The Tradeskill System

The tradeskill system is designed to allow players to more fully interact with their environment and players, and to make their own neat stuff. There are three different types of tradeskills: gathering, crafting, and artisan. For this example, I will walk you through the process of making a loaf of bread.

Making a loaf of bread from scratch requires the gathering and crafting tradeskill types: You'll first need to harvest the wheat, mill the wheat into flour, and then bake the flour (and other ingredients) into bread. You might use an artisan tradeskill such as pottery to make a dish with which to serve the bread.

Harvesting is essentially reaping items from the land, whether it is wheat, iron ore, or lumber. Often, you will need to refine those materials into something more usable, and a crafting tradeskill will be needed to accomplish that. Artisan tradeskills are primarily used to create something aesthetic and enriching, such as a piece of jewelry, a portrait, or a plate.

For each tradeskill that is available in the game, you can see 'help tradeskill (tradeskill name)'; for baking, you can see 'help tradeskill baking'. You can see what tradeskills are available by typing 'help tradeskills'.

You will find various areas in which a tradeskill helper is available to teach you new tradeskills, or to let you focus or forget about them. Focusing a tradeskill makes it "active" (seen as a * in the tradeskills command). If a tradeskill is not active, you cannot use it; further, non-active tradeskills will degrade for each hour of age). Professionals (players who have a non-civilian profession) may not have as many active tradeskills as civilians. For the exact numbers, see 'help tradeskills'. As such, you must choose wisely what tradeskills you wish to master.

Mastering a tradeskill can only be accomplished through use. Practice, practice, practice! Even if you do not succeed in crafting, you will probably learn something from it.

Like the rest of The Two Towers, tradeskills are not a static thing. As time goes on, new tradeskills will be added to the game and many tradeskills may be used together to create even better things.

For more information see: help tradeskill, help tradeskills