Tools

Tools are items that are required for an activity but not consumed by it. They represent the reusable, breakable equipment a craft or a gathering attempt depends on, such as a blacksmith’s forge, an alchemist’s cauldron, a wizard’s focus, or a miner’s pick.

Imagine a blacksmith who needs an anvil and hammer to forge a blade, or an alchemist who brews potions in a cauldron. These tools are essential to the work, but they are not used up by it. The cauldron is still there after the potion is bottled. A Tool models exactly this. It is an item that must be present (and may need to pass a requirement) before an activity can proceed, and that may wear out and break over repeated use.

Tools belong to the crafting system. Each crafting system carries its own shared Tools library, authored on the system’s dedicated Tools page in the Crafting System Manager. They are not owned by a gathering environment or task. A gathering task only points to a Tool that lives in the system’s library. The same Tool entry can therefore gate a recipe step, a salvage operation, and a gathering task across the one system.

Where Tools are required

A Tool becomes a prerequisite wherever you reference it in the UI.

You can require a Tool on a whole recipe, where it applies to every step and ingredient set in that recipe. You can require a Tool on a single step of a multi-step recipe, where it applies only to that step. You can require a Tool on a specific ingredient set, where it applies only when that ingredient set is selected. You can require a Tool on a gathering task, where it must be present to attempt the task. You can require a Tool on a salvage setup, where it must be present to salvage the component.

For crafting, the Tools that apply to a given attempt are everything required at the recipe level, the step level, and the selected ingredient set combined. If a referenced Tool no longer exists in the library, Fabricate quietly drops the stale reference rather than failing. This is the same behaviour gathering tasks use.

The requirement gate

Every applicable Tool must be present in the source actor’s inventory and must pass its optional requirement before the activity can proceed. The owned item is recognised whether it is the Tool component’s source world item or a copy duplicated from it.

A Tool’s optional requirement is a condition checked against the acting character that must pass. You write it as a single roll expression evaluated against the character’s roll data, for example a proficiency check. A requirement with no expression is invalid.

If a referenced Tool is missing or disabled, or the character does not own a non-broken instance, or the requirement does not pass, the activity is blocked. In gathering this is reported as a blocked tool. In crafting the Tool is flagged as missing or unsatisfied in the craftability summary.

Breakage modes

Each Tool picks exactly one breakage mechanic:

Mode	Behaviour
Limited uses	A usage counter ticks up each attempt. The Tool breaks when the counter reaches the chosen maximum. Leave the maximum unset for unlimited use, in which case usage is still tracked.
A chance each use	A flat percent chance per attempt that the Tool breaks. Set it to 100 to always break and to 0 to never break.
A dice roll	A dice roll is compared against a numeric threshold. The Tool breaks when the roll comes in below the threshold.

Only limited-uses Tools track how many times each item has been used. The other two modes never record a per-item usage count.

On-break actions

When a Tool breaks, the on-break action you chose runs:

Action	Behaviour
Destroy it	The owned Tool is removed from the character’s inventory.
Flag it as broken	The Tool stays in inventory but is marked as broken. A broken Tool fails the presence check on future attempts until a GM clears it.
Replace it with a broken variant	The original is removed and a broken variant component is created on the character. You can build a recipe that consumes the broken variant to produce the repaired Tool. While the character holds the broken variant, the gathering app shows the required Tool as Broken rather than Missing.

Authoring a Tool

Tools are authored in the Crafting System Manager (not constructed via the API). In Manager V2:

Add the component. In the system’s Components tab, add the Tool item as a managed component. If you plan to replace the Tool with a broken variant when it breaks, also add the broken-tool variant as a separate component.
Open the system’s Tools page. With a crafting system selected, click the top-level Tools entry in the Manager navigation (it sits alongside Components, Essences, and the Gathering group, and it is not nested under Gathering, because Tools belong to the system). Click Add tool, pick the Tool component (drag-drop from the Items directory or use the dropdown), and optionally set a display label.
(Optional) Add a requirement, a condition checked against the acting character (see The requirement gate).
Pick a breakage mode: limited uses, a chance each use, or a dice roll (see Breakage modes).
Pick an on-break action: destroy it, flag it as broken, or replace it with a broken variant (see On-break actions).
Save, then reference the saved Tool from the recipes, steps, ingredient sets, gathering tasks, or salvage configurations that require it.

Failure behaviour

By default, Tools are not broken or degraded when a crafting or salvage check fails. You can change this per system in the crafting check settings.

You can choose to apply Tool breakage on a failed recipe check. You can separately choose to apply Tool breakage on a failed salvage check.

See Consumption on Failure for where these options live.

For gathering, the system-level Tool breakage outcome setting (Manager V2 → System Settings → Gathering Rules) decides whether a broken Tool fails the whole attempt (the default) or whether drops are still awarded with the breakage reported alongside.

What the results show

After an activity that resolved Tools, the result describes what each Tool did.

The run record lists each Tool’s outcome for that attempt. The chat card shows the Tools involved, including any that broke. Macros that run on success, on failure, or when setting result properties also receive the Tools that were used.

Migration from Catalysts

If you are upgrading from a version before 0.6.0, every recipe, step, ingredient set, and salvage catalyst is converted automatically into a Tool in the system’s library, and each place that used a catalyst now references the matching Tool instead. After the migration runs, the GM sees a one-time notification with a count of migrated entries and a pointer to the Tools tab.

The conversion preserves behaviour:

Old catalyst	Resulting Tool
Present but never consumed	A Tool that never breaks and is flagged as broken if it ever would. It is present-only and tracks no usage.
Consumed on use, limited uses, destroyed when exhausted	A limited-uses Tool that is destroyed when it breaks.
Consumed on use, limited uses, kept when exhausted	A limited-uses Tool that is flagged as broken when it breaks.

The present-only row is a deliberate, behaviour-preserving choice. A Tool with a zero breakage chance never wears out and never records usage, exactly matching the old never-consumed behaviour.

Identical catalysts are combined into a single shared library Tool. Catalysts that differ in meaning are kept separate. Recipes whose crafting system is missing are skipped rather than causing an error. The migration is safe to run more than once.

In-flight usage counters. A Tool that you had already worn down as a catalyst keeps its used count after the upgrade. This matters only for migrated limited-uses Tools. The first use after the upgrade records the count in the new place, and that becomes authoritative from then on.

Tool library relocation (0.7.0)

In early gathering builds, Tools authored in the Manager were stored with the gathering configuration rather than with the crafting system. Now that Tools belong to the system, a second upgrade step moves any such Tools onto the matching crafting system and clears the old copy, so there is a single library. It combines duplicates by Tool. When the same Tool already exists on the system, the existing system Tool wins and the stale copy is dropped rather than merged. Tools whose system no longer exists are left in place rather than discarded. Like the earlier step, it is safe to run more than once. Once the old copies are cleared, running it again does nothing.