Diablo 3 Crafting Guide

Crafting is a new feature available in Diablo 3. While Diablo 2′s Horadric Cube offered some crafting options, the system in Diablo 3 is much larger and will play a much bigger role in gameplay than crafting did in Diablo 2.

In this Diablo 3 crafting guide, we are going to go over exactly what crafting options are available in Diablo 3, how they work, and how you can use them to make gold and increase the strength of your character.

Diablo 3 Crafting Guide – System Overview

In Diablo 3, crafting is broken down into two NPCs (non-player characters, that is computer controlled characters) that you unlock by playing through the game. These NPCs are officially known as Artisans, though you will often see them referred to simply as crafters. The Blacksmith is unlocked very early in Act 1 whereas the Jeweler is thought to be unlocked in Act 2 or 3.

Once you unlock these NPCs, they are available for crafting in the town they were unlocked in. The Blacksmith crafts all your weapons and armor whereas the Jeweler upgrades gems, removes gems from equipment, and can add a socket for gems to certain gear slots.

Your crafting NPCs start out with a very limited set of recipes and skills. In order to get them to craft high level armor and gems, you need to spend gold to train them. Once you get out of Normal mode, your crafters also require special items to level, such as Pages of Blacksmithing (found off of Nightmare enemies), Tomes of Blacksmithing (found off Hell enemies) and Tomes of Secrets (found off Inferno) enemies.

After leveling your Artisans to the max, the very top level recipes are actually rare drops off from Inferno mode. There are also lower level recipe drops you can collect as well.

The cool thing about crafters is that they are account wide. For example, if you level up your Blacksmith to level 5 on your first character and learn a few new recipes, when you make a new character it will have the same level Blacksmith with the same recipes. This makes it imperative to invest in crafting since all your characters will benefit. With that said, your hardcore and softcore Artisans are separate for obvious reasons.

In the next part of our D3 crafting guide, we will be looking at each Artisan in detail, starting with the Blacksmith and then going over the Jeweler.

Diablo 3 Crafting Guide – The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith is the first artisan you get access to and is really the only true “crafting” Artisan in D3 at release. While the Jeweler is just as important, only the Blacksmith makes equipment for your character.

Unlike other fantasy games where the creation of equipment is split up into various categories like weaponsmith, armorsmith, leatherworker, woodworker, and so on, the Blacksmith in Diablo 3 does it all. He gets access to literally hundreds of recipes across all levels and most slots. The Blacksmith even makes class-specific gear like Wizard orbs, Witch Doctor ceremonial knives, and Demon Hunter quivers.

The only limitation on the Blacksmith’s skill is that he cannot create rings or amulets. Right now, no Artisan can create rings or amulets (not even the Jeweler). We will update this Diablo 3 crafting guide should that change.

The Blacksmith uses materials and gold to craft with. You can get these materials by bringing your magic (blue quality) and rare (yellow quality) items to the Blacksmith and then clicking the “salvage” tab. Select salvage and click an item to break it down.

Typically blue quality items break down into blue quality crafting materials whereas yellow quality items break down into yellow quality crafting materials. Occassionally, you will get a rare crafting material from breaking down a magic item.

The quality level of materials salvaged from armor and weapons alike depends on the difficulty level where the items were found. There are four tiers of crafting material – one for each difficulty. Higher tiers of materials are used for higher level recipes.

Once you collect your materials and gold, that is really all there is to Blacksmithing in D3 – select your recipe and click craft and you are done. The catch is that all items are created with random stats; your crafted item of the same recipe could be complete garbage or an amazing piece.

Like many things in Diablo 3, getting good items boils down to the luck of the draw. If you hate chance, the next Artisan discussed in our Diablo 3 crafting guide might be more up your alley. The Jeweler follows a much more logical system of progression.

D3 Artisans Guide – The Jeweler

Despite the name, the Jeweler does not make rings or amulets. The only thing the Jeweler is concerned with is gems. Gems are just like they were in Diablo 2 – things you can put into sockets in order to increase your stats.

If you think gems in Diablo 3 are as weak as they were in Diablo 2, think again. In Diablo 3, gems not only have much better stat bonuses than they did in Diablo 2 but there is also a whopping 15 grades of gems in Diablo 3, with each one providing a slightly better bonus than the previous grade.

Not only do gems have much better stats than they did in Diablo 2, but they are also much harder to get in Diablo 3. The system is the same: three gems of the same type (i.e. topaz) and grade (i.e. chipped) can be upgraded to the next grade. For example, three chipped Topaz can be upgraded to 1 flawed Topaz through the Jeweler.

In Diablo 2, you could find grade 5 gems in Hell mode and those could be converted to perfect (grade 6) gems, which were the highest in the game. In Diablo 3, the highest grade of gems you can find is level 8, and the grades go up to level 15! This means you have to find a whopping 2178 grade 8 gems to get a max level gem. As you can imagine, max level gems will be extremely rare and expensive considering players will want these for all of their sockets.

Fortunately, the Jeweler can also remove gems from their sockets. Should you find a valuable gem, you do not have to worry about wasting it by putting it in your equipment since you can retrieve it at any time.

The Jeweler gets most of its recipes from training fees. The only exception is that you need to find or buy a handful of recipes for the top tier of gems.