How to Craft a Lightsaber

As a Jedi or a Sith, you’ll naturally receive your first lightsaber as you follow your class story, at the end of your first planet. After that, you’ll occasionally receive new lightsaber models from various quests across the galaxy. Apart from questing or buying a lightsaber from another player on the GTN, you can also craft your own lightsabers and double-bladed lightsabers using the Artifice crafting crew skill.

Picking a Crew Skill

You can pick up Artifice in the Strongholds & Crew Skills section of the fleet after you leave your first planet, by talking to the Artifice trainer. When you talk to a crew skills trainer for the first time, a codex will pop up that tells you about the skill and what its two complementary gathering skills are. The two gathering crew skills that go with Artifice are Treasure Hunting and Archaeology, which allow you to get the materials to craft Artifice items.

If you are on a free-to-play account, you can only choose one crew skill per character, so you might take Artifice on one character, and Archaeology on another and have them work together. If you are a former subscriber, you’ll have two crew skill slots available but you can get a third unlocked by using a referral code, I’ve linked mine in the description of this video, and if you’re a subscriber you naturally have 3 unlocked per character, so you can take all three complementary crew skills, Archaeology, Treasure Hunting and Artifice all on one character.

Gathering Materials

You can start gathering materials to craft a lightsaber right away with Archaeology and Treasure hunting by sending your companions out to gather. Press B on your keyboard to open the crew skills window, then click either the Archaeology or Treasure Hunting symbol. You will have a few Grade 1 missions available to start, and as your companions successfully return from missions, your gathering skill level will go up, and more missions will become available. Archaeology also allows you to pick up any crystals and archaeological finds you see find on the ground while you are out and about questing – if you right click any gathering node, your companion will go and grab it for you. Many players take these types of Gathering missions – Archaeology, Scavenging, Biochem and Slicing – so they can pick materials up off the ground to sell or use later for crafting. You can buy and sell materials on the GTN – so if you have credits and don’t want to spend time gathering, you can buy materials from other players who have gathered them.

Your crafting materials will automatically go in to your Materials bay which you can get to from your inventory. This Materials bay is shared by all your characters on your server – any materials you pick up will be placed in your Materials bay, and anything you craft will draw from your Materials bay.

Crafting Components

To start crafting, press the B key to open the crew skills window, and the Artifice symbol beside a companion. This will open the crafting schematics window which shows everything you have available to craft – when you chose Artifice as a crew skill, you got some basic schematics to help get you started. We’re going to start by crafting a Rubat Artifice Bonded Attachment, a schematic we got from the Artifice trainer by default, which requires 2 Lost Artifact Fragments, 2 Fibrous Nylite Solutions and 2 Rubat Crystals. Since this is artifice, the materials will likely come from either Archaeology or Treasure Hunting, Artifice’s two complementary skills. To find out what type of crafting materials these are, hover over them. When you look at the tooltip by hovering over them, The Lost Artifacts fragments are Grade 1 Artifact Fragments and the Rubat Crystals are Grade 1 Power Crystals. If you open up your Archaeology missions, you’ll notice that the missions tell you what they reward – in this case, your first two available missions reward Grade 1 Power Crystals and Artifact fragments, which is exactly what we are looking for, so we’ll send our companions out to get some by double clicking the mission.

The Fibrous Nylite Solution, the last material we need, is a white-bordered material. White-bordered materials are a bit different – you can either send your companions to gather them if you have a mission available for them, or buy them directly from a vendor called the Crew Skills Trade Vendor in the Strongholds & Crew Skills section of the fleet who sells them pretty cheap.

Once you have all the materials you need, go back to your bonded attachment schematic for Artifice, and click craft on the bottom right, and your companion will start crafting. Once your companion is finished crafting it, the item will show up in your inventory.

Crafting a Lightsaber

The first lightsaber you can craft is a Fire Node Lightsaber or Double-bladed lightsaber which requires Artifice level 10. You won’t be able to see it on the Artifice trainer yet when you first pick up Artifice, because your crafting level is too low. As you craft Rubat Artifice Bonded Attachments, your crafting level will go up, and once you reach Artifice level 10 the schematic will be available from the Artifice trainer. The Fire Node lightsaber requires 4 Rubat Artifice Bonded Attachments and 4 Fire Nodes to craft. You can craft the four bonded attachments yourself, and when you hover over the Fire Node you’ll see it’s a gemstone, which is a type of material that can be gathered through the Treasure Hunting gathering skill. Once you’ve crafted your four bonded attachments, and gotten a hold of four Fire Nodes, you’ll be able to craft your first lightsaber! Many types of crafted items require this two-step process – first craft components, then use the components to craft useable items.

As you level up your artifice, usually by crafting different types of bonded attachments, more schematics will show up on the crew skills trainer. Crafting low-level schematics won’t help you level up your crafting skill – you must craft more difficult items over time, and the easiest way to see if crafting a schematic will raise your crafting level is by looking at the colors of the schematic in the schematics window – if it’s grey, you won’t gain any crafting levels by crafting it, and crafting orange items will give you the biggest boost your crafting level.

The fire Node lightsaber is meant for characters who are at level 10 or slightly higher, but higher level lightsabers will become available over time.

One important thing to know though is that these craftable lightsabers are not moddable – this means they are locked to the level they are meant for, and they are not useful to you when you are a higher level in the game. There are only a small handful of lightsabers that are moddable. Some of the schematics I’ve found on the GTN that you can buy from other players include the Custom-built Lightsaber and Double-bladed Saber, the Elegant Modified Lightsaber and Double-bladed Saber, and the Midlithe Lightsaber and Saberstaff. Another thing to note is that you do not need high-level equipment while you are leveling up in the game – crafting is something fun and supplementary you can do to gear yourself or friends up, but it isn’t required.

As an Artificer, you can also craft all kinds of other cool things – dyes, color crystals for your lightsaber, relics you can equip and hilts you can put inside moddable lightsabers to upgrade them.