Overview
This guide will explain how the confusing and convuluting crafting system in Assassins creed III
Introduction
The Crafting feature in Assassin’s creed is found on Accounting books near the static vendors located in Boston, New York, Frontier and One in your manor in Homestead. You cannot use crafting on moving vendors.
At first glance, crafting in Assassin’s creed 3 looks very complicated. This guide will try to simplify everything in crafting, explain how it works, what to do for best profit turnout and what to avoid.
Crafting will be very useful in mid-game and near end because you will need tons of money to upgrade you ship for missions, and as well for sea missions if you ever want to do it.
Stockpile Tab
These is where you buy raw ingredients to be able to craft, animal pelts, mineral ores, lumber, food that is available for you (depending on the level of the people on your homestead).
There’s a limit of 10 that you can buy and stock, so you are limited to only 10 materials at a time to craft. You cannot expand that limit and the only way to circumvent that is to retrieve raw ingredients as rewards for looting caravans, recruit missions or through hunting.
Crafting Tab
In the crafting tab, there are 3 different sections: Artisans, Resources, and Recipes.
You don’t need to actually worry about artisans and resources part. You just need to search for the recipe of the thing you want to craft and look if you have the correct item to craft it. Guessing for the appropriate combination of an artisan and the resources would be time consuming unless you are using a wiki to guess them.
You can find recipes hidden on large wooden treasure boxes scattered all throughout the game.
While selecting on the item you want to craft, you need to satisfy the level of artisan required to craft the item and the appropriate materials for them. Most of the materials are available in the stockpile tab, while some are needed to be crafted still in the material section, and very rarely, some are only available through hunting.
Once you met all the requirements, you will then need to pay for the appropriate fee for the artisan to craft it. The fee depends on how many times you have used that particular artisan.
The fee starts from 25£ from the first 2 crafts then increments by 25£ starting from the 3rd and preceding crafts. Some items needs 2 artisans to craft it so depending on how you used your artisan, you may pay up to 7000£ on your 10th craft (I will show you later on what item this may happen)
So for example, you want to craft 10 barrels:
– You will use Lance 10 times
Meaning if you want to craft 10 barrels at once, you need to pay him a total of 1150£ (25+25+50+75+100+125+150+175+200+225)
The artisan fee resets ONLY AFTER you traded the items crafted in the trading tab. They will not reset even if you have crafted the barrel to another item that needs that item
Trading Tab
Here is where you trade and reap the profits from buying, crafting or hunting those items.
You will need to buy a Land convoy on the special items in the crafting tab first. You can buy up to a maximum of 3. Each convoy starts with 3 or 4 slots, I can’t remember, but you can buy a convoy capacity upgrade up to 8 slots in a land convoy.
Later in the game, you will be able to buy upto 3 Naval convoy which can hold 15 items at max capacity upgrade.
At the start of the game, you would be able to sell only at Boston and Frontier, New york will come later in the game. You will be able to unlock different merchants as you discover them on the map.
Select your land convoy, then you will be greeted by empty slots, enter it and select on the item you want to trade, after that you will select for a particular merchant to trade it.
You may want to look at the profit the the merchant is buying the item is, but beware that to be efficient, you want to only use only 1 merchant per convoy, maximum 2 if you really need to. Everytime you select a different merchant on 1 convoy, you increase the time and risk on delivering your item. From time to time your convoy will be attacked and needs to be defended.
Once you filled up all slots or you are satisfied will all the items you want to trade, you send a convoy by pressing the spacebar.
The timer will start once you leave the accounting tab UI. The timer will pause everytime you open the map, press esc, or any UI that pauses the game.
Risks and Tax
This is very prevalent in the early game since risks and tax are associated to liberated forts and naval missions to reduce risk in naval convoys.
To lower the risk and tax, You want to clear and liberate forts as soon as possible. if you don’t, you may need to protect your convoy everytime, this is very risky especially if you are in a middle of the main mission.
You will need to travel in the frontier and rescue your convoy within a time limit. Once you reach your convoy’s location, you will need to take down 15 redcoats with 8 bluecoats assisting you.
Early trading
At the start of the game, you won’t be able to do much in crafting and trading because you are lacking some artisans that you need and the levels for them to able to craft those items. The best way to earn money in the early game is to either invest in trading for atleast 5k on it and purchase land convoys and upgrades to the max.
After that, all you have to do is buy and sell beaver pelts and sell them for a profit. You will be only able to trade 10 pelts at a time from a particular animal.
Regardless of the type of the animal, you are sure to profit a minimum of 360%.
Here’s a table of your possible profit, 10 is the max you can send per trade and the highlighted row, 4, is the minimum that you can send in the early game
* The calculation above assumes that you have the minimum tax of 0% and are selling the beaver pelts on the boston merchants
As you can see, you can get a profit of 1.6k just by buying and selling beaver pelts in the early game. Up to 4.1k if you have the full land convoy upgrade every 12 minutes.
If you have bought all 3 the land convoys, you can farm beavers in homestead at the map below.
NOTE: Use only your hidden blade when hunting beavers. They are slow as hell so you don’t need to worry about chasing them
3 Kinds of profit graphs
There are 3 kinds profit graphs on items that you can craft and sell.
These are items that are bought directly in the stockpile and sold on merchants. They have a static profit percentage so the more you sell them, your profit will increase proportionally.
Bear Pelts
These are purchasable in the stockpile once Myriam has reached level 3. They cost 240 each and sells for 1248 max in land convoys and up to 1560 in naval convoys
These are craftable items which are made by multiple artisans, or multiple instances of 1 artisan. One example is meat pies. It requires flour, pork, and hare meat created by oliver, but the flour needs to be crafted with wheat by oliver again. You will need to use oliver twice to make a single meat pie.
Here’s how the profit graph looks like
* This one is a extreme one, there are other much subtle with the diminishing profit return.
This is the last one and these are the ones you want to avoid OR craft only within the positive range profit.
Artillery
This is found in war supplies, avoid crafting war supplies if you are using it for profit, all of the items there have a peaking profit graph. Here’s what it looks like
If you can see, the profit peaks at 4 crafts, anything else is less than that profit. Everything above 8 crafts is a loss.
Best Items to sell
Obviously, the best item to sell are the animal pelts you can buy in the stockpile, hunting section.
They all inherit a static profit graph.
Here are the profit that you can get with bear and beaver pelts.
– Stockpile
– Stockpile
———————————————————————————-
Not all crafted items generate a profit, some will have an extreme diminishing graph where profits will be disappointing, and rarely, some have a peaking profit graph. I’m just gonna list here what are the best ones to craft and the artisans needed,
– Ellen x2, Lance x1
Best Items to sell pt.2
– Ellen x4
– Lyle x1, Big Dave x1
– Lance x1
Best Items to sell pt.3
– Lance x1, Oliver x1
– Big Dave x1
– Oliver x2
Best Items to sell pt. 4
– Big Dave x1, Lyle x1
Profitability summary graph
I will add more items in the best items part if I find more items that are profitable, meanwhile, here’s a summary of the profitability of these items
End Game Profiteering Item Combination
This Part assumes that you have:
– Unlocked All Artisans
– Bought All Land and Naval Convoys
– Bought All Land and Naval Convoys expansion upgrade
– Liberated enough forts to attain 0% tax
– Discovered All Static Vendors in-game
Thus you must have a total of 69 item slots. 24 in land and 45 in naval.
Here’s the current best Item combination to make profit that you can do in late game.
– 10 Bear Pelts in stockpile
– 10 Beaver Pelts in stockpile
– 10 Gold rings
– 10 Fine Furniture
– 10 Quilts
– 10 Meat pies
– 9 Duffy’s Elixir
Items in Land Convoys
– 10 Gold Rings
– 9 Duffy’s Elixir
– 5 Fine Furniture
Items in Naval Convoys
– 10 Bear Pelts
– 10 Beaver Pelts
– 10 Meat Pies
– 10 Quilts
– 5 Fine Furniture
Total Cost for materials: 6582
Total Crafting cost: 15300
Total Sales: 72910
Total Profit: 51028