Panbu’s crafting area was dramatically different from what they’d had in the previous camp. In fact, it was closer to the shop setup they had after the town upgrade. Demriv’s push for work on the crafting stations was on full display here. Instead of a handful of tents protecting the workstations, there were completed wooden buildings, slightly elevated above the muddy ground. They had to walk up a few small steps to get to the door, and once inside, they had access to a large room full of crafting stations.

“So what are we working on?” Kaldalis asked as he tried to look everywhere at once. “I know Balrim is trying to level everything, but that sounds annoying.”

“Reno and I were talking about that already,” SeventyEight said, gesturing around the room. “We figured it would be the best use of all our time if we divided the different crafts up.”

“Well, there are four crafts and three of us,” Kaldalis said, “I don’t know if that fits.”

“Five, actually,” Reno said, gesturing towards five visibly different groupings of stations in turn, “but four of them can be split into two groups, so it does work out.”

Kaldalis shook his head. “Alright, let’s pretend I know nothing about crafting. Talk me through it.”

“The five crafts are alchemy, cooking, weaponmaking, tailoring, and charmcrafting,” Reno said. With the name of each craft, she gestured at a group of stations.

The alchemy stations were relatively obvious. They looked like chemistry labs with little burners and bottles and tubes. The cooking stations were more familiar, looking like the shared kitchen area of a college dorm - a very small stove with only two burners, a microwave-sized oven, and about two square feet of counter space. Weaponmaking stations looked almost like Sivima’s workshop had, but with much smaller forges and anvils to allow three of them to sit side-by-side in the room. The tailoring stations were positioned in between the weaponmaking setups, presumably to allow for the construction of armor, and included a loom and a spinning wheel. Lastly, the charmcrafting stations were the strangest of them, though, as they looked like a cross between a handyman’s garage and a jeweler’s workbench, with hammers, chisels, and sandpaper, but also tweezers, pliers, wire cutters and a giant magnifying glass on a jointed metal arm.

“Alchemy and cooking go together because they share a lot of materials,” Reno said. “Weaponmaking and tailoring go together for the same reason.”

Kaldalis laughed softly to himself. “I’m going to be completely honest: I didn’t know tailoring was a thing. I thought all our stats were on charms. I didn’t know clothes could do anything.”

“They’re purely aesthetic,” SeventyEight said.

“Mostly,” Reno said with a tilt of her head. She turned to grin at SeventyEight. “Don’t forget, once we’re into the higher levels, it’ll open up the crazy shit.”

“Okay, so we’re divvying up the crafts, right?” Kaldalis looked at his companions with a critical eye. “Someone is doing weapons and armor, someone is doing the actual armor with charms, and then someone is handling the alchemizing and the crafting.”

“Right,” SeventyEight said. “Does anybody have any preferences? I’d prefer handling weapons and armor, personally.”

“Okay, Ess is on the weapons then,” Reno said, gesturing towards the forges. “Any particular reason why?”

SeventyEight started moving towards the nearest crafting station. “The tailoring. Having seen what some of the DPS outfits look like, I kinda want to have some control over my own clothing.”

Reno looked down at herself. “What’s wrong with the DPS outfits?”

“There’s a reason I chose to be a Finnean,” SeventyEight said with a smirk, gesturing at her chest. “I don’t like having my girls hanging halfway out all the time, and this was the only race that properly covered themselves.”

“Hey, I think I look great,” Reno said, turning up her nose as she gestured at her own chest.

“Alright,” Kaldalis said. A part of him wanted to give his input on that conversation, but his inner Admiral Ackbar advised him to change the subject instead. “So then we have charms and the cooking package remaining. I imagine I’m probably on cooking duty, since I’m the fisherman.”

“Nope,” Reno said cheerfully. She grabbed his arm before he could move towards the tiny kitchen on the far end of the building. “You should get on charmcrafting.”

“Wait, what? And also, why?”

“You’re higher level than we are,” Reno explained, using her grip on his arm to direct him towards the charmcrafting station. “You’ll be able to grind up to a higher skill level right away, which will help us all out with our gear. You can make stuff for us right now, while neither of us can make stuff for you until we catch up.”

It made sense. Didn’t mean Kaldalis had to like it. “Alright,” Kaldalis said, trying not to grumble something about all the fish he had built up in his inventory. “So how do I get started?”

“There’s a tutorial,” Reno reassured him as she started towards the alchemy stations. “Once you sit down, it should walk you through the first one. They patched them back in to the crafting stations for if you skipped the intro quests. Like, you know, someone.”

Kaldalis shrugged at the correct accusation and looked over the charmcrafting workshop.

There were three stools in the middle of the L-shaped bench, the three covering a wide range of heights. It was obvious what they were for. The races Kaldalis had encountered in this world covered a large range of sizes, and so it made sense that they would need a tall stool to accommodate a Suyon and a shorter one to accommodate a Bhogad or Talsar.

Kaldalis was on the tall side for a Vathon, but the middle bench was still comfortable for him. Even though he was probably about eight feet tall, the shorter bench was made for people who were over nine foot and even pushing towards ten.

True to Reno’s promise, as soon as he was seated, he got a little quest pop up. He focused on it for a moment in order to get the full explanation.

First Charm’s the Time

0/3 Choose materials for your first charm.

Charms are made of three materials. You will need a base material of rock or wood from gathering, an accent material of bone, skin, or shell from monster drops, and a decoration material made from any valid base or accent material.

Kaldalis was glad for the explanation. He had a huge amount of materials available that fit the bill for this. The only difficult one to provide was the base material, as most of the wood and rock he’d acquired had gone directly into the town building quests, both here and back in Cotanaku.

He seemed to remember he had a few types of stone that he’d been told were unsuitable for the types of construction being done here. Just took him a moment to sort through his inventory. Eventually, he was able to dig out some andesite from his inventory. It was a plain-looking black stone, with a tooltip that described it as igneous rock. Given the amount of rock each construction quest had asked for, he was surprised to see that when he retrieved the andesite from his inventory, it was only a fist-sized stone.

With monster parts being usable for both other materials, Kaldalis’s inventory could easily be called a target-rich environment. He had teeth, skins, bones, claws, shells, and more, all saved up ever since Balrim had teased him for just shoving everything off on the NPC. He poked around, trying to find materials that he expected wouldn’t be wasted on his first venture into crafting. He settled on some kismeleon bone and grizzled dragon claws, because they were the most numerous items in that category. He had plenty to spare, in case he needed them.

Putting the three items on the counter caused the quest to tick up, and progress to his next objective. Again he concentrated, looking for the quest to provide him with direction.

First Charm’s the Time

0/1 Shape the base

0/1 Shape the accent

0/1 Shape the decoration

Charm bases need to be carved down to an appropriate shape and size, with fittings to accommodate your accent and decoration. Your accent must be made to either wrap around the base or to be inlaid into it. The decorations can take many forms, like banding, spikes, rings, or settings.

Given his choice of materials, he elected to start on the base item. With a small chisel and hammer, he chipped away at the fist-sized stone, carefully. In time, he had reduced the stone to something close to the size of his thumb, with a deep dent in the middle for him to apply his accent item. He was pretty sure the game was helping him with this, as despite his unpracticed hand, he didn’t shatter the stone to a billion pieces right when it was looking done.

Eventually, the quest ticked up, indicating he had succeeded at this component, and no further work was needed.

His second objective was that accent. There was a small saw among the tools, and he used it to cut down the grizzled dragon claw to an appropriate size, before taking the sandpaper to try and shape it to fit into the dent he’d chipped into the stone. It didn’t take long for that quest to tick up, as well, and he put the bit of carved claw down into the stone to confirm that it was done. It wasn’t exactly a snug fit, and all of his zero skill was on display with the rough surfaces, but he didn’t see any trouble with it.

For the decoration, he was drawn to the idea of making bands as described on the quest text. It would hold the loose inlay in place, and all he had to do was cut the bone into sections and clear out the marrow. Kismeleons were small creatures, and the femur he had was about the right size that he wouldn’t need to do too much work. The hardest part was cutting the bone into sections; the bone was much more brittle than the claw, and he messed up a couple of times trying to cut the bands too narrow, and they cracked apart. He still got a good three little bone rings after only about five or six tries, and using the magnifying glass, he was able to clean and carve them down to the right size and shape for his would-be charm, causing the quest to tick up and move on to the next objective.

First Charm’s the Time

1/1 Apply the accent to the base

0/1 Apply the decoration to the charm

Kaldalis was surprised that he didn’t need to do any further work on the accent. When he picked up the charm to apply the bands, he found that the formerly loose claw inlay was now firmly stuck in place. Without further hesitation, he put the bone bands on the charm, and found that they, too, stuck fast once they were roughly where he had pictured them.

With that, the quest completed, along with the charm. He was rewarded at first with a familiar skill gain message, informing him that his charmcrafting had increased by 0.7 points. Shortly after that, though, he got the reward for quest completion, awarding him two full points of charmcrafting skill.

Now that he was done, he looked over the new charm. Unusually, it actually gave him the option to name it, though it already had a default name.

Least Searing Charm

Item level: 1

Acumen: 5

Clout: 5

Vigor: 6

Burn affinity: 4

After finishing, he’d almost expected the roughness of the charm to automatically smooth out, just like the component parts were now holding fast together, but there was no such luck. It looked like a poorly peeled potato. He honestly didn’t know what to do with it.

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, “one down. Now what?”

“Keep going,” SeventyEight said with a shrug as she waited by the forge for a bar of metal to heat up. “It’s called grinding for a reason.”

“You should be getting a second quest,” Reno said with a grin tossed his way. “There’s a catchup mechanic now to feed you a crafting quest every level. It’ll be a raw grind once you get through those, but they should help get you to a reasonable point.”

True to her word, another quest appeared.

Second Charm’s the Time

0/3 Choose materials for your next charm.

With a sigh, Kaldalis dug into his inventory again for another lump of andesite and a couple more random monster parts.