Simplified Crafting Advice: General guidelines that help with returns.

Crafting may seem complicated and more like a slot machine. In a sense it is, but in a sense no. See... You can eliminate some of the slot machine traits by crafting items with enough markup that even if you lose a few clicks you can still break even or profit with the markup.

However, there are a great many questions about what is best to set the slider to on the crafting machine. After much thorough thought, and some experimenting today with crafting, I have came to the following solution:

IF 100QR and you have the skills needed!

Short run: Best to either do full quantity and use residue if L items, Or set the slider to just where Green turns to Yellow.

Medium run: Recommend setting to the bottom of the green. It will give you a little bit better chance at big drops without giving you too many no drops.

Long run: If you want to go for a jackpot on a cheap item, Full Condition wont hurt you if you have a couple thousand clicks to do, in fact, you might be surprised!

IF 50 to 75 QR

Keep the slider in the green if you can. Once you are over 75 or 80 you can comfortably increase condition without worrying too much on longer runs.

If under 50...

Then I recommend keeping it in full quantity.

UNLESS!!! You are an uber crafter starting with a fresh blueprint in which case your skills will greatly help offset the cost in levelling up a new blueprint. If you are crafting level V components with no problem, I wouldn't worry about doing full condition on a 1QR print of a lower level, just go ahead and do it if you have the peds and want to do it.

Also...

If you aren't getting good results in one area, change to another outpost or tp. It's like mining: You can't hit what isn't there!