Crafted Items are items made with the Horadric Cube in Diablo II.
By using the Horadric Cube's ability to transmute items, a player can use certain recipes to essentially create a Rare Item; only with certain preset mods along with the random prefixes and suffixes.
They appear differently from all other items, showing up with orange text rather than gold or yellow like Rare and Unique Items, and like Rune Words, Crafted Items abide to certain rules that can sometimes be confusing and counter intuitive. Although they may appear tedious to make, Crafted Items have the potential to be extremely powerful, and even more valuable than even Unique Items.
Crafting Basics[]
All crafted items are made with Magic Items as the base items, and a variety of other items (most often perfect Gems, Jewels of any kind, and specified Runes). Any magical item can be used, including Ethereal items, or items socketed due to a magical prefix such as Mechanic's. However, after the crafted item is made, the Ethereal or socketed condition would be gone, as crafting an item gets rid of any preexisting mods. This is important to remember: magical items with mods that have been crafted by a player should not be then crafted again, as doing so would erase them.
Mods[]
A crafted item always has a set of pre-set mods that depends on the recipe used in its crafting and the type of item that is crafted. There are four types of basic recipes, that correspond to four types of pre-set mods:
Along with this set of pre-set mods, a crafted item is also imbued with a set of random mods: 1-4 suffixes or affixes that would normally be found on magic items or rare items. Higher character levels and item levels spawn higher numbers of mods, as well as higher level mods: for instance, crafting a Dimensional Shard at level 81 would spawn 4 higher level random mods, as opposed to crafting a Jared's Stone at level 20, which would most likely spawn 1 lower level mod. Using the same logic, Crafted Items can also have very high character level requirements: sometimes even over level 100, making them unusable.
Pros and Cons[]
Crafted Items can be compared and contrasted to a Rare Item. The main advatange of Crafted Items is the ease of accessing them - unlike Rare Items which can only be found or gambled for, Crafted Items are far easier to create - the runes used are generally fairly common, there is no specific requirement about the Jewel, the base item can be easily gambled for (although if the player desires an elite item as base, it will take more effort to obtain), leaving the perfect gem as the rarest item to obtain, which is far easier than trying to obtain a Rare Item of a specific base. The preset mods also give the player some control over what they want on the item. In addition, some of those preset mods are normally not found on Magic or Rare Items, while some others can stack with normal randomly generated affixes - for example, normal amulets can only obtain 10% Faster Cast Rate, while a caster amulet can obtain up to 20% if it spawns "of the Apprentice" suffix as well.
On the other hand, Crafted Items can only be generated with up to 4 affixes, compared to Rare Item's 6. More importantly, Crafted Items have a higher level requirement than Rare Items. Some otherwise truly monstrous Crafted Items are rendered pointless because they could require something like level 96 to wear. They also cannot obtain affixes that are exclusive to Magical Items, although Rare Items cannot obtain them either.
Patch Differences[]
Crafted Items went through a variety of changes from Patch 1.08 to Patch 1.09, including changes in recipes. Although no differences have been made from Patch 1.09 to the current Patch 1.14d, those few players not updated to the latest patch may find Crafted Item recipes quite different from those listed.
Early patches also had quite a few problems with Crafted Items: Prior to Patch 1.09, players could imbue Crafted Items with the Act I quest. However, since then, the bug has been fixed.
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