Difference between revisions of "Skill Fletching"

Revision as of 16:51, 6 August 2011

I classify the trade skills into two groups; moneymakers and RP skills. The moneymakers are the skills like smithing and tailoring which have a high potential for turning a profit. The RP skills are ones like baking and brewing which don’t seem to have a whole lot of effect on game play and, consequently, tend to be mainly practiced by RPers. I place fletching firmly in the middle of the two groups. If you really hustle, you can probably turn a profit with fletching but, in all probability, it’s really only worth working on if your character is big on archery.

Tips on becoming a master fletcher

The nice thing about fletching is that you’re basically making two objects, bows and arrows, over and over again. That makes it very easy to figure out the relative difficulty of making a particular item. Basically, the higher the quality of your supplies, i.e. the more expensive they are, the more difficult they are to work with. If you seem to be getting a lot of failures with a particular type of arrow or bow, try downgrading one or more of your components to something cheaper. Please note that there isn’t a direct correspondence between the cost of arrows and bows and their relative difficulty. Rough hickory bows will be trivial to make long before you’re able to manufacture arrows costing several gp apiece.

How do you make bows and arrows? The first thing you’re going to need is a fletching kit. Then for bows you’ll need a bow staff, string, and, optionally, whittling knife, planing tool, and/or cams. For arrows you’ll need arrowheads, shafts, feathers, and nocks.

When making bows, the bow staff determines base damage, range, and delay. Your string modifies this. The better quality the string, the less damage the bow does but the shorter the delay. This means that a hickory bow with a linen string will do more damage than a hickory bow with a silk string, but the bow with the silk string will be faster. Whittling knives and planing tools decrease delay even more but reduce damage as well. I’m not sure what effect cams since I’m not yet good enough to make a bow that uses one but I imagine it’s similar to strings, whittling knives, and planing tools.

As for arrows, the better the arrowhead, the more damage the arrow will do. Same for shafts, the better quality the shaft is, the more damage the arrow does. Feathers modify range and damage. Round cut feathers will give your arrow a base range of 50. Parabolic cut feathers will increase the base range to 100. Shield cut feathers will reduce base range to 0 but increase the base damage of the arrow. Nocks modify the base range of the arrow so that the smaller, i.e. better, the nock the greater the range of the arrow.

Making arrows is a tedious process and at some point you will be tempted to try putting all of your arrowheads, all of your shafts, all of your feathers, and all of your nocks into your fletching kit at one time and pressing combine. Do NOT do this! No matter what quantity you put in, you will only get one arrow out which means that all of your extra material will be wasted.

Finally, when practicing to raise your skill level, always work on arrows instead of bows. This is just common sense. Arrows are far cheaper to make than bows so your mistakes will be far less costly and you can make more attempts for the same amount of money. Try to make bows every so often just to get an idea of how good you are with them but for the most part, practice on arrows. --Siobhan, Tunare Server

Arrow Recipes

Arrow and bow sections from Aoenla's Fletching Guide.

info from this webpage needs to be reformatted, cleaned up, and inserted here

Bow Recipes

Bows consist of a staff and string, are sometimes constructed using optional tools, and optionally may contain 1 or 2 cams. The final statistics of the bow are all dependent upon the choice of each component.

To create a bow, you simply place the staff, string, and any optional components you wish into the fletching kit, cross your fingers, have all your pals /shout Good Luck!, and press the Combine button. With luck, if your fletching skill is high enough and all goes well, you’ll be left with a nice new bow on your cursor. If the attempt fails, the staff, string and cams are lost, and the tool (if one was used) ends up on your cursor. If the failed attempt involved some expensive components, you then /cry.

Staff material

Choices are Hickory, Elm, Ashwood, Oak, and Darkwood (Shadewood introduced ~Dec 2001 on Live) arranged in order of degree of difficulty and final potency. The staff material determines the base range, damage, and delay of the final bow.

These values form the basic statistics of the final bow. The choice of string, tool, and cams all provide modifications to these base values.

Note that the Bowyers Guide mentions Steel and Ceramic staves as other possibilities, however to my knowledge these component types have never been put into the game.

String Material, Tools, and Cams

String is required for all bows. Choices include Hemp, Linen, and Silk. Hemp is the simplest to work with, and yields highest damage but greatest delay. Linen and Silk are progressively more complex to work with, and provide progressively lower damages and delays.

Tools and cams are optional, and indeed only allowed on certain staff materials. The simpler tool choice is the Whittling Knife, which yields a Carved bow. The more advanced tool is the Plane, which yields a Shaped bow. The use of Cams yields a cammed or compound bow, and are usable on Oak (1 cam) and Darkwood (1 or 2 cams) and Shadewood (1 or 2 cams).

The effects on the final bow statistics are shown below. All effects are cumulative.

Special Note about Cams and Shadewood: When Cams are used on Shadewood, they not only provide the modifications to Damage and Delay as stated in the above table, but they ALSO provide a range bonus. Adding 1 cam to a shadewood staff yields a 175 range bow, and adding 2 cams yields a 200 range bow.

The Bow Table

At this point we’ve got everything we need to prepare a table or spreadsheet of data. This table shows every combination of bows possible in the game. For comparison purposes, it also includes the bows available via purchase or quest within the game. Note that all cost values are shown in coppers.

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