Readme: Auto Assault How To Craft Guide

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Auto Assault How To Craft Guide

People always say it’s easier to blow stuff up than to build ‘em from scratch. Pull the trigger, Pike explodes. Drive the wasteland at full speed, osterake becomes instant roadkill. If you want something, you go out and take it. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. That’s the Auto Assault way!

Of course, all that blood and violence is fun only if you can make it even bloodier and more violent. That’s what crafting in Auto Assault is all about: building things and making them better. Let’s say you have a pretty nifty turreted pulse laser but it just doesn’t have the range or punching power you’d like for those frenetic Arena bouts. If you had the right skills and components, you could reverse engineer that pulse laser, rebuild it from its recipe of individual parts, experiment with some special components, and voila! Hopefully you now have a brand new, homemade persona-marked super turreted pulse laser to impress your friends and terrify your enemies.

So how do you get started? We’ll use the Humans and the Projectile Weapons Discipline as an example. If you’re Mutant or Biomek don’t worry, the procedure is generally the same. Basically you’ll want to visit one of the three main starter cities (Upside, Fort Logan, or Tocado), depending on your race, and look for the Projectile Weapons Craft guy. In Upside, he’s known as the Hestia Vectronics Intern. Yes, he’s only an intern, but he can teach.

Projectile Weapons is one of three base-level Apprentice Crafting Disciplines you can learn (the others are Armor and Power Plants). Once you become familiar one or more of these you can then move on to bigger and better Disciplines, which will open up the ability to craft badder, cooler items. However, you have to start at the beginning, which means you get to build the basic, non-sexy stuff first: Discipline Training Kits.

You’ll need to learn Projectile Weapons Discipline, which is why you’re at that particular teaching intern in Upside. It’ll cost you a hundred clink to get started, which shouldn’t take too long to accumulate in the wastelands. Note that you’re also standing next to the Control Shop, which you will need to know for later. Next, you’ll need something to serve as a basis.

Essentially, you can make any item in Auto Assault from its component parts, kind of like a set of building blocks. The only way to build something is to know what it’s made out of – its recipe. You can learn it one of two ways: Reverse Engineer it or buy it broken. With Reverse Engineering, you’re literally taking something apart to learn what it’s made out of. Alternatively, you can buy something that is already broken – that is, the item doesn’t work but you now have an idea of what it is made out of. If you have the skill and proper components, you can put it back together again. Either way you’ll have a broken item that needs fixing in order for you to gain in skill.

So you’ll need to find the guy who sells broken stuff in town. In Upside, the Hestia Used Parts Distributor – a fancy name for junk salesman – is conveniently standing nearby. Talk to him, select Projectile Weapons, then find the Broken: Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit item in the vendor list; it should be at or near the top. They only cost one clink each, so buy a couple. You should now see them in your inventory.

Mousing over the broken kit will tell you what components/commodities you will need to fix it. In the case of a Projectile Weapons Discipline Training Kit, you’ll need one Salvaged Metals and one Salvaged Nuts and Bolts. The good news is that you can commonly find these items in the Central Wastelands; you might have even picked them up already in your travels by blasting someone’s house to rubble or wiping out the local gang of Scav’s vehicles.

If you right-click on the kit you’ll now see the meat and bones of the crafting process – the Crafting window. The middle area not only lists the components you need to repair the kit, but it’ll show if you have the items in your inventory. You should see a percentage chance of success at the bottom left (if you have a 100% chance of success, there’s no way you can screw it up). If you have all the necessary components, the “Assemble” button on the bottom right should light up. If it doesn’t, you probably need to go out and do more killin’ and destroyin’. Note that you will also need to be near a Control Shop in order to repair an item.

Now that you have your supply of ill-gotten components and want to build something, go ahead and click on “Assemble”. After a few moments you will have fully repaired the broken kit. Your Projectile Weapons Discipline will go up a notch and you may be asked if you want to Memorize the item. Don’t worry, it’s not painful. By Memorizing the item, you now have a Limited Patent to build the item from scratch without needing to have a broken item in inventory. If you have more of the kit components/commodities you can quickly build more kits. Note that you can only build a certain amount (the Memorization display tells you how many) before you effectively lose the Limited Patent and can no longer build that specific item.

Let’s not forget that these kits are generally pretty useful; they just aren’t throw-away items but can really help you out in the wastelands. These kits are one-use items that can boost one particular attribute or skill for a lengthy period of time. The Projection Weapons Discipline Training Kit adds ten points to your Combat attribute for thirty minutes. You can also sell them too but won’t get too much money for them.

Refining is one process you will need to be aware of. Many of the higher quality components/commodities can be incredibly difficult if not impossible to find in the wastelands on a general basis. These higher quality components are usually required in the crafting of a high-value item. Instead of waiting for long periods of time hoping someone has it available or finding it yourself, you can just refine the lower-quality component in your existing inventory instead. The component has to be of the same type (Nuts and Bolts do not refine into Wiring for instance), and you can only refine into a higher-quality component, not the other way around. Refineries are located in the starter cities and a few places here and there. There is a cost involved, but it’s generally affordable, and worth it to create some of the cooler items in the Auto Assault.

That’s the very basics of crafting in a nutshell. (Nutshells not included and probably not available from post-apocalyptic trees.) We’ve just scratched the surface of crafting in Auto Assault; later on we’ll discuss Experimentation (using certain commodities in the crafting process in an attempt to improve the item), and Tinkering (adding Gadgets to the item after crafting).

Crafting is expansive in Auto Assault and the best part is the ability to construct and recreate items that are unique. You could be the only person on your server to know how to make a particular item with a particular set of stats. If you manage to construct something that literally blows the competition away, you’re on to a nice little earner as other players come to you with clink, scrip and bar burning a hole in their pockets.