I am trying a run with crafting being part of the build but for the life of me, I cant figure out what is worth saving and what isnt and it is clogging up my inventory to a point where I have only 10 spaces left at most. So - what is used in Alchemy, Smithing and Tinkering - each for themselves? So far I have tried for myself but it seems that the only reliable material to gather for smithing is Steel (and iron, coal and chalk to make more steel) while the others are a chaotic mess which would easily kill off your inventory if you hope to ever be able to make anything with it.
Electrum and Platinum are only used very very rarely for one or two base recipes and a few secret ones. It's generally okay to dump them just because they give you so much money and if you need the ingots later you'll find em. Brass and Gold are used in the Smithing tree for some armors. There are a few secret ones for the others but if you are short on inventory, not a big deal. Iron and Steel are the most Important for Smithing if you're going for heavy armors and weapons. Brass and Copper are definitely the most important for Tinkering. There is one Alchemy recipe -- the one to make a gold solution-- which requires you to have NATIVE gold. But there are not that many other recipes which use gold solution, so, not a big deal. There are no other recipes that require a native ingredient.
Awesome thanks! Any tips regarding what one should aim for? Thus far I have been just aiming at steel axes and upgrading them as far as goes but it doesnt really seem all that impressive getting a 17 axe from using 10 steel bars when you can just as easily find better magical weapons just lying around.
To be honest I think Smithing is a bit underpowered right now. It does get you a nice advantage early game, but it does, as you said, quickly become less useful later on. There's no much you can do really except hope for a good secret recipe. hopefully they change it up soon.
I pretty much gave up on crafting mostly due to inventory space. I got soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo tired of lugging around 3 entire backpack rows' worth of shit in order to, once every 3 hours of gameplay, craft a single (usually marginal) upgrade. Tinkering to make Bolts is supposed to be pretty good, but honestly I never got a character up to a high enough level that I was able to make large stacks of scythed bolts that might be able to damage something. And you still run into the problem of needing 2 dozen + inventory slots to do that. So... meh. Alchemy is the sole exception; once you can remember what you need to make Healing/Mana/Regen/Replenishment potions, you can store just those items in your pack (along with a Still and Alchemy Box-thingie) and be able to make useful consumables fairly regularly and "only" have to use up about 1 backpack rows' worth of space.
If you want to know if a crafting material is worth keeping you can see what it can be crafted into on Dredmorpedia in the Items tab. e.g. Salt can be crafted into
