People always say it’s easier to blow stuff up than to build ‘em from scratch. Pull the trigger, Pike explodes. Drive the wasteland at full speed, osterake becomes instant roadkill. If you want something, you go out and take it. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. That’s the Auto Assault way!

Of course, all that blood and violence is fun only if you can make it even bloodier and more violent. That’s what crafting in Auto Assault is all about: building things and making them better. Let’s say you have a pretty nifty turreted pulse laser but it just doesn’t have the range or punching power you’d like for those frenetic Arena bouts. If you had the right skills and components, you could reverse engineer that pulse laser, rebuild it from its recipe of individual parts, experiment with some special components, and voila! Hopefully you now have a brand new, homemade persona-marked super turreted pulse laser to impress your friends and terrify your enemies.

So how do you get started? We’ll use the Humans and the Projectile Weapons Discipline as an example. If you’re Mutant or Biomek don’t worry, the procedure is generally the same. Basically you’ll want to visit one of the three main starter cities (Upside, Fort Logan, or Tocado), depending on your race, and look for the Projectile Weapons Craft guy. In Upside, he’s known as the Hestia Vectronics Intern. Yes, he’s only an intern, but he can teach.

Projectile Weapons is one of three base-level Apprentice Crafting Disciplines you can learn (the others are Armor and Power Plants). Once you become familiar one or more of these you can then move on to bigger and better Disciplines, which will open up the ability to craft badder, cooler items. However, you have to start at the beginning, which means you get to build the basic, non-sexy stuff first: Discipline Training Kits.

You’ll need to learn Projectile Weapons Discipline, which is why you’re at that particular teaching intern in Upside. It’ll cost you a hundred clink to get started, which shouldn’t take too long to accumulate in the wastelands. Note that you’re also standing next to the Control Shop, which you will need to know for later. Next, you’ll need something to serve as a basis.

Essentially, you can make any item in Auto Assault from its component parts, kind of like a set of building blocks. The only way to build something is to know what it’s made out of – its recipe. You can learn it one of two ways: Reverse Engineer it or buy it broken. With Reverse Engineering, you’re literally taking something apart to learn what it’s made out of. Alternatively, you can buy something that is already broken – that is, the item doesn’t work but you now have an idea of what it is made out of. If you have the skill and proper components, you can put it back together again. Either way you’ll have a broken item that needs fixing in order for you to gain in skill.