Essences

Requires the Essences feature to be enabled on the crafting system.

Essences are abstract properties that can be assigned to components. They provide a flexible way to categorise ingredients beyond simple tags. For example, an item might contain “2 units of Fire essence and 1 unit of Arcane essence”.

Consider a Dragon Scale that radiates heat and hums with faint magical energy, or a Frost Crystal that chills anything it touches. Rather than treating these as unrelated ingredients, essences let you tag each component with the qualities it carries: three units of Fire and one of Arcane on the scale, four units of Frost on the crystal. When a recipe calls for “at least 3 Fire and 2 Arcane”, players can mix and match any combination of components whose essence totals meet the threshold, opening up creative flexibility at the crafting table. Essences can also drive automatic effect transfer, so a sword forged from fire-heavy ingredients inherits flame-related properties. Below you will find the fields that define an essence and how to assign essence quantities to your components.

Defining Essences

Essences are defined at the crafting system level. Each essence definition has the following fields:

Field	Description
Name	Display name, for example “Fire”, “Arcane”, or “Nature”
Icon	A FontAwesome icon class. Leave it blank to use the default mortar-and-pestle icon.
Description	Flavour text
Source item	The component whose active effects represent this essence, used for effect transfer. Leave it unset if the essence is not linked to an item.

When you link an essence to a source item, Fabricate checks that the component still exists. If the linked component is later removed, the link is cleared.

Example Essences

Essence	Description
Fire	The raw energy of flame
Frost	The biting cold of winter
Arcane	Pure magical energy
Nature	The vitality of the natural world

Assigning Essences to Items

In the Items tab of the GM admin, each component can have essences assigned with quantities:

Item	Fire	Frost	Arcane
Dragon Scale	3	0	1
Frost Crystal	0	4	0
Arcane Dust	0	0	2
Phoenix Feather	5	0	2

Using Essences in Recipes

Ingredient sets can require specific essence quantities. When a player crafts, the essences from their chosen ingredients are totalled and compared against the requirement.

For example, an ingredient set requiring “3 Fire essence and 2 Arcane essence” could be satisfied by:

1x Dragon Scale (3 Fire + 1 Arcane) + 1x Arcane Dust (2 Arcane) = 3 Fire + 3 Arcane (meets requirement)

Effect Transfer via Essences

When effect transfer is enabled on a recipe and essences are active, Fabricate can transfer active effects from essence source items to crafted results:

Fabricate works out which essences are contributed by the ingredients that were used
For each essence linked to a source item, it collects that item’s active effects
Those effects are applied to the created result items

This lets you create systems where crafting with fire-essence ingredients automatically gives the result fire-related properties.

Managing Essences in the GM Admin

Essence definitions are configured from the Systems tab of the GM admin, inside the Essences feature card. The card is visible only when advanced options are enabled and the Essences feature toggle is on.

Open Manage Crafting Systems
Select your system in the sidebar
Enable Show advanced options
Enable the Essences feature toggle
In the Essences card, fill in the name, description, icon, and optional source item, then click Add
Existing essence definitions are shown in a list below the form. Click the trash icon to remove one

The icon field accepts any FontAwesome icon class. If you leave it blank, a default mortar-and-pestle icon is used.

The source item dropdown lists components already added to this crafting system. Selecting one links the essence to that component for effect transfer purposes. The label in the UI reads Source item.