Fallen Earth MMO Ballistics Crafting Starter Guide
Imitating What You See On TV
If you’ve seen any of the promotional videos for Fallen Earth you undoubtedly witnessed a lot of players with cool looking guns laying waste to all kinds of bad guys and mutants. The one thing you probably didn’t know is that all those fancy guns and cool looking modifications have to be crafted. If you’re thinking that crafting your own guns, swords and makeshift weapons sort of suck, well then you’re quite mistaken. It’s possible to get a hold of revolvers, pistols, swords and axes early in the game if you know how to craft them correctly. And crafting weapons in Fallen Earth is much easier than coming up with the money to buy them directly.
Crafting Versus Buying
Some of the weapons that you can craft are sometimes available at specific vendors throughout the game world. If you have several hundred bucks to spare you might be able to purchase a high grade weapon from a vendor, but you would have to be in the right town and with a heck of a lot of cash to do so. The faster route to acquiring weapons worth using is making them using the tradecraft skills.
The other upside to crafting your own weapons is that if you no longer want the weapon you can always salvage it for the parts that can be put to use for some other item. The other good part about crafting weapons is that every time an item is successfully crafted your character earns experience or attribute points, which is just another reason why crafting wins out over blowing tons of money on useful items.
Brains Over Brawn
Before getting down to the basics of crafting weapons useful to your character, take note that saving APs for your character’s stats is very important. It takes 5 APs to upgrade one stat point (and stat points are separate from the skill points but they can affect skills and tradecraft). It might be wise to upgrade the strength stat once (just so your weight limit increases and you can carry more items) and put the rest of your points into intelligence.
Intelligence, in Fallen Earth, increases the crafting level limit. In order to craft most of the good stuff most of your tradecraft skills will have to be at level 30. As mentioned in the crafting and scavenging starter guide, it’s important to constantly keep small items in the crafting queue in order to level up the tradecraft of your choice. If it happens to be for ballistics, you might want to keep zip gun ammo or crossbow bolts constantly in queue since they only require small amounts of material (usually scrap wood and copper) to make.
Zip Guns And Crossbows Before Revolvers
In order to build advanced weapons such as revolvers or rifles, players will need their ballistics tradecraft above level 30. In order to get to level 30 quickly it would be best to focus on building crossbows or zip guns, and selling the extra ones you make. They happen to sell for a pretty penny, too.
Making zip guns and crossbows is no short walk in the park, though. Both weapons will require a lot of wood, copper, strap fasteners, iron and a few other items. This is where extra weight comes in handy, because gathering up the supplies necessary to build ballistic-style weapons will require a fair bit of adventuring and scavenging, unless you start at a town that has a nearby junkyard or quarry.
Don’t hesitate, though, to venture out and about and find a good place to scavenge items suitable for making the zip gun or crossbow of your choice. Also, take note, that the zip guns are usually easier to make because the supplies and materials are easier (or cheaper) to find (or buy). And just remember to sell extra materials that takes up space in your inventory or bank, because the money could go toward buying material for building a zip gun or crossbow.
Pacing Your Parts
Building anything better than a zip gun or crossbow will require several parts before even beginning the process of building the gun. Players will have to craft the barrel, the handle, and the chamber, which will require three separate training manuals – all of which can be picked up from just about any ballistics trainer within town.
When it comes to building advanced guns, instead of trying to get materials for all the parts all at once, focus on gathering materials for one specific part at a time. Otherwise you can end up broke and with an over abundance of supplies hampering down your inventory and storage space.
Science Goes Hand In Hand With Guns
While it may not be exactly what you want to read, you may need to upscale your science tradecraft in order to make bullets for your guns. While creating bullets is within the ballistics tradecraft margin, gunpowder is not. In order to make gunpowder your character will need to be at level 30 in the science tradecraft.
The best way to level-up the science tradecraft is simply by making lots of dyes and acid grenades. Dyes are pretty easy to make and the chemicals can usually be retrieved from mutants or materials located near mutants. It’s not absolutely necessary to have your science upped to level 30 in order to make gunpowder – because it’s possible to simply buy gunpowder – but it’s far cheaper and easier to make gunpowder as opposed to buying it and wasting a lot of money.
Gunslinging Awaits
After following the tips in this guide your character should be on the way to venturing the wastelands as a kick-butt gunslinger. There’s also a lot of money to be made as a gun salesman or ballistics merchant…so if you have materials left over to make extras, be sure to visit the auction house to put your goods up for sale because there are a lot of gamers who would love to get their hands on some pistols, revolvers, shotguns or bullets.
Still need help venturing the wastelands of Fallen Earth? Be sure to check out the rest of the guides in the Fallen Earth starter guide series or learn more about the game with the Fallen Earth intro game guides.
This post is part of the series: Fallen Earth Starter Guides
All the necessary info you need for starting the game and starting off right.
