As with any self-respecting RPG, crafting items and improving your gear is an important part of the game — and Cyberpunk 2077 is no exception.
You can craft everything and upgrade your equipment directly from the crafting tab of the menu, or from the stash of sellers.
Crafting
Crafting is not available at the very beginning of the game: you'll have to finish the lifepath quests before.
There are different levels of rarity: common, uncommon, rare, epic and legendary. At the basic level, your character can only make common and uncommon items.
You will need to use the perks in the skill tree in order to craft items of higher rarity. The perks in question are all present in the Technical Ability tree, or the Intelligence one for cyberwares.
- Uncommon Cyberwares: You must unlock the perk Hacker's Manual in the Quickhacking skill tree.
- Rare Items: You must unlock the True Craftsman perk, available at the very start of the game.
- Epic Items: You must unlock the Mechanic perk, available at attribute level 12.
- Legendary Items: You must unlock the Edgerunner Artisan perk, available at attribute level 18.
Crafting can be extremely useful, especially when you run out of ammunition or healing items.
Disassembling Items
This feature is essential — even indispensable — to easily get crafting and upgrading components. Unlike in The Witcher 3, disassembling items is free.
The components can be recovered in any Night City: by buying them from vendors or by disassembling items. Disassembling items of a certain rarity will allow you to obtain components of the matching rarity.
You can also obtain rarer components, such as epics, on different bosses.
Upgrades
In general, you can upgrade the majority of equipment items to increase the stats of weapons or clothing.
All items with the name "iconic" can be upgraded from their basic version. As soon as you loot an iconic item, you will automatically receive the corresponding crafting blueprints with different levels of rarity — and statistics — for the item in question.
So be sure to set aside iconic weapons and equipment that you like and that you can improve later. This allows you to keep good armor and DPS without having to run around looking for the best possible equipment. Iconic items that you can loot at the beginning of the game remain effective long enough with upgrades.
Generally speaking, crafting and upgrading is fairly easy, if you take a few minutes during missions to loot everything you see. Don't worry about your inventory, the components weigh almost nothing.
Original content by Célia "Lolisa".
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