Recipe crafting, recipe by recipe

Unlocking crafting

1. 1

   Crafting unlocks mid-story

   A few hours into Act 1, right after a New Vision story dive, a banner announces Card Crafting and the game walks you through a guided tutorial craft. From that point, recipes found in story entries can be forged from the hub at any time.

   

2. 2

   The recipe decides the card

   The Recipes tab is explicit about the deal: “Create new, stronger Cards through Crafting.” Each recipe — At The End and An Aberrant Freedom in the first hours — defines exactly which card a successful craft produces, so hunting recipes in story entries is hunting cards.

   

Crafting a card, step by step

1. 3

   Open a recipe and start the puzzle

   Selecting a recipe opens its crafting board: the card preview on the right, base stats on the left, and the hex grid in the middle. A prompt tells you to click to begin, and the board waits for your first Iota.

   

2. 4

   Place Iota to fill the colored zones

   Placement is a tiny puzzle: “Iotas are placed in the grid to fill in Colored Zones.” The tutorial has you place, delete and re-place freely, and it teaches the first boundary the hard way — push a piece outside the outline and the board flags Out of Bounds.

   

3. 5

   Read the board before you commit

   A finished placement shows everything at once: the Penalties tally on the left, the Potency Multiplier, and the card preview with its final Power and Defense — An Aberrant Freedom’s tutorial craft lands at 1,030 / 1,058. If the numbers look wrong, rearrange before you hit CRAFT.

   

The rules that make or break a card

1. 6

   Finalize shows what the craft keeps

   Committing a craft opens a Finalize Card preview. Early recipes show “NO TRAITS AVAILABLE — there are no Traits to choose from with this recipe” and “Color Change not available for this Card” — the basics are locked in, and fancier options arrive with later recipes.

   

2. 7

   Pick the right girl before you craft

   Crafting is character-bound, and the launch-day run learned it live: “Does it matter who I craft the cards with? Actually, crafting as Iris…” Each girl’s skills shape what a craft produces — Iris’s kit includes Expanded Iota Limit and Incremental Tolerances — so switch crafters before placing pieces, not after. The Austere Advisor craft below lands at a clean 1,537 / 1,537.

   

3. 8

   Learn the five penalties once

   The game teaches placement penalties with tooltips worth reading once: Out of Bounds Penalties apply per Iota in a pink-marked zone, and each Iota can give at most one penalty. The full family — Overloaded, Out of Bounds, Disconnected, Overlap and Falsehood — is catalogued in our Integration wiki; the crafting twist is that penalties subtract from the exact card you’re building.