Artisan
Basics
Prerequisites:
None
Role:
The Artisan profession is one of the foundation stones in your characters
Crafting career and covers a wide range of basic skills and abilities. Not only does the Artisan profession unlock every specialist
Crafting profession, it also provides basic Business skills and allows you to improve your all important Surveying ability.
Engineering [ *xxx ]
The Engineering tree is where you'll find a number of fairly simple weapons, droid batteries and a plethora of general items such as surveying and
Crafting tools. When fully completed it also allows you to build simple structures in the form of personal extractors.
Unlocks: Novice
Architect; Novice
Armorsmith; Novice
Shipwright; Novice
Weaponsmith
Total XP to complete tree: 10,500 General Crafting XP
Domestic Arts [ x*xx ]
Domestic arts is the the skill of making foods and garments and a number of simple components such as glasses and fiberplast panels.
Unlocks: Novice
Chef; Novice
Tailor
Total XP to complete tree: 10,500 General Crafting XP
Business [ xx*x ]
The Business tree of the Artisan template provides the basic tools for selling your goods and placing vendors into public structures.
Unlocks: Novice
Merchant
Total XP to complete tree: 10,500 General Crafting XP
Surveying [ xxx* ]
Surveying stands alone within the Artisan profession and each branch on the tree increases the range at which you set survey tools to scan and increases your sample yield amount. Certainly early on in the game all crafters should fill this tree out at the earliest opportunity as completing all four branches will double the amount of resources you get when sampling.
Total XP to complete tree: 18,000 Surveying XP
Master Artisan
Mastering the Artisan template is not necessary to unlock any other professions. If you do however, it does provide you with the ability to craft a number of transports such as Landspeeders and Speederbikes along with some components that are required in expert professions (such as Control Units and Energy Distributors).
Total XP to complete template: 46,500 General Crafting XP + 18,000 Surveying XP
Levelling
There are many different trains of thought on what is the best item to level with for the Artisan tree. My own preference would be the Generic Crafting Tools. This grants 546 XP General Crafting XP per craft (in practice mode) and requires only 20 Metal [12/4/4] (86 crafts with 1,720 metal to fully master).
One popular variation is to fill out the Engineering tree [ 4xxx ] and then craft Personal Mineral Extractors. These grant 5,798 XP per craft but use five different resources (110 Metal / 60 Steel / 50 Ore / 15 Non-ferrous Metal / 15 Aluminium). They provide a lower XP per resource than Generic Crafting tools, but you only need to craft 7 in order to gain the missing 36,000 XP - and you can actually do these with practice mode off too which means you can either sell or use the extractors.
It's also worth adding that if you have the Novice
Entertainer skill (which all characters start with), selecting your character (hit F1 or click on your HAM bar) and using the Inspire ability, you can grant yourself a +12% XP bonus for three and a half hours.
I would also suggest for newer players to look at the Artisan Mission Terminals. Crafting missions reward 500 General Crafting XP and an amount of credits depending upon how far you have to travel to turn them in. Mos Eisley will normally have missions that need to be handed into Anchorhead (up to1400 credits per mission), Anchorhead has missions that need to be handed into Bestine (up to 800 credits per mission) and then Bestine back to Anchorhead and just travel back to Mos Eisley to repeat. It's not a massive amount of credits, but perfectly possible to grab a few thousand to cover training costs if you're not able to find somebody to train you up.
