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Crafting turns what you mine into what you build and sell in SpaceCraft. It is the bridge between gathering raw materials and assembling ships or trading on the marketplace.
What You Craft
You craft raw materials into valuable materials or ship parts. Refined materials and components are both useful in their own right and as the building blocks for ships. The same crafted goods can be kept for your own use, traded, or sold.
How Crafting Fits the Loop
Input | Output | Use |
|---|---|---|
Refined materials | Higher-value goods to use, trade, or craft further. | |
Refined materials | Components assembled into custom ships. | |
Items to sell on the player-driven marketplace. |
Crafting and Ship Building
Crafted parts are what you assemble into ships. Each component you craft and add to a vessel impacts its performance, so what you craft directly shapes how your ship flies and what it can do. See Ship Building and Blueprints for assembly and ready-made designs.
Crafting and the Economy
Crafting also feeds the player-driven economy. You can sell refined materials and ship parts on the marketplace, where every transaction affects prices. Skilled crafters can build a business around supplying parts and materials to other players. See Trading and the Player-Driven Economy.
Refining at a Station
Crafting begins by refining raw materials at a space station. The Smelter converts ore and nuggets into ingots, taking about five seconds per ingot, and The Company charges a commission of roughly 15 percent of the output’s market value. The Workshop then turns ingots into components, tools, and ship modules, with a smaller commission that scales with the value of the crafted item.
As a worked example, the Scanalyzer Alpha (an early scanning tool) is crafted from 1 Small Module Kit, 1 Iron Sheet, and 2 Wire, which you assemble from refined ingots. See Space Stations and Progression: Permits and Experience for where refining fits and how recipes unlock.
Step | Building | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Smelting | Smelter | Ore/nuggets to ingots, about 5s per ingot, around 15% Company commission. |
Crafting | Workshop | Ingots to components, tools, and modules; smaller commission by item value. |
Crafting With Liquids
Crafting that uses liquids happens in a Chemical Factory. One confirmed recipe is the Vanadium Battery, made from Sulfuric Acid, Vanadium, and Graphite, which extends battery life in dark environments. Sulfuric Acid can also be produced from Water and Sulfur. See Liquid Resources for the liquid system.
Announced Changes to Workstations
Announced, not shipped. The developer has previewed a rework of how the Smelter and Workshop behave. None of this has shipped. It was published on August 21, 2026 as a preview of work in progress, and no build has released it, so the game does not behave this way yet. Treat the detail below as direction, and check Updates and Patch Notes for whether it has landed.
Change | What it would mean |
|---|---|
Production continues after you leave | You would no longer have to stand at a workstation waiting for a progress bar to fill. |
Queueing system | A queue would automatically produce the intermediate resources a recipe needs, instead of you crafting each step by hand. |
Five-minute manual cap | Manual crafting would be limited to recipes taking under five minutes. Longer production is intended to run through base automation. |
Clearer recipe requirements | The interface would list everything a recipe needs and disable the craft button when something is missing. |
Retuned timings | Automated crafting times would come down and manual crafting times would rise slightly, so automation stops being the slower option. |
The reasoning the developer gave is worth noting because it explains the direction: manual crafting had become more efficient than automation even for recipes meant to benefit from a production line, which made building one feel pointless. The retuning is meant to give manual crafting and base automation distinct jobs rather than having one dominate.