Dabbling in Cyberpunk 2077's crafting system may not be required to enjoy the game, but investing some of those hard-earned perk points into its skill tree can net players an endless source of powerful items and, more importantly, money. Crafting is arguably the most lucrative thing V can do in Night City, but getting to the point where it earns players a ton of eddies per hour can be tedious.
Cyberpunk 2077's crafting system remained fundamentally the same across the game's many patch drops. However, now that high-tier crafting specs are much easier to obtain, players are able to exploit the Crafting skill tree in order to get copious amounts of money in a very short span of time. Here's how to level this skill up as fast as possible.
How to Power-Level Crafting in Cyberpunk 2077
V gains Crafting XP every time they make or break items in the game. Crafting literally anything, from guns to bullets and clothing items, will give experience points, and so will dismantling loot. Right from the start of the game, players should be looting and dismantling everything they can get their hands on. Don't worry about losing Eddies — tons of these will come soon enough.
The ideal leveling setup is to stock up on crafting materials and just make as many copies of one item as possible. To do this, visit one of Night City's many Junk Shops. These often sell crafting materials of various rarities that players can use to kickstart the leveling process. Buy every crafting material in the merchant's inventory, wait 24 hours via the in-game character menu, then buy everything from the merchant again. Repeat until broke or satisfied.
Next, craft the highest-rarity item possible from the Crafting menu. This should preferably be a weapon of some sort. Higher-rarity items sell for more compared to lower-tier ones. If players aren't concerned about money, then simply dismantle the newly-created weapons to feed materials back into the crafting loop.
Ideally, players should have enough perk points to grab the following Crafting skills in order to make the leveling process fly by much faster:
- Workshop 3 (Chance to earn free materials after disassembling items)
- Mechanic 1 (Gain more components when disassembling)
- True Craftsman 1 (Craft Rare items)
- Grease Monkey 1 (Craft Epic items)
- Edgerunner Artisan 1 (Craft Legendary items)
- Ex Nihilo 1 (Chance to craft an item for free)
- Tune-up 1 (Upgrade low-quality components into higher-quality ones)
Players can respec their perk points in the character screen by spending Eddies, so no need to worry about having to level up. Just hit the respec button, grab the perks listed above, then respec again after crafting. However, players will need a high Technical Ability stat in order to unlock skills like Ex Nihilo and Edgerunner Artisan.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.