How do I craft stuff?There are no "crafting stations", so if the recipe doesn't require something like an anvil/forge you can just combine the components in your inventory by dragging them together.
The first forge can be found in Cyseal near the Abandoned House.
How do I craft recipes involving 2 stackable items?If you want to make a large iron bar out of 2 iron bars, but only have a big stack of them instead of multiple individual items, you have to split the pile first. To do so hold the SHIFT key and drag the pile to an empty slot in your inventory. When you combine the piles again, you can select whether you want to craft or stack the items and how many of them you want to create.
How do I unlock recipes?It is not necessary to unlock the recipes, but some of them require a certain level of crafting / blacksmithing.
What do the books with recipes do?The recipes are typically described there with some kind of back story. After one of your chars has read the book the text of the whole book will be permanently listed in the recipe tab (click on the note symbol next to the minimap) and stay there even if you sell the book afterwards.
Help! It doesn't work!!!The inventory management can be a bit annoying, so make sure that you have actually selected your crafter after moving components around from inventory to inventory.
If your crafting/blacksmithing level is not high enough, a message is going to appear over the head of the crafter, so make sure that this isn't being blocked by something like the inventory screen.
If everything seems to fail try one of the simple recipes like the food stuff (Pizza Sauce = Tomato + Hammer) to make sure that you are doing it right.
Which kind of items can boost my crafting / blacksmithing skills?So far the bonus tend to exclusively show up on bracers and belts. Maybe some high level items or uniques can improve these skills as well, but I wouldn't count on it.
Does my level or skill level affect the items?The quality of some items seems to scale with your level and how many skill points you have in crafting / blacksmithing. The crafted items that are not consumable have the same level as your crafter. This does not affect the attribute / skill / resistance bonus of crated items, but only their damage + defence rating as well as their price. Blacksmithing gives you a notable bonus to the damage and defence rating of the forged items as well.
Do I have to make one of my main chars a crafter or are there any companions that can craft well?Nope, unless both of your characters are using Lone Wolf. You will find a good crafter very early in the game.
His name is Jahan - he is located on the first floor of the major's house in Cyseal.
Absolutely! Even if you want to save the rare crafting materials just upgrading your weapons and armor through anvil, whetstone and the mobile kitchen gives you a significant boost. Your forged strength based melee weapons are better than most of the non-unique weapons that you can find.
You will always have gear that is your level and can't get screwed by the random loot.
Upgrading the items that you don't need or just crafted iron weapons in order to sell them is also quite profitable.
Blacksmithing allows you to repair your gear, although that is not that important as it might sound.
Through crafting you can equip your party with decent rings, amulets and belts until you find a permanent replacement for them. The attribute bonus from rings, amulets and belts stay relevant till the midgame, because they can help you wear high level items, equip self-bearing items (like giving your int 5 warrior a Sarong with +1 int +15% resistance that requires 6 int). These attribute bonus are especially important for chars with the Glass Cannon talent, since getting your speed to an odd number will give you +2 additional AP per turn, but at the same time you need to increase you maximum AP through constitution.
