PVE

Crafting (from the Archeage Website)

Make a name for yourself with over 20 crafting Proficiencies from Alchemy and Tailoring to Printing, Larceny, Composition (music) and more. You’ll gain skill in each Proficiency simply by performing its activities: mine to increase your Mining level, make wood furniture to increase Carpentry, and so on.

When you reach 10,000 points in a Proficiency, it will be capped until you choose to unlock that specific skill as a specialization. You can raise any number of Proficiencies to 10,000, but from there specializations are limited – only 7 can reach 20,000, only 5 can reach 30,000, only 4 can reach 40,000, and only 2 can reach 90,000 (though you can add additional specializations at the in-game Store).

The benefits of specializing in additional tiers of a Proficiency are increased action speed (when harvesting or crafting), decreased Labor costs, increased chance to gain rare items when gathering, and access to skill-locked crafting recipes.

In addition to gaining experience and skill when using Proficiencies, you’ll also gain Vocation Points. These points can be redeemed like a currency at the Blue Salt Brotherhood’s representative merchants.

Proficiencies – What will you Create?

• Alchemy
  Potions, gear enhancement stones (Lunastones), reagents for other crafting recipes, dyes.
• Carpentry
  Wooden weapons, furniture.
• Commerce
  Regional Specialties (trade packs). Also gained by successful Auction House sales.
• Composition
  Sheet music for the Composition system. Increased skill level allows you to write longer compositions and play compositions with fewer mistakes.
• Construction
  Non-production skill. Gained by completing construction steps on structures and ships.
• Cooking
  Food and drinks that provide combat buffs and health/mana regeneration.

• Farming
  Planted/harvested fruits, vegetables, and grains.
• Fishing
  Salt and freshwater fish (plus sport fishing for large, trophy catches).
• Gathering
  Planted/harvested herbs and flowering crops.
• Handicrafts
  Instruments, jewelry, fishing tools, and home décor.
• Husbandry
  Care and feeding of domesticated livestock.
• Larceny
  Non-production skill. Gained by opening coinpurses (dropped by mobs) and stealing unprotected crops or livestock from same-faction players.

• Leatherworking
  Leather armor, refined pelts, other leather goods.
• Logging
  Maintaining and/or chopping down trees.
• Machining
  Vehicles, ships, gliders, and associated small parts.
• Masonry
  Hereafter Stones, refined stone.

• Metalwork
  Plate armor, refined ore ingots.
• Mining
  Ore and gems (gathered from mining veins).
• Printing
  Paper, music paper, books.
• Tailoring
  Cloth armor, refined fabric.
• Weaponry
  Metal weapons and implements of war.

Trade

Trading is the art (and thrill and business) of getting valuable Trade Packs across the continents of ArcheAge. It’s a way to earn precious gold, and it’s one of the only ways to earn important crafting components as well as Gilda Stars. This rare currency is required to buy building and ship blueprints as well as specialty goods from Mirage Isle.

Trading is also source of great risk: opportunistic players could be waiting over the next hill or around the next island, armed to the teeth and prepared to relieve you of your wares. But the potential rewards can’t be overestimated: the farther you travel, the more you can make… and the more you can offer mercenaries to guard you on the journey!

Your First Run

To run a trade route, you must craft (or find or steal) a Trade Pack, transport it to another region, and deliver it to a Trade NPC. A helpful Trading Guide NPC will give you a quest to craft and deliver your first Trade Pack as you level through your race’s starting zones. (Don’t worry about thieves to start – your first run should be between safe regions on your home continent!)

Of course, Trade Packs are heavy and will encumber your character, so expect to be slowed (nor can you use gliders or world gates while carrying a Trade Pack).

Crafting Trade Packs

To craft a Trade Pack, you must visit a Specialty Workbench. These Workbenches can be located on your map under the Infrastructure section – simply ensure the checkbox next to “Specialty Workbench” is checked and its location will appear on your map.

Each Workbench (and the Trade Packs it can produce) is region-specific, requiring local ingredients that you can gather and harvest yourself or purchase from other players or the Auction House. Finishing a Trade Pack also requires a Quality Certificate, which you can purchase from General Merchants. Note that Trade Packs can be left safely on your land to be delivered later, but dropped Trade Packs will disappear after 6 days!

Delivery

Once you’ve crafted your Trade Pack, you will need to deliver it to a Gold Trader, Resource Trader, or Gilda Star Trader in another region … or another continent! Gold Traders reward you with gold, Resource Traders reward you with important crafting components used in a variety of other recipes, and Gilda Star Traders pay out Gilda Stars you can use to purchase specialty items including blueprints for houses, boats, and more.

Note: To receive rewards from a Resource or Gilda Star Trader you must deliver your Trade Pack to the other continent or Freedich Isle!

How do I Get There?

By Donkey, of course! The Donkey is an early-game quest reward mount – the only one, in fact, that is effective at carrying a Trade Pack. It is not as fast as normal mounts, but is certainly better than walking (or attempting to ride your Elk, Snowlion, Horse, or Leomorph with a Trade Pack equipped).

Other modes of transportation such as ships, farm wagons, and cars have room to carry Trade Packs as well. You can also make use of the world’s automated transport systems such as Airships and Carriages.

Safety First

There are several ways to help protect yourself from would-be bandits and pirates while running a trade route. First, watch your map! PvP regions will enter a Peace period after a great deal of player-versus-player combat has occurred. During this period, no PvP combat is allowed, making it the ideal time to move through with a Trade Pack.

When you transport a Trade Pack across the ocean, consider traveling with friends and/or guild members for protection. Player mercenaries might also be available for hire, just make sure that they are reputable and will not turn on you. The larger the trade caravan, the safer… and the more lucrative for attackers!

Housing & Farming

In ArcheAge, you can build your own houses, manors, farms (and eventually castles!) across the open world. Your properties are not instanced, meaning they are visible to anyone passing by; they have a real location, like “across the road from Windshade Village” or “on the south coast of Villanelle”. Choosing where to live involves weighing your access to desirable resources, conveniences, climates, environments, and the availability of land!

Farms

There are two farm sizes: 8×8 meters and 16×16 meters. These come from a set of farming quests offered very early in the game by the Blue Salt Brotherhood (you’ll get the quest for the 8×8 farm first). Once placed, farms have a single step of construction requiring specific resources (like boards or a lumber pack). After you finish this step and complete the farm, you will have exclusive access to the land within its plot.

Aquafarm
Aquafarms are special 16×16 plots that can only be placed underwater in specified areas, usually near the coastline. Aquafarms have a central air supply rather than a scarecrow, which allows you to stay underwater longer. This type of farm allows for the cultivation of corals, kelps, and shells that won’t grow on land.

Houses

Houses come in a variety of pre-made designs that fit into the following categories:

• Small: 16×16 meters
• Farmhouse: 24×24 meters (a small house on a medium plot of land)
• Medium: 24×24 meters
• Large: 28×28 meters
• Mansion: 44×44 meters

These dimensions refer to the footprint of land around the house, which is protected and can be used to grow plants and livestock just like a farm. The house sitting in that footprint may have more or less interior space, even within the same size category!

To buy a house, head to Mirage Isle, where you can take a tour through life-sized demos for each layout, see mini-models of the different color and material options available for each type of house, and see deed details like the amount and type of resources needed to actually build the house once placed.

Claiming Land

Throughout Erenor, you’ll find large areas of land where houses and farms can be placed. You’ll see some of these indicated by icons on the map, but just as many are unmarked, left to be found by enterprising explorers.

There are many factors that determine how desirable a particular housing area is, and different players will have different priorities!

• Housing areas are available in protected zones, zones that have occasional wartime periods, and open PvP lands.
• Some housing areas have a small “community center” with some combination of water well, farming seed vendors, basic crafting stations, auctioneers, mail and warehouse NPCs, or Mirage Island portals.
• Regional Specialties, the crafts used in trade routes, can only be made at specified crafting stations. There are typically two of these per zone, located at different housing areas.
• Ocean access is often a priority for loading merchant ships (and required for building Marine Housing that includes space for an underwater aquafarm).
• A zone’s climate (temperate, tropical, arid, etc.) impacts growth of certain different crops.
• Naturally appearing resources vary widely between zones.
• Many players have a preference in what they want the area around their land to look like.
• In a nutshell: location, location, location!

Once you’ve found the perfect spot, right clicking the deed in your inventory puts you into placement mode. At your cursor will be a full size representation of the completed property and the borders of its footprint, which will highlight as red until you’ve fit it into a valid placement location. In this mode you will also see vertical posts that designate the border of a housing area. There’s a grid system that determines the facing of the square property footprint, but once you’ve clicked to select the location of the property, you can rotate the house or scarecrow within that square however you wish.

Furnishings & Features

A wide variety of furnishings can be used to decorate or customize your space. Some are placed outdoors, like planters or fences. Other items, like chairs or bookshelves, can only be placed inside of a house. Furniture can be crafted and sold among players, or bought from the demo homes on Mirage Isle (and some decorative items are found as random drops in the world). Farms and houses both have a limit on the number of decorative items they can hold based on the size of the property.

Features

A house can hold two or more storage chests. Chests come in different sizes (number of storage slots) and can also be crafted or purchased. A fireplace is also extremely useful: when lit, it can be used as a cooking workstation or recorded in a player’s list of teleport locations for easy return trips.

Homes can also hold Regal Workstations – special crafting stations required for higher-level recipes – and furnishings that provide a bonus to specific crafting skills when they’re placed in a house with a crafting station.

Access

Houses and farms offer a few different access levels. They default to private, owner-only access, but through the house information menu you can adjust this to include members of your family, members of your guild, or the general public. This allows other players to plant, tend, and harvest crops, open doors and windows, and use your crafting stations or other general installations. Only the owner, however, can pick up furnishings at any access level.