Add links to basic armorcrafting sites here
Keltor's DAOC Spreadsheet is now maintained by Odlaw and is the pricing tools used by most crafters.
Armorcrafting is time consuming and expensive. A player who wishes to make their own armor should have an armorcraft of 20 times their level + 100. Mythic stated somewhere that crafting should take less time than leveling. I find this unlikely.
It has been stated that the probability of a sucessful craft is 50 + your skill - item skill, and this equation seems to match measurements. It has also been stated that the probability of an skill advance is some constant times the probability of failure, and that the constant is dependant on the material used. This also seems to be correct.
I started keeping accurate logs of my crafting at level 500 and started following an semi-optimized pattern at level 600. Herein I report my results
Crafting mithril, the level 500 material, from skill level 550 to level 599 on mostly yellow/orange items I achieved 107 combined in 244 attempts with 48 advances in armorcraft. This shows that 63% of all crafts resulted in a piece of armor and 46% of those combined resulted in an armorcraft advance. Solving the equation for k, we find that k-factor for mithril is 1.2
Starting with adam I attempted to follow a semi-optimal crafting plan designed to maximize gains while minimizing cost. This plan uses the fundamental equations to observe that the optimal range of crafting is on items your skill level to 15 above your skill level. Anything more than 15 levels above your skill level results in too many critical failures (lost components). Anything much below your skill level results in combines with no skill gain (lost gold). A future exercise will try to determine the theoretically optimal items to craft for every skill level. The plan followed for this experiment seems intuatively close.
Crafting adam, the level 600 material, from skill level 614 to level 699 produced the following results:
| Starting skill | Ending Skill | Item | Attempts | Combines | Advances | Time spent |
| 614 | 620 | Stel gloves | 55 | 29 | 6 | 1h06m |
| 620 | 640 | Svar gloves | 145 | 60 | 20 | 3h50m |
| 640 | 650 | Stel boots | 41 | 29 | 10 | 0h50m |
| 650 | 667 | Stel sleeves | 147 | 72 | 20 | 4h00m |
| 667 | 699 | Svar sleeves | 100 | 47 | 13 | 2h15m |
| 614 | 699 | Totals | 556 | 263 | 86 | 13h26m |
Doing the math we see that 47% of all crafts resulted in a piece of armor and 32% of all armor produced an armorcraft skill advance. Solving the equation we find the k-factor for adam to be 0.6