Outriders Crafting Guide – Tips and Tricks for Upgrading Gear

This page contains an overview of how crafting works, what each of the options do, and tips for making the most of your resources and customizing the ultimate gear.

Crafting is not unlocked from the start (though you can scrap items once you get out of the tutorial). You’ll need to play for a couple of hours – at least until you leave the first area, rescue Dr. Zahedi, and obtain his missing briefcase.

Once you’ve completed these early main missions, you’ll find the doctor back at your basecamp, and can choose to ask him to help you craft when interacting with him. Not to be confused with crafting in other games, this feature is more about modifying existing armor and weapons rather than creating new ones.

Note that crafting will cost resources – a lot of them. For this reason, you’ll want to be constantly on the lookout for chests in the wild, as well as ore deposits that glow along the walls, and mine everything you can.

Once you have enough of the given resources, you’ll find that there are lot of options for both armor and weapons. If you’re not sure you’ve collected enough currency – take a look at the different resources types below:

Since many types of currency can be obtained by disassembling gear, you’ll rarely want to ever sell weapons and armor to vendors except for the most common items. This especially holds true for obtaining new mods to add to your collection that can then be used in the gear you want to craft (if there’s a square icon next to the mod, it means you already have it in your collection, and may want to sell it unless you’d rather get shards or other crafting resources.)

When in the crafting interface, you will be able to select any gear that you either have equipped or are carrying in your backpack. Depending on what item you select, it will appear with all of its stats in the center, and will list certain options on the right depending on the item type and rarity. See more information about each option in the following sections:

• Improving rarity will not only increase base damage or armor, but will also add Mod Slots to your gear, allowing you to choose from a set of options (but you cannot make an item Legendary).
• Each item comes with a few random attributes, and can be improved a set amount of times using shards. However, you’ll need to disassemble items with similar attributes to get the necessary shards for an upgrade.
• Rare or better items come with mods in one of three tiers. By disassembling an item with a mod, you can then swap that mod in on gear you are crafting. Mods will either boost skills specific to your class, or offer general abilities that any class can take advantage of – but you’ll only find better tier mods the further you get into the game. Note once you swap in one mod for an item, the other mod will be locked in permanently!
• Each weapon comes in one of several variants – most will be standard by default. Swapping out variants allow you to sacrifice certain aspects of your gun to improve other areas, like reload time, magazine size, and others.
• Leveling up an item is the best way to keep using a piece of gear that works best for you – though the quality of its attributes may change at random, which can potentially undo some of your attribute raising. Each items also has a maximum level it can be upgraded to – meaning you’ll eventually need to move onto a new replacement!

• Early on, you’ll want to sell all your common (white) items for scrap, as they won’t give you any mods or shards. Instead, you’ll want to disassemble your unusual (green) items for shards/leather/iron, and hang onto most of your rare (blue) items. When you start to notice some of your blue items have the same mod, disassemble the duplicates to keep those mods on hand to swap in later.

• Scrap is only good for buying items from vendors – and you may find something special that has a mod you haven’t seen yet. Just remember that gear is plentiful enough you shouldn’t need to buy too much (especially if you’re on your second character)

• Focus on accumulating a library of mods; pick one or two weapons and pieces of armor you want to keep and wear as you play then scrap the rest to add the mods to your collection

• Armor Mods are where it’s at, since they’re hugely beneficial to your Skill loadout

• If you find yourself crafting constantly and struggling to find iron and leather, don’t be shy about dismantling gear, you want to build up a decent stockpile of leather and iron

• As a general rule, the higher the level, the better the more materials you’ll get back

• Swapping mods is cheap (usually a hundred or so iron/leather) so don’t be shy about stopping at Zahedi’s tent regularly to make that shiny new piece of gear fit your build better

• Titanium may seem like a rare commodity at early levels, but don’t worry about farming it. Still, if you do find some early on, SAVE IT

• Shards can be a bit hard to understand, as the UI for these isn’t well explained, but here’s the deal: all of your items have attributes (ex: skill leech, + crit chance, +DMG, etc) and to increase those attributes you need to spend shards of the same type. One of those attributes per weapon will be marked with the shard symbol, meaning when you dismantle that item, you’ll gain X amount of the indicated shard to use in crafting later

Late Game Crafting Tips

• When you reach World Tier 7/8 you’ll get Epic (purples) more regularly (~20-25% drop rate)

• By now, you should be very discerning about how you spend titanium at first. Once you reach the forest section (~ 1/2way through the campaign) you’ll see more opportunities for harvesting it from defeated monsters

• Dismantling Epic items is a good way to get more titanium. It will usually start at 1-2 pieces each but at level 30+ you’ll get more and more.

• Epic mods have two mod slots, but only ONE can be altered. Once you choose to change a mod in either slot one or two, the other slot’s mod becomes permanent.

• Tier 3 mods only come from Legendary items (gold)

• If you somehow get duplicate Legendaries, scrap that stuff! Remember that no matter how good your Legendary gear is when you first get it, you’ll eventually reach a point where you can’t level it up anymore – but the Tier 3 Mod you get from dismantling will stay with you long after!