In today’s Friday Feature, Demiurge once again provides insight into another important aspect of crafting – powerups! So without further ado…
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Powerups: Cornerstone of an Empire
Last week, I wrote about Armorsmithing on EiF. This week I wanted to write another article to address questions, opinions, and concerns about crafting in general in SWG. Crafting comes in many forms in this game. More and more often, I hear people commenting on how it’s impossible to gain a foothold into it or compete with established players. This article is intended to specifically address that misconception.
Most people who have played on EiF for any length of time know who I am. I am primarily associated with the crafting of armor, even though I also make weapons, artisan wares, some architect items, and every now and then clothing, BE, and medical items too. But here’s one of my biggest secrets: I make a large chunk of my credits crafting an item that a new player can make within a day or two of character creation… Powerups.
So just like with last week’s write-up, I will break down what it takes to craft them. As you might suspect, Powerups are one of the easiest items to craft in the game. There are no subcomponents and each craft takes a combined 10 resources: 6 minerals and 4 chemicals.
Here are the essential factors that will determine your success or failure:
- Your resources – This is the single most important factor in determining a Powerup’s statistics.
- The crafter – Are you a Master Artisan? That’s all you need. No need for any extra tapes. No need to be anything other than a 10 point crafter.
- Your crafting tool – The stats of your crafting tool matter (again, the crafting station does not). You will want a Weapon, Droid, and General Item crafting tool.
- Where are you performing the craft – Crafting in a player city is always the most desirable way to make something. As with other types of crafting, Research Centers are the best location to craft a powerup (as each individual craft will use a ton of single-point experimentation rolls).
- PATIENCE – I mention this one last, but it is really just as important as the resources you use. This is because it takes a tremendous amount of patience to craft, scrap a craft that isn’t exactly what you want, and try again. I have been known to scrap over a thousand attempts for a single one I like enough to turn into a factory schematic.
Food and Drink are irrelevant for crafting powerups, as are Skill Enhancing Attachments. They are not needed, and even without them, you will still be able to craft server-capped powerups. Please note: while it is not important to have more than 10 experimentation points for powerup crafting, having +25s to both assembly and especially experimentation will still be beneficial in the sense of improving each experimentation roll to help with its quality… but it is not mandatory. Before I get into the discussion on how to make a powerup, I would like to share an old website that has a lot of valuable information pertaining to the crafting of powerups. I will fill in the blanks as they apply to EiF, since the website’s data is not 100% accurate for us. Nevertheless, Agock wrote an excellent guide for its time, and I still reference it on occasion to remind myself what stat combinations are possible.
https://www.swgemu.com/archive/scrapbookv51/data/20070205033706/index.html
What Exactly is a Powerup?
A powerup is a simple crafted item that is added to any normal weapon you might want to use (heavy Commando weapons such as a flame thrower or acid rifle and a Bounty Hunter’s Light Lightning Cannon are examples of weapons that can not be augmented with a powerup). A powerup consists of a primary stat modification, and any number of smaller, secondary stat modifications (anywhere from zero to five, depending on the type of powerup crafted). The primary stat modification is the major upgrade. For purposes of example, please see the picture below:
This is a basic, 4-stat melee powerup. The primary modification is the first stat listed (Attack Speed). The other stats listed below are secondary modifications. EiF has modified the “uses left” stat for our server. On any other server I’ve seen (including live), powerups each have 100 uses. Here, they last 10 times as long (1000 uses). This is a major quality of life improvement for players because, for some end-game content (or PvP), it would be extremely easy to blow through those 100 uses and have to worry about placing another PuP (short for Powerup) on your weapon, mid-battle. As someone who has crafted them for years, I will also tell you that they still sell daily.. so it is not a market killer (as you simply sell them for more than elsewhere).