Having good gear is essential in any turn-based RPG, and that's especially true in Wartales. Not only do items increase a mercenary's stats, but they also give them more options to use in a fight in the form of skills. Choosing the right weapon and wearing the right armor is crucial to surviving combat encounters, so players will want to get their hands on the best ones possible as often as they can.
Combat gear can be typically found as drops from enemies or as merchandise from vendors. Alternatively, weapons and armor can also be crafted. This is great for players who can't afford to fight strong enemies yet or parties that are strapped for cash. Gear crafting is a relatively simple process, but there are still parts that may leave some players confused. Here's a guide to help with that.
How To Craft New Gear In Wartales
Firstly, players must have a Blacksmith in their party if they want to make weapons and armor in Wartales. This can be done by interacting with any Forge in the world and assigning the profession to a free character. The randomly-generated, recruitable mercenaries in taverns may also already be Blacksmiths as well, so keep this in mind when hunting for a new party member.
To craft gear, players must interact with a Forge with their party's resident smith. This will open a crafting window showing all the available weapon and armor recipes. Some items, such as throwing weapons, can be ordered in bulk and delivered straight to the player's inventory right from the get-go. Bigger gear pieces like shields, swords, and armor need to be manually crafted by finishing a quick mini-game—the better players perform here, the better the quality of their crafted gear.
Where To Get New Weapon And Armor Recipes In Wartales
In the beginning, players will only be able to make a handful of off-hand throwing weapons and some crude armor. As the game progresses, more recipes will be unlocked depending on the decisions players make and how they choose to improve their characters.
The Compendium has a ton of unlockable skills and crafting recipes for players to discover, including an entire page's worth of options under the Anvil category. Here, players will be able to unlock most (if not all) of the craftable weapon and armor recipes in Wartales.
However, each unlock does require players to spend a Knowledge Point, so unless they can generate enough of these quickly, it's best to pick and choose which recipe to unlock wisely.
To unlock additional recipes, players need to level up their party's Blacksmith. This can be easily done by just crafting as many items as possible. Making gear pieces for the first time gives a nice XP bonus, so make sure to add this to the list of best practices when adventuring in Wartales.
Lastly, some items will only be craftable once their counterpart in the previous tier of gear has been made at least once. For example, players who want to unlock two-handed steel weapon recipes will need to craft iron versions of said weapons first.
Wartales is available now on PC.