Crafting

Item Identification

Monster-dropped weapons arrive unidentified — you can see the shape but not the magic. Item Identification reads them, and at Grandmaster it reads them the moment they drop without you asking. Until then, an unidentified pile is a pile you can't safely sell or wield.

How you train it Start the skill with unidentified items in your pack and it works through them. Loot runs out long before the skill does, so it is mostly learned on Practice Curios, a Tinkering craft: with nothing unidentified, it studies one of those instead and wears it down. The first fifty points come quickly. The second fifty are a long climb.

What you need Something unidentified in your backpack, or a Practice Curio.

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At 100 the skill identifies loot the instant it drops, without you starting anything. Until then an unidentified pile is a pile you cannot safely sell or wield.

How it climbs

What trains it: Every attempt, whether or not the item is identified
Up to 50: Quick: about half an hour of attempts
From 50 to 100: A long climb that slows all the way up. About 35 hours of attempts in all
With nothing unidentified: A Practice Curio (Tinkering, 250 attempts each) is studied instead

Rares

Five yard pieces found only by working this skill. Every piece you identify can turn one up — and once you have mastered the skill, every piece it reveals the moment it drops. Each stands in your yard or your house, carries its own story on its tooltip, and trades like any other item.

Piece	Its story
The Appraiser's Great Lens	A magnifying glass as wide as a shield on a brass arm, ground by a Vesper lens-maker for an appraiser who could not abide squinting. It shows every flaw in a gem and every nick in a blade, and it is kind about nothing. Nobody looks at their own face in it twice.
The Identified Mimic	Appraised by a novice as 'chest, wooden, ordinary', and by the novice's master, rather more quickly, as 'not a chest'. It has since been fed, named and taught to sit. It will look after your things if you ask it nicely, and give most of them back.
Three-Ball Pawn Sign	Three gilded balls on an iron bracket: the old sign of a trader who will tell you what a thing is worth and then offer you half. It hung over a shop in Buccaneer's Den that never once asked where anything came from. The balls are hollow. The shop was not above that either.
Idol of Disputed Worth	A squat little idol with ruby eyes, valued by three appraisers as priceless, worthless and cursed. All three were right in their way: nobody can afford it, nobody will buy it, and every one of its owners has had remarkably bad luck at cards.
Crystal of True Seeing	A shard of clear crystal on a carved stand that shows a thing as it truly is: through it a blade of Vanquishing burns like a coal, and a blade of Ruin like a wet match. Held up to a person it shows them as they truly are, too, which is why it lives outdoors now.

Other Crafting skills

Blacksmithing Carpentry Tinkering Alchemy Tailoring Inscription Cooking Cartography