Shrine of the Omnissiah
By now, many of you have fiercely proven your worth to the crew of the Mourningstar and have been rewarded with an ever-growing arsenal of weapons and curios drawn from Grendyl’s armoury.
But how can you customise those weapons to better suit the demands of Atoma’s gruelling war zones? Hadron Omega-7-7, the Mourningstar’s resident Tech-Priest, is ready - if not quite eager and willing - to provide her technical expertise to those Rejects who have earned the warbands' trust.
The Shrine of the Omnissiah can be found on board the Mourningstar. Here, you can upgrade and modify your weapons and curios … so long as you have the necessary resources to do so. Hadron requires two resources to perform her labours: Plasteel and Diamantine. These resources can be salvaged from Tertium - the more dramatic the customisation and the rarer the weapon, the more Plasteel and Diamantine you’ll need.
You will have access to five actions as part of the crafting systems at the Shrine: Consecrate, Earn Blessing, Combine Blessings, Re-Bless, and Refine Item.
Consecration
Consecrating a weapon or curio increases its sanctity in the eyes of the Emperor, improving its effectiveness, and adding a random Perk or Blessing, depending on the item type and its new sanctity level.
Earn Blessing
You may also choose to surrender a weapon to Hadron in exchange for a Votive Offering dedicated to one of the weapon’s Blessings. This allows you to extract the Blessings you are interested in from weapons you no longer want, and collect them for use with the Combine or Re-Bless actions.
Combine Blessings
At the Shrine you may choose to combine three Votive Offerings into a single upgraded Votive Offering. Currently, most Votive Offerings have a maximum Tier of IV, but there are some exceptions to this. We're testing a few different options with the requirements and the results of combining these Votive Offerings.
Re-Bless
By Re-Blessing a weapon in the Shrine, you can replace a weapon’s existing Blessing by expending a Votive Offering from your collection, further tailoring the weapon to your liking. The weapon gains the Blessing associated with the chosen Votive Offering -he original Blessing is lost in the process.
Refine Item
To refine your weapon and curios, Hadron takes your item and attempts to scour away the corrosion and damage of its long use, uncovering its true nature and altering its strengths. In game, these strengths take the form of the item’s Perks. Accordingly, each time you Refine an item, one Perk is discarded in favour of another, random Perk uncovered by Hadron’s repairs. Multiple refinements on the same item attract increasing costs - the deeper a weapon’s true character lies, the harder it is to reach it.
As an example, you may choose to select the perk “Deal +10% damage to Armored enemies” on your Chainsword for refinement and in its stead Hadron replaces it with “Increase Melee Critical Strike Chance by 2%”.
At the heart of it
By now we expect you have experienced or heard about the first crafting feature available in Darktide, Consecration. We also hope this blog gives you a glimpse of the broader crafting system(s) and the depth of customising your weaponry and loadout for the perfect playstyle you wish to engage with. At the heart of this is the Blessing extraction and Re-Blessing functionality, where you can collect and swap out Blessings in order to customise the different combination of weapons you wish to experiment with.
We have learned a lot from our previous choices and gameplay surrounding crafting offered within the Vermintide series. For Darktide we wanted to take those lessons to expand and improve in such a way that crafting would become a central pillar of player progression, while giving more impact and agency to you, the player in your preferred playstyle.
The nature of randomization and repetitive actions sometimes seen within crafting is something that we are steering to avoid in the crafting system within Darktide. Meaningful choices will be made with strategy and goals behind them, as you set your eyes upon that perfect combination of melee and ranged weapons for your class.
Additionally, the crafting resources found within Darktide are now acquired in a completely different way than the Vermintide series. We opted to add these directly into missions as pickups to reward exploration, as well as rewards for completion of some specific objectives. We believe that this feels on theme to have players collecting these resources in the world, so keep your eyes peeled. You can currently find small and large caches of both Plasteel and Diamantine.
In closing, we hope you enjoyed this look into Darktide’s crafting system. We are excited to bring you the rest of the crafting features, which we'll gradually be rolling out throughout December. And we look forward to building upon this system in the future.
Thank you for reading, and watch each other's backs down there on Tertium.