Crafting In Outriders: How To Upgrade Your Weapons And Armor

Players diving into People Can Fly's Outriders have a ton of options at their disposal. Even after choosing which of the game's character classes they want to play as, gamers will find a whole world of weapons and armor to upgrade and equip in their battle to save Enoch. If you're going to beat some of the game's tougher bosses, you may want to go ahead and equip auto-looting and stock up on crafting materials. 

Crafting in Outriders is relatively easy, but the multiple options can be a bit confusing at first. Instead of using the crafting menu to build all new equipment, crafting is used in this game to improve upon the weapons and armor that you already have. 

Upon meeting the character of Dr. Zehedi, you'll be able to open the crafting menu for the first time. As illustrated out by YouTuber Vulkan, choosing the weapon or gear that you want to modify will immediately present you with several different options: Improve Rarity, Raise Attributes, Mod Gear, Swap Variant, and Level Up. Selecting one of these options will show you which resources you need to make your upgrades. Here's how each of those work.

As displayed in a tutorial from Ebontis, improving the rarity of an item has two significant effects. It not only raises the strength of the item (making armor more durable and guns more powerful), but it also opens up an extra slot for Mods. Adding Mods to a piece of equipment will grant players exciting new class-specific abilities (more on that in a bit). To improve the rarity of Unusual items, players need Iron or Leather, which can be found by dismantling items or killing enemies. Meanwhile, you'll need to use Titanium to improve the rarity of a Rare class item.

As the name would imply, "Raise Attribute" allows players to boost the power of a specific effect or stat for a piece of gear. In the case of a specific mask in Vulkan's tutorial, spending enough Anomaly Shards can have the effect of boosting a player's health or close range damage while that upgraded mask is equipped. Of course, different items will have different attributes that can be upgraded. 

Anomaly Shards can be acquired by dismantling gear, so get ready to trash a bunch of unwanted loot in order to craft better equipment.

As explained by Ebontis, Mods can be unlocked when dismantling a piece of equipment containing that Mod. These Mods can then be slotted in as a boost for other pieces of equipment at any point in the game. Much like with improving rarity, swapping mods will cost resources. Ebontis recommends that players look into using Mods to find builds that work for their play-style, particularly since modding costs fewer resources than some of the other crafting projects in the game.

"Swap Variant" allows players to change the specific way in which a weapon or piece of armor performs. For instance, players could want to change a gun to have better stability, or to make it fully automatic. Doing so will cost a good amount of resources, but it will allow players to build a loadout that matches how they want to approach the next mission. 

Lastly, leveling up is pretty self-explanatory. Each time a weapon or gear piece is leveled up, all of its stats improve. Guns will deal more damage and have a higher range, while armor will be able to take much more of a beating. In other words, it's very much worth your time to scavenge every last bit of leather and metal you can find.