you craft something, it’ll add time to a crafting slot. While the clock on a slot is still ticking down, you can’t use that slot to craft anything. You start with just one, but you get more slots as you raise your crafting level.
Why should I care about crafting?
Good question. It depends on what you play Wizard101 for.
It gives you an alternative way to get gear that’s good enough for the level.
That’s the jist of it, at least, it’s not always that simple:
- In early-game, there’s not much useful crafting to be done. The exception is min-maxing a lower level for a specific purpose, like PvP. This can be aided by specific gear combinations that aren’t always the best with dropped or purchased gear.
- In mid-game, the crafted gear is an acceptable alternative that requires you to farm reagents instead of farming a dungeon. If you have a higher level wizard, crafting can be made easier by having more reagents to begin with, or having access/knowledge of better reagent farming places. Jewels are also easiest to get from crafting at this point.
- In late-game, the crafted gear fades a bit into the background. The most notable exception of level 125 critical boots, where crafting gives you an alternative to just craft something pretty easily that’s basically as good as you need it to be.
- In end-game, crafting allows you to take a different approach to getting Dragoon gear. You can farm Fellspawn, but you can also farm Abandoned or Crypt, which can be zombie-farmed easily and are pulled off without tight coordination with strangers.
Basically, it gives you more options. Options are good for the player when they allow them to play by their own rules and still succeed, especially in a friendly game intended for a general audience.
(This point is undercut by the fact that some of the recent changes, for example, the shadow pip system change, that force players to prefer one strategy over the other, i.e. spam hitting over one-shotting, as well as the overarching problem where the best way to beat the game is by “imitating storm,” hitting hard and fast, because if you don’t you’ll just die, while not providing design tolerance towards letting more defensive classes actually have fun being defensive, rather than just blading the storm and “knowing they’re useful” because it’s clearly and obviously the most effective way to beat every battle in the game, and this whole paragraph is a bit indulgent, but it just ended.)
It gives you cool things to decorate your house with, or a house to decorate.
There are plenty of things, like castle blocks, that you might want for your house, but are just never in the Bazaar. You might want the Treetop Getaway house, a house that can be crafted with just a membership. If you think decorating can be a creative outlet, it’s easy to see that more options is nice, and if crafting is the way to get the furniture you want, you’ll probably want to give it a shot.
That being said, I hope you see the benefits of crafting if you didn’t see them before. Now all we have to do is figure out what to do with this knowledge.
See also:
All Wizard101 Folio Crafting Guides
A Beginner’s Guide to Gardening
Hopefully this helps any prospective crafters. Happy crafting!
