Gotham Knights has a crafting system that lets you make new gear to keep you punchin’ and whackin’ those Gotham City criminals. This is a system that you’re going to need to take advantage of if you want to stay ahead of the game’s enemies, which scale up to meet your character level. With low-level gear on a high-level character, you’re really going to struggle.
Unfortunately, Gotham Knights‘ crafting system is a little obtuse. It’s an odd system that feels kind of out of place in this game world, and the game also doesn’t bother to explain any of it to you. But don’t fret and don’t sweat, because I’ve spent a bunch of time figuring out all the ins and outs of how it all works. And now that I’ve put in that effort, I’m going to share my bounty with the rest of the Gotham Knights-playing world.
Using the workbench
You’ll be doing your crafting at the workbench in the Belfry. If you’re not sure where to locate it, it’s just to the right of the Batcomputer.
When you interact with the workbench, you’ll bring up a menu that allows you to craft gear in three categories: Suit, Melee, and Ranged. I probably don’t need to explain this, but Suit is your outfit, Melee is your main weapon, and Ranged is your secondary weapon. The last part is a little confusing, actually, as Red Hood’s weapons don’t exactly fit neatly into these categories. His pistols are categorized under Melee, and his ammo is categorized under Ranged. Yeah, it’s not a perfect system.
As you can see in the image above, each of these three categories has its own icon; a shied representing Suit, a fist representing Melee, and a crosshairs representing Ranged. Note that Suit will affect your appearance, and Melee will affect the appearance of your weapons, but Ranged doesn’t seem to have an impact on aesthetics at all (Barbara’s Batarangs seem to be an exception to this).
Salvage and blueprints
You need two things to craft anything in this game: a set of blueprints and the required salvage. Both of these things are acquired the same way. You can loot them off enemies, you can find them in chests, or you can get them as rewards for completing missions and challenges.
Anything you’ve earned will show up on the left side of your screen for a brief moment.
Or, if it’s a mission reward, it will show up briefly under the completion text.
Blueprints have nice little icons that look like a square with one of the corners folded over. But don’t confuse this with mods, which have a similar icon, though it’s shaped like a square with all four corners cut off, so it’s almost an octagon. I’ll talk more about mods later, but just know that both blueprints and mods use the same shield, fist, crosshairs icons to show you which category they belong to. All of these icons should have a number at the bottom, which represents the level of that blueprint or mod.
These are also color-coded to show their rarity level.
White is Common, green is Uncommon, blue is Rare, orange is Heroic, purple is Epic, and yellow is Legendary.
Now, every crafting blueprint requires specific components, which are called salvage in this game. If you want to look through your current stock of salvage, you can do so in the Crafting menu whenever you’re in the Belfry — you don’t even have to manually walk up to the Batcomputer or workbench; you can just open your menu (by holding down the touchpad, if you’re playing on PS5) and navigate to the Crafting section.
This will show you all of the piles and piles of salvage you’ve managed to collect. It doesn’t really matter what this stuff is called, but if you’re curious, starting in the upper left-hand corner and moving to the right, the image above shows:
- Polymer
- Titanium Mesh
- Graphene Fiber
- Organic Composite
- Industrial Solvent
- Rare Earth Metals
- Colloidal Crystal
- Electrum
- Accelerant
Polymer can be found pretty much anywhere, but the other components drop from specific factions. Titanium Mesh and Rare Earth Metals, for example, drop from the Mob faction, while Industrial Solvent and Accelerant drop from the Freaks faction.
Honestly, I wouldn’t get too hung up on salvage, though, because you’ll be collecting so much of it that you’ll almost always have what you need without having to go out and grind it too much.
Dismantling old gear
All of your current gear is held in your Gear menu, but if you want to get rid of some of it, you can dismantle any piece of gear to break it down into components. If you’re playing on PS5, you simply go to your Gear menu, select an item, and press the L3 button. This will bring up a list of components you’ll get for dismantling the item. If you’re cool with it, you can confirm that you want to dismantle it. If not, you can back out at this point without completing the dismantling process.
Now, there’s a tooltip in the game that claims you have limited storage, but I’ve never hit my maximum capacity for any item, so I don’t really know if this is true or not. If you’re worried about it at all, dismantling your gear will keep your inventory slots nice and clean.
Weird crafting mechanics
Crafting is super weird, and there are some odd behaviors you should be aware of if you’re going to do a lot of it. So here are some general observations that I made during my hours and hours of crafting in Gotham Knights.
Stats seem super random. The stats of any blueprint seem to be completely randomized. In general, higher-level items will have better stats than lower-level ones, but there’s also the rarity factor, as well as some plain ol’ randomness.
You can craft items while out on patrol. You have full access to crafting while exploring Gotham City, but anything you craft will be waiting for you at the Belfry.
You will always earn blueprints specific to the character you are playing. Barbara will only ever earn Batgirl blueprints, and Jason will only ever earn Red Hood blueprints.
Blueprints are single-use-only. Crafting something destroys the blueprint permanently. Kind of. This doesn’t seem to be true all of the time, for some reason? I’m doing more experimentation on this to see if I can nail it down.
Items earned via story missions seem to be shared across characters. This is a really weird exception to the previous two observations. Whenever you earn gear as a mission reward, it does seem to carry over to your other characters. So, if Barbara earns a Heroic tonfa as a mission reward, Dick Grayson will acquire a Heroic pair of sticks that match the stats of Barbara’s tonfa.
Mods
Okay, now let’s get to mods (or modchips). As you get later into the game, you will find (and craft) items that include mod slots. These slots can be filled with modchips. Mods fall into the same three categories as the rest of your gear (Suit, Melee, and Ranged), so they can only be used with gear from the same category. A Suit mod can only be used on Suits, for example.
To slot a mod, go to the Crafting menu, then navigate to the Mods tab. You should see all of your mods here. Now, simply select one, then select the piece of gear you want to add it to.
If you don’t have any mods yet, you might not be deep enough into the game to be finding them. I personally started noticing them at around level 10, and they seemed pretty common after that point.
You can actually fuse mods to make more powerful versions, which is also a good way of cleaning up your mod inventory. Basically, go into the Mods tab of your Crafting menu, then press triangle (if you’re playing on PS5) to open up the Fusion menu. Now, you’ll need to select four modchips that will then be fused together into one higher-stat modchip.
You can combine chips across stats, and even across categories, and if you do, it seems like the result is kind of random. You can also stack four mods of the same stat in the same category to ensure you’ll create a powerful mod with a specific stat. For example, you might want to stack four Suit mods that all have the Health stat to get a single mod that has an even higher Health stat.
There does seem to be a limit for how high these can go, though. I tried jamming as much Health as I could onto a single mod, and the result was that I just burned through a lot of mods without increasing the Health stat any further.
If you want to unequip a mod, simply select the piece of gear that has the mod equipped, then press the R3 button (on PS5). This allows you to either swap your current mods with other ones, or even unequip all of your currently equipped ones.
Styles, transmogs, and colorways
Finally, let’s talk about style. Basically, your cosmetic options break down into two categories: tansmogs and colorways. Transmogs are taking one suit’s aesthetic while keeping the stats of another suit. So, your equipped suit is what determines your stats, while your transmog is what determines your look.
You don’t have to apply a transmog to your current suit if you don’t want to. With transmogs, you aren’t allowed to tweak the finer details of your suit. So, normally you can change visual touches of your suit, including colors, gloves, bat symbol, etc. You can’t do this with transmogs.
And that brings us to colorways. Colorways are sets of colors that you can apply to your currently equipped suit.
Now, both transmogs and colorways need to be unlocked. As far as I can tell, transmogs are unlocked once you successfully craft a particular type of suit. So once you craft a Year One suit, you’ll have access to the Year One transmog. As far as colorways, the unlocking process is a bit more vague. There’s a tooltip that explains that you can unlock colorways by completing missions and challenges, but I’ve had a hard time matching my colorway collection with my mission progress. It does seem kind of random.
Conclusion
And there you go. That’s pretty much everything I’ve been able to figure out about crafting in Gotham Knights. Go out there and make some stuff, Batty!
