New World Engineering guide: Tips and tricks

The world can’t exist without engineers, and New World, the freshly released and already popular MMO from Amazon Games, is no exception to this rule. Engineering is a crafting trade skill that can be leveled up at either the Workshop or the Forge.

At the Workshop, the Engineering skill is used for crafting ranged weapons, ranged ammo, tools, and different qualities of repair kits. Over at the Forge, Engineering is used to spears and hatchets. Like any other crafting skill, it will take some time and plenty of resources until you can freely craft items of Rare or Epic quality.

Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to approach Engineering in New World, from the Gathering skills you need to keep up with to the items you should be crafting first to speed up the process.

Resources/other trade skills to focus on

Similar to Weaponsmithing and Armoring, you’ll have to do a little bit of everything to get the resources necessary to start Engineering. This means you’ll need to keep up on Logging, Mining, Harvesting, and Tracking and Skinning. Most, if not all, Engineering recipes will require wood and hide refined into timber and leather, as well as some amount of cloth and/or metal. Wood and hide you’ll find anywhere, but early on, you can seek out iron ore in highland areas and hemp in forest or grassland areas. You can see where these zones are in the Resource Locations section of your map.

Like with the other crafting skills, we recommend the items to craft (once you get your hands on some iron ore) to be a full set of iron gathering tools. These will help your Gathering skills in the early game and crafting those items increases your Engineering skill, up to level seven if you craft a full set. A full set includes a skinning knife, harvesting sickle, logging axe, mining pick, and fishing pole.

What Engineering items should I craft first?

Once you’ve gotten your full set of iron tools and have amassed a nice sum of resources, it’s time to start crafting. But where to start? Well, since resources like ore and fiber are rarer than wood and hides, you’ll want to prioritize recipes that use as little iron and cloth as possible. It’s much easier for you to get more timber and leather if you need more.

Here are a couple of recipes to consider early on that have no Engineering skill level requirement:

• Treated Wood Bow: 12 Timber, three Coarse Leather, two Linen. Adds 204 Engineering points.
• Treated Wood Fishing Pole: 12 Timber, three Coarse Leather, two Linen. Adds 204 Engineering points.
• Iron Spear: 10 Timber, five Iron Ingots, two Coarse Leather. Adds 204 Engineering points.

These three recipes are relatively low cost when it comes to scarcer resources like iron and linen, but they reward the largest number of Engineering skill points compared to any other starting recipe. As you progress through the game and level up these skills, you can create higher tiers of these recipes that create steel or Starmetal versions of these items. These versions will reward you with much more Engineering skill.

Other tips for Engineering

While we don’t want to dissuade you from exploring the Aeternum continent in New World, for the purposes of crafting, it’s best to call one settlement home for a few reasons. First, you can keep all your crafting materials in the storage shed and grab items directly from the shed when you actually go to craft, freeing up your inventory to go out and collect more resources. Additionally, you can take advantage of several Territory Standing upgrade benefits, including faster gathering times and lower crafting fees.

As for the process of gathering items, if you have some coin weighing you down, you could buy some of the basic crafting materials directly from the Trading Post. Some of the costs are a little inflated since the game just launched (1.35 coins per single piece of timber on Valhalla, at time of writing), but these will likely go down over time as more listings are added. If you convince your Company to make you the lead Engineer, perhaps they can lend you some gold to get your skill level up quickly.

What’s great about New World is that you can collect the resources you need while running around and completing quests, so don’t feel obligated to drop your quests just to work on resource gathering. Enjoy yourself.