Bowcraft and Fletching are two aspects of a single skill used to make a variety of bows and all types of feathered ammunition. For bows that means arrows and crossbow bolts, but the fletcher also creates fukiya darts for ninjas to use with their carpenter-crafted fukiya blowguns. Kindling and the imbuing ingredient ‘Elven Fletching’ can also be made by a bowyer.
Tools and Resources
Everything you need can be bought from an NPC Bowyer’s shop, but that can prove costly. You will need fletching tools, those made by a GM tinker are desirable as they will have more uses than store-bought. You will need wood, lumberjack is therefore a useful skill for a bowyer to consider training. Feathers, unsurprisingly, come from birds; use a sharp implement on the corpse of a bird or harpy to find feathers in its loot. Birds and harpies in Felucca have twice as many feathers as those in other facets. A further skill the bowcrafter would benefit from is armslore, which gives a damage bonus to weapons.
Recipes
The full range of items crafted by a bowyer can be found on the page Bowcraft Craftables. You will see that some items require that you have read a recipe to be able to craft them. These recipes are obtained as rewards from quests. For this reason it is suggested that you incorporate these quests into your training regime, allowing you to both gain in skill and collect the recipes. There is also the potential to obtain crafting talismans or even a runic fletching kit as you train.
Bulk Orders
Bulk orders for Bowcraft became available in late 2016, publish 95, details of the system are explained in Bulk Orders and orders and rewards relating to Bowcraft can be found by following the link at the bottom of this page.
Training
Buy your initial 30 points from a Bowyer NPC, collect a pack animal full of wood and head to Heartwood.
- 30 to 35 make shafts, gather feathers and undertake the Heartwood quest ‘Lethal Darts’
- 35 to 55 Take the Heartwood quest ‘A Simple Bow’
- 55 to 60 Take a break from Heartwood and make Fukiya Darts
- 60 to 70 Take the Heartwood quest ‘Ingenious Archery (part I)
- 70 to 80 Make Composite Bows, you can sell these to the bowyer in town
- 80 to 90 Make Heavy Crossbows for the Heartwood quest ‘Ingenious Archery (part II)
- 90 to 100 Make Repeating Crossbows for the Heartwood quest ‘Ingenious Archery (part III)
Jukan Slayer Bows
The archer ‘Juka Lord’ has in his loot what appears to be a plain, no properties, normal bow. Do not disregard this seemingly useless item. With the help of a gear made by a tinker (or even looted from a golem) a GM bowyer can transform this into a bow with a slayer property. To do this double click the bow then target the gear – but do not be too hasty to perform this transformation.
Unmodified Juka Lord bows can be re-forged with a runic fletching kit and/or imbued and then possibly even enhanced with special woods after they are modified, giving the potential for 6 or 7 item properties. The downside is the slayer applied is random so you could expend a lot of imbuing ingredients or charges on a runic tool only to end up with a ‘troll slayer’ bow.
When modified the bow changes color, as illustrated, the bow was imbued with 5 properties, including undead slayer and 30% swing speed increase, then modified, which added the property ‘Earth Elemental Slayer’. Finally enhanced with ash taking swing speed to 40%