When it comes to improving your combat stats, you don’t have a whole lot of options in Crimson Desert - you can either spend Abyss Artifacts to purchase new skills (including generic skills that boost your stamina, health, melee damage, and ranged damage) or you can improve your gear, either by buying or finding new, more potent arms, armor and accessories, or by refining the gear you already have. This page will discuss how to refine gear in Crimson Desert, including info on how to preview the stats of some gear before you waste precious resources on them!
Page Breakdown¶
| Quick Search |
|---|
| Crafting and Refining Gear |
| Crafting |
| Materials |
| Refinement |
| Refinement Preview and Upgrades |
To craft and refine gear, just find a smith! These are the two major services these NPCs provide.
Crafting and Refining Gear¶
Both crafting and refining are services offered by smiths around the world, and since there’s one in Hernand city that you’ll complete an early side quest for (Turnali’s Request), there’s no excuse for not knowing about these mechanics. Just talk to any smith and you can choose either the “Refinement” option or the “Crafting” option.
To unlock new crafting recipes, you’ll have to read crafting books/scrolls, which can be found lying around or purchased from various NPCs.
Read the crafting tome and you’ll be able to craft new recipes!
Crafting¶
Crafting is a pretty simple process, you provide the materials and the smith will - at no monetary charge - create an item for you. You can create weapons, shields, accessories and more, the only catch is that you, again, need the raw materials for the item and you need a recipe for it. Recipes typically come from crafting tomes, which can be found lying about the world (look for book icons on your minimap as you explore) or they can be purchased from merchants. Note that once you’ve read a crafting/recipe book or scroll, you don’t have to keep it - sell it to recoup some of the cost!
Materials¶
Materials for crafting and refinement include timber, ore, gems, hides, bones, fleece and the like, most of which can be harvested from the environment or purchased from merchants. Keep an eye out as you explore and hunt game and mine ore as you go if you want to stock up on crafting materials… assuming you have the inventory space, of course.
(1 of 3) Visit a smith and provide the materials for them to refine - or upgrade - a piece of gear.
Refinement¶
While crafting creates new items, refinement upgrades existing items, otherwise functioning similarly to crafting: Select the option, provide the materials and the chosen piece of gear will get a stat boost. No coin required and, in the case of refinement, no crafting books needed either. Not all items can be refined, but those that can be refined can have a quality level between 0 and 10, which indicates the item’s current level of refinement. Refined items will have a number of gold ticks in the upper left corner of its icon in your inventory screen, letting you know how refined it is at a glance.
Most gear has at least once core stat - Attack for weapons, Defense for armor (boots and gloves have both, the former of which presumably denotes their efficacy when attacking unarmed). In addition, many pieces of gear will have secondary stats, like Critical Rate, Attack Speed, Movement Speed, and fire/ice/lightning resistance, and some gear - mainly accessories - will have a tertiary effect like health/spirit/stamina regen.
Refinement Preview and Upgrades¶
Not all of these boons will appear at lower refinement levels, with some accessories not getting their tertiary stat until Refinement Lv3. Other items will gain a level or two in their secondary stat(s) as they are further refined, with most of the gains coming at the highest levels of refinement, if at all. At a glance there’s a whole lot of ambiguity about refinement, namely what any individual piece of gear will look like, stat-wise, when further refined, which could lead to some (understandable) hesitation on the player’s part when it comes to burning resources on them.
Fortunately the developers thought of this and there’s a way to preview the stats on gear at various refinement levels, although you’re not explicitly told about this. Select a piece of gear in your inventory and you’ll see the “Inspect” option on the bottom right of the screen (by default, press 
to inspect something). Once you’re inspecting an item, press again to access the “Refinement Information” screen, where you can scroll through all ten refinement ranks to see what stats an item will get and the resources each stage costs. This is invaluable to help you plan out whether you want to expend resources on a piece of gear or not - maybe that sweet-looking bow doesn’t actually gain much in the way of Attack Speed or Critical Rate as you refine it further, and your materials can be better spent elsewhere?
The only downside to this is, for some reason, accessories like rings, amulets and earrings cannot be previewed. This is a shame, because accessories are the most obtuse bits of gear when it comes to how they will evolve as you refine them - you may want to save-scum until a particular accessory is Lv3 to see what secondary and tertiary skills unlock, as this is a good indicator of what the higher level version of the item will do. Generally, however, rings give Stamina regen, amulets give Spirit regen and earrings give Health regen.
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