Materials & reagents

Materials are the raw stock the trades work with, covering ore, hide, herb, bone, cloth, and everything else that goes into a finished thing. Reagents are the charged stock that backs tempering work, steering it toward the power you want. Neither is worn and neither is used on its own, and both are spent to make something else. Materials and coin take up no inventory space.

Where they come from

• Materials are gathered from the world, bought from merchants, and taken off what you kill.
• Creatures shed reagents according to what they are, so you can farm a particular reagent by hunting the creatures that carry it.
• Dismantling gear that carries affixes returns an essence, a reagent drawn from one of that item's own affixes at the item's rarity and level. A piece always breaks into the same essence, so a retry never changes the yield. Gear with no affixes breaks into plain materials, and Legendary gear is never dismantled.

Breaking down an Epic piece with a high mastery of Crafting returns better scrap alongside the essence.

Two affinities

A material that carries two affinities comes up as one or the other on each drop, decided when it drops. A Frozen Flame Core can arrive as frost or as fire, the aspect is written on the material as Frost Warding or Fire Warding, and the two affinities keep separate piles in your pack.

Reagents and tempering

A reagent carries a family and a rolled aspect, and its card lists the affixes that aspect can create along with the gear each one can be tempered onto. When you stage a temper, that pairing is what points the work at the affix you want, and the prefix chooser groups a family's affixes by aspect and names the reagent in your pack that powers each group.

The reagent also sets the floor. Every row in the chooser carries a guaranteed tier, and the work cannot land below it even on a bad roll. A rarer reagent raises that guarantee, and so does one at or above the item's own level, and so does a high mastery of Crafting. The tempering card shows the guarantee on every staged row before you commit, as described on Tempering.

Writing an item effect into a piece spends materials rather than reagents. Any material in reach can carry it, and one matching the effect's element is chosen first when you have one.

Materials in crafting

Each trade draws on its own stock, with metal, hide, and timber for Crafting and ingredients for Potions and Cooking. What a craft needs is quoted before you commit, along with the difficulty and the outcomes, as described on Crafting.

Named work

A few rare materials name the one legendary work they feed. Such a material serves only its named craft, and that craft demands its material, so neither can be spent on anything else. The item's card names what it forges into.

For the full list, see Category:Materials.