# Arknights: Endfield Crafting Formula Unlock Guide
> Unlock crafting formulas by opening the Backpack, entering Crafting, and checking the Crafting Manual. This plan focuses on the menu path, the material requirement for unlocking recipes, and where to find unlocked formulas afterward.
- **Game:** Arknights: Endfield
- **Category:** Getting Started
- **Author:** LongBeam (https://guides-factory.com/about)
- **Difficulty:** Beginner
- **Reading time:** 20 min
- **Published:** 2026-08-15
- **Updated:** 2026-08-31
- **Tags:** backpack, crafting, formulas, materials, menus, unlocking
- **Adapted from:** [How To Unlock Crafting Formulas In Arknights Endfield](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NFj7f4mR3c)
- **Canonical URL:** https://guides-factory.com/guides/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
| What | Answer |
| --- | --- |
| What a formula is | A crafting recipe, tracked in the **Crafting Manual** |
| Where formulas live | Backpack → Crafting → Crafting Manual, top right |
| How you unlock one | Gather enough of one material, then claim the reward |
| How the Manual is split | Two regions, counted separately: **Valley IV** and **Wuling** |
| Gear Assembly unlock | Finish **Rally and Unite** in Valley IV |
| Artificing unlock | The **Gear Artificing** quest, after you reach Wuling |
| AIC factory recipes | Set on the production unit itself, not in the Manual |
## 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.
| System | What it produces | Where it lives | How it opens |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Formulas** (Crafting Manual) | Food, medicine, powders, planting plots | Backpack → Crafting | Available from early Valley IV |
| **Gear Assembly** | Gear pieces, from a recipe list | Its own **Gear Assembly** menu | Finishing **Rally and Unite** |
| **Artificing** | Nothing new — it raises stats on gear you own | The **Artificing** tab inside Gear Assembly | The **Gear Artificing** quest in Wuling |
| **AIC** production | Industrial materials and components, automatically | On each factory unit | Story progress through the AIC |
Tip
If you are looking for a recipe and cannot find it, ask what kind of thing it makes. Something you eat or drink is a **formula**. Something you wear is **Gear Assembly**. Something that raises a number on gear you are already wearing is **Artificing**. Something that comes out of a machine on a conveyor is an **AIC** recipe.
## 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.
Why it feels random
Formulas arrive on their own schedule because they are tied to gathering totals rather than to quests or levels. A player who picks every plant they walk past will have far more of the Manual open than a player at the same story point who does not — and neither of them did anything wrong.
## 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.
## 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.
## 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.
## 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.
| Tab | What it holds | Typical example |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **EMS F&M** | Single-step powders and simple compounds | Yazhen Powder, from 1× Yazhen |
| **Fine F&M** | Cooked dishes and multi-ingredient consumables | Meat Stir-Fry, from 8× Tartpepper and 4× Fillet |
| **Planting** | Planting plots for growing a material yourself | A plot for any plant you have picked once |
| **Personal Device** | Personal equipment recipes, added in Homecoming | — |
| **Transmute** | Converting one resource into another, added in Homecoming | — |
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](/guides/sword-vault-dale-100-exploration-map) 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.
This is what turns planting on at all.
A single pickup permanently unlocks that plant's plot formula.
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:
5,000 Wuling Stock Bills, one purchase.
Up to 25 a day, so this is the input that paces you.
1,000 Wuling Stock Bills per unit produced.
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.
| Step | Requirement |
| --- | --- |
| Prerequisite | **Authority Level 2** or above |
| Prerequisite quest | **Valley Reboot** |
| The mission | **Rally and Unite**, Chapter 1, The Hub, **Valley IV** |
| The trigger | Repairing the Hub Base Comms Node at the end of it |
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.
If the menu is missing
Players who race ahead in exploration sometimes reach later content before finishing Rally and Unite, then wonder why the gear menu is not there. The unlock is tied to the mission, not to your level or your region — go back and finish it.
## 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
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.
Tip
Gear you have decided against is not dead weight. Recycling an unwanted piece returns the large majority of the bills spent on it, so clearing the inventory is close to free. Weapons cannot be discarded at all, but a spare low-rarity weapon can be fed into a better one as upgrade material.
## 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.
| Rule | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| What it costs | An **Artificing Catalyst**, plus another gear piece of the same type |
| What that piece must have | An **equal or higher** value in the stat you are raising |
| Per-stat limit | Each stat can be raised **3** times |
| Per-piece limit | **9** Artificing attempts on a single piece of gear |
| On failure | The **Artificing Progress Bar** fills; a full bar guarantees the next attempt |
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:
| Unit | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Refining Unit** | High-temperature refining — Originium Ore into Origocrusts, ore into fibres |
| **Shredding Unit** | Shredding — Origocrust into Origocrust Powder |
| **Forge of the Sky** | Xiranite-based products, including Bumper-Rich fertilizer |
| **Seed-Picking and Planting Units** | Automated sowing and harvesting, from AIC Level 2 |
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.
The clearest way to keep them apart
Ask where the recipe is stored. A **formula** is stored on your character and crafted from the Backpack. A **gear recipe** is stored in the Gear Assembly menu. An **AIC recipe** is stored on a machine standing in the world, and it runs whether you are watching or not.
## Also worth knowing
Before you go looking
- **Gathering totals never go down.** The Manual counts what you have ever picked up, so spending a material does not undo progress towards its next threshold.
- **Each region's Manual is its own ladder.** Valley IV totals do not contribute to Wuling ones, and the reverse.
- **Plot formulas need one pickup, not a threshold.** Collect a plant once anywhere in the overworld and you can grow it in bulk forever.
- **The Crafting Manual pays Oroberyl.** Some rungs hand over pull currency rather than a recipe, which makes filling it worth doing on its own.
- **Artificing is the only system that eats gear.** If you are recycling every duplicate gold piece, you are burning the material Artificing runs on.
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NFj7f4mR3c) by How To Games. System details cross-checked against the [Crafting Manual](https://endfield.wiki.gg/wiki/Crafting/Crafting_Manual) and [Crafting](https://endfield.wiki.gg/wiki/Crafting) pages on the Endfield Talos Wiki, Game8's [Rally and Unite](https://game8.co/games/Arknights-Endfield/archives/575537), [gear artificing](https://game8.co/games/Arknights-Endfield/archives/577016) and [planting](https://game8.co/games/Arknights-Endfield/archives/535800) pages, GameWith's [Rally and Unite walkthrough](https://gamewith.net/akendfield/72623) and [Bumper-Rich fertilizer guide](https://gamewith.net/akendfield/72995), and Game Rant's [gear crafting and artificing guide](https://gamerant.com/arknights-endfield-how-to-craft-upgrade-artifice-gear/).
**See also:** [Arknights: Endfield Character Pick Guide](/guides/arknights-endfield-character-pick-guide) — getting started
**See also:** [Arknights: Endfield Redeem Codes for August 2026](/guides/arknights-endfield-redeem-codes-and-how-to-use-them) — getting started
---
## FAQ
### What are formulas in Arknights: Endfield?
Formula is the game's own word for a crafting recipe, and every formula you own is listed in the Crafting Manual. They cover consumables rather than equipment: food, medicine, powders and planting plots. Gear is made in the separate Gear Assembly menu and never appears among your formulas, and the AIC factory's production recipes are set on the machines themselves rather than stored in the Manual.
### How to get more crafting formulas in Arknights: Endfield?
Gather more materials. The Crafting Manual records every item you pick up and keeps a running total, and each material has a ladder of thresholds that pay out a new formula, a product upgrade or Oroberyl as you pass them. Buckflower pays out at 1, 25 and 50 gathered; other materials run further. Farming helps twice over, because harvested plants also feed Crafting Manual points. Open Backpack, then Crafting, then the Crafting Manual at the top right, and use Claim All to take everything you have already earned.
### Is artificing the same as crafting in Arknights: Endfield?
No. Artificing creates nothing. It raises a stat on a piece of gear you already own, consuming an Artificing Catalyst and a second piece of gear of the same type that has an equal or higher value in that stat. Each stat can be raised three times and each piece allows nine attempts in total. It sits in its own tab inside the Gear Assembly menu, which is why it is so often mistaken for a crafting feature, and it unlocks separately through the Gear Artificing quest after you reach Wuling.
### How do you unlock Gear Assembly in Arknights: Endfield?
Finish the main mission Rally and Unite, in Chapter 1 in The Hub, Valley IV. It needs Authority Level 2 or above and the Valley Reboot quest done first. Gear Assembly turns on at the very end of the mission, when you repair the Hub Base Comms Node by rotating the Originium circuit components into a continuous power path, and the game then walks you through forging and equipping your first piece.
### Why is my Crafting Manual empty again in Wuling?
The Manual is split by region and each half is counted from zero. Valley IV totals do not contribute to Wuling entries and the reverse is also true, so arriving in Wuling means starting a fresh set of ladders against that region's own plants and materials, such as Yazhen, Jincao and Redjade Ginseng. Nothing has been lost; the Valley IV half is still there and still complete.