#r2mich2

First thing’s first, why is it important to know how to craft in TF2? To put it simply, crafting can get you free cosmetics, weapons, and a couple other things within the game. The only thing you are spending is your time! 

Playtime in TF2 will grant you free Normal Quality weapons. These weapons will add up over time and you will eventually begin to get duplicates! These duplicate items can be crafted into Scrap Metal or Class Tokens. Metal and tokens are able to be directly used for either the creation of cosmetics, weapons, or used as currency within the TF2 trading market. 

So how do you craft?

Step 1: go to your Items tab on the main menu! 

Step 2: Click on the Crafting tab! (Pretty self explanatory).

From here you will have multiple tabs for where you can craft. Most of your crafting will be done on the first tab that I have shown here. It is hard to miss because it is the first one that shows up on the crafting menu. I have the tab for it outlined in orange as well!

From here, you have many options (as you can see). These can get confusing if you have no idea what they mean or what they’re for. Understandably, I would avoid crafting if I had no idea what was going on in this menu too!

So, the beginning to almost all crafting is smelting class weapons (unless you specifically want a token, which I will get to). 

Smelting class weapons will create scrap metal. The requirements for creating scrap metal is two weapons from the same class, IE: You would need two weapons from Scout. This is shown below:

By putting in two weapons from the Scout class, I am able to craft for one pile of scrap metal. Cool! From here you will craft reclaimed metal. Reclaimed metal requires the use of 3 piles of scrap. This means you need 6 weapons to create one piece of reclaimed metal. 

From reclaimed metal you can craft refined metal. Refined metal is there things get to be fun with crafting/trading! To craft refined metal, you will need 3 piles of reclaimed metal. This means you will need 18 weapons just to create one pile of refined metal.

To create a crude diagram of how much it takes to get refined metal, here’s a crude diagram I made in 5 minutes!

It’s hideous but I find that this is a good way to show exactly how much goes into refined metal. Refined metal can be used for many things in the TF2 community. First and foremost, it is a legitimate form of currency within the TF2 economy. Traders will use refined metal, reclaimed metal, and scrap metal to price items on sites like backpack.tf. The current price of refined is $0.04 USD. This is a small amount but you would be surprised what you can trade for using refined! You can even see that you can get keys using refined metal! TF2 has its own economy!

Remember what I said about TF2 crafting not being a legitimate form of income? This is what I meant! The good news though is that you can put in less money and get more through the usage of crafting. I highly recommend everyone learn to use it for things like trading. If you would like to learn more about how to trade on Backpack.tf, I have a guide posted Here.

So what about the other parts of Crafting?

What if you want to ignore trading altogether and create things for yourself from your own bare hands? You can do that too! TF2 allows you to craft weapons and cosmetics for yourself. They will only be normal quality (someone correct me if I’m wrong), but you don’t have to pay anything for them.

To craft weapons, you will need a combination of things depending on what you are looking to craft. If you just want to craft a weapon for a specific slot for a specific class, you will need a Class Token, Slot Token, and one pile of scrap. This option can be found on the 2nd crafting tab: Common Items.

Slot Tokens and Class Tokens are very simple. Much like scrap, they are made from weapons. To create a Slot Token, you will need 3 weapons equipped in the same loadout slot. For example, if you wanted to craft a Primary Weapon for Soldier, you would need 3 Primary weapons from any class to create the token. There are no class requirements for Slot Tokens.

To craft a Class Token you will need 3 weapons used by the same class. They do not need to be from the same slot in a load out.

From here, you can use those tokens to craft class weapons and class cosmetics. Certain class weapons can also be crafted directly on the Common Items menu. These items will tell you what they require to be crafted. The list of directly craft-able weapons is a bit weird so I suggest you check it out for yourself! The items needed to craft a specific weapon depends on the weapon itself and will require things like metal and other weapons. 

Cosmetics can be created in the Rare items tab.

As you can see here, there are many different things in the Rare Items tab. But to craft cosmetics, or Headgear, you will need 3 pieces of Refined Metal. So for the TF2 economy equivalent of 0.12 USD, you can get a random cosmetic for a random class! This does not include ALL cosmetics available so if you want something specifically you will probably want to get into trading.

If you want to craft one for a specific class, you will need a class token and 4 pieces of Refined metal. The craftable class headgear can be found in this wikipedia link: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Random_crafting_recipes. To my knowledge this also includes all craftable cosmetics.

Otherwise, that’s pretty much the basics for crafting! There are many other things you can craft or do with your crafted materials within TF2, but I will let you guys find those out for yourself! If you have any questions please shoot one to the askbox and I will get back to you!