How to Craft Weapons and Gear in The Division

If you've spent any time exploring The Division then you'll have found plenty of weapons and gear scattered around Manhattan, as well as receiving them as mission rewards and purchases from vendors. However, there's another way of getting new items - crafting - which not everyone is familiar with. Crafting can be a great source of new weapons and gear to improve your arsenal, so follow this guide and you'll be building upgrades in no time.

Find blueprints

In order to craft an item, you first need to find a blueprint for it. These are normally acquired by completing side missions, and by highlighting the marker on the map you can see which blueprint you'll receive.

Find materials

The next thing you need for crafting is materials, in the form of Weapon Parts, Tools, Electronics and Fabric. You'll see these marked on the map when you get close to them - normally Fabric and Electronics are found in stores, Tools in garages/workshops, and Weapon Parts in locations such as police stations. You can deconstruct items you don't have equipped to receive materials by selection the appropriate option in the Inventory menu, and there are also Wing Upgrades you can purchase for your Base of Operations that give you a regular supply of materials for collection.

Get crafting

Once you have blueprints and materials, you can use the Crafting Station in your Base of Operations to make some new items. Scroll down the list of items to see their level and the range of damage or armour they'll fall into, as well as how many random bonuses will be assigned to that item. At the bottom of the screen are the Resource Requirements, and if you meet them you can craft the item, which will have stats and bonuses randomly assigned to it. If you're not happy with the outcome you can deconstruct the item, but be aware that you'll only receive back a portion of the original materials.

Material conversion

Materials are ranked in the same way as weapons and gear, with green being standard, blue for specialised and yellow as high-end. At the bottom of the Crafting Station menu you'll find a Material Conversion option, where you can 'trade up' five pieces of a material for one of the next level up, so if you find yourself short on a particular resource then this can help you reach your target.