Gear up
You will need a crafting tool that covers all of your skills (i.e. prospector, forester, tailor) instead of 3 different tools that eat away at your inventory space. These tools can either be crafted by your Metalsmith, bought at the AH, or you can buy a Universal Toolkit in the Lotro Store (or be lucky with your daily presents).
Now you’re good to go!
The first thing you need to do is gather mats. Which you basically do by questing – turn on your Track Mines skill and empty all nodes you pass by.
Yes, empty, as the nodes only respawn if they are emptied. Feel free to pick any wood you see, but don’t use the Track Wood skill if you are not gathering for something special.
Pick any wild flowers you see (can be used for dyes), but skip crops like strawberries, rhubarbs and such. These only take up inventory space… Your farmer can make them when you need them, or (like rhubarb and honey) buy them from a supplier.
You will get hides a-plenty when you kill animals. Keep those!
You will also get a lot of other – more or less useful – crafting mats just by questing and picking ore/wood. These can be normal ingredients, rare components or crit items.
All crafting mats has a green background with a frame of lighter green.
KEEP’EM! Send them on to the alt that can use them (read the tooltip), or donate to your kin when you’re done levelling your own crafting skills.
When do I get to craft?
Now. You get to craft now 😊.
Or as soon as you have some crafting mats to start with, and are close to a crafting station.
The first thing you want to do is get your Prospector and Forester skill up so that you can gather the next level of ore/wood.
PRO TIP #1
You only need to fill the first tier of your Prospector and Forester to be able to handle the next tier.
Be happy! Send the leftover mats to your other alts so that they can level their skills as well.
PRO TIP #2
You do want to fill both tiers on your profession skill (Tailor etc) as you will only be able to crit “next tier” if “previous tier” is full.
Bella's Lotro 