The world in which the Rangers exist is a perilous environment filled with challenge at every turn, where desperation and despair wait just ahead and trail close behind. Survivors in this world do not get by with sheer luck or by accident. They maintain a will to survive that has been tempered for generations in this radioactive wasteland where life was meant to die.
Out here, the pieces of this broken world are your keys to rebuilding anew . . . or should at least prove helpful in prolonging your own grisly demise for another day.
CRAFTING THE APOCALYPSE
This year’s updates so far have included Permadeath, Difficult Skill Checks, new difficulty modes, new cosmetic options, and a host of quality-of-life changes and game improvements—but we’re not stopping there. With Patch 1.4.0 releasing in the next few weeks, your Rangers will soon be able to finally put much more of what they find across frozen Colorado to new use, and forge items that are oftentimes helpful, sometimes exotic, and occasionally, just batshit insane.
Wasteland 3’s Crafting system will introduce exciting new weapons and high-level mods for squads to experiment with. This is going to be especially beneficial for those of you coming back to play the expansions we’ve got coming. This is a true-to-Wasteland system, with new gear that celebrates the post-apoc theme, and packs other surprises that’ll keep you guessing. Along with all that new hotness, there’s also the obvious convenience of making your squads more self-sufficient in the field, as they’ll be able to make their own ammo and medical supplies on the run.
Overall, this system is going to give new purpose to a lot of the vendor Junk you find in the world, allowing you to grind it all up and spit it all back out as a bunch of shiny new items.
The new craftable W.A.S.P. Gun is every bit as horrific as you imagine it to be.
RECIPES FOR DESTRUCTION
Whether you’ll be challenging Colorado’s tundra in a fresh playthrough, or are continuing from an existing save, this next update will immediately grant you access to this new feature. Crafting in Wasteland 3 doesn’t require a Crafting skill—all you need are recipes and the components to make them.
There are effectively three ways to get recipes:
1. By leveling up your Skills!
The most basic recipes are acquired automatically as your characters’ Skills are leveled up. Increasing your First Aid, for example, will also unlock recipes to craft Med Hypos, Medic Packs, and more. Skill-point recipes like these tend to offer the most basic and regularly useful items like ammo, healing items, as well as standard weapon and armor mods.
When ranking up your Skills you’ll be able to see what recipes the next point will unlock. Not all skills have associated recipes to be unlocked, but it’ll be clear to you which ones do.
2. Buying from vendors & searching containers!
The more valuable recipes are purchased from vendors, or found out in the world in containers and safes. Vendors tend to have standard gear like higher-end mods and grenades, while the more exotic gear and unique items can only be found scattered across Colorado.
3. By acquiring mystery recipe ingredients!
Some recipes can’t be discovered directly; instead, you’ll get an idea for a recipe as soon as you pick up a particularly strange or special item. When you do, you’ll see a notification that an unknown recipe has been discovered, which will tell you what else you need to make it… though you still won’t yet know what it’ll all turn into. Only when all the listed ingredients of said recipe are glued, stapled, duct taped, or welded together will you finally perceive the glory of its final form. Ever wondered what you’d get if you combined Ken’s Shriveled Junk with some Mustache Wax? Now, you’ll finally get to find out!
POTENT COMPONENTS
So you have some recipes and are ready to craft, but this isn’t the Nordic realms of yore – you ain’t gonna find pristine iron ingots and finely milled cords of lumber just laying around. As you might surmise, the primary crafting component in the wasteland is… (drum roll…) Scrap! Now, you may have seen some Scrap in the game before, but with your newfound knowledge of Crafting you’re going to want to see a lot more of it. Scrap is obtained lots of ways, but primarily by looting it from the corpses of your enemies, opening containers that don’t belong to you, as well as from field stripping weapons you have no need for.
In addition to Scrap, there are of course other components you’ll usually need to craft your various items. These components are also mostly obtained from dead bodies and containers. Fair warning: Items which may have been previously disregarded as junk back before patch 1.4.0 could now be worth their weight in clean drinking water. Good thing vendors don’t seem to have much of a market for all that junk you sold them—that stuff is easily bought back if you revisit them.
As mentioned above, sometimes picking up a random piece of junk will kick off a mystery recipe. You won’t know what these mystery recipes are going to make, and you’ll just need to find the odd and sometimes very unique bits and pieces and hope they make something useful when you smash it all together.
CUE THE MONTAGE
Ok, so we’ve teased a bit at some of what you can make. Ammo and healing items are great and all, but we know what you’re thinking: what’s the end game here? What’s going to make chasing after recipes worthwhile? So, we’ll simply leave some images here of just some of the things you could discover and craft in the next update—that is, if you can find the recipe and components. Make no mistake, these cobbled-together items are powerful late-game weapons that, as you could guess, are typically unconventional with unique mechanics.
SAFETY GLASSES REQUIRED
We’re in the thick of it now, Rangers. We want to thank all of you in the community for continuing to answer this call to arms and for joining us on this leg of the adventure in Colorado. We’re continually humbled by your appreciation for the game, and we want you to know that it’s our pleasure to continue to pour our frozen hearts and icy souls into this.
Stay tuned! We have more features and additions to preview for Patch 1.4.0 in the weeks ahead, as well as content and previews for the recently announced first expansion to Wasteland 3, The Battle of Steeltown.
F.A.Q.
Q: How much will I get out of crafting if I’m close to the end of the game?
There’s fun to be had with crafting for you, and recipes to be found, but you would very likely need to reacquire reagents you had previously sold to vendors. Additionally, any crates you’ve opened and NPC’s you’ve talked to are “tapped” and won’t populate with the new recipes available to discover. To be clear, we expect that the feature is going to be most valuable to new playthroughs or those early on in their adventure.
Q: So, stuff marked as Junk could be useful? Now you tell me…
Vendors don’t actually sell the items you’ve dumped on them, so you can buy any crafting materials back as you see fit.
Q: The new craftables sound cool, but how cool are they really?
They range in coolness from literal shit to some of the best weapons in the game. Good luck!
Q: How will this work with The Battle of Steeltown?
We're so glad that you asked, imaginary person! If you own The Battle of Steeltown, you'll be able to access additional new crafting recipes that tie into Steeltown's own content, such as weapons and armor. But rest assured that if you don’t own the DLC, we aren't holding anything back from the base game when 1.4.0 drops.
Q: How are these questions “Frequently Asked” when you just posted this?
We’re going to level with you… FAQs are a sham. A charade. It’s bull hooey. They’re almost never frequently asked questions, but instead a different way to present the information to the reader to explain complex or confusing ideas. Or sometimes it’s a way to get across info the presenter left out entirely. They should really be called “Important Info We Left Out, Phrased As a Q&A” or “What We Said Before Might Have Been Confusing, So Here it Is in a Different Format.” We’re sorry to have to drop this on you but try to have a good day anyway.