14 Mar 2023 8:41 PM +00:00 UTC

Last Epoch crafting explained - shards, runes, glyphs and more

Want to know how to craft your best gear in Last Epoch? If you've played Diablo, Path of Exile or other ARPGs, then you know that one of the best ways to get some of the best gear in the game is to craft. Unlike the complete RNG system of Diablo, or the overly complicated system of Path of Exile, Last Epoch crafting is deterministic, and very straight forward and we'll give you all the details about the system.

There's a few different basic things to consider when crafting in Last Epoch. This guide will cover the basics from crafting materials, how to craft basic rare gear, and some advanced crafting tips.

While you're here, why not check out some of our other Last Epoch guides, such as our guide to Last Epoch's trade system, our guide to the top five starter builds for 0.9, and our guide to one of the best Paladin starters for 0.9.

Last Epoch crafting materials

First thing's first, let's talk about crafting materials. There are a few different types of materials that you'll need to be aware of when crafting. The first thing is your crafting base piece. This is your armor, weapons, jewelry and relics. You can craft on any rarity of item, with unique items having a special way to craft on them, which we'll cover in a bit.

The next material are affix shards. This is going to be your main method of crafting specific effects on your gear. These can be found on the ground from killing monsters, or are obtained through breaking down gear. There are prefix shards and suffix shards.

Next up are glyphs. Glyphs are used to modify outcomes of crafts. There are four glyphs in total. There is some terminology that is on these that we'll go over in a little bit.

Glyph of Hope: grants 25% chance to not use Forging Potential.
Glyph of Chaos: Randomly changes an affix and upgrades the tier one stage.
Glyph of Order: Prevents the roll of an affix from changing when it's upgraded
Glyph of Despair: Has a chance to seal an affix instead of upgrading it, moving it to it's own slot and opening up the slot it was occupying.

Lastly, we have Runes. Runes don't affect specific crafting outcomes but have various effects that will affect the item itself. There are seven types of runes.

Rune of Shattering: Destroys an item, granting you a random number of affix shards based on the affixes on the item.
Rune of Refinement: Rerolls the values of all affixes on the item within their tier.
Rune of Removal: Randomly removes an affix on an item, returning a number of affix shards equal to its tier.
Rune of Discovery: Fills any empty slots on an item with tier 1 affixes, with an increased chance to get rarer affixes.
Rune of Shaping: Rerolls all implicit modifiers on an item
Rune of Ascendance: Changes an item into a unique or set item of the same base type.
Rune of Creation: Duplicates an item, but reduces its Forging Potential to 0.

Last Epoch crafting basics

Now that we know what tools we're working with let's talk basics. Non-unique gear can have four total affixes normally, two prefixes and two suffixes. These affixes have different tiers. Tier one is the lowest rank and tier five is the highest craftable rank. You can find tier six and seven mods on items that drop on the ground. These are called Exalted items and are purple in color. Those mods cannot be upgraded further. If you use a Glyph of Despair, you can have five mods on gear, which is incredibly powerful.

Your gear has something called Forging Potential. Any time that you perform a craft on a piece of gear, that Forging Potential gets reduced by a random amount. Once the Forging Potential on an item reaches zero, the item cannot be crafted on anymore. As a mod increases in tier, there is a higher chance that more forging potential is used.

Opening the crafting menu with the F key will allow you to put a piece of gear in the space. You'll see any existing modes show up, with prefixes on the left and suffixes on the right. You can click on the affix if you see an arrow, which indicates that it can be upgraded. If you see an empty slot, you can click the plus symbol, and select an affix and it will craft as tier one.

Sometimes while you're crafting, you'll get a critical success. This means that either the mod that you had chosen to upgrade skipped a tier, or a second mod was upgraded one tier as well.

Crafting Unique items

Unique items can also have a crafting Potential, called Legendary Potential. Legendary Potential can range from zero to four total potential. This allows you to use special crafting means to be able to add affixes to a unique item, turning it into a Legendary.

a hell reach bow with 2 legendary potential in last epoch

In order to do this, you'll need a couple things. First, you'll need a Unique items with Legendary Potential. Second, you'll need an exalted item of the same base type that has four affixes. Lastly, you'll need a key for the Temporal Sanctum dungeon and to defeat the boss at the end, Jurla.

Defeating Jurla will grant you access to the Eternity Cache, which will allow you to combine the two. For example if your unique item has a legendary potential of one, then when you put it and the exalted item into the cache, the unique will inherit one of the affixes on the exalted item. If the unique has a legendary potential of two, it will inherit two random affixes, and so on.

Last Epoch crafting tips

That's the basics of crafting. It's rather straight forward. But here's a few tips that you should keep in mind.

Use Glyph of Hope whenever you're crafting up affixes to help mitigate the loss of Forging Potential.
When crafting, craft all modifiers on your item before upgrading. Higher tier modifiers tend to use more Forging Potential.
A Glyph of Chaos is a great way to get rid of a stat that isn't useful to you and turn it into something better. Use these on lower tier stats.
Use a Rune of Removal if you want to extract a specific affix's shards. You need Forging Potential to do this, so don't craft on the item if it's only for shards. Rune of Shattering may not give you the shards you're looking for.
Rune of Discovery are best used on helms, as they can give the rare affix of increased skill level. This can greatly power up your build.
When combining a Unique and Exalted item at the Eternity Cache, try to craft the Exalted Item to have all useful stats. This will ensure that no matter what the outcome, your new Legendary will be as useful as possible.

And that's our guide to crafting in Last Epoch! While you're here, why not check out some of our Diablo 4 guides, such as our Diablo 4 beta guide, our Diablo 4 seasons roadmap guide, and our Diablo 4 classes guide

For more articles like this, take a look at our Guides and Last Epoch page.