Crafting

Note: this section is about manual crafting, automated crafting will be explained here.

Sooner or later you probably have to do some crafting. Even if you are more combat oriented and don't care about crafting much you most likely will not be able to avoid it. If you are just starting out then you probably don't have much crafting tools. So after you found a decent place to settle you probably want to craft some additional crafting tools. Fortunately you are given a basic crafting tool and you can use this to bootstrap yourself. The structure crafting tool and equipment crafting tool are probably the most useful at this point.

Especially in the beginning, you will often run into recipes with unfamiliar requirements that you don't know (or can't remember) how to craft. Luckily, the game also provides you with a colonial assembly datapad. You can use this to lookup with datapad and if the datapad knows about it it will tell you what tool to use to make it.

Pro tip: use generic queries with the datapad and don't try to be overly specific. For example, if you need adaptive-phase fabric don't lookup adaptive-phase fabric with datapad but lookup fabric with datapad instead. Or even just lookup fab with datapad. Your chance of success will be much higher and with luck you will also find out about some other interesting stuff you can make.

As awesome as the datapad is, it has its limitations. There are blueprints that are not on the crafting tools by default but these have to be found in game. They usually contain pretty interesting things and some of them are highly desirable. The things you can make with blueprints that are found in the game world usually don't appear on the datapad. Also some of the things that you can improvise also doesn't appear and has to be found out by experimentation.

Besides regular crafting using the blueprints on a tool, you can also improvise things if you have the improvisation skill. This grants you access to a second group of objects to craft, often with cheaper requirements than crafting the item normally.