Crafting Systems

A crafting system is a self-contained configuration that groups together environments, components, essences, recipes, and rules. You can have multiple crafting systems in a single world. For example, “Alchemy”, “Blacksmithing”, and “Enchanting” could each be their own system with different recipes and rules.

Creating a System

Only GMs can create and manage crafting systems.

Open the GM admin panel (Manage Crafting Systems in the Items sidebar) and click Create System in the Systems tab.

System Settings

Setting	Description
Name	Display name shown in the UI
Description	Optional flavour text
Resolution Mode	How recipes produce results: Simple, Routed, Progressive, or Alchemy. See Resolution Modes

Tags And Categories

Custom recipe categories organize recipe browsing and authoring, and item tags allow component labeling plus tag-based ingredient matching. The reserved General recipe category is always present and is not stored in the custom category list.

Feature Toggles

Each system can independently enable or disable optional features. Most optional features are off by default and must be explicitly enabled by a GM.

Feature	Default	Description
Essences	Off	Enable the essences system for abstract ingredient properties
Property macros	Off	Allow result items to have their properties set by a macro
Effect transfer	Off	Transfer active effects from essence source items to crafted results
Multi-step recipes	Off	Allow recipes with multiple sequential steps
Gathering	Off	Show the Environments tab for authoring gathering locations and tasks. Any enabled system also exposes the player Gathering action in the Items Directory

Toggle optional features in the Features card on the System tab of the Crafting Admin panel. Each toggle takes effect immediately for all future crafting attempts in that system.

Changing the resolution mode is a destructive operation. All recipes in the system will be deleted because they may be invalid under the new mode. You will be asked to confirm.

Chat Output

Fabricate automatically posts a chat message to the table after every crafting or gathering action.

Success messages include:

Crafter name (the actor who performed the craft)
Recipe or gathering task name
Items created, with quantities
Ingredients consumed, with quantities
Tools used (and any that broke)

Failure messages include:

Crafter name
Recipe or gathering task name
Failure reason
Any ingredients consumed or tools broken as part of the failure

Chat messages appear as if spoken by the crafting actor.

When chat output does not fire. Chat messages are only posted for craft attempts that reach the engine’s resolution step. Early validation failures do not post a chat message, because the craft never started. These failures include a missing actor, missing ingredients, missing or unsatisfied tools, and invalid recipe configuration.

Crafting Checks

If your system uses Routed mode with a macro-driven outcome, or Progressive mode, you must configure a crafting check to gate outcomes on a player roll. See Crafting Checks for the settings, consumption-on-failure policies, and worked examples.

Effect Transfer

When both the Essences and Effect transfer features are enabled, Fabricate can copy active effects from essence source items to crafted results. See Effect Transfer for how the feature is enabled, configured, and used, with worked examples.

Recipe Visibility

Recipe visibility controls which players can see and access recipes through the visibility service and planned player Crafting UI. You configure this per crafting system in the Recipe Visibility feature card on the System tab of the Crafting Admin panel.

Fabricate supports three list modes:

List mode	Description
Global (default)	All recipes visible to all users
Player	GM restricts individual recipes to named players
Knowledge	Recipes discovered through gameplay via recipe items or learning

For full details on each mode, knowledge sub-options, recipe items, the learn flow, and configuration examples, see Visibility & Knowledge.

Alchemy Mode

Alchemy mode is a special resolution mode where recipe names and ingredient lists are hidden from players. Macros and integrations can submit selected items to the alchemy engine. Fabricate matches the combination against known recipe signatures. Set the resolution mode of a system to Alchemy to enable this. See Alchemy Mode for current usage, configuration, signature matching, consume-on-fail, and learn-on-craft options.

Graph Visualization

The Graph tab in the Crafting Admin panel is planned and not yet available. It will show a visual map of how your recipes are connected through shared components.

See Recipe Graph.

Salvage

When the salvage feature is enabled, players can dismantle components to recover partial materials. See Salvage for resolution modes, salvage crafting checks, component configuration, and worked examples. Salvaging can also be used to harvest monster corpses and world resources for usable parts.

Gathering

When the gathering feature is enabled, GMs can author environments and gathering tasks for the system’s managed components. If at least one crafting system has gathering enabled, players see a separate Gathering action in the Items Directory that opens the player Gathering app. The action is removed again when no systems have gathering enabled.

See Gathering Environments for the current GM editor fields, task authoring, player app behavior, active/history surfaces, required-tool references, and validation behavior.

Startup and Preferences Cleanup

Each time the module loads, Fabricate automatically cleans up stale saved preferences that point to crafting systems or recipes that no longer exist. You do not need to trigger this manually. It runs while Fabricate starts up, before the module is ready for use.

What is cleaned up

Preference	Cleanup behaviour
Last viewed system in GM admin	Cleared if the remembered system is no longer one of the current crafting systems
Last selected gathering actor	Cleared when the remembered actor no longer exists or is no longer selectable by the current user
Progressive result order preferences	Any entry for a recipe that no longer exists is removed

Why this matters

If you delete a crafting system or recipe while a player has a session open in another browser tab, their browser may still hold preferences pointing to things that no longer exist. The same can happen after restoring a world from a backup. The cleanup pass on the next load prevents stale references from causing unexpected behaviour in the crafting UI.

The cleanup leaves things alone when nothing is stale, so nothing is written unless a stale entry needs clearing.

Components

Components are the building blocks of recipes. Instead of pointing at a single specific world item, recipes refer to a component, and any matching item can satisfy it. This means:

Recipes work regardless of which specific world item instances exist
Multiple world items can satisfy the same component reference
You can reorganise your item compendiums without breaking recipes

Adding Components

Open the Items tab of the GM admin panel. You can add items one at a time or import an entire compendium pack at once.

Single-item drop

Drag any Item document from the Items sidebar or from an open compendium browser and drop it onto the components list.

Open the Items sidebar or the compendium browser
Drag the item onto the Items tab drop zone in the Crafting Admin panel
The item appears in the list of components

If the item is already registered in the system, whether by the item you dropped or by the original it was copied from, the drop reuses the existing component instead of creating a duplicate. If the stored name, image, or linked item is out of date, Fabricate updates the component in place and remembers the previous link so items already in characters’ inventories still match.

If Foundry reports an original compendium source but that source no longer exists, Fabricate links to the item you dropped instead, remembers the broken source link as a fallback, and warns the GM.

After import, Fabricate also listens for linked Foundry Item updates from a GM client. When a linked item changes its name, image, or description, matching components refresh their stored name, image, and display-safe plain-text description automatically.

If the dropped document is an Actor, JournalEntry, Scene, or any other non-Item type, a warning notification is shown and nothing is imported. If the drag data cannot be resolved to any UUID, the same warning is shown.

Bulk compendium pack drop

To import all Item documents from a compendium pack at once, drag the compendium pack header (the title row in the compendium directory sidebar, not an individual entry within it) onto the drop zone. Fabricate iterates over every Item document in the pack and adds each one.

Items not yet in the system are added as new components.
Items already registered, whether by the item itself or the original it was copied from, are updated in place rather than duplicated.
Items already registered and already up to date are skipped.
A single crafting system cannot contain two components that claim the same source item.
A summary notification reports how many items were added, updated, and skipped.
If an item’s recorded original source link is broken, Fabricate links to the imported item instead, remembers the broken link as a fallback, and warns once for the bulk import.
Non-item document types in the pack (Actors, JournalEntries, etc.) are ignored.

Folder drop

Drag a world folder containing Item documents onto the drop zone to import every Item in that folder. Fabricate expands the folder, applies the same source-chain deduplication logic as single-item drops, and shows a summary notification with the number of items added. If any imported item has a broken original source link, Fabricate warns once with the affected count. If the folder contains no Item documents, a notification says so and nothing is written.

Bulk pack import requires that Foundry emits a compendium-type drag event from the pack header row. If your Foundry version does not support this drag shape, use single-item drops instead, or import the pack through the API.

Requirements

Systems can optionally require time or currency for crafting.

Time Requirements

When enabled, individual recipe steps can require an amount of time, given in minutes, hours, days, months, or years. The step is blocked until world time advances past the required duration.

Time gates are checked:

When a player tries to advance a step
Automatically when world time changes
On module startup

Currency Requirements

When you enable currency requirements, a recipe step can cost an amount of a currency unit you define. Fabricate checks whether the crafting actor can afford the step before the craft begins, then spends the cost when the step is taken. If the actor cannot pay, the step is blocked and the craft is stopped before any ingredients are consumed.

You configure currency in the system settings editor, in the Currency units card.

Choosing a spend strategy

The Spend strategy selector decides how Fabricate reads and spends an actor’s money. It offers three strategies, and you can pick any of them in any world, regardless of game system. A short hint under the selector describes the strategy you have chosen.

Actor data path reads each currency unit from a numeric field on the actor sheet, such as a Dungeons & Dragons 5e character’s gold. Fabricate makes its own change across the denominations you define, so a step priced in silver can be paid from gold and the difference returned in smaller coins.
Actor inventory treats coins as items the actor carries, read and spent through a preconfigured provider. This is the right choice for game systems such as Pathfinder 2e, where coins live in the inventory rather than in a single sheet field.
Macro drives currency with macros you write, for any game system. The macro receives the actor and does whatever it needs, so this strategy is not tied to the inventory.

The provider (Actor inventory)

When you choose Actor inventory, a Provider selector appears.

A provider is a built-in adapter that already knows how to read and spend coins from your game system’s inventory. Pathfinder 2e ships with one. When a provider is selected, it manages the denominations for you, so the unit list becomes a read-only Provider-managed denominations list. You can still reference those denominations by their abbreviation in a step’s currency cost, but you cannot edit them here. In a world whose game system has no provider, Fabricate shows a note steering you to the Macro strategy instead, and leaves your own units untouched.

The currency macros (Macro)

The Macro strategy has three drop zones. You link each macro by dragging it from the Foundry macro directory onto a drop zone, and right-click a linked macro to unlink it.

Can afford macro runs before the craft to decide whether the actor can pay. Return a success result to allow the craft, or a failure result to block it.
Decrement macro runs after a successful craft to spend the cost.
Increment macro is reserved for a future refund flow. You can link it now, but Fabricate does not run it yet.

Each macro receives the step’s cost, keyed by the abbreviation you gave each currency unit, so your macro can match coins by the same abbreviation you configured. If a macro reports failure or stops with an error, Fabricate blocks the step and the craft is stopped before any ingredients are consumed.

Defining currency units

When you use the Actor data path or Macro strategy, you define your own currency units. Each unit has a label, an abbreviation, and an icon.

Under Actor data path, each unit also names the field on the actor sheet that holds its balance.
Under Macro, units have no path or denomination. Your macros match coins by abbreviation, so a note reminds you that conversion between units is handled by your macros.

You can also describe how units break down into smaller ones, such as one gold breaking down into ten silver. A unit with no breakdown is treated as a base denomination.

To get started quickly, use Seed presets to add the standard coin ladder for your world. Seeding in a Dungeons & Dragons 5e world adds units on the actor data path strategy. Seeding in a Pathfinder 2e world adds inventory units and selects the Pathfinder 2e provider. Preset seeding is only available in Dungeons & Dragons 5e or Pathfinder 2e worlds.