Ara: History Untold – How to use the crafting system

Learn how to maximize your economy’s potential

Oxide Games / Microsoft

The mechanical crown jewel of Ara: History Untold is its deep “crafting system” – in essence, a city-builder-style production system that allows you to take basic resources and refine them into amenities for your cities and materials to deploy armies. 

Table of Contents

1. Ara: History Untold – How to get resources
2. Ara: History Untold – How to craft Amenities
3. Ara: History Untold – How to use Supplies and Specialists

If you’re used to the simpler economies present in other turn-based strategy games, that bit of complexity may catch you off guard when first starting up Ara. It takes a bit of learning to get a grip of all the options this system affords you. Putting theory into practice is the next step – the right plan and a bit of foresight will allow you to maximize the potential of your economy and fuel whichever playstyle you prefer.

Learn how to use the crafting system in Ara: History Untold below.

Ara: History Untold – How to get resources

Like in the real world, some locations are more abundant than others when it comes to certain types of resources. Each region in Ara: History Untold provides a base yield of Food, Timber, Materials, and Wealth, which is added to your total at the end of each turn, even if you have no improvements there.

This base yield is crucial for determining how to specialize each region, because it decides how efficient improvements like Farms, Mines, and Logging Camps are going to be – you’ll want your Farms in regions with four Food, Mines in those with four Materials, and Logging Camps in those with four Timber, ideally.

That’s just the basic resources available everywhere, of course. Special resources from Rice to Natural Gas can also be found in the world, but their natural gathering rate is very slow. To exploit these resources effectively, you’ll need to construct improvements. In most cases, these are the same Farms and Mines you’d build on empty zones, though others need special buildings, such as Oil Wells.

Some resources provide different types of yields, allowing you to freely choose between them. A Goat Farm, for example, can generate Wool to power your textile industry or Goats to slaughter for meat. A Rice Farm can harvest Rice Grain for use in a Granary or Brewery or generate Food to grow your city directly, and so on. Check out our Ara: History Untold food production guide for more detailed information on that topic.

Ara: History Untold – How to craft Amenities

Once you’re harvesting basic resources, it’s time to refine them into Amenities. Amenities are a type of good you can activate in your cities, generating powerful effects for them to help growth, production, or quality of life.

You craft Amenities inside improvements built into previously empty zones, such as a Granary. Once the building is completed, you can choose which type of good it should craft – more are unlocked over time as you progress through the tech tree. You can order infinite production, which is good for stuff you’ll need consistently, or order a limited amount of items.

Amenities for cities or goods that need to be further refined in another production step (Bread, for example, is both an Amenity and can be used for advanced recipes like Gourmet Meals), should be produced infinitely. Supplies, on the other hand, are best produced in limited quantities, since they are not consumed at a consistent pace – but we’ll get to that below.

You can choose to create Grain Store with Grain, Rice Grain, or Wealth as primary ingredients and use Ceramic Pots or even more Wealth in the secondary slot. Note the Supplies delivered to the building at the top and the slotted-in Specialist. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

There is a recipe for every Amenity, giving you several options on how to produce them. Taking Grain Store as an example, you have a two-slot recipe you can fill out. It’s important to note that Grain Store will be produced even if you leave these two slots empty, but it will happen slower. The primary slot, which adds more production power to the process, can be filled with Grain, Rice Grain, or Wealth – so you get one generic and rather inefficient option (Wealth) and two options powered by natural resources you might have access to (Grain and Rice Grain). In the second slot, you can either use Ceramic Pots or Wealth. Again, the latter is generic and not overly efficient, while the first requires you to have a Ceramics Workshop pumping out pots – these, in turn, have their own recipe with connections to other goods.

Resources assigned to recipes are consumed every turn, so you need to ensure a steady supply of them to keep crafting efficient.

You can always see the current production and consumption rates of your resources and goods in the overviews on the right side of the top bar on the screen, or by mousing over any goods.

The top right bar has useful economy overviews in store. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

To activate an Amenity, click on a town and use one of the + symbols on the right side.

Ara: History Untold – How to use Supplies and Specialists

Filling out a recipe is not the only way to boost the production of your crafting buildings. You can also deliver Supplies or assign Specialists to them to improve their output.

Supplies are generally crafted goods themselves, for example Plows or Tractors which can be used in Farms. You can assign Supplies in the top right corner after clicking on an Improvement. Another use for Supplies is to deliver them to your housing districts in cities, where they generate powerful bonuses for the entire city.

This Granary is already getting boosted by Wheels and Ceramic Pots, but we can further bolster its production with Ropes. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

An important thing to note is that Supplies are not consistently consumed like the resources in a recipe are – only a single unit of the Supply is consumed upon being assigned to a building, so you can produce these in smaller quantities and simply build more when you need more later.

Specialists are generated by city growth. You can assign these directly in the Improvement view, or click on the Specialist icon on the top of the screen in the city overview to fill a Specialist slot. Buildings can house up to three Specialists (with more slots often being unlocked via upgrades) and each Specialist generally increases their production rate alongside useful buffs like raised base yields or generating quality of life stats for the city.

Note the outgoing modifiers of this Dwelling, which have been expanded by the Supplies delivered to it. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Planning out your production districts is another thing to keep in mind: Some buildings buff the production or yields of other improvements, creating important synergies.

For more on the game, read our Ara: History Untold developer interview.