When you first start Outriders – or rather when you first gain your abilities and see Enoch beyond the almost idyllic glade you first arrived on – you’ll be using rusted out weapons and ragged armour. Rift Town is embedded in a thirty-year war, and they don’t have quality supplies to hand out, even to newly awoken superheroes.
As you progress through the game, you’ll start finding rarer and better quality gear that might come with added benefits and mods to improve your chance at survival. These will appear sparsely at first, but by the time you reach the First City, you’ll probably have collected a few.
So, it can be a little surprising at the end of Salvation questline that you can now access the Outriders crafting menu through Dr Zahedi. And it can be even more surprising to learn that it’s actually a pretty complicated affair. But don’t worry if you’re confused, as this guide will break down everything you can do in the Outriders crafting menu.
Other Outriders guides: Devastator, Trickster, Technomancer, Pyromancer, Five Tips and Tricks for Beginners
How Crafting Works In Outriders
When you first start to Zahedi and open up the crafting menu, you’ll see several options along the screen’s right. Improve Rarity, Raise Attributes, Mod Gear, Swap Variant, and Level Up. Outriders doesn’t explain what each of these means until you start experimenting with them, and even then, you can still feel a little in the dark.
Each affects your equipment differently, so we’ve broken down exactly what each one means below. To do anything to your equipment, though, you’ll need resources first, the most basic of which are iron and leather. Iron can be collected from metal deposits found glowing in the game world. Leather can be picked up from the defeated wildlife of Enoch. You can also get iron by dismantling weapons and leather from disassembling armour.
Titanium, a higher tier resource used to level up and improve the rarity of your gear, is mainly harvested from dismantling epic or legendary gear, but you can sometimes find it by defeating elites.
Shards, the last resource to collect, is exclusively found by taking apart your old weapons, so make sure you’re doing that regularly and not just selling it off to the merchants.
Improve Rarity
To put it as simply as possible, improving the rarity increases the item’s colour rarity in question. The most basic items (white) cannot be improved in this manner, but you wouldn’t want to waste the resources on them anyway. Green will become blue (rare), and blue will become purple (epic). Epic and Legendary weapons cannot have their rarity improved.
Improving the rarity does more than simply change the background colour, though. It will also improve the primary stat for the item too. This will be its firepower for a weapon, and for armour, it is armour, oddly enough.
On top of that, improving the rarity will also add more mod slots to the item. You’ll also be offered three random mods to fill the slot, but you can always replace them in the Mod Gear menu. Improving the rarity of an item costs leather for armour and iron for weapons, as well as some titanium as you get to the higher tiers.
Raise Attributes
Your items’ attributes are the random bonuses you’ll get, which you can see listed beneath the item’s image. Each attribute has six possible upgrades available that you can see charted in the menu. You’ll also see how much the upgrade will increase the attributes.
Upgrading these attributes cost specific shards, which are gathered by dismantling items with the same attributes. You’ll also get some of the shards spent back if and when you dismantle an item you’ve raised the attributes of.
Mod Gear
This is probably the most commonly used menu in the Outriders crafting options. Blue rarity items and above will have at least one mod slot, which offers an additional bonus or effect when you have the item in question equipped. These can vary wildly, and the armour sets even have class unique mods that can be used.
But if you don’t like the selection you’ve currently got, you can replace them in the Mod Gear menu. It costs leather for armour and iron for weapons to replace a mod.
You collect mods by dismantling items that have mods attached. When you dismantle a mod for the first time, you’ll be able to add it to as many items as you would like in the future. That makes it very worth your while to dismantle items you’re not using with good mods so you can use them in the future. Just remember that mod effects don’t stack, so there is no point in having the same one on two different items equipped on your character.
Swap Variant
Possibly the most confusing title in the Outriders crafting options is swapping the variant. However, it’s actually really simple.
As you may have noticed already, some weapons have different firing styles than others. Some assaults and submachine guns fire in burst rounds, while others are fully automatic. Some shotguns only have three shells before reload, and others have six and so on. What you might not have noticed is that these are dictated by the variant and can be changed in this menu.
So, if you find yourself using a burst fire weapon when you really want to unload your entire clip at once, use the swap variant option to do the trick. It’ll cost a bit of iron, but it can really help you find the most optimal weapon for your playstyle.
Level Up
The very last option on the Outriders crafting menus is to level up your item. Similarly to improving the item’s rarity, doing this will upgrade the item’s firepower or armour each time you do it. Obviously, though, it doesn’t change the rarity itself.
Instead, it increases the item’s level. You won’t be able to improve the item’s level beyond your own level, and each upgrade will cost leather or iron and titanium after a certain level. Levelling up the weapon will also reroll the strength of the attributes attached to the item. This isn’t always going to be for the better, so it does become a gamble if the numbers are already good in that regard.
An item’s level dictates how many attribute bonuses it does get, though, so sometimes upgrading an item will add a new attribute to it as well as rerolling the valuables already there.
