First of all, I was given dozens of recipes (from chests I think) early in the game, before I could even craft. There was no hint that you shouldn't bother trying to figure out how to craft. Heck, the game even tells you when you get that pistol as Haytham that you should craft a double holster, hours (Game time) before you could do so.

Second, now that I can craft, is it just me or is it difficult to tell what you could craft if you bought ingredients from your serfs from the interface? I ended up just buying every ingredient so that it would show me what I could make. Good thing they are cheap.

Can't it be both?

Everytime I tried to do anything with it, it just said that my caravans (or whatever the fuck they're called) were unavailable. So I just ended up not using it during the game. I don't even know what the point of it is.

Yeah, it's pretty clunky and some of the stuff you make kept bugging out on me. I got the twin holsters but whenever I fast-travel or enter a different area it got rid of my other pistol so i had to go re-equip it, i think that got fixed but now now i was using twin dual pistols (if you get what I mean) and it keeps replacing them with Pitcairn's pistols. that game is rough

So for those who are telling me I'm wrong and it works great after a while, what am I missing? Will the game open up a new mechanic or did I miss something?

How am I supposed to even know what those little symbols in recipes mean, can I highlight them? And how am I supposed to know what my serfs produce and thus I could have if I left the crafting menu, bought them and came back?

It seems to me it should highlights items I don't have but could have from my serfs in another color, and if I select the recipe it offers to buy them (in the required amounts) for me so I can make the recipe. Otherwise it seems like I'm just going to have to write down what I could buy, then when I see a recipe I like which I could build if I bought some ingredients, I remember how much I need of each ingredient, then exit the crafting, buy the ingredients in those amounts and come back to crafting.

And will I ever be able to craft anywhere but at my house? And will I ever be able to fast travel to my house? Right now if I fast travel to my homestead I end up out on the peninsula and I have to run around the water to my house to get there.

I'm with you PridedWalnut, this game is rough. It has so many small problems (in the frontier near Concord, markers you set don't stay where you put them, you have to reset them over and over) that it's a huge turnoff. And by turning people off to this game, they will probably lose customers for sequels. They have to fix up this game to be actually enjoyable, even if it doesn't lead to increased profits off this game, simply because it will increase future sales of follow-on games.

My first caravan got attacked and it didn't say how I could prevent it, besides the fact that it happened while I was playing to game and unable to attend to it (kinda important mission, derailed by some nonsense of caravans). The game never told me afterwards how to prevent it or even how to get a new caravan, from what I've seen online it seems I just find the recipe or whatever to make them but I need a lot of various items and have to do some more side missions to even get the people/crafters required to make a new one.

So I stopped caring about doing anything in the game, because the game stopped caring about me doing said things. I haven't finished the game, and I think I'll finish it next year, maybe they will have released a patch that makes it run a bit better as well. It's a shame I can play every other video game on my PC at above 50+ pretty solidly with basically 99% of their settings maxed along with various tweaks to further different things (usually AA) yet AC3 runs so inconsistently. It's almost worse that it does run at 70+fps when you don't look at the city and instead are pointing the camera at the sky while climbing or in an area with less or no of the background city because when you do get into the meat of the game it makes the slow downs way more apparent. These are really my only complains to the game, afterall I did play every other game in the series and never felt bad about them really. Maybe it's a little lame that it seems desmonds story petters out in a very lazy fashion (jesus save us, the entire earth needs one brave man to deal with his issues and save everything) but the majority of the stuff is as solid as any other AC game has been so far really.

It's just really obtuse. You only need to engage in the game's economy on a deep level if you want all the ship upgrades.

Its a shit system that is unnecessary. You wont miss anything by skipping it.

It's a mess. Just stuff your naval convoys with enough bear pelts to buy all the Aquila upgrades and never look back.

And will I ever be able to fast travel to my house? Right now if I fast travel to my homestead I end up out on the peninsula and I have to run around the water to my house to get there.

It's not explained at all and has little effect on anything in the game. I never bothered with it. It's just kinda there.

@DJJoeJoe said:

My first caravan got attacked and it didn't say how I could prevent it, besides the fact that it happened while I was playing to game and unable to attend to it (kinda important mission, derailed by some nonsense of caravans). The game never told me afterwards how to prevent it or even how to get a new caravan, from what I've seen online it seems I just find the recipe or whatever to make them but I need a lot of various items and have to do some more side missions to even get the people/crafters required to make a new one.

Well, it's kind of useless info now, but if you had the farmers (black couple who were attacked) and the lumberjacks (I think you saved them up on the cliff edge in the south) in your village and you had bought all the items they have to offer, total cost of about £120, then you would have had enough stuff to make another caravan. But it's not like you'd know that since it doesn't tell you the difference between items you don't have because you didn't buy them off your citizens and the items that are much harder to obtain.

It just does a terrible terrible job of explaining any of this. From the very first mention of crafting where it tells you to make something you won't be able to make until you do about 10 more missions (including all that lovely training and retraining), it botches the whole thing.

To others, thank's for the tips about the pelts. If you really cannot craft or trade except by returning to your house, then I surely will not be doing much of this. It's good to know the little bit of work I do have to do though.

@Capum15 said:

@flippyandnod said:

And will I ever be able to fast travel to my house? Right now if I fast travel to my homestead I end up out on the peninsula and I have to run around the water to my house to get there.

That took me a while to figure out - there should be one of those circle icons denoting the Homestead house fast travel point. You probably have to zoom in a bit since it's covered up by another symbol. I kept wondering why I couldn't fast travel there and fiddled with the map a bit and found that out.

Oh, I do see that thing. But when I click it it only offers to set a marker there, it doesn't offer to fast travel. Maybe it will later?

Wow, even if I click the harbormaster, if I do so after having clicked one of the circle dots first, it doesn't offer to fast travel to the harbormaster, it instead just sets a marker. I have to leave the map and come back to get that to work. And it still doesn't work on the house.

This game is so buggy.

I have some trouble with it too. I'm in the eighth or so sequence, and I rarely am able to craft anything besides barrels and crates successfully. It's completely irritating, so I'm just selling all my pelts and such to buy weapons and forgetting this lazy, half-assed mess.

It is a clunky mess that isn't very rewarding. Some people will argue that it is a waste of time to even try to figure out and understand.

It's poorly designed, but it's not difficult to figure out.
 
The leftmost tab is resources your homestead generates. This is things like metal ore, lumber, etc. Buy everything you can there (generally 10x of each item). That makes crafting easier.
 
The rightmost tab is your convoys. If a convoy is attacked and you don't save it it means you lose the items it was transporting, but you don't have to make a replacement convoy. You can make more convoys and you can make naval convoys, and you can upgrade the carrying capacity of both.
 
The center tab is the crafting tab. 
 
Select a recipe. It will show a few icons along the bottom. On the very left will be one or more people. These are people that work in your homestead. That person will have a number on them. That indicates what level of upgrade that person has to have had. If the person is red it means you either don't have that person in your homestead or don't have them upgraded enough. You upgrade your homesteaders by doing homestead missions for them.
 
To the right of the person icons (the crafters) are the mats you need for crafting. If one of them is red it means you don't have it. Select it to see what you are missing. Use common sense to figure out if that's a raw component you haven't unlocked yet (such as gold ore) or if it's a component you have to craft (flint). Under recipes look at the section called Materials to get a picture of what sort of intermediate things you can craft to make a finished product. Make one or two of each of them if you want to, this can help you identify what you are actually able to produce or not.
 
It's ugly, it's not user friendly, and it's clunky.  It's not impenetrable.

@DarknessMyOldFriend said:

Use common sense to figure out if that's a raw component you haven't unlocked yet (such as gold ore) or if it's a component you have to craft (flint)

Or if it's a component you must buy from your serfs at your homestead but you have not bought any of. A component which will appear red even though it is readily available.

Also, flint is not something that is crafted, in the real world it's an ore (rock) that is collected/mined. So common sense would lead me to believe I buy it from my serfs. But apparently you don't. And I'm not the only one fooled by this.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/621797-assassins-creed-iii/64587309

This, IMHO, is a big reason why some people cannot figure out how to make much stuff in the crafting, because they don't know that some of those red items will never be found nor will ever show up as a recipe. It will perpetually be red until you get the right people on your homestead and then buy their output.

@Capum15 said:

@flippyandnod said:

And will I ever be able to fast travel to my house? Right now if I fast travel to my homestead I end up out on the peninsula and I have to run around the water to my house to get there.

That took me a while to figure out - there should be one of those circle icons denoting the Homestead house fast travel point. You probably have to zoom in a bit since it's covered up by another symbol. I kept wondering why I couldn't fast travel there and fiddled with the map a bit and found that out.

Oh, I do see that thing. But when I click it it only offers to set a marker there, it doesn't offer to fast travel. Maybe it will later?

Wow, even if I click the harbormaster, if I do so after having clicked one of the circle dots first, it doesn't offer to fast travel to the harbormaster, it instead just sets a marker. I have to leave the map and come back to get that to work. And it still doesn't work on the house.

This game is so buggy.

@Capum15 said:

Hmm. I haven't played the game in a while, but I know I was able to fast travel to the house at some point, so maybe you do need to play more to use it.And yeah, that other glitch is weird. The only bug I've really encountered / can remember was the one where it sets your marker to a random spot after collecting a view point or chest.

And it deletes your marker altogether after dying. Of course, that goes hand in hand with collecting a viewpoint on the frontier, because you can't see the ground from trees and climbing down trees doesn't even seem to work. So instead I just leap in the direction I think maybe I saw a pile of leaves in and hope for the best. At at least beats trying to climb down (R1+circle) which kills you 100% of the time.

Having to climb down something or standing a big chance of dying getting down really puts a damper on the fun of climbing tall objects. Ubi seemed to know this with previous games, hence the prevalence of haystacks, somewhere I guess they forgot?

@Capum15 said:

@flippyandnod said:

And will I ever be able to fast travel to my house? Right now if I fast travel to my homestead I end up out on the peninsula and I have to run around the water to my house to get there.

That took me a while to figure out - there should be one of those circle icons denoting the Homestead house fast travel point. You probably have to zoom in a bit since it's covered up by another symbol. I kept wondering why I couldn't fast travel there and fiddled with the map a bit and found that out.

I found it now. A little later in the game (when you age after going to sea) one of those circles with an up arrow inside it (fast travel icon, like the sewers in AC2/B/R) appears on the carriage outside the house. You can fast travel to that from the ship.

The other bug (fast travel to harbormaster) also corrected itself at that time.

It's a goddamn mess. There's only one or two actual things that are of any use and the rest is garbage that's requires too much effort to produce and does nothing for you.

Its garbage, you can craft tons of shit that sells for less than pelts. And since you can only do so much trading at once you can just keep selling pelts. It wouldn't be so bad if you could actually make something else out of 90% of the craftables, but there isn't. The crafting seems like it was built for a different game to me.

Yes, seriously. I'm cleaning up on deer pelts. They're worth like like 5x what anything I can actually craft is worth.

Why does it cost more each time I craft a crate? They're £125 now and they only sell for £125 so after taxes I'm taking a bath and that's if I don't lose them en route (35% chance).

I was hoping to get my craftsman up to a higher level so he could make other stuff but now I'm running out of patience with all the crafting/trading in the game.

Even fully figured out I find the crafting system to be extremely unintuitive and cumbersome to use. There is way too much of going back and forth and having to remember what is best made for whom, so you don't end up wasting money on making things nobody wants. I really hope that in the next game they make the process less tedious and time consuming. I really like the idea behind it, but as of now it is a very inefficient system.

I really loved AC3 but the whole homestead felt super clunky and the crafting was terrible.

the UI is just fucked

Why do they keep putting crafting in the Assassin's Creed games? Or an economy, for that matter.

Why do they keep putting crafting in the Assassin's Creed games? Or an economy, for that matter.

@BisonHero said:

@Snail

Why do they keep putting crafting in the Assassin's Creed games? Or an economy, for that matter.

Because this is the one series Ubi makes that isn't in a fairly well-defined genre, so they just toss in whatever ideas that are trendy lately or that the devs feel like putting in a game. At this point, if somebody wants to add a system to AC, I don't think anybody at Ubi is capable of saying no anymore.

I guess after putting tower-defense in there, anything else is less stupid.

Like most of the rest of the game, it's badly thought out and poorly executed.

The quality of the franchise dipped pretty badly with Revelations, but AC3 has it in a vertical dive. Basically everything they've added to the game is either pointless or awful (or both), and they've fucked up most of the stuff that used to be good too. Shitty story, awful characters (especially Connor - wow), boring as hell cities, badly thought out optional objectives, infuriating checkpoints for trying to complete those optional objectives, and the whole frontier bit is just subpar Red Dead Redemption.

The dumb ship mini-game is probably the best thing about the whole game, because it slightly reminds me of Pirates! and the storms are neat. The crafting / trading system is so bad that they should be embarassed it ever made it into the final product.

It's shitty. It does have its perks though, so check it out and make som badass sword, daggers and guns. Some good looking recipes neer the end of the game. For money just ship pelts. Wolfs are everywhere, and sell for a lot. Just go for a low risk salesman and you're good.

Of course, only a little bit after I asked that money ceased to matter anyway, as is the case in Ubi games. I wasn't using the money for anything but ship upgrades and I had all those after a while, so I don't need money anymore.

The crafting is a total washout. I wish Ubi would just leave useless stuff like that (and the colony takeovers) out of the game. Spend more time polishing the missions instead.

I didn't enjoy the crafting. It was my least favorite thing to do in the game.

It's a mess, yes. The crafting menus are counter-intuitive. Even when you know what the hell you're doing they're still cumbersome to navigate. I'm pretty sure that crafting system was put in at the very last minute.