Crafting and Buildings
Crafting runs the economy in Swag and Sorcery. You do not make money by selling the raw materials your heroes drag out of the woods. You make money by turning those materials into gear and selling the finished products.
To craft gear, you need the right buildings and heroes with the right stats.
Stat Alignment
Every character in the game has four main stats. Each of the four crafting buildings scales exclusively off one of these stats. If you put a high-strength hero in the Magic Shop, they will craft terribly. You must match them correctly.
| Building | Required Stat | What it Crafts |
|---|---|---|
| Smithy | Strength | Heavy armor, swords, axes, maces |
| Hunting Lodge | Agility | Light armor, bows, daggers |
| Laboratory | Stamina | Potions, rings, amulets |
| Magic Shop | Intelligence | Robes, staves, wands |
Assign dedicated crafters to these buildings. Do not make your primary combat heroes do the crafting. Combat heroes need well-rounded stats to survive, whereas dedicated crafters need to max out a single stat to hit one hundred percent efficiency.
The 250 Stat Threshold
Your goal is to push each crafter's relevant stat to 250. That is the number that triggers one hundred percent crafting efficiency.
What 100% efficiency actually does depends on what you are crafting:
- Raw materials (refining): You get triple the output. This is what breaks the mid-game material bottleneck.
- Gear (weapons and armor): Low-tier results (grey and green rarity) are eliminated entirely. Your chance of getting a Purple or Orange item caps at 75%, with Legendary specifically falling somewhere between 25% and 50%. Luck is always a factor, even at max efficiency.
Buy the stat-boosting gear from the market and equip your dedicated crafters with it. A crafter wearing a full set of intelligence gear will perform vastly better in the Magic Shop than a naked hero.
Patch 1.50 removed all intermediate refined materials (like wooden planks and ingots) from the game. You now refine raw logs and ores directly into finished gear without a secondary processing step.
Upgrading Buildings
Upgrading a building unlocks new recipes and higher-tier gear. Prioritize upgrading the Smithy and the Hunting Lodge early. Melee weapons and bows give you the best damage output in the early game.
Do not upgrade buildings blindly. Check the required materials for the next tier of recipes before you spend gold on the upgrade. If a tier two Smithy requires materials you can only find in the Swamp, but your heroes die instantly in the Swamp, upgrading the Smithy is a waste of gold. Wait until your adventuring party can actually source the materials before you upgrade the crafting station.
Always keep your crafting queues full. If a hero is standing around doing nothing, you are losing gold.