- Mar 13, 2019
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Welcome to the crafting guide for 1.07-1.08! So far most information on crafting in these patches was spread across various forum posts in the SPF and in the minds of the more experienced time travellers.
The last guide on crafting in 1.07 was written about a decade ago by @WoRG who has probably crafted more in 1.07 and 1.08 than anyone who ever played 1.07-1.08 has together. His guide was the starting point for mine and I owe him a lot, especially for keeping the 1.07 News, Info & Gossip thread alive for all these years. Here's a link to the original guide:
and should it ever go down here is the link to the version on this site:
www.purediablo.com
The other big contributor to this guide is @Fruit who joined the party rather late in 2017 but managed to revolutionize 1.07-1.08 crafting 18 years after release of these versions by solving the mystery of the ilvl 99 crafts. Before then it was believed that crafting Ilvl was capped at 65 which would mean that +2 to class skills couldn't spawn on amulet crafts for example.
I start this guide off with a short overview of what is possible in 1.07-1.08 crafting and then delve into the theoretical aspects and mechanics needed to reach the full potential of crafts in these versions.
1) 1.07-1.08 Crafts: The Greatest Hits
Here's a short selection of the best crafts that are possible in 1.07-1.08:
2) Crafting Recipes
General Info
Every crafting recipe is of the form:
The Recipes
For 1.07 the following recipes are enabled:
while the ones for 1.08 are:
In addition to the above 1.08 has four special recipes called deadly crafts which are only available on certain days of the month:
1.07 Discussion
A few things about the 1.07 crafts:
1.08 Discussion
In 1.08 all crafts are enabled and the broken recipes from 1.07 are fixed. In particular the caster amulet and belt can now spawn with +(1-15)% faster cast rate. This makes 1.08 the first patch with real FCR belts (other than the 1.07 1% FCR caster belt) and the only patch with up to 25% faster cast rate on an amulet. Note also how the bonuses to speed on amulets and the FCR bonus on belts are the same on lesser as on greater crafts which means that they are very easy to obtain.
The deadly crafts are unique in the history of Diablo II since they are only available on certain days of the month. Of course the helm and the boots are beaten by Guillaume's Face (1.07+) and Goreriders (1.09+). Similarly the gloves are certainly nice but for certain characters 10% deadly strike is not going to matter more than 5% extra crushing blow (as obtainable on greater blood gloves).
The true prize are the deadly belts which are the only source of crushing blow and deadly strike on a belt in any version of the game. Usually the belt is considered to be somewhat of a "free" slot on a melee character so this means that deadly belts are a perfect fit for them. Sadly the fact that runes need to be "fresh" (i.e. used to craft in the game they were found in) to produce a guaranteed four affixes together with the fact that you must find the rune on days 23 to 31 of the month means that deadly belts are the hardest crafts in all of Diablo II.
Another big change from 1.07 is that crafts can't spawn with magic only affixes any more.
3) Getting the Ingredients
Gems
Since 1.07 crafting doesn't put any constraints on the quality of the gem used in the craft it is actually very simple to get enough gems for crafting. So simple in fact that you can easily also craft resistance rings with sapphires and rubies and cube (or shrine) flawless amethysts to perfect and forward them to 1.08 for caster crafts without losing out on 1.07 crafts.
The gem situation in 1.08 is essentially the same as in later patches when it comes to crafting, however since runes are more scarce than in modern patches it can easily happen that you run out of runes long before you run out of gems still.
In both cases doing normal HF rushes for gems isn't really needed.
Runes
There are essentially three ways of obtaining runes for crafting:
The first way is probably the least reliable since getting a rune in 1.07-1.08 is as likely as in any other patch given that the "good" TC was chosen, however the distribution of runes itself is heavily skewed towards the bottom end. The most common runes are El and Eld while the greater and deadly crafting recipes require runes of Amn and above. The most popular crafting recipe with a "low" rune is the blood craft for heavy gloves for which getting the Tir rune is actually doable in a reliable fashion by running Lower Kurast or the council.
The HF is a lot more reliable since each of the 11 runes it offers has the same probability of occuring. For reasons explained in the rune ilvl section the runes from the normal HF are not suitable for crafting though. The NM and Hell HF are probably the best way to reliably get runes for greater crafts, especially amulet and ring crafts. In fact if you want to do a lot of deadly crafts you basically have to do HF rushes or get very lucky with drops. Since the Hell HF is capped at Um in 1.07-1.08 (and also 1.09) you can't get Mal from it which incidentally prevents you from making a large quantity of deadly belt crafts, making it the hardest and most exclusive craft in the history of Diablo II.
Qual-Kehk's runes are always the same and offer Tal and Ort, the first being interesting for Amulet crafts in 1.08 while the second is used for weapon crafts in both patches. As explained in the rune ilvl section you will need very high level characters to get good results from crafts made with these runes but if you reach those levels it should be the fastest way of obtaining these particular runes.
Jewels
Your best bet of obtaining jewels is to run Lower Kurast, Travincal or multiplayer Cows. Other chests can work as well but Lower Kurast has the highest density of superchests in any area. The most important fact about jewels is that in 1.08 they are as likely to drop as in modern patches but are 1,9 times as likely to drop than in 1.07, i.e. you will run out of jewels in 1.07 if you craft too many things. This makes it necessary to carefully pick a selection of craft recipes and stick to it without wasting jewels on crafts you don't really want or need.
Bases
One of the trickiest aspects of crafting is getting a reliable stream of bases. To narrow down on why this is we first look at the easy to get bases which are jewelry and normal items.
You can always gamble a ring or an amulet since they are guaranteed to show up in the gambling screen.
Similarly it is possible to shop or gamble most normal bases and in fact all of them can drop in 1.07-1.08 with a lot of them being rackable as well.
Weapons play a special role because you can use a crafted weapon to craft, i.e. if you get your hands on a very rare crafting base (such as a Grand Matron Bow) you can craft it as long as you want without having to get a second one. (Of course you should stop if you get something good
)
A lot of elite armors can't drop in 1.07 and a small selection is neither shoppable nor gambleable which in these cases only leaves racking. However the chance of a magic item from a rack is rather high so that racks are very reliable sources of these bases once you find a rack that drops the item you want.
To be perfectly precise on what can drop, be gambled, shopped or racked would go beyond the scope of this guide but here are some rough infos you can use as a guideline:
Inventory management
As already mentioned earlier you asbolutely want to craft with runes in the same game they dropped in. This means you need to have the other ingredients with you at all times to be prepared for a potential crafting rune drop. The best way of achieving this is to always keep a few jewels in your stash together with a selection of amethysts, rubies, sapphires and emeralds (depending on what recipes you're interested in). The hard part are the base items which can take up a lot of space in your stash with e.g. a Great Hauberk taking up 6 slots. This somewhat limits the amount of crafts you can prepare for realistically.
A simple solution to this is to always keep a lot of gold on your character so that you can gamble a few of the interesting bases if needed. This applies to rings and amulets especially, there is simply no need to keep those in your stash at all times. But also most normal items can quickly be gambled if needed, e.g. heavy gloves.
In reality the amount of crafting materials you want to store is also bounded by how many jewels they use up on average. Especially lesser glove crafts are draining since they only need a Tir rune which isn't all that uncommon.
If you want to craft greater crafts you should sometimes pass on lesser crafts if you are low on jewels. There will always be more low runes but finding a Ko and not being able to use it in its "fresh" state to craft a blood ring with it is painful to say the least.
4) Basic Mechanics
What is the item level of a craft?
As usual with crafts we refer to the item level of the result as Ilvl while the item level used to calculate it is called ilvl. The Ilvl formula for crafting in 1.07-1.08 is then:
What? Runes have an ilvl? Yes, in 1.07-1.08 runes have an item level which defaults to 1 as soon as you leave the game. This is because they are classified by the game as "simple" items, that is they do not save variable stats upon exiting the game. This means that in order to have control over the Ilvl you need to craft with a rune in the same game as you found it. If you do not do this the Ilvl will be calculated as:
We say that a rune that didn't have its ilvl wiped is "fresh" and otherwise we call it "stale".
To close of this subsection we tackle the question of why the game does not use the ilvl of the item used to craft as in later versions. The idea here is that the game is told by the cubemain.txt to scan the ingredients of the craft for an ilvl. The first ingredient it checks is already the item you craft with and it readily takes its ilvl. But now the game doesn't stop, it goes on to check the jewel's ilvl and overwrites the item's ilvl with that of the jewel. Now the same thing happens to the rune but not the gem because somehow the game knows to skip gems when looking for ilvl. Since the last ilvl read was that of the rune the game is now working with that level to calculate Ilvl.
How many affixes does a craft get?
The number of randomly generated affixes is directly influenced by the Ilvl of the craft as follows:
Note that crafing with "stale" runes can only ever guarantee a minimum of three affixes but is capped at a 20% chance for four affixes.
How many sockets does a craft get?
In 1.07 Larzuk will attempt to give any craft three open sockets while in 1.08 he is capped at one open socket. This is not a random roll of one to three sockets, rather Larzuk will determine how many sockets the item can get (based on Ilvl) and if this number is S he will give a total of min{S, 3} sockets to the item. For a table of all socket numbers in 1.07-1.08 refer to this post:
www.purediablo.com
Despite that information being available in the list I will reiterate the following here: in 1.07-1.08 Bone Visages, Troll Nests, Blade Barriers, Shrunken Heads and Orbs get zero sockets by default and additionally in 1.07 Wands get 0 sockets. This limits the crafting potential for these items severely.
What is the required level of a craft?
The required level formula for crafts is essentially the same as nowadays:
You might have noticed that there is no contigency for rlvls over 99 in the above formula. Indeed the game will happily create crafts with rlvl over 99 and think nothing of it. The highest rlvl achievable should be 108 which happens if the suffix "of Freezing Arrows" spawns on gloves. This affix has rlvl 86 and so if the craft gets four affixes you get to and rlvl of 10+3*4+85 = 108.
This rlvl formula (just as in 1.09+) makes it very hard to create useful low level crafts since any craft will have at least a level requirement of 13 and the really interesting ones with four affixes have an rlvl of at least 22.
5) Rune ilvl
We already know that runes have an ilvl in 1.07-1.08 but what remains to be seen is how we can actually know what it is. Again there are three sources of runes in 1.07-1.08:
Drops
The ilvl of a dropped rune is equal to the level of the monster or container (i.e. chest) that dropped it. For chests this makes it very easy since they drop items of level equal to the level of the area they are in and one can easily read those out of the files:
www.purediablo.com
For reference the area level of Lower Kurast is 88.
Now in 1.07-1.08 monsters have levels independent of the area level which makes it harder to determine ilvl without having the game files at hand. For now let's just say that regular cows and council member minions have a level of 90 while champions except berserkers have base+2 and uniques and berserkers have level base+3 where base is the level of the monster type they are based on. Minions in 1.07-1.09 (maybe even 1.10a) do NOT get a bonus of +3 to base level.
HF rewards
The HF rewards take their item level from the area level of the River of Flame which is 27, 60 and 93 in Normal, NM and Hell respectively. As you can see the ilvl of a normal HF rune only adds 17 to the level of a craft which makes it impossible to guarantee four affixes for these runes.
Qual-Kehk rewards
These runes have as item level the clvl of the character receiving the reward. The most efficient way to farm these rewards is to rush characters in 1.07 and giving them the three ancient quest rewards in order to level them. A level 1 character will be level 24 after normal ancients, level 42 if you add nightmare ancients and finally level 52 if you complete all three quests.
What clvl do I need to craft these runes?
The following table lists the most common rune ilvls, what Ilvls you can achieve with them using a clvl 99 character and what clvl you need to craft Ilvl 91 and 99 crafts with them:
As you can see a "stale" rune, a Qual-Kehk rune from a once Ancient'ed rushee as well as a normal HF rune can never produce Ilvl 91 crafts. For Qual-Kehk runes even a twice Ancient'ed rushee can only guarantee four affixes if the rusher is level 97 while a three times Ancient'ed rushee needs a more modest clvl 87 rusher to guarantee four affixes.
Of note is NM HF which only needs a level 79 crafter to guarantee four affixes AND a chance at the +2 to class skills affixes on amulets.
The Hell HF is usually picked up in 1.10a-1.10s to make use of the higher drop range of Hel-Gul which can then be used to make beta runewords. For this reason a perfect rush harvests Qual-Kehk rewards in 1.07-1.08, NM HF in 1.07-1.08 and Hell HF in 1.10a-1.10s. The normal HF is only done to quickly get a lot of gems (i.e. it is done with the whole party in the game in contrast to NM and Hell where you need to do them individually with each rushee because it only gives one rune regardless of partysize)
When do runes become "stale"?
There are a few things that are known to make a rune lose its ilvl:
The game auto-saving does NOT affect the ilvl of the rune, so you have plenty of time to gamble or shop bases if needed. There is currently no known way to "refresh" a rune. @WoRG tried selling and rebuying a rune to do this but it did not work. Similarly you can't try cubing runes up since those recipes were only introduced with 1.09.
Should I craft with "stale" runes?
You should avoid it at all costs since you can never guarantee four affixes that way. In fact you should aim for all of your crafts to have Ilvl at least 91 or 80% of them will fall short of their potential. Assuming the best case clvl of 99 a rune still needs to be at least level 40 to guarantee Ilvl 91. So forget about stale runes, once Ancient'ed rushees and their Qual-Kehk runes and normal HF.
6) Affixes
The formulas and considerations here can basically be applied to any quality whether magic, rare or crafted. Note that in 1.07 crafts can get magic only affixes while in 1.08 they are limited to rare affixes.
The Affix Level Formula
Every affix of level at most the level of the affix level of an item can spawn on that item. The affix level of an item is calculated using the magic, quality and item level of the item which we will call mlvl, qlvl and ilvl for short. Note that for crafts what we called Ilvl above is now what is used as our ilvl. Also remember that the monster level is sometimes abbreviated as mlvl but it is essentially different from the magic level.
The affix level formula for an item is:
Magic Level 0 (1.07 only)
This section is strictly about items with magic level 0, whatever is said here does not apply to items with positive magic level at all. Here is a visualization of the alvl(ilvl) function for 1.07-1.08:
followed by the same table for 1.10+ (and most likely 1.09 as well):
The main difference here is that the 1.10+ formula is more refined and is actually scaled in such a way that an ilvl 99 item will have alvl 99 as well. The same is not true for 1.07 where the highest alvl possible on an item type is sometimes less than 99. (This value is displayed next to 99 at the upper right corner in all four graphs).
For example a qlvl 45 item has a maximum alvl of 77 (at ilvl 99). However as a close look at the alvl formula shows this is the worst case scenario, that is: at ilvl 99 every item always has at least alvl 77.
Now how is this relevant? As it turns out the list of affixes of level higher than 77 is actually very short:
Prefixes:
Suffixes:
But here it comes: Every item with qlvl 19 or less as well as every item of qlvl 71 or more has alvl 90 or higher at ilvl 99 anyway. Since we can force ilvl 99 from crafts this means that we don't need to worry about the seven class skill prefixes (amulets have qlvl 1) as well as the mana leech and minimum damage affixes (rings also have qlvl 1).
So as long as your crafts have ilvl 99 they can get every affix except for maybe five charges on gloves.
Magic Level != 0 (1.07-1.08)
This is not anywhere as interesting as the first case since the affix level formula is more straightforward. Here is a list of all items with non-zero magic level together with their qlvl and minimum alvl:
Note that circlets can't be crafted but should rather be racked directly. Other than that all items with non-zero magic level can be crafted to have ilvl 99 and thus get any affix available.
A sample calculation for stale runes in 1.07
This subsection is supposed to give you an example of how to use the affix level formula to determine when an affix can spawn on a craft. We will look at lesser blood gloves (base: heavy gloves) and answer the question which clvl is needed to craft them with a stale rune so that they can still get the "Lancer's" prefix (+3 to Javelin and Spear Skills). At the same time we will show that greater blood gloves (base: vampirebone gloves) crafted with a stale rune will never get that same affix.
First off we find out what the alvl of the "Lancer's" prefix is, maybe by looking up this table of affixes:
www.purediablo.com
which is in the third spoiler. We see that the prefix has affix level 60.
Heavy gloves are qlvl 7 so they have alvl = max{ilvl, 7}-[7/2]+max{0, 7-45} = max{ilvl, 7}-3. This means that Ilvl needs to be at least 63 in order to reach affix level 60.
Vampirebone gloves are qlvl 69 so they have alvl = max{ilvl, 69}-[69/2]+max{0, 69-45} = max{ilvl, 69}-10. Crafting with a stale rune means that the maximum Ilvl will be 65 which is reached at clvl 99. So we have alvl = max{65, 69}-10 = 69-10 = 59 < 60 which means that the "Lancer's Prefix" can never spawn on these crafts.
Now what clvl do we need in order to get Ilvl 63 on our crafted heavy gloves? Well we are essentially interested in the smallest clvl for which we have 63 <= [clvl*0,66]+[ilvl*0,66] where the second term vanishes because ilvl = 1 as we are crafting with a stale rune, so the condition becomes 63 <= [clvl*0,66] which is equivalent to 63 <= clvl*0,66 which in turn is equivalent to 63/0,66 <= clvl. Now since clvl is an integer this last statement is equivalent to roundup(63/0,66) <= clvl. But the right hand side is just 96. Thus we need at least clvl 96 in order to craft lesser blood crafts with the "Lancer's" prefix using stale runes.
7) Crafting Bugs: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good
Through a mysterious mechanic called stacking crafts in 1.07 can sometimes bug out and have their automods added to a randomly rolled affix. The two most notable examples of this are life and mana leech on blood crafts.
If a blood craft spawns with life leech as a random affix it can happen that the life automod becomes life leech instead. For example a lesser blood glove gets (1-4)% life leech as an automod as well as +(10-20) to life. Now if the life leech affix spawns on this item (it gives +3% life leech) and the craft bugs out you get +(17-30)% life leech instead of +(4-7)% life leech and +(10-20) to life.
This bug can occur on blood crafted items which may spawn with life leech affixes, i.e. gloves, weapons and rings. (amulets can't spawn life leech in 1.07-1.09)
A variation of this happens if instead of a life leech affix a mana leech affix spawns. In this case the life leech automods can get converted to mana leech. Sadly this stacking is nowhere near as profitable since the life leech automod is much lower than the life automod.
This bug can occur on blood crafted items which may spawn with mana leech affixes, i.e. gloves, weapons and amulets. (rings can't spawn mana leech in 1.07-1.09)
There is another such bug with hitpower weapons but it's not beneficial to us.
We do not understand the mechanics behind stacking as of yet.
In 1.08 there is a potentially unintended dynamic where bonuses to FCR and FRW (and potentially FHR, FBR as well) have their values rounded up to 5% if they are below 5%. This means you can't actually get a caster amulet with less than 5% FCR. A rather minor bug but still technically beneficial to the player.
The Bad
At least in 1.07 (not confirmed yet in 1.08 and probably not possible) the enhanced damage that can be on a craft is capped at 511% since the game uses 9 bits to store the enhanced damage. One possible combination that could lead to this is Grandmasters (up to 200% ED) combined with Cruel (up to 300% ED) together with a weapon craft automod.
As a consequence the best possible crafts for lesser and greater weapon crafts will not differ in their enhanced damage at all.
It seems that socket affixes do not work when they spawn on a craft in 1.07 but there are no reports about this in 1.08. Of course we don't care about the Mechanic's and Artisan's affixes because Larzuk can outmatch (or just match) them with a guaranteed number of sockets. Nevertheless this means that you can't get four open sockets via the Jeweler's affix on a craft. In fact it will just end up taking up an affix slot doing nothing.
Related to the stacking bugs (high life leech) in 1.07 there is a "bug" in 1.08 which makes affixes not stack with automods in certain cases. It seems as though this is meant to be a fix for the stacking bugs but ends up deleting affixes instead. Here is some speculation:
Luckily it has been confirmed that the FCR on caster crafts do stack with the FCR suffix so all is well. As with the stacking bug the actual mechanics behind it are not understand as of yet.
The Ugly
There has been a report of certain crafts having the potential to corrupt your ATMA stashes:
www.purediablo.com
This is serious news and maybe using 1.08 caster boots is a bad idea because of it.
8) Credits
This guide would not have been possible without @WoRG and @Fruit who are crafting experts in every sense of the word! Also thanks to @GalaXyHaXz and @Helvete for helping uncover the ilvl 99 mystery!
Appendix A
In order to do affix level calculations like the ones above you will need access to all the qlvls, alvls and mlvls which are all available in the .txts the game comes with.
Generally you look for the item/affix you are interested in and then look in the "level" column for the respective level.
The .txts are attached below. If you want more detailed information on how to read them a google search such as "phrozen keep fileguides" will give you the necessary details. Note that 1.09 and 1.10+ guides can be good approximations if there is no 1.07/1.08 guide available. Just don't assume too much!
The last guide on crafting in 1.07 was written about a decade ago by @WoRG who has probably crafted more in 1.07 and 1.08 than anyone who ever played 1.07-1.08 has together. His guide was the starting point for mine and I owe him a lot, especially for keeping the 1.07 News, Info & Gossip thread alive for all these years. Here's a link to the original guide:
WoRG's 1.07 Crafting miniguide v1.0
WoRG's 1.07 Crafting miniguide v1.0 WoRG's 1.07 Crafting miniguide v1.0 1.07 has long been known as a source of great items: ethereal items, +damage charms, and select Uniques from 1.07 are commonly sought after for their superior qualities. Less well known is the AWESOME potential of 1.07...
www.diabloii.net

WoRG's 1.07 Diablo 2 Crafting Guide v1.0
1.07 has long been known as a source of great items: ethereal items, +damage charms, and select Uniques from 1.07 are commonly sought after for their superior

The other big contributor to this guide is @Fruit who joined the party rather late in 2017 but managed to revolutionize 1.07-1.08 crafting 18 years after release of these versions by solving the mystery of the ilvl 99 crafts. Before then it was believed that crafting Ilvl was capped at 65 which would mean that +2 to class skills couldn't spawn on amulet crafts for example.
I start this guide off with a short overview of what is possible in 1.07-1.08 crafting and then delve into the theoretical aspects and mechanics needed to reach the full potential of crafts in these versions.
1) 1.07-1.08 Crafts: The Greatest Hits
Here's a short selection of the best crafts that are possible in 1.07-1.08:
- 1.07: Body armors with up to 16 MDR, 30 PDR and three sockets for potentially up to 51 PDR on a single item.
- 1.07: Gloves with +3 to a skill tab (e.g. Java or Martial Arts), up to 15% crushing blow, 20% increased attack speed and up to 34% life leech.
- 1.07: Rings with 10% FCR, dual to triple resists, up to 39% life leech and up to 120 mana.
- 1.07: Weapons with up to 511% enhanced damage, up to 40% increased attack speed, up to 63 maximum damage and up to 40% life leech as well as three sockets.
- 1.08: Amulets with +2 to class skills, up to 25% FCR (!!!) and big resists.
- 1.08: A belt with up to 10% crushing blow AND deadly strike.
2) Crafting Recipes
General Info
Every crafting recipe is of the form:
Jewel + Gem + Rune + Base -> Craft
where the details vary by version and craft. A few general remarks:- Any quality jewel can be used for crafting. The jewel must just be present, none of its stats have any influence on the result.
- In 1.07 the quality of gem does not matter, e.g. you could craft a blood ring with a flawed ruby if you wanted. In 1.08 crafts require perfect gems.
- In order to get the best possible results the rune must be crafted in the same game it was found in. See the next few sections for more info on this.
- Only magic armor of the specified type can be used in a recipe. There are no exceptional armor crafts in 1.07 and exactly four in 1.08.
- In 1.07-1.08 any quality and type of weapon can be used for any weapon craft. In particular you can craft the same weapon type multiple times if you just use the result of the previous craft.
The Recipes
For 1.07 the following recipes are enabled:
while the ones for 1.08 are:
In addition to the above 1.08 has four special recipes called deadly crafts which are only available on certain days of the month:
1.07 Discussion
A few things about the 1.07 crafts:
- There are no Helm crafts enabled.
- Only the greater jewelry crafts are enabled.
- There are barely any hitpower crafts enabled and they are all bad which means that all of your sapphires can go to resistance ring cubing.
- The blood amulet and caster amulet and belt are bugged to only give +1% to faster run/walk and faster cast rate respectively.
- The greater weapon crafts only differ by +(6-13)% enhanced damage from their lesser versions yet are much more expensive by comparison. As we will see in the section on bugs the maximum enhanced damage on greater and lesser weapon crafts is actually the same, so there is nothing wrong with crafting lesser weapons.
- The safety crafts allow for ridiculously high MDR and PDR numbers and additionally you can get magic only affixes on them that stack with the automods. The fact that 1.07 calculates MDR and PDR after resistances makes these very strong defensive options.
- The blood crafts for items which can spawn with life leech sometimes bug out to give very high life leech numbers, see the section bugs for more info.
1.08 Discussion
In 1.08 all crafts are enabled and the broken recipes from 1.07 are fixed. In particular the caster amulet and belt can now spawn with +(1-15)% faster cast rate. This makes 1.08 the first patch with real FCR belts (other than the 1.07 1% FCR caster belt) and the only patch with up to 25% faster cast rate on an amulet. Note also how the bonuses to speed on amulets and the FCR bonus on belts are the same on lesser as on greater crafts which means that they are very easy to obtain.
The deadly crafts are unique in the history of Diablo II since they are only available on certain days of the month. Of course the helm and the boots are beaten by Guillaume's Face (1.07+) and Goreriders (1.09+). Similarly the gloves are certainly nice but for certain characters 10% deadly strike is not going to matter more than 5% extra crushing blow (as obtainable on greater blood gloves).
The true prize are the deadly belts which are the only source of crushing blow and deadly strike on a belt in any version of the game. Usually the belt is considered to be somewhat of a "free" slot on a melee character so this means that deadly belts are a perfect fit for them. Sadly the fact that runes need to be "fresh" (i.e. used to craft in the game they were found in) to produce a guaranteed four affixes together with the fact that you must find the rune on days 23 to 31 of the month means that deadly belts are the hardest crafts in all of Diablo II.
Another big change from 1.07 is that crafts can't spawn with magic only affixes any more.
3) Getting the Ingredients
Gems
Since 1.07 crafting doesn't put any constraints on the quality of the gem used in the craft it is actually very simple to get enough gems for crafting. So simple in fact that you can easily also craft resistance rings with sapphires and rubies and cube (or shrine) flawless amethysts to perfect and forward them to 1.08 for caster crafts without losing out on 1.07 crafts.
The gem situation in 1.08 is essentially the same as in later patches when it comes to crafting, however since runes are more scarce than in modern patches it can easily happen that you run out of runes long before you run out of gems still.
In both cases doing normal HF rushes for gems isn't really needed.
Runes
There are essentially three ways of obtaining runes for crafting:
- Drops from killing monsters and opening chests
- HF rewards (El-Amn in Normal/ Sol-Um in NM)
- Qual-Kehk rewards (Ral, Ort, Tal)
The first way is probably the least reliable since getting a rune in 1.07-1.08 is as likely as in any other patch given that the "good" TC was chosen, however the distribution of runes itself is heavily skewed towards the bottom end. The most common runes are El and Eld while the greater and deadly crafting recipes require runes of Amn and above. The most popular crafting recipe with a "low" rune is the blood craft for heavy gloves for which getting the Tir rune is actually doable in a reliable fashion by running Lower Kurast or the council.
The HF is a lot more reliable since each of the 11 runes it offers has the same probability of occuring. For reasons explained in the rune ilvl section the runes from the normal HF are not suitable for crafting though. The NM and Hell HF are probably the best way to reliably get runes for greater crafts, especially amulet and ring crafts. In fact if you want to do a lot of deadly crafts you basically have to do HF rushes or get very lucky with drops. Since the Hell HF is capped at Um in 1.07-1.08 (and also 1.09) you can't get Mal from it which incidentally prevents you from making a large quantity of deadly belt crafts, making it the hardest and most exclusive craft in the history of Diablo II.
Qual-Kehk's runes are always the same and offer Tal and Ort, the first being interesting for Amulet crafts in 1.08 while the second is used for weapon crafts in both patches. As explained in the rune ilvl section you will need very high level characters to get good results from crafts made with these runes but if you reach those levels it should be the fastest way of obtaining these particular runes.
Jewels
Your best bet of obtaining jewels is to run Lower Kurast, Travincal or multiplayer Cows. Other chests can work as well but Lower Kurast has the highest density of superchests in any area. The most important fact about jewels is that in 1.08 they are as likely to drop as in modern patches but are 1,9 times as likely to drop than in 1.07, i.e. you will run out of jewels in 1.07 if you craft too many things. This makes it necessary to carefully pick a selection of craft recipes and stick to it without wasting jewels on crafts you don't really want or need.
Bases
One of the trickiest aspects of crafting is getting a reliable stream of bases. To narrow down on why this is we first look at the easy to get bases which are jewelry and normal items.
You can always gamble a ring or an amulet since they are guaranteed to show up in the gambling screen.
Similarly it is possible to shop or gamble most normal bases and in fact all of them can drop in 1.07-1.08 with a lot of them being rackable as well.
Weapons play a special role because you can use a crafted weapon to craft, i.e. if you get your hands on a very rare crafting base (such as a Grand Matron Bow) you can craft it as long as you want without having to get a second one. (Of course you should stop if you get something good
A lot of elite armors can't drop in 1.07 and a small selection is neither shoppable nor gambleable which in these cases only leaves racking. However the chance of a magic item from a rack is rather high so that racks are very reliable sources of these bases once you find a rack that drops the item you want.
To be perfectly precise on what can drop, be gambled, shopped or racked would go beyond the scope of this guide but here are some rough infos you can use as a guideline:
All normal and exceptional item types are of qlvl 64 or lower in 1.07 so they can drop. In 1.08 all item types can drop.
Furthermore in 1.07 every piece of armor EXCEPT elite belts can either drop, be shopped or be gambled while all armor item types can be racked. This means that elite belts can only be obtained via racking. This is due to two reasons:
As for weapons in both patches it's not possible to rack the crystal sword line, the club line, the spiked club line, orbs, wands, staves, bows or crossbows. The unrackable and undropable items in 1.07 are:
Furthermore in 1.07 every piece of armor EXCEPT elite belts can either drop, be shopped or be gambled while all armor item types can be racked. This means that elite belts can only be obtained via racking. This is due to two reasons:
- All elite belts have qlvl 67 or higher and can thus not drop.
- There is a mistake in armor.txt which causes normal belts to upgrade to elite boots instead of elite belts, so elite belts can't appear in shopping windows or gambling screens.
As for weapons in both patches it's not possible to rack the crystal sword line, the club line, the spiked club line, orbs, wands, staves, bows or crossbows. The unrackable and undropable items in 1.07 are:
- Diamond Bow
- Crusader Bow
- Ward Bow
- Hydra Bow
- Colossus Crossbow
- Demon Crossbow
- Grand Matron Bow
- Lich Wand
- Unearthed Wand
- Shillelagh
- Archon Staff
- Dimensional Shard
Inventory management
As already mentioned earlier you asbolutely want to craft with runes in the same game they dropped in. This means you need to have the other ingredients with you at all times to be prepared for a potential crafting rune drop. The best way of achieving this is to always keep a few jewels in your stash together with a selection of amethysts, rubies, sapphires and emeralds (depending on what recipes you're interested in). The hard part are the base items which can take up a lot of space in your stash with e.g. a Great Hauberk taking up 6 slots. This somewhat limits the amount of crafts you can prepare for realistically.
A simple solution to this is to always keep a lot of gold on your character so that you can gamble a few of the interesting bases if needed. This applies to rings and amulets especially, there is simply no need to keep those in your stash at all times. But also most normal items can quickly be gambled if needed, e.g. heavy gloves.
In reality the amount of crafting materials you want to store is also bounded by how many jewels they use up on average. Especially lesser glove crafts are draining since they only need a Tir rune which isn't all that uncommon.
If you want to craft greater crafts you should sometimes pass on lesser crafts if you are low on jewels. There will always be more low runes but finding a Ko and not being able to use it in its "fresh" state to craft a blood ring with it is painful to say the least.
4) Basic Mechanics
What is the item level of a craft?
As usual with crafts we refer to the item level of the result as Ilvl while the item level used to calculate it is called ilvl. The Ilvl formula for crafting in 1.07-1.08 is then:
Ilvl = [0,66*clvl]+[0,66*ilvl]
where clvl is the character level of the crafter and ilvl is the item level of the rune.What? Runes have an ilvl? Yes, in 1.07-1.08 runes have an item level which defaults to 1 as soon as you leave the game. This is because they are classified by the game as "simple" items, that is they do not save variable stats upon exiting the game. This means that in order to have control over the Ilvl you need to craft with a rune in the same game as you found it. If you do not do this the Ilvl will be calculated as:
Ilvl = [0,66*clvl]
and thus capped at 65 which you can only achieve with a level 99 character. For information on how the ilvl of a rune is determined and what wipes it you can consult the section on rune ilvl.We say that a rune that didn't have its ilvl wiped is "fresh" and otherwise we call it "stale".
To close of this subsection we tackle the question of why the game does not use the ilvl of the item used to craft as in later versions. The idea here is that the game is told by the cubemain.txt to scan the ingredients of the craft for an ilvl. The first ingredient it checks is already the item you craft with and it readily takes its ilvl. But now the game doesn't stop, it goes on to check the jewel's ilvl and overwrites the item's ilvl with that of the jewel. Now the same thing happens to the rune but not the gem because somehow the game knows to skip gems when looking for ilvl. Since the last ilvl read was that of the rune the game is now working with that level to calculate Ilvl.
How many affixes does a craft get?
The number of randomly generated affixes is directly influenced by the Ilvl of the craft as follows:
ilvl \ affixes | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
1-30 | 40% | 20% | 20% | 20% |
31-60 | 0% | 60% | 20% | 20% |
61-90 | 0% | 0% | 80% | 20% |
91-99 | 0% | 0% | 0% | 100% |
How many sockets does a craft get?
In 1.07 Larzuk will attempt to give any craft three open sockets while in 1.08 he is capped at one open socket. This is not a random roll of one to three sockets, rather Larzuk will determine how many sockets the item can get (based on Ilvl) and if this number is S he will give a total of min{S, 3} sockets to the item. For a table of all socket numbers in 1.07-1.08 refer to this post:

1.07 News, Info, and Gossip
20 in fact + few Zons. Same gear. Zons have charms. +40% FRW Boots +40% FRW M'avina's belt +40% FRW Trang-Oul's body +30% FRW Circlet/Tiara/Diadem +61% FRW BoS (Sins only, no charms =) Frostburn +40% Mana + Mana regen (1.08 Sins have 1.08 Craft Lesser caster shields, more mana & regen) +100-120...

What is the required level of a craft?
The required level formula for crafts is essentially the same as nowadays:
rlvl(craft) = max{rlvl(base item), 10+3*#affixes+max{rlvl(affix) | affix on craft}}
where #affixes is the amount of random affixes spawned on the item and the third term in the sum is the maximum over the rlvl of all affixes spawned on the craft. This might further be overwritten by the rlvl of staff- and automods on the item but this will not happen often in practice.You might have noticed that there is no contigency for rlvls over 99 in the above formula. Indeed the game will happily create crafts with rlvl over 99 and think nothing of it. The highest rlvl achievable should be 108 which happens if the suffix "of Freezing Arrows" spawns on gloves. This affix has rlvl 86 and so if the craft gets four affixes you get to and rlvl of 10+3*4+85 = 108.
This rlvl formula (just as in 1.09+) makes it very hard to create useful low level crafts since any craft will have at least a level requirement of 13 and the really interesting ones with four affixes have an rlvl of at least 22.
5) Rune ilvl
We already know that runes have an ilvl in 1.07-1.08 but what remains to be seen is how we can actually know what it is. Again there are three sources of runes in 1.07-1.08:
- Drops from killing monsters and opening chests
- HF rewards (El-Amn in Normal/ Sol-Um in NM)
- Qual-Kehk rewards (Ral, Ort, Tal)
Drops
The ilvl of a dropped rune is equal to the level of the monster or container (i.e. chest) that dropped it. For chests this makes it very easy since they drop items of level equal to the level of the area they are in and one can easily read those out of the files:

1.09 News, Info and Gossip - Make 1.09 Great Again
Welcome to the time travel thread for the most unpopular patch ever! In the old SPF there was no exact such thread but I'm hoping that new developments will drive people back to 1.09. First off here are RobbyD's 1.09 guide as well as his 'Rollcall' thread for 1.09 which is close to a 'News...

Now in 1.07-1.08 monsters have levels independent of the area level which makes it harder to determine ilvl without having the game files at hand. For now let's just say that regular cows and council member minions have a level of 90 while champions except berserkers have base+2 and uniques and berserkers have level base+3 where base is the level of the monster type they are based on. Minions in 1.07-1.09 (maybe even 1.10a) do NOT get a bonus of +3 to base level.
HF rewards
The HF rewards take their item level from the area level of the River of Flame which is 27, 60 and 93 in Normal, NM and Hell respectively. As you can see the ilvl of a normal HF rune only adds 17 to the level of a craft which makes it impossible to guarantee four affixes for these runes.
Qual-Kehk rewards
These runes have as item level the clvl of the character receiving the reward. The most efficient way to farm these rewards is to rush characters in 1.07 and giving them the three ancient quest rewards in order to level them. A level 1 character will be level 24 after normal ancients, level 42 if you add nightmare ancients and finally level 52 if you complete all three quests.
What clvl do I need to craft these runes?
The following table lists the most common rune ilvls, what Ilvls you can achieve with them using a clvl 99 character and what clvl you need to craft Ilvl 91 and 99 crafts with them:
As you can see a "stale" rune, a Qual-Kehk rune from a once Ancient'ed rushee as well as a normal HF rune can never produce Ilvl 91 crafts. For Qual-Kehk runes even a twice Ancient'ed rushee can only guarantee four affixes if the rusher is level 97 while a three times Ancient'ed rushee needs a more modest clvl 87 rusher to guarantee four affixes.
Of note is NM HF which only needs a level 79 crafter to guarantee four affixes AND a chance at the +2 to class skills affixes on amulets.
The Hell HF is usually picked up in 1.10a-1.10s to make use of the higher drop range of Hel-Gul which can then be used to make beta runewords. For this reason a perfect rush harvests Qual-Kehk rewards in 1.07-1.08, NM HF in 1.07-1.08 and Hell HF in 1.10a-1.10s. The normal HF is only done to quickly get a lot of gems (i.e. it is done with the whole party in the game in contrast to NM and Hell where you need to do them individually with each rushee because it only gives one rune regardless of partysize)
When do runes become "stale"?
There are a few things that are known to make a rune lose its ilvl:
- Leaving the game. (Found by @Fruit)
- Transfering a rune via the trade window. (Found by @WoRG)
- Completing an act and traveling to the next one also does this. (Found by @WoRG)
The game auto-saving does NOT affect the ilvl of the rune, so you have plenty of time to gamble or shop bases if needed. There is currently no known way to "refresh" a rune. @WoRG tried selling and rebuying a rune to do this but it did not work. Similarly you can't try cubing runes up since those recipes were only introduced with 1.09.
Should I craft with "stale" runes?
You should avoid it at all costs since you can never guarantee four affixes that way. In fact you should aim for all of your crafts to have Ilvl at least 91 or 80% of them will fall short of their potential. Assuming the best case clvl of 99 a rune still needs to be at least level 40 to guarantee Ilvl 91. So forget about stale runes, once Ancient'ed rushees and their Qual-Kehk runes and normal HF.
6) Affixes
The formulas and considerations here can basically be applied to any quality whether magic, rare or crafted. Note that in 1.07 crafts can get magic only affixes while in 1.08 they are limited to rare affixes.
The Affix Level Formula
Every affix of level at most the level of the affix level of an item can spawn on that item. The affix level of an item is calculated using the magic, quality and item level of the item which we will call mlvl, qlvl and ilvl for short. Note that for crafts what we called Ilvl above is now what is used as our ilvl. Also remember that the monster level is sometimes abbreviated as mlvl but it is essentially different from the magic level.
The affix level formula for an item is:
alvl = max(ilvl, qlvl)+mlvl
if 0 < mlvl else it is given by:alvl = max{ilvl, qlvl}-[qlvl/2]+max{0, qlvl-45}
Note that the last term is 0 for items with qlvl at most 45 so it acts as a sort of bonus to items with qlvl above 45.Magic Level 0 (1.07 only)
This section is strictly about items with magic level 0, whatever is said here does not apply to items with positive magic level at all. Here is a visualization of the alvl(ilvl) function for 1.07-1.08:
followed by the same table for 1.10+ (and most likely 1.09 as well):
The main difference here is that the 1.10+ formula is more refined and is actually scaled in such a way that an ilvl 99 item will have alvl 99 as well. The same is not true for 1.07 where the highest alvl possible on an item type is sometimes less than 99. (This value is displayed next to 99 at the upper right corner in all four graphs).
For example a qlvl 45 item has a maximum alvl of 77 (at ilvl 99). However as a close look at the alvl formula shows this is the worst case scenario, that is: at ilvl 99 every item always has at least alvl 77.
Now how is this relevant? As it turns out the list of affixes of level higher than 77 is actually very short:
Prefixes:
- alvl 90: Skill bonus affix: +2 to class skills; can only spawn on amulets (and circlets, but their mlvl is non-zero)
Suffixes:
- alvl 78: Mana leech affix: +(7-8)% mana stolen per hit; can only spawn on amulets (and circlets).
- alvl 81: Minimum damage affix: +(10-13) minimum damage; can only spawn on rings and amulets (and circlets)
- alvl 83, 85, 90, 92, 94: Five different crappy charges of Amazon attack skills; can only spawn on gloves.
- alvl 91: Life affix: +(41-45) to life; can only spawn on grand charms.
- alvl 110: Life affix: +(46-50) to life; can only spawn on grand charms.
But here it comes: Every item with qlvl 19 or less as well as every item of qlvl 71 or more has alvl 90 or higher at ilvl 99 anyway. Since we can force ilvl 99 from crafts this means that we don't need to worry about the seven class skill prefixes (amulets have qlvl 1) as well as the mana leech and minimum damage affixes (rings also have qlvl 1).
So as long as your crafts have ilvl 99 they can get every affix except for maybe five charges on gloves.
Magic Level != 0 (1.07-1.08)
This is not anywhere as interesting as the first case since the affix level formula is more straightforward. Here is a list of all items with non-zero magic level together with their qlvl and minimum alvl:
Note that circlets can't be crafted but should rather be racked directly. Other than that all items with non-zero magic level can be crafted to have ilvl 99 and thus get any affix available.
A sample calculation for stale runes in 1.07
This subsection is supposed to give you an example of how to use the affix level formula to determine when an affix can spawn on a craft. We will look at lesser blood gloves (base: heavy gloves) and answer the question which clvl is needed to craft them with a stale rune so that they can still get the "Lancer's" prefix (+3 to Javelin and Spear Skills). At the same time we will show that greater blood gloves (base: vampirebone gloves) crafted with a stale rune will never get that same affix.
First off we find out what the alvl of the "Lancer's" prefix is, maybe by looking up this table of affixes:

1.07 News, Info, and Gossip
Welcome! This is the place for general 1.07 news, info, and gossip... A place where intrepid timetravellers to the primordial past of the Expansion can share their finds, characters, and projects...ask questions and share advice and ideas...or just share their experiences or ask about other's...

Heavy gloves are qlvl 7 so they have alvl = max{ilvl, 7}-[7/2]+max{0, 7-45} = max{ilvl, 7}-3. This means that Ilvl needs to be at least 63 in order to reach affix level 60.
Vampirebone gloves are qlvl 69 so they have alvl = max{ilvl, 69}-[69/2]+max{0, 69-45} = max{ilvl, 69}-10. Crafting with a stale rune means that the maximum Ilvl will be 65 which is reached at clvl 99. So we have alvl = max{65, 69}-10 = 69-10 = 59 < 60 which means that the "Lancer's Prefix" can never spawn on these crafts.
Now what clvl do we need in order to get Ilvl 63 on our crafted heavy gloves? Well we are essentially interested in the smallest clvl for which we have 63 <= [clvl*0,66]+[ilvl*0,66] where the second term vanishes because ilvl = 1 as we are crafting with a stale rune, so the condition becomes 63 <= [clvl*0,66] which is equivalent to 63 <= clvl*0,66 which in turn is equivalent to 63/0,66 <= clvl. Now since clvl is an integer this last statement is equivalent to roundup(63/0,66) <= clvl. But the right hand side is just 96. Thus we need at least clvl 96 in order to craft lesser blood crafts with the "Lancer's" prefix using stale runes.
As you may have noticed the alvl of vampirebone gloves crafted with a stale rune will always default to 59. This is not a coincidence:
- A stale rune craft has Ilvl at most 65.
- For every item of qlvl at least 65 the term max{ilvl, qlvl} will default to qlvl.
alvl = 2*qlvl-[qlvl/2]-45
This means you can't improve these crafts via higher clvls or exclude affixes using a lower level character.7) Crafting Bugs: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good
Through a mysterious mechanic called stacking crafts in 1.07 can sometimes bug out and have their automods added to a randomly rolled affix. The two most notable examples of this are life and mana leech on blood crafts.
If a blood craft spawns with life leech as a random affix it can happen that the life automod becomes life leech instead. For example a lesser blood glove gets (1-4)% life leech as an automod as well as +(10-20) to life. Now if the life leech affix spawns on this item (it gives +3% life leech) and the craft bugs out you get +(17-30)% life leech instead of +(4-7)% life leech and +(10-20) to life.
This bug can occur on blood crafted items which may spawn with life leech affixes, i.e. gloves, weapons and rings. (amulets can't spawn life leech in 1.07-1.09)
A variation of this happens if instead of a life leech affix a mana leech affix spawns. In this case the life leech automods can get converted to mana leech. Sadly this stacking is nowhere near as profitable since the life leech automod is much lower than the life automod.
This bug can occur on blood crafted items which may spawn with mana leech affixes, i.e. gloves, weapons and amulets. (rings can't spawn mana leech in 1.07-1.09)
There is another such bug with hitpower weapons but it's not beneficial to us.
We do not understand the mechanics behind stacking as of yet.
In 1.08 there is a potentially unintended dynamic where bonuses to FCR and FRW (and potentially FHR, FBR as well) have their values rounded up to 5% if they are below 5%. This means you can't actually get a caster amulet with less than 5% FCR. A rather minor bug but still technically beneficial to the player.
The Bad
At least in 1.07 (not confirmed yet in 1.08 and probably not possible) the enhanced damage that can be on a craft is capped at 511% since the game uses 9 bits to store the enhanced damage. One possible combination that could lead to this is Grandmasters (up to 200% ED) combined with Cruel (up to 300% ED) together with a weapon craft automod.
As a consequence the best possible crafts for lesser and greater weapon crafts will not differ in their enhanced damage at all.
It seems that socket affixes do not work when they spawn on a craft in 1.07 but there are no reports about this in 1.08. Of course we don't care about the Mechanic's and Artisan's affixes because Larzuk can outmatch (or just match) them with a guaranteed number of sockets. Nevertheless this means that you can't get four open sockets via the Jeweler's affix on a craft. In fact it will just end up taking up an affix slot doing nothing.
Related to the stacking bugs (high life leech) in 1.07 there is a "bug" in 1.08 which makes affixes not stack with automods in certain cases. It seems as though this is meant to be a fix for the stacking bugs but ends up deleting affixes instead. Here is some speculation:
1.08 News, Info and Gossip
@WoRG Ah, right, that's a lot more sensible. :p Was there a specific purpose of that 1.07 list? I'm confused why it would exceed TC66 at all. Or if the idea was "completeness", then why are there items missing? :rolleyes: (For example Sacred Armor, which, if not deliberate, might not be the only...
www.diabloii.net
The Ugly
There has been a report of certain crafts having the potential to corrupt your ATMA stashes:

1.08 News, Info and Gossip
i wonder is that mf real, and if so could you get closer to MF breakpoints by using merc this way. also, did you try taking the armor off and putting it back on?

8) Credits
This guide would not have been possible without @WoRG and @Fruit who are crafting experts in every sense of the word! Also thanks to @GalaXyHaXz and @Helvete for helping uncover the ilvl 99 mystery!
Appendix A
In order to do affix level calculations like the ones above you will need access to all the qlvls, alvls and mlvls which are all available in the .txts the game comes with.
Generally you look for the item/affix you are interested in and then look in the "level" column for the respective level.
The .txts are attached below. If you want more detailed information on how to read them a google search such as "phrozen keep fileguides" will give you the necessary details. Note that 1.09 and 1.10+ guides can be good approximations if there is no 1.07/1.08 guide available. Just don't assume too much!
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