Crafting is the cornerstone of progression in the world of Pax Dei. From the humblest shelters to the most formidable armor, everything you need to thrive in this expansive land must be crafted by your own hands. You’ll quickly discover that a significant portion of your time will be spent at various crafting stations, diligently producing the necessities for survival and advancement. Whether you’re aiming to forge powerful weapons, tailor protective clothing, prepare nourishing meals, or construct a sturdy dwelling, Pax Dei offers a dedicated crafting station to meet every requirement.
For newcomers to Pax Dei, the crafting system might initially seem intricate. However, understanding its fundamentals is key to establishing a flourishing home base and embarking on your journey to create the settlement of your dreams. This guide will walk you through the essentials of crafting in Pax Dei, providing you with the knowledge to start building and thriving.
Crafting Basics
Pax Dei’s crafting system presents a unique approach compared to many other open-world survival games, and it may take a little time to become fully accustomed to its nuances.
The Hammer: Your Foundational Tool
The very first crafted item you’ll create in Pax Dei, and arguably the most crucial for initiating your crafting journey, is the hammer. This simple tool is the gateway to building everything else.
To craft the hammer, you’ll require just two basic resources: one Gneiss Rock and two pieces of Sapwood. These are readily available in the starting areas, encouraging early exploration.
The hammer is essential because it grants you access to the game’s build mode. This mode is how you place any pre-fabricated structures, crafting stations, and other assets you acquire or unlock.
Equipping the hammer opens up several crucial interfaces: the plot management screen for land control, the build mode itself for placing structures, and the crafting recipes menu. Within the ‘Crafting’ tab accessed via the hammer, you will find a selection of fundamental recipes, most importantly those needed to create categorized crafting stations.
After crafting your hammer, your immediate next step should be to use it to create a Wood Chopping Block. You’ll find the recipe within the hammer’s ‘Crafting’ tab. The Wood Chopping Block is vital because it allows you to produce components necessary for building the Basic Carpenter’s Workbench.
Once you’ve constructed the Basic Carpenter’s Workbench, it becomes your primary hub for accessing a broader range of crafting recipes that you’ve unlocked. This workbench is also where you will craft essential crafting kits and sets. These kits are crucial as they unlock more advanced crafting stations, which can then be built from the Crafting menu accessible through your hammer.
Unlocking Crafting Recipes
Crafting recipes in Pax Dei are not immediately available from the start. Instead, they are unlocked organically as you progress and develop your character’s skills. As you reach specific skill level milestones in various disciplines, new recipes will automatically become accessible to you. This system encourages players to actively engage in different activities to expand their crafting repertoire.
Furthermore, you will also discover new recipes when you create crafting kits and stations. Each newly crafted station and kit inherently unlocks a set of recipes that are relevant to that station or the broader crafting category it represents. This creates a sense of progression and discovery as you expand your crafting capabilities.
For a concrete example, crafting the Wood Chopping Block not only serves its immediate purpose but also automatically unlocks the Wooden Peg recipe. This seemingly small detail highlights how the crafting system is interconnected and rewards players with new options as they build and explore.
Crafting Stations
In Pax Dei, crafting stations are structured into two distinct sets. The first set you’ll encounter involves unlocking kits or categories, which then paves the way for building the second set: advanced crafting stations. Understanding this two-tiered system is crucial for efficient crafting progression.
Unlocking Crafting Categories
Crafting categories are unlocked by crafting specific items, typically referred to as “tools” or “kits.” Items like Basic Fletching Tools exemplify this. When you construct Basic Fletching Tools, they don’t just allow you to fletch arrows; more importantly, they unlock the associated Fletching crafting category within the Crafting tab of your hammer’s build mode.
To illustrate further, crafting Basic Leatherworking Tools at the Basic Carpenter’s Workbench will unlock the Leatherworking tab in the hammer’s Crafting menu. This new tab then reveals all crafting stations and recipes associated with leatherworking, significantly expanding your crafting possibilities.
It’s almost a universal rule in Pax Dei crafting that you must first unlock a crafting category’s basic crafting kit before you can create more specialized crafts or build advanced crafting stations within that category. This system ensures a structured progression and prevents players from skipping essential steps.
Building Advanced Crafting Stations
Once you have successfully unlocked a crafting category through its basic kit, you can then proceed to build more advanced crafting stations within that category. Typically, each category will contain multiple types of stations, and these stations are often designed to work in conjunction with one another to create a complete crafting workflow.
Consider the Tailoring category as a prime example. Within tailoring, you’ll find three core crafting stations: the Spinning Wheel, the Simple Tailoring Table, and the Simple Loom. Each station serves a distinct purpose in the tailoring process.
You need the Spinning Wheel to process raw materials into threads, the Simple Loom to weave those threads into cloth, and finally, the Tailoring Table to fashion the cloth into wearable clothing items. This interconnectedness is a common theme throughout Pax Dei’s crafting system.
Crucially, all three of these tailoring crafting stations—Spinning Wheel, Simple Loom, and Simple Tailoring Table—become available for construction after you craft the Basic Tailoring Tools at the Basic Carpenter’s Workbench. This reinforces the importance of unlocking crafting categories as the prerequisite for accessing advanced stations.
How To Craft Items
The actual process of crafting items in Pax Dei is generally consistent across all crafting stations and build menus. At any crafting station, you will always need to meet specific material requirements before the crafting button becomes active and usable. This ensures you have gathered the necessary resources before attempting to craft an item.
Once you have accumulated all the required ingredients or components in your inventory, you can then initiate the crafting process for your chosen item. The interface is usually clear and intuitive, making it easy to understand what materials are needed and how to begin crafting.
Understanding Difficulty Levels
Crafting recipes in Pax Dei are assigned different difficulty levels, and these levels directly influence the success rate of your crafting attempts. As you level up your skills in specific crafting disciplines, you will naturally achieve higher success rates when crafting items that fall under those skill categories. Skill progression is therefore directly tied to crafting efficiency.
Recipes categorized as easy or trivial present a higher probability of successful crafting. Conversely, recipes deemed hard will pose a greater challenge, resulting in a lower initial success rate.
When you engage in crafting an item, you will observe a blue progress bar appearing beneath the displayed difficulty level. The core objective during the crafting process is to ensure that your blue progress line extends and reaches the center marker on the bar. The difficulty level of the recipe dynamically decreases the size of your available progress bar as you work on the craft.
Higher-difficulty recipes will cause the available progress bar to shrink more rapidly, increasing the challenge of reaching the center marker before the bar depletes. This dynamic element adds a layer of engagement to the crafting process.
If the available progress bar diminishes past the center marker before you complete the craft, your crafting attempt will unfortunately fail. However, as a measure of fairness, the game will refund your material costs, returning the resources you invested in the failed attempt. These refunded materials are typically ejected onto the ground in the vicinity of the crafting station you were using.
It’s worth noting that sometimes the refunded materials may take a few moments to visually appear on the ground near the crafting station. Waiting for a short period is usually sufficient to allow them to materialize.
It is also important to understand that all difficulty levels in Pax Dei crafting inherently carry a chance of failure. Even a recipe classified as “easy” can still fail if luck is not on your side. However, the most reliable method to minimize failure and maximize success is to actively focus on leveling your skills in the relevant crafting categories.
The higher your skill level in a particular crafting discipline, the significantly more likely your crafting recipes are to succeed within that skill category. Skill progression directly translates to crafting reliability and efficiency.
Tips For Crafting
If you find yourself struggling to gather the necessary materials to unlock crucial crafting categories or construct essential crafting stations, consider seeking out a friend’s or neighbor’s settlement. Pax Dei encourages community interaction, and it’s quite possible that other players have already built the crafting station you currently require.
A valuable aspect of Pax Dei is that you can freely use other people’s crafting stations, provided that you supply your own materials. This fosters a collaborative environment and allows players to assist each other in overcoming crafting hurdles. In some cases, you might even stumble upon unclaimed crafting stations scattered throughout the game world.
If you haven’t yet established your own plot of land, you have the strategic option to place your plot directly on top of unclaimed property that contains crafting stations. This action effectively annexes the unclaimed property into your territory and grants you ownership and control of any structures, including crafting stations, located within that annexed land. This can be a clever way to gain access to crafting stations that you might otherwise find difficult or time-consuming to acquire or build yourself.
When deciding where to establish your base, prioritize placing it in resource-rich areas. Even if a location is abundant in only a single type of resource, such as a large field of Flax, it can still be a strategically advantageous choice in the long term. Proximity to resources minimizes travel time for gathering and provides a guaranteed supply of that resource for your future crafting needs.
Furthermore, it is highly advisable to create a well-organized chest system to manage and categorize your resources effectively. As you progress to more complex crafting recipes, you will inevitably require larger quantities of various resources. Having these resources readily accessible and neatly organized in chests will significantly streamline your crafting process, saving you valuable time and effort.
By mastering the crafting system in Pax Dei, you unlock the true potential of the game. From basic tools to advanced gear, the power to shape your world is in your hands. Embrace the crafting journey and build the life you envision in Pax Dei.
