Arknights: Endfield Crafting Formula Unlock Guide

Formula is the game's own word for a crafting recipe, and every one of them is tracked in a single screen called the Crafting Manual. So the short version of how to unlock crafting formulas in Arknights: Endfield is that you do not really unlock them at all — you gather materials, the Manual counts what you have picked up, and formulas fall out of those counters as you pass each threshold.

The reason this question gets confusing is that the game has three separate systems that all look like "crafting" from the outside, and none of them share a menu. Formulas make consumables. Gear Assembly makes equipment. Artificing makes nothing — it upgrades gear you already own. And the AIC factory has a fourth pile of recipes that live on the machines themselves. This page covers all four, and starts by drawing the lines between them.

Quick answer

Three systems, three menus, and only one of them is crafting

Most of the confusion around this topic is a vocabulary problem rather than a game problem. Four different things produce items, and players reach for the word "crafting" for all four.

Arknights: Endfield Crafting Manual explained

The Crafting Manual is a logbook, not a shop. Every time you pick a plant, mine an ore or loot a material, the Manual writes an entry for that item and keeps a running total of how many you have ever gathered — not how many you are carrying now. Spending the material does not roll the counter back.

Each material entry has a ladder of thresholds, and each rung pays out a reward. Rewards are usually a new formula, sometimes a product upgrade that improves what an existing formula makes, and occasionally Oroberyl. The rungs differ per material: Buckflower in Valley IV pays out at 1, 25 and 50 gathered, handing over Formula: Buck Capsule [C] and then Formula: Buck Capsule [B]. Redjade Ginseng in Wuling runs 1, 20, 30, 50 and 150.

Open the crafting menu

Unlocking formulas starts with reaching the crafting interface. You can access the crafting menu from either the pause menu or by pressing B on the keyboard/controller. In the pause menu, scroll down to select Backpack, then choose Crafting from the Backpack screen. The Crafting Manual is visible at the top right of this screen. This is where all available crafting formulas are listed.

1. Open the Backpack from the pause menu or with B 0:04
2. Select Crafting from the Backpack screen
3. Find the Crafting Manual at the top right of the crafting screen

Unlock a formula with the required item

To unlock a recipe, browse the list in the Crafting Manual and select the formula you want. For example, the Slug Meat Formula is available for unlocking after you collect one required item. Formula unlock requirements are shown alongside each recipe. As soon as you have the item in your inventory, the formula unlocks immediately, granting you the ability to craft that item.

1. Select a desired formula from the Crafting Manual, e.g., Slug Meat Formula 0:33
2. Collect the specific item required for that formula (quantity: 1)
3. Formula unlocks automatically after requirement is met

Use the materials you have to unlock more formulas

Each new formula requires one of a specific item to unlock. As you collect materials in the game, more recipes become available for unlocking. For example, Chromatic Lipids at a gathered count of 21 is enough to unlock the Edible Dense Stack Formula. Other materials like Clay Mold are also shown as unlockable entries. Check the Crafting Manual regularly; whenever you have minimum required items in your inventory, you can unlock the formula directly.

Claim every remaining formula

Continue unlocking recipes by scrolling through the manual and claiming formulas as you meet their requirements. If you have multiple formulas ready to unlock—thanks to having several gathered materials—use the Claim All option, which appears in the formula list, to unlock all eligible recipes at once. Repeat this process until all available formulas are claimed.

1. Scroll through the formula list for recipes not yet unlocked
2. Use Claim All to unlock multiple formulas simultaneously 1:02
3. Repeat for remaining formulas until your manual is complete

Find unlocked formulas and see their ingredients

Once recipes are unlocked, you can find them back inside the Crafting interface or in the F&M section (such as the F&M tab). Unlocked formulas are listed, and selecting any recipe shows its ingredient requirements and product details. This allows you to plan which materials to gather for crafting specific items.

Arknights: Endfield all recipes list: the five crafting tabs

There is no single Arknights: Endfield all recipes list inside the game, because the crafting screen is split into five tabs and each one holds a different class of formula. A recipe takes between one and three inputs, never more.

F&M stands for Food & Medicine, which is why healing items and buff dishes share a home with basic powders. EMS F&M is the plain end of that — one raw material in, one usable item out, such as Buckflower into Buckflower Powder to restore HP. Fine F&M is where the real cooking sits, with recipes like Mini Honey Slugpudding (1× Slug Meat, 1× Energized Aggagrit, 1× Citrome Powder) and Old Man John's Burger (1× Bitter Flour, 1× Slug Meat, 1× Fillet).

Because the tabs and their contents change between versions, treat any external recipe list as a snapshot. The Crafting Manual in your own save is the only list guaranteed to match the build you are playing.

Arknights: Endfield Valley 4 recipes

The Manual is divided by region, and Valley IV is the half you fill first. Its entries are the plants, meats and minerals of the starting map — Buckflower, Reed Rye, Tartpepper, Slug Meat, Citrome, Chromatic Lipids — and the formulas they pay out are the early healing and buff items you will lean on before gear matters.

Two things make the Valley IV set feel different from the Wuling one. Growing Buckflower and Reed Rye over time produces both the normal and the rare variant naturally, so the rare-material rungs on those ladders fill by themselves if you keep a plot running. And Valley IV has no sprinkler facility, so plots there still need watering by hand.

Planting itself is a side unlock rather than part of the Manual. It comes from the Farming Toils exploration quest, which you get by speaking to Vera in the Originium Science Park. Once it is running, every plant you harvest also feeds Crafting Manual points, so farming is the single fastest way to walk the Valley IV ladders up.

1. Talk to Vera in the Originium Science Park and take Farming Toils This is what turns planting on at all.
2. Pick each new plant once in the overworld A single pickup permanently unlocks that plant's plot formula.
3. Reach AIC Level 2 for Seed-Picking Units and Planting Units These automate the sowing and the harvest.

Arknights: Endfield Wuling crafting formulas

Wuling is the second region and it gets its own half of the Manual, counted from zero. Nothing you gathered in Valley IV carries across, which is why the Manual looks sparse again the first time you open it after arriving — that is the system working, not a bug.

The Wuling entries are the region's own plants and materials: Yazhen, Jincao, Redjade Ginseng and their rare variants, Thorny Yazhen and Fluffed Jincao. Growing the Wuling plants gives a chance at those rare drops, and the rare drops are what the long thresholds at the top of each ladder are asking for. Wuling farms also have a Sprinkler, which removes the manual watering step entirely.

Wuling is also where a second economy for recipes appears. Wuling Stock Bills buy things that Valley IV never asked you to pay for, including at least one formula sold outright rather than earned by gathering — see the fertilizer section below.

Arknights: Endfield food and fertilizer recipes

Food and fertilizer are the two sub-classes of formula that are easiest to overlook, and they behave differently from each other.

Food is ordinary Fine F&M. Dishes restore HP or apply a buff, some of them remove a debuff, and every one of them comes from a Manual threshold you crossed by gathering. Superhot Slug Gratin (1× Slug Meat, 1× Tartpepper, 1× Hard Aggagrit) is a fair picture of the shape: three cheap overworld materials, one useful consumable.

Fertilizer is the exception that proves the rule, because it is the one recipe you buy. Bumper-Rich fertilizer is not a Manual reward at all:

1. Buy the Fertilizer Formula Flyer from Pu Yuan, east of Wuling City 5,000 Wuling Stock Bills, one purchase.
2. Pet Burdenbeasts in Wuling for Burdo-Muck Up to 25 a day, so this is the input that paces you.
3. Make Liquid Xiranite from Clear Water and Xiranite
4. Run the Bumper-Rich line in the Forge of the Sky 1,000 Wuling Stock Bills per unit produced.
5. Apply it to a plot during the growth phase, not after harvest It raises that plot's yield; applied late it does nothing.

Note where that leaves fertilizer on the map of systems: the formula is bought from a vendor, the item is produced in an AIC facility, and the thing it improves is a planting plot you unlocked through the Crafting Manual. It touches three systems at once, which is a large part of why the terminology tangles.

Arknights: Endfield Gear Assembly unlock

Gear is not in the Crafting Manual and never will be. It has its own menu, Gear Assembly, and that menu does not exist until you finish a specific main mission.

Rally and Unite is a long mission that also introduces most of the factory: you meet Andre at the Core AIC Area, gather Originium Ore, place a Refining Unit and an Electric Pylon, investigate the Originium Byproduct Processing Center, run a Portable Originium Rig and build a Shredding Unit. Gear Assembly arrives at the very end, when you solve the Originium circuit puzzle on the comms node by rotating the components into a continuous power path. The mission then walks you through forging and equipping your first piece.

How to craft gear in Arknights: Endfield

Once the menu exists, gear crafting is the most conventional of the four systems: open Gear Assembly, pick a recipe from the list, press Craft.

What changes over the game is which recipes are on that list. You start with basic grey and white pieces, and higher rarities arrive from three separate places:

• free arrives on its own
• setup needs you to go somewhere or unlock something first

1. Authority Level freeLevelling to the high thirties opens recipes up to blue rarity.
2. Wuling templates setupMarked on the Wuling map; reaching one unlocks its gold recipe.
3. Stock redistribution setupSome blueprints sit behind upgrades to Wuling stock redistribution.

Costs scale with rarity and with the level of the piece you are making. A grey or white piece at level 10 asks for Origocrust and Wood; a blue piece at level 36 wants Valley Stock Bills and Ferrium Components; gold pieces move onto Wuling Stock Bills and Xiranite Components, and are reported at 8,000 Wuling Stock Bills and 50 Xiranite Components apiece.

Gold gear is where the factory stops being optional. Xiranite Components come off an AIC line, so a player with no working production chain cannot craft gold gear no matter how much of the map they have cleared.

How to upgrade gear in Arknights: Endfield

There are two different things people mean by upgrading gear, and only one of them is Artificing.

The first is levelling, which is the ordinary one: you feed a piece materials, its numbers go up, and its main stat grows faster than its sub stats. On the gear screen the main stat carries a yellow icon and the sub stats grey ones, which is the fastest way to tell at a glance whether a drop is worth keeping for an operator whose damage comes from that stat.

The second is Artificing, covered below, and it runs on a different economy entirely — it consumes other gear rather than materials.

Arknights: Endfield artificing system explained

Artificing does not craft anything. It takes a piece of gear you already own and raises one of its stats, consuming an Artificing Catalyst and a second piece of gear to do it. It lives behind its own tab inside the Gear Assembly menu, which is exactly why it gets mistaken for a crafting feature.

It unlocks separately from Gear Assembly: you have to reach Wuling and take the Gear Artificing quest, and the function turns on during that quest. Nothing you do in Valley IV opens it early.

The same-type rule is the one that catches people out: an armour piece cannot be fed into gloves, and a piece whose value in the target stat is lower than the one you are upgrading is not accepted. That, plus the nine-attempt ceiling, is what makes Artificing a late system in practice even after the quest has opened it — you need a surplus of spare gear of the right type before you can spend any of it.

Arknights: Endfield factory recipes: AIC production lines

The AIC is the factory, and it has the largest recipe set in the game by a wide margin — community databases catalogue well over four hundred production recipes across roughly ninety buildings. None of them appear in the Crafting Manual, and none of them can be made by hand.

An AIC recipe lives on a production unit rather than in a menu. You place the building, open it, choose the recipe you want it to run, and then feed the correct inputs into its input port by conveyor; the finished item leaves through the output port. The units are specialised rather than general:

Layouts can be shared as blueprint codes through the in-game blueprint menu, which is why community guides circulate strings of characters rather than screenshots of factory floors. Importing one places the whole arrangement of units and belts at once.

Also worth knowing

Accurate as of 22 August 2026, game version 1.4. Menu names, thresholds and costs move between versions — the Crafting Manual in your own save is the authority on what your build actually holds.

Source: How To Unlock Crafting Formulas In Arknights Endfield by How To Games. System details cross-checked against the Crafting Manual and Crafting pages on the Endfield Talos Wiki, Game8's Rally and Unite, gear artificing and planting pages, GameWith's Rally and Unite walkthrough and Bumper-Rich fertilizer guide, and Game Rant's gear crafting and artificing guide.

See also: Arknights: Endfield Character Pick Guide — getting started

See also: Arknights: Endfield Redeem Codes for August 2026 — getting started