Crafting and Upgrading in Cyberpunk 2077 - No Man's Sky | Video Tutorials | Live Streams | Xaine's World (2024)

Crafting in Cyberpunk is huge, covering Weapons, Clothing, Consumables and Cybernetics.

You can Craft, Upgrade and Dismantle most things.

First up are the components you’ll need to craft and upgrade everything.

Normally, this wouldn’t be first but it’s just so simple.

There are Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary Crafting Components, as well as Rare, Epic and Legendary Upgrade Components.

These aren’t headers for a range of components used in Crafting and Upgrading, these are the names of 8 items that are used to craft everything in the game other than Quickhacks.

This simplicity of components is really great, it simplifies inventory management in a huge way, not requiring you to keep a huge variety of crazy things in case you may want them to craft with later.

It doesn’t lead to annoying nights trying to grind for that last item you need to craft something.

And it keeps the challenge in obtaining parts to craft awesome things due to the rarity levels of each component

Quickhacks have a separate component pool, but there are only 4 different items.

These are simply Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary Quickhack Components.

Obtaining these components is fairly straight forward. You will find them randomly around the world, or from disassembling items.

You will find much higher rarity and in greater numbers when on missions as apposed to just lying about in the open world.

Crafting in Cyberpunk is huge, covering Weapons, Clothing, Consumables and Cybernetics.

You can Craft, Upgrade and Dismantle most things.

First up are the components you’ll need to craft and upgrade everything.

Normally, this wouldn’t be first but it’s just so simple.

There are Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary Crafting Components, as well as Rare, Epic and Legendary Upgrade Components.

These aren’t headers for a range of components used in Crafting and Upgrading, these are the names of 8 items that are used to craft everything in the game other than Quickhacks.

This simplicity of components is really great, it simplifies inventory management in a huge way, not requiring you to keep a huge variety of crazy things in case you may want them to craft with later.

It doesn’t lead to annoying nights trying to grind for that last item you need to craft something.

And it keeps the challenge in obtaining parts to craft awesome things due to the rarity levels of each component

Quickhacks have a separate component pool, but there are only 4 different items.

These are simply Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary Quickhack Components.

Obtaining these components is fairly straight forward. You will find them randomly around the world, or from disassembling items.

You will find much higher rarity and in greater numbers when on missions as apposed to just lying about in the open world.

The 2 things you need to craft an item in most cases are the Components and the Specs.

Some higher quality items require specific perks, but we’ll go over that in the Perk section.

There are a total of 223 different crafting Specs, not including Quickhacks, of which there are a further 53.

Over half of the Crafting specs are obtained through vendors in the game. These specs range in price dramatically and are not gauranteed to be up for sale by the correct vendor at any one time.

This is one of the few times in the game that RNG may be introduced, that may annoy you a little.

If the spec you are after is not in stock, you can skip time by 2 days to replenish the stock and see if it has now come in.

40 of the specs available in game are rewards for skilling up in crafting.

Remember that to skill up to a specific level for a sub attribute, you will need to have the attribute it is associated with at or above that skill level you’re shooting for.

*****So for Crafting, the associated Attribute is Technical Ability, and to increase the skill you must do Crafting related things, like Crafting and Upgrading items.

You gain 10 uncommon specs after hitting a skill level of 6 in crafting. 10 Rare specs at level 9, 10 Epic specs at level 13 and 10 Legendary specs at level 18.

The rest of the specs are gained through various mission related things, either dropped by special mobs or rewarded for completion, often being a completion after fulfilling specific requirements.

I’ll certainly be doing videos on particularly fantastic items including clothing and how to obtain them or their specs, but also if I have the time and people are interested, I’ll see about putting up a full list of all specs and how to get them on my website, xainesworld.com, so let me know below if there’s interest.

There are a number of Perks under crafting which you should consider, but some of them are especially useful and a few others; required.

If you want to be able to craft everything in the game, or specifically, Rare, Epic and Legendary Items, you are going to need to invest 18 attribute points into technical Ability.

Doing so will unlock the perk required to craft Legendary Quality items.

Rare and Epic item crafting also requires a perk each, but these are available with a Technical Ability attribute level of 5 and 12 respectively.

You may also wish to invest in quite a few of the other crafting perks, many of them are very good, with increases to the damage of crafted weapons, the armor rating of clothing, decreases to the cost of crafting and upgrading and even the ability to upgrade crafting components to higher tiers.

*****There are also 4 perks specific to disassembling, these are:

Mechanic, which allows you to get more components when disassembling, you can get it right away and it is very worth it,

Scrapper, which automatically disassembles junk as you loot it, a perk I originally thought was lazy and just not required, but after more play, it is too useful and will save you incredible amounts of time.

Workshop, which grants a 5% chance of receiving a component of the same quality level as the item being disassembled

Waste Not Want Not which will return the mods you have applied to the item when Disassembling.

Crafting skills are very worth shooting for. Not only are there 40 specs to be gained from levelling it upto at least 18 with 10 of them being legendaries, but they are generally very worth while.

As with all of skills, about 40% of them just give you an extra perk point, which I do actually like, Perks aren’t a huge bottleneck in this game, the overall balance of character building is done really well.

At level 3, 4 and 11 you’ll gain a 5% reduction in crafting costs, which on it’s own is particularly good when dealing with Epic and Legendary iconic weapons.

At level 7 & 12, it will increase the chances of getting a component while crafting by 5% each time.

At 15 you get a 5% increased chance to gain a component while upgrading, and at 16 and 19, reduces the cost of upgrading by 15% each time.

The last skill at level 20, as with all skill types, unlocks the last perk in the section.

Compounding all of these skills and perks can make crafting incredibly worthwhile.

As for levelling your crafting skill, disessembling does not seem to add anything, but Crafting and Upgrading does, and if you want to level it quickly and efficiently, one of the best bets is just standard health boosters.

They cost just a few common and uncommon components to make which you will get loads of from junk and even from disassembling food and drink.

Carrying it all can of course be an issue if you are making crazy amounts, but you could sell extras or also split it up via using lots of grenades, as they are also cheap to make relatively speaking

Though be sure to upgrade your gear and craft the better versions of the Iconic weapons you are using for nice skill boosts.

*****To craft itself, is very simple, you need the spec for the item, and the components to make it in your inventory, and of course, if the item is Rare, Epic or Legendary, you will need the respective perks.

Then just head to the crafting section of your inventory and craft away.

To upgrade is very similar, in the crafting section of your inventory is an upgrade tab. Upgrading allows you to increase the item level of the item, but not it’s rarity.

Where Rarity increases mod slots and may add special effects to the item, upgrading it’s item level allows you to increase it’s base stats.

Each item such as weapons and clothing have an item level between 1 and 500. You may get a legendary shirt at a lower than max level, so it’s item level isn’t as high as you’d like, but instead of just throwing it away for an item you don’t like the look as as much but has a higher item level and so higher stats, you can just upgrade your old shirt that you prefer to the level of the new one.

This is especially epic as for clothing, the base stats are the same for all other items of the same body part, rarity and item level. So you can wear what you want without having to settle for a fugly but powerful item.

Disassembling is super simple, but not super obvious right at the beginning.

To disassemble an item you need to go specifically to the backpack section of your inventory, in there, when hovering over an item, you will have an option to disassemble the item for parts.

You can see what you will receive for it on the left where the Crafting component counts are displayed.

It will put in brackets how much of whichever components you will receive when disassembling the item you are hovering over.

*****Also note that you can disassemble pretty much anything, including food and drink.

Iconic Weapons are a special kind of unique item that you can only get in specific ways, such as encounters, looting a boss and more.

These unique items are Iconic, but also still have a Rarity and Item Level.

As with all non-consumbale items, you can upgrade them to increase their item level, but with Iconic weapons, when you receive the weapon, you also receive the spec to make the next rarity level version of it.

So if you get the Dying Night iconic pistol like I did from the weapon vendor just outside your apartment, which is an Uncommon rarity item, you can then also craft the rare version, which upon crafting will destroy the uncommon version you have but also give you the spec to make the Epic version, and then again to get the Legendary.

*****Sadly, Iconic weapons do require the respective Crafting perks to craft the Rare, Epic and Legendary versions. I am personally not a big fan of this as for anyone to use Iconic weapons in end game that they obtained earlier or just not as Legendary, they must invest 18 attribute points into Technical Ability and then many perks.

*****It feels like it goes against the idea of Iconic weapons to me.

Quickhacks are Cyberpunk 2077’s version of spells. They are effectively hacks that you do to NPCs.

You’ll start the game most likely with Reboot Optics, which will temporarily blind whoever you use it on.

These come in different rarities and are all crafted.

You don’t, however, obtain the specs to craft them from vendors or drops, you obtain them via 4 perks, these perks are split up into rarity with Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary all found in the Quickhacks perks under the Intelligence Attribute.

These Perks are Hacker’s Manual for Uncommon, School of Hard Hacks for Rare, Hacker Overlord for Epic and Bartmoss’ Legacy for Legendary.

When crafting these at higher levels, you will need the lower level version of the Quickhack to do so.

If you do wish to lean heavily into being a futuristic mage, you will need to whack a full 20 points into Intelligence and go all in for the best stuff, as the Legendary versions require it.

But it does seem pretty damn powerful to be able to get someone to commit seppuku or pull a grenade from their waste and set it off in their hand.

That about covers everything.

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