Recipe

In order to craft an item, you must first have the recipe for that item. In general, there are four ways to obtain a recipe:


 * 1) When you first hire a worker, they will come with a couple of very basic recipes.
 * 2) You can have your workers spend time researching the recipe.
 * 3) Occasionally, an adventurer will come in and offer to sell you a recipe.
 * 4) You will also receive some recipes as a reward for completing a quest or achievement.

Once you have a recipe, you can use it to produce as many of the item as you want; the only way to lose it is to abdicate.

Research
Research is the primary way of obtaining recipes in the game. To research, simply select the worker, click on "research", and then select the item you wish to research. If the item is a cooperative item, all workers will need to be free in order to research the item. Many recipes will also require your worker to be a certain level to research (the example below requires a blacksmith level of 20 and a sorceress level of 35).



Most recipes in the game have prerequisites; that is, there are simpler items which must be researched first before the desired recipe can be researched. The research dialog box will only allow you to select recipes for which all of the prerequisites have already been obtained. The recipes which are then unlocked by that research are shown on the right side of the arrow. (See the example at right.) For a list of all prerequisites required to research a given item, consult the individual item page.

Some recipes are token recipes and require, in addition to the above, a number of tokens to be spent to research the recipe. These items are identifiable by a glow around the item; they are listed at the end of the list in the research dialog box to avoid confusion with regular recipes. Not surprisingly, items made from these recipes tend to be more desireable and profitable than items from regular recipes.



The amount of time required to research a recipe is not known exactly, but it appears to follow this basic pattern:


 * Every recipe has a certain number of "research points" that must be completed to finish the recipe.
 * Each hour, your worker produces a number of points equal to (worker's Innovation stat) + 2*(your Innovator skill).
 * Once you've reached the target number of points, the research is complete. (If the research involves multiple workers, each will finish when they reach the target.)

Since the number of research points required to finish is never displayed by the game, however, we can only estimate it. You can see the number of research points being generated by your workers every hour when they are researching.

Note that once you've started researching, unlike crafting, it cannot be hurried or stopped, so plan carefully before starting a long research project!

Purchase
From time to time, a customer will come into your shop and offer to sell you a recipe. Since the September updates, these rules appear to always hold:


 * The price to buy the recipe is always 4 times its market price. This means that buying the recipe (if you can afford it) is always a good idea, since in the time it would take you to research it, you could produce and sell many more items.
 * Token recipes can be offered to you too, however the occassion that this is happening is rare. Cost for a token recipe is the same as a non - token recipe: 4 times it's sell value. If you buy it from a customer, you will not need to use tokens. No known recent occurence of token recipe offer (among multiple players). If this happens, please get a screenshot. [The recipe price is 4x item's market price (confirmed), but this is useless as it will not be offered.]
 * As a result, recipe offers will become very rare after level 100 or so, simply because by that point you have probably researched nearly all of the non-token recipes. They still can happen (confirmed @105, invalidating previous limit), at least until you have researched all of the non-token recipes.
 * Once turned down, the recipe is unlikely to be offered again.

Note that customers can offer you the recipe for items for which you don't have the prerequisite recipes, or the required worker levels, which can be a big time saver.

Reward
Some quests or achievements will also offer you recipes, as in the example below. (For achievements, the recipe will arrive in the mail.)



Most of these reward recipes cannot be obtained any other way, either through research or purchase, although there are a few exceptions (for example, the Masamura can be researched).