Ramblings of Narc

This is part 3 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link to part two, the general overview, in case you missed it.

So, you wanna be a craftsman? Or maybe you just want to read about what they can do? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

The craftsman class of The Guild 2 is one of the easiest to make money with, primarily because it features the most lucrative raw material building in the game: the Mine. But before we get into the details, let’s start with…

General Background

As the tutorial explained, craftsmen are the sources of weapons, armor, and clothing, as well as a few useful artifacts. What the tutorial doesn’t mention is that craftsmen are also the ones who extract iron, gold, silver, and gems, and that they also cut both kinds of wood. This makes the craftsman class mostly self-contained, being able to supply themselves with most raw materials, with the notable exceptions being leather and wool. The items craftsmen make also tend to be high-priced with low production costs, so they’re a good class for starting out.

Speaking of prices, part 2 of the guide recently gained some additional notes on prices. If you haven’t read that yet, go and take a look now, just so we’re on the same page.

First and foremost: the Mine

A good strategy for a craftsman is to buy a mine as soon as the game starts. And by this I really mean immediately — if you wait as little as 30 seconds, the mine’s price will have shot past 10,000 (the highest amount of money you can start with), because the AI wastes no time in hiring workers and starting production, which is reflected in the building price. Adding to that the fact that mines aren’t likely to be up for sale when the game starts, you might be better off building your own. If you do that, be careful to build it near the precious stone deposit — the shorter the commute from the mine to the deposit, the more you will be able to gather in the same amount of time.

Precious stones have a base price of 291 per unit and the production cost is as low as the minimum wage for a worker working for about an hour^[1]. So, even though markets are quickly saturated and the sell price goes below 291 easily, you can still easily make a profit selling them, enabling you to support other workshops.

Aside from that, mines also give you iron, silver and gold. Iron is extremely important for a craftsman, so it’s almost always worth extracting that. In my games, I tend to extract iron with one mine-worker and precious stones with the other two until I get enough money on-hand to feel comfortable, then switch to iron only and build a second mine for precious stones only. In fact, mining tends to reward specializing, since you can never have more than three workers, and goading them periodically tends to be a very micromanage-y activity.

The Woodcutter’s Hut

This is sort of like a mine, except not worth buying in the early game. Unlike the mine, which has precious stones to make large profits, the woodcutter’s hut only has oak wood and pine wood, both of which are high-volume, low-price items. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still possible to make profits just selling oxcart loads of wood at the market, but they’ll be much lower than what the mine can give you with just a handcart.

The woodcutter’s hut comes into its own when you own a foundry or carpenter’s shop (or upgraded versions thereof) — you can provide these workshops with all the wood they can use for much lower price than buying from the market.

Speaking of which…

The Foundry

Foundries have two upgrade paths, one leading to the Goldsmithery, the other to the Armour Forge. Personally, I consider the latter much more worthwhile than the former (making and using your own armor is a good money-saver), but to make any of the high-end armour you need leather, which craftsmen cannot produce (leather is produced by Patrons instead). So, unless you have a source of leather (married a patron, maybe?), you might be better off with the Goldsmithery, making gold chains and precious stone rings.

The Carpenter’s Shop

If you have one of these, you’ll likely be making most of your money from construction material and torches. Both of these seem to be consumed quickly by the AIs, and so both will make large profits. Together with them being available early in the game, this makes the carpenter a very easy starter.

Aside from that, the highest level of the carpenter’s shop, the Joinery, gives you the most powerful weapon in the game, the Battleaxe, which features a base damage of 24 (compare with the Longsword’s 20). However, like the foundry, the higher-level production goods from the joinery also require leather. Really, if you’re a craftsman, you’d do well to get a patron in the family, just for the leather source.

The Weaving Mill

This would have to be, by far, the least profitable option for a craftsman. Weavers require wool (from a patron again) just to start with, and the higher-level production goods also require leather. Also, the highest-priced goods you can produce from this workshop are very likely to be poorly sought-after, meaning it only takes 10 or so of them to satisfy market demand. By comparison, weapons and armor are always in short supply (even if the AI rarely seems to use them), so a carpenter or blacksmith almost invariably make better profits.

On the other hand, clothiers will quickly arrive at the cheapest armor (leather doublet, armor level 20 (compare with 30 and 40 for the other two armors)), and they are the only ones to produce gloves (leather gloves, armor 10), adding to a well-armored character or thug’s defenses.

Class synergies

I already mentioned the patrons — providing you with a supply of leather you will find invaluable in the mid-to-late game, when everyone wants cheap armor. Even if you play the patron seriously and following up on that production chain, you will still have enough leather for the craftsman workshops, even with just one farm.

Rogues also make a decent synergy because armored robbers will be able to do far more waylaying than unarmored ones, thus easily providing you with extra profit. Aside from that, robbers looting farms that are usually poorly protected (being outside of town) will often bring home small-to-medium amounts of leather, helping you out if you’re missing that all-important patron synergy.

Scholars, on the other hand, tend to compete with your leather supply early on. Still, a scholar will also use your excess gold and silver, which you’ll have little use for if you followed the path of the armorer. And it doesn’t take much pine wood to keep them going for a reasonably long time.

That’s it for the craftsman. Join me again next time for the patron guide!

Footnotes

• ^[1] — as with all raw materials, the production cost is hard to determine accurately because it depends on multiple factors: the distance from the mine to the extraction location, the skill level of the worker doing the extraction, the inventory capacity of same worker, and the duration of extracting one unit of material (precious stones take longer to extract than iron, for instance). Nevertheless, the average true production cost for precious stones should not surpass 50 per unit, whereas selling price rarely goes under 200.