Leatherworking Skill Tips

Leatherworking

To leatherwork you will need; a needle, an awl, some leather, a leather knife and a mallet.

The best way to begin your leatherworking career is to make leather belts.

This is because leather belts use small amounts of leather when created and when improved. Leather belts also have a high % chance to make at low skill, which means you will not fail as often.

Once you have created your leather belt, get a piece of QL 15+ leather and improve the belt until you need another tool. Keep improving it and you will gain skill (you still gain skill from fails but repairing will slow you down).

Once you have a higher % chance on other items, make lots of leather gloves and improve them all to 15QL.

Keep doing this with higher difficulty items keeping in mind that items with a 50% success rate will give you the biggest skill gain.

NOTE: Needle quality and leatherworking skill will determine the % chance to succeed when creating leather items.

Once your skill reaches 10-15 (EDIT - I would have said 20-25 but this depends on if you like making rivets :Shweet), try and stud some of them. It takes 0.2 kg of rivets to stud ALL leather items apart from leather pants which take 0.8 kg and leather jackets which take 0.4 kg. If you fail to stud an item you will lose the item and the rivet.

Rivet ql and leatherworking skill will determine the % chance to succeed when riveting leather armour, not the ql of the leather item to be studded. Tip; combine rivets before improving them.

As your skill goes up you will need better quality tools since the quality of your tools will determine the failure rate when improving. You leatherworking skill level limits the max improving quality.

You can improve with raw leather that has lower quality than the item you are improving however you will suffer from larger fail to improve rates.

The only item used that has its own skill is a mallet; the miscellaneous skill “hammer” will affect your ability to successfully improve with the mallet.

As with other skills you will gain the most skill by improving items rather than creating them, and when the item quality is closer to your skill you will also gain the most skill. Working on drake armour gives a greater skill gain than plain or studded leather armour.

Creating leather

Successful creation of leather is determined by your leatherworking skill and the quality of the lye used.

If successful the leather will be created at the quality of the hide, the higher your leatherworking skill the better chance you will have of creating leather at the maximum hide quality.

Higher quality hides are harder to turn into high quality leather and, unless you have very good leatherworking skill and lye, it will turn into lower quality leather.

When making leather try to use the smallest amount of lye possible as the entire amount is used. To do this, fill a pottery flask with lye and place a garlic in a second flask, then move the lye into the flask with the garlic. This will leave a tiny amount of lye in the first flask (less than .01kg) to be used on the hide.