The Crafting Skill

The Crafting Skill is used to create and repair items including alchemical items such as potions, toxins, weapons, books, clothes, and furniture. For characters that use alchemy, build snares, or in a party of folks that use Shield Block regularly, Crafting is an important skill. The key ability for Crafting is intelligence.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks.

  • Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
  • Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
  • Green: Good options. Useful often.
  • Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

Proficiency Levels

  • Trained: The ability to reliably repair shields and craft items will be extremely valuable to the party. The ability to earn an income can likely be quite lucrative.
  • Expert: This proficiency is required to take the Magic Crafting feat, a prerequisite to crafting Potions.
  • Master: If Crafting is central to your character then Master proficiency will allow you to take the Inventor feat as well as offering improved crafting and faster crafting with Complex Crafting.
  • Legendary: If Crafting is central to your character, such as an Alchemist or Inventor, it is worth either advancing to Legendary or taking the Legendary Tattoo Artist to become Legendary at Crafting for free. Becoming Legendary allows you to take the Craft Anything feat, gives the benefit of Legendary Proficiency to checks, faster crafting with Complex Crafting, and increases earned income from Crafting as a Downtime Activity.

Crafting Skill Actions

Untrained Actions

  • Repair: Most critical if one or more party members relies heavily on Shield Block. Remember that you must have a repair kit to perform the Repair action. An untrained successful repair provides 5 HP to the item. A party member at least trained in Crafting can repair 10 HP on Success to an item.  For most Base Shields that 10 HP is at least half of the item’s total HP. Note that, unlike Treat Wounds, you can attempt to Repair an item repeatedly 10 minutes at a time. 

Trained Actions

  • Craft:  For classes such as the Alchemist or the Inventor the Craft action is a central Action of the class. A great session zero conversation to have before taking these classes is to understand how your GM expects to handle formula purchase. Preferences may range from “you must reverse engineer every formula from items in your possession” to “just pay the gold and the formula is yours”. Wondering what to do with all that extra crafting capacity? The gold economy of PF2e is strong! Downtime activities to make money are a great way to spend some time with your character between sessions to earn money. Listen to the RPGBOT.Podcast episode on Crafting and Downtime Activities for our take on Crafting and making money in Downtime across systems.
  • Identify Alchemy: Given that you have alchemist tools this would be situationally useful. As an example, should I drink this or throw this? What is the nature of this plot device? Note well, GMs, this is a Secret roll. A Critical Failure allows the GM to lie!

Crafting Skill Feats

A complete list of Crafting Skill Feats across source books can be found on Archives of Nethys.

Level 1

  • Alchemical CraftingCRB: A signature feature of the Alchemist class, Alchemical Crafting can add flexibility to any class to deal damage at range or heal your party. Alchemical Crafting is also a base Feat for the Assassin Archetype.
  • Crafter’s AppraisalAPG: Likely not the only way to use Identify Magic on magic items available to your party.
  • Improvise ToolAPG: If your GM has denied you access to a repair kit or a basic crafter’s book I suppose this Feat is worthwhile. 
  • Quick Repair CRB: The difference between 10 minute repair and 1 minute is likely flavor, but once your character is a master in Crafting the “three actions” repair might allow for the party to give chase while allowing the Crafter to repair shields after combat. 
  • Seasoned APG: In a game where food hardly matters a +1 circumstance bonus to Craft food or drink doesn’t feel worth the feat. A +1 to making potions will matter 5 % of the time. How often does your character craft potions?
  • Snare Crafting CRB: A character that invests heavily in crafting might enjoy having various Snares be significant, both for roleplay and mechanically.  
  • Specialty Crafting CRB: This skill will be mechanically important for characters that dabble in Alchemy as well as for the Inventor that must make Crafting checks regularly. Alchemists need not take the feat as most common uses of Crafting succeed automatically.

Level 2

  • Magic Crafting CRB: A prerequisite to Potion crafting. Another task Magic Crafting enables is to disassemble magic items and attempt to learn their formula. If your GM treats magic items as scarce this may be a way of increasing the number of available consumables and allowing multiple characters to have a version of that very special magic item. Of course, there is always the risk you Critically Fail and destroy part of the raw materials. Surely those weren’t rare…
  • Tattoo Artist SoM: Tattoos can be very impactful mechanically. Being a tattoo artist can be quite lucrative as well…

Level 4

  • Kreighton’s Cognitive Crossover PFS (uncommon): Getting a second chance at a failed Recall Knowledge check using a Skill you’re presumably good at is a great boost to the likelihood of passing the Recall knowledge. Crafting might be useful to discover the origin of an item or where in the city particular materials might have been procured. 

Level 7

  • Bless Tonic GaM : If you use Crafting, as opposed to advanced alchemy, Quick Alchemy, etc, and your campaign features many Negative energy sources then maybe this feature is worthwhile.
  • Bless Toxin GaM: Unlike Bless Tonic, if a creature is being healed in combat there is a reasonable likelihood that your blessed alchemical poison’s negative trait will cause them to regain fewer hit points.
  • Impeccable Crafting CRB: The ability to have to turn Rolled Successes into Critical Successes for crafting doesn’t add significant value.
  • Inventor CRB: If your GM is denying you access to all the amazing formulas you’re craving this feat would allow you to work around their limitiations. Without this feat you would need an instance of the formula’s item to disassemble and risk the destruction of components. With this feat you risk no items, nor do you risk components. 
  • Quick Setup TV: Such little impact that this should have just been part of the Complex Crafting rules.
  • Rapid Affixture APG: The difference between 10 minutes and 1 minute to Affix a Talisman is likely flavor. If you are Legendary in Crafting the ability to use a turn in combat to Affix a Talisman might be interesting, but likely not worth the opportunity cost. 

Level 15

  • Craft Anything CRB: Given you have a permissive GM this skill mostly unlocks the book for crafting items without Formulas or hindrance from Ancestry requirements. It’s the GMs decision whether you may use this to the fullest. We suggest discussing with your GM how you’d like to use the feat before taking it. 
  • Legendary Tattoo Artist TV: Your character gains a free Skill Increase to Legendary in Crafting potentially enabling the character to have 2 legendary skills at Level 15. Increased power of tattoos is a nice bonus.