How Crafting works in Cyberpunk 2077 - a complete guide (2023)

A beginner’s guide to how Crafting works in Cyberpunk 2077. What you need to craft or upgrade an item, how to get resources and is it worth it

The article includes an overview of the Crafting and Upgrading panels, an explanation of how crafting and upgrading gear works in the game, how to gather blueprints and crafting materials, which are the best items to craft first and regularly and why!

This guide does NOT contain any story spoilers from Cyberpunk 2077. The Crafting system in the game is a separate tool that you can focus on at any time and in any place, regardless of what you were doing a moment ago and how far into the story you have progressed.

What items can you craft in Cyberpunk 2077

The Crafting system in Cyberpunk 2077 is very robust and works perfectly in supporting your gameplay and needs for better quality gear as you focus on the narrative in the game and the fantastic stories CD Projekt Red have created.

In Cyberpunk 2077 you can craft nearly everything. Here is a quick list of the categories of items you can make for yourself instead of paying to vendors for them:

• Guns – both ranged and melee weapons of any kind
• Armor and clothing
• Healing Consumables
• Cyberware Upgrades
• Grenades

You can upgrade the all kinds of gear from the same category as well. If you own a piece of gear and want to keep using it, you can simply spend resources to keep upgrading it. This will help you keep the item at your side or equipped on your body (depending on the item) through the whole game and into the EndGame.

The more you craft, the higher your skills will be. Each item you craft or upgrade, contributes to your Crafting Level. You start from 1, of course.

Crafted items usually have better stats than the equivalents you can buy from vendors. This is intended to create an incentive for you to want to craft your own gear.

How to craft or upgrade Items

You can craft at a vendor or on your own. The system allows you to craft anything anywhere at any time.

Here are the steps to craft or upgrade an item:

1. Open your Crafting / Upgrades Screen.
2. Find an item you want to craft from the list on the left side.
3. Make sure you have all of the required crafting components (and perk sometimes).
4. Press and hold the Craft / Upgrade button.
5. If you crafted a new item, it will be available in your Inventory immediately.
6. If you upgraded an existing item, you will see its stats change immediately while you are still on the Upgrade Screen.

Every crafted item will be slightly different, because the stats and damage type bonuses are randomly rolled each time you craft an item.

Crafting Screen UI Explained

To open the Crafting screen, click on the Crafting button in the main horizontal menu bar in the pause menu.

In the top left corner you have buttons for filtering items by category. In the late game you will have a lot of schematics of items you can craft and filtering to find the one you are looking for will be useful.

In the left half of the screen you see all of the craftable items schematics you know. They are all color-coded to match the rarity of the items.

On the right half of the screen you see the item you are about to craft with its level, stats and perks. Below it are the required crafting components and sometimes perks.

Upgrading Screen UI Explained

The Upgrading screen looks very similar to the Crafting Screen. To access it, press on the Crafting button in the pause menu and from the Crafting Screen click the top button that reads “Upgrades”.

The items you can upgrade are displayed on the left half of the screen. Here you will only see items you have in your inventory and items that you have placed in your gear slots.

There are small light-blue corners marking the items that you have currently equipped to help you get a better understanding of what items are sitting in your inventory and what items are currently being used in your gear.

How to get Blueprints and Schematics

Blueprincs, also known as Specs or Schematics in jargon, can be obtained by one of the following methods:

• Gaining Skill Levels to unlock higher qualities of existing schematics.
• Looting schematics from the world. Some of the best items schematics are often hidden in plain sight around you – in a container or on a corpse of an enemy you just defeated.
• Purchasing schematics from vendors and stores available all over Night City.

How to get Crafting Components

Depending on what item you want to craft or upgrade, you will have to provide the required crafting materials, called Crafting Components.

You can get Crafting Components by one of the following methods:

• Loot them from the open world.
• Buy them from vendors.
• Disassemble items in your inventory.

The best way to get a lot of Crafting Components in the early game that will help you craft items and increase your Crafting Level quickly is to simply deconstruct the items you loot as you play the game.

Most of the lowest quality items you loot are not worth much to sell to a vendor for Eddies, but they will give you priceless Crafting Components and in great quantities too.

Crafting Perks and Passive Skills Boosts

I highly recommend that you spend Attribute points to level up your Crafting Skill. It is worth it. I can’t tell if and when CD Projekt Red will patch the crafting, but as of right now it is an incredibly overpowered and rewarding skill to develop. Not just for crafting your own weapons, clothes and other gear, but for money making as well.

Below is the full description of the Crafting Skill Tree, located under the Technical Attribute.

Level 1

• Mechanic (Passive) [1 level]: Gain more components when disassembling.
• True Craftsman (Passive) [1 level]: Allows you to craft Rare items.
• Scrapper (Passive) [1 level]: Junk items are automatically disassembled.

Level 7

• Workshop (Passive) [3 levels] {Requires Level 7 Technical Ability}: Disassembling items grants a 5% chance to gain a free component of the same quality as the disassembled item (at level 1).

Level 9

• Innovation (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 9 Technical Ability}: Consumables are 25% more effective (at level 1).
• Sapper (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 9 Technical Ability}: Grenades deal 10% more damage (at level 1).

Level 11

• Field Technician (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 11 Technical Ability}: Crafted weapons deal 2.5% more damage (at level 1).
• 200% Efficiency (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 11 Technical Ability}: Crafted clothes gain 2.5% more armor (at level 1).

Level 12

• Grease Monkey (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 12 Technical Ability}: Allows you to craft Epic items.
• Efficient Upgrades (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 12 Technical Ability}: Grants a 10% chance to upgrade an item for free.
• Ex Nihilo (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 12 Technical Ability}: Grants a 20% chance to craft an item for free.

Level 14

• Let There Be Light! (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 14 Technical Ability}: Reduces the component cost of upgrading items by 10% (at level 1).
• Cost Optimization (Passive) [2 levels] {Requires Level 14 Technical Ability}: Reduces component cost of crafting items by 15%.

Level 16

• Waste Not Want Not (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 16 Technical Ability}: When disassembling an item, you get attached mods back.
• Tune-up (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 16 Technical Ability}: Allows you to upgrade lower quality components into higher quality ones.

Level 18

• Edgerunner Artisan (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 18 Technical Ability}: Allows you to craft Legendary items.

Level 20

• Cutting Edge (Passive) [1 level] {Requires Level 20 Technical Ability}: Improves damage and all damage-related stats of crafted weapons by 5%.
• Crazy Science {Requires Level 20 Technical Ability}: Increases the sale price of crafted items by 10%. +1% per Perk level.

Learn more about Attributes and Skills in Cyberpunk 2077 by reading our guide.

You start the game knowing by default how to craft Common (Grey) and Uncommon (Green) items.

To be able to craft Rare (Blue) Items, you will need to get the True Craftsman Perk.

To craft Epic (Purple) Items, you will need to get the Grease Monkey Perk.

For the Legendary (Orange) Items, you will need to get the Edgerunner Artisan Perk.

Crafting and Upgrading Iconic Gear

Some times you will stumble upon an Iconic piece of gear. These items are automatically added to your Crafting screen. You will always be able to craft them, so once you find them, there’s no way you can lose them.

Iconic items are usually found during main missions and as reward for special side missions. They can be of any quality, not always legendary, but you can easily upgrade them later on.

Check out the Cyberpunk 2077 Legendary and Iconic Gear Locations guide if you want to be better prepared of what Iconic items are available and when and how you can get them.

Crafting specs of iconic weapons you find in the world do not require you to have a lower version of the item in your inventory when crafting it from that schematic. However, to make the same item of the higher quality, you will need to have the lower quality item crafted first.

To craft an Iconic weapon of a higher quality than the one you currently have, the one you have will be used in the crafting process and “upgraded”. This is a bit misleading, since this is not a normal level and damage upgrade of the item, but a quality improvement as well.

How to get the best results from Crafting Gear

There is a certain RNG element involved with crafting your own gear. I highly recommend you to read carefully this segment of the guide to get the best results from your crafting attempts, especially if crafting expensive Legendary and/or Iconic gear.

The DPS stat on a weapon means nothing. Look at the additional stats that are pulled from a pool of predefined stats bundles for each weapon you craft. The stats are what determine if the weapon is good, not the DPS meter on the top.

But how to properly read the stats?

Each weapon has a number of stats that roll a “not-so-random” stat value each time you craft an item. On the image above you see a comparison between two crafted Revolvers.

This example shows the correct DPS comparison because the only difference between the two is the Crit Damage bonus perk.

If one of the weapons had a different or an additional perk rolled, you’d see different DPS. If, say, this revolver had rolled “Charge” bonus, the DPS would show higher value on the item with + Charge, but this specific model does not have Charge, so the DPS value would be misleading you.

I can’t tell if this is a bug and CD Projekt Red will fix it and when, but if you learn to always check the stats and perks of the items you craft, you will not make a mistake ever.

Another simple method of testing is to simply equip two weapons you have hard time choosing a favorite from and go find some trouble. Preferably the same group of mobs (there are many groups of mobs that will respawn if you run far enough from the scene and return 30 seconds to a minute later.

Is Crafting items worth your time in Cyberpunk 2077

Crafting items in Cyberpunk 2077 is not a time waste for sure. Crafted items would almost always yield better rolls on the stats and damage boosts compared to the identical items purchased from vendors.

There is a whole Crafting Skill Tree, where you can invest Perks to improve your crafting capabilities and make even better and stronger items for yourself instead of having to rely on the luck of the loot roll or spending countless hours of searching for something.

If you plan to invest into Crafting more seriously, and you should, I highly recommend you to get the Mechanic Perk early on. It will grant you more components from disassembled items.

Crafting is a supplementary system in Cyberpunk 2077, but it is designed well and does not get in the way of your story experience. Exactly the opossite!

Example: If you play on harder difficulties or have trouble getting used to the kinda strange first-person shooting and gameplay mechanics CD Projekt Red designed for the game, you might need heals more frequently.

It’s best to craft your own Grenades, Health Packs and Ammo instead of buying them. If you loot everything around you, you will usually have plenty of these.

What is the fastest way to level up crafting in Cyberpunk 2077

There are several sneaky things you can do to level up your Crafting Skill in Cyberpunk 2077, but the best is to craft Purple Grenades, then deconstruct them for Purple materials and craft Purple weapons for a lot of + Crafting Skill Points per item crafted.

Crafting an incendiary Epic (Purple) grenade costs 1 Common and 1 Uncommon crafting components per grenade crafted.

Deconstructing these Incendiary Epic (Purple) grenades would yield you a ton of materials, including Epic ones.

And you even gain small amounts of XP per grenade crafted, which is an added bonus.

This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get one of your Skills up to level 20 and earn the “Ten out of Ten” achievement. To learn more about achievements and trophies in the game, check out the Cyberpunk 2077 Achievements List and Guide

This method is valid and applies to all tiers. If your crafting skill level is low and you cannot craft Purple grenades, just craft whatever highest you have.

It’s most likely a mistake on CD Projekt Red’s side that they allow you to craft all tiers of purple grenades for the cheapest possible crafting resources per crafted grenade.

Note that crafting Rare (Blue) grenades cost different types and amounts of materials for the different grenades you can craft. The Incendiary grenade is the cheapest one in this lineup.

Combining this method of crafting and deconstructing with some of the passive perks from the Crafting Skill tree will grant you even better results.

• Get the “Mechanic” perk for more components per item deconstructed.
• Choose “Cost Optimization” to reduce the cost of crafting items. by up to 30%
• Pick “Workshop” for a small chance to get a free component of the same quality as the disassembled item.

Note that you can purchase a special token, called Tabula E-Rasa, from every Ripperdoc’s Trading inventory for 100 000 Eurodollars that will immediately reset all of the Skill Perk Points spent, so when you are done with crafting, you can spend these points elsewhere and improve your combat or netrunning techniques.

To get easy crafting components you can also deconstruct the drinks you can purchase for 10 Eurodollars from the vending machines in Night City. The 10 Eddies ones, not the 5 Eddies. Buy until the machine is sold out and then deconstruct them to get much more and more valuable Common and Uncomon crafting components.

A great location to start is this area in Corpo Plaza in the City Center:

This same method can be used to make money in Cyberpunk 2077. Instead of crafting weapons with the components you get, sell these components to a vendor or a drop point. The budgets of the vendors reset every 24 hours, so you can sell and skill and sell and skip…

You will need this trick if you want to complete the Autojock and Master Crafter Achievements quick and easy. If you are interested in learning more about the achievements in Cyberpunk 2077, check out the full guide!

This is it for now. I hope you now have a better understanding of how crafting works in Cyberpunk 2077 and how valuable it is if you approach it early on and develop your skills and Perks to improve it down the road. Check out more of the Cyberpunk 2077 Guides here on VULKK.com as well!