The word Cycle is a good description when it comes to how The Cycle: Frontier handles crafting. Grabbing scrap from Fortuna III and turning it into useful gear and weapons that will help you get your hands on even more exotic crafting parts and equipment. It’s an endless and repetitive cycle that you’ll find yourself slotting into right from the beginning, but it’s the only way to get stronger.
The requirements aren't too complicated, and the process of putting together your junk into something useful is pretty streamlined. It can be a little odd to those used to more hands-on crafting mechanics in other games, but here's a guide to crafting in the Cycle: Frontier to explain it all.
Where Is Gear Crafted?
First things first, every game with crafting has a crafting spot or vendor to throw your pockets full of trash at. In the case of The Cycle: Frontier you'll be getting very friendly with the Gear Printer in the Hub on the Space Station. It's located on the right-hand side if you're facing the drop pod or left if the pod is at your back.
Inside the crafting menu of the printer is a deluge of options from basic consumables to armor and weaponry in a variety of flavors. Nothing comes for free and some of the recipes can be quite intense and expensive. So start dropping on the planet as soon as you can if you want to hit the crafting of The Cycle: Frontier hard.
How Does The Crafting Work?
The crafting mechanics in The Cycle: Frontier are pretty easy to get to grips with. All you need is the right parts and a couple of Krypto Marks to cover the cost, then you just hit the build button, and off it goes. Simple, easy, and not a lot of depth. Where things get odd is that instead of giving you the item right away, or letting you watch a progress bar fill, you need to wait.
Real-time has to pass before the item can be finished being built, and the more exotic and complicated the thing you want, the longer you need to wait. Most of the low-tier items will only cost a few minutes' worth of wait time. But unfortunately, the big toys are going to set you back a couple of hours. This can be sped up by using credits, and whilst it's a little pricey at first, the amount does decrease over time so if you're short on cash you'll need to wait until the clock runs out.
Crafting Tips
The crafting can be quite resource and time intensive, and for newbies, this can be a little overwhelming. It can be quite easy to blow all your credits and expensive items in the wrong spot. Plus grinding up the crafting parts for some of the rarer items can cost an eye-watering amount of resources and time.
The humdrum of the grind can quickly set in as you drop to the planet again and again. So to make grinding away at that work stone a little easier to handle and streamline your crafting goals, here are a couple of handy tips worth knowing about the Gear Printer.
Start Small
When you start to dig into it, the best crafting tip in The Cycle: Frontier you can have is to start small. Stronger weaponry and thicker armor might seem like the first port of call, but you’ll want to hold off on that for a while if you’re new.
In the early days, you’ll be dying frequently, and stronger equipment is extremely expensive and it will just burn through your digital wallet. Instead, opt for cheaper and lower-end items that will keep you alive and able to scavenge. As an example, small backpacks, a gun or two, and some health consumables will see you right for quite a while as well as let you stockpile your cash for later.
Know Your Recipies
Knowing your crafting recipes in The Cycle: Frontier can be incredibly helpful. There are a lot of items to scavenge and the things you can build all have their own unique requirements in order to fabricate them. Some are more difficult to get than others, but knowing what’s worth picking up and what to discard can save a lot of time.
For example, most metals and monster parts, Waterweed Filaments, Smart Mesh, and CPU’s are always worth grabbing. These can be recycled into armor or other useful equipment that you’ll be using on a regular basis. Take notes of what’s important or use a crafting tracker to find out where the stuff you need tends to spawn. Then once you have a solid cache of these stored away you can start aiming toward the more complex items much later on.
Set A Goal
Another great tip for crafting is to have a goal for what you want to make. Whether that's upgrading your current arsonal or saving towards some top-end equipment. It helps to have a plan when you crack open the Gear Printer.
You can lose a lot of time and resources running solo or even more if you're with a group, chasing an item that might not be worth it. Take some time to figure out what you want and what you'll need to scavenge to make it. Items are hard enough to come by on the planet below, so know what you need to get and where to get it.
Don't Shorten The Timer
The crafting timer can become your nemesis pretty early on, and it's always tempting to dump some cash to speed things up. But you really shouldn't do that. Shortening the timer is just burning money that could be better spent elsewhere.
This is especially important when it comes to the more exotic equipment as just crafting it alone can be pretty pricey. Once you've paid for the item the first time it's already yours, so just wait it out. Do more drops, or leave the game open and do something else to kill time. Just don't pay to shorten the timer, it's never worth it.
Endgame Loot Takes A Long Time
It really cannot be stressed enough just how much of a time investment The Cycle: Frontier is. Unless you dump some premium currency in, it’s going to take you a long while to get to that endgame equipment. The return on drops, whether that be resources or credits, is often small, the legendary weapons range from five to six-figure credit amounts, and to become strong enough to be able to get the parts you need to physically make it is a herculean task unto itself.
Whilst Legendary weapons are extremely powerful, you will rarely encounter anyone using them. The Faction Leader arsenal is much more varied in strength and type.
Even the act of crafting one legendary weapon will take hours in the printer, with each piece starting at 20 hours minimum. So imagine all of that time and resources spent on getting that high-end equipment, only to then potentially lose it forever in the next drop in a firefight or during a difficult extraction. Whilst they offer a massive bonus in combat, considering how much of a gamble it is, and how much of a time and resource investment they can be. It’s not worth making them in the long run.