Stars Reach Crafting Guide: Recipes, Stations & Refining
The six rules that shape every craft
| Rule | What it means at the bench |
|---|---|
| Recipe book has a size limit | 8.4.0 lowered the base recipe book size. Capacity grows as you acquire skills that grant recipes — it is not a flat unlock. |
| Loot recipes no longer auto-file | Recipes found as loot go to your inventory. You right-click to add them to the book, and right-click to remove them. Re-adding a removed recipe has a cooldown. |
| No more critical-path loot gates | 8.4.0 removed ingredients that were only obtainable from loot and made them skill unlocks instead, after players hit soft-locks in the new crafting system. |
| Recipe trees are in the UI | Right-clicking a recipe opens a tree view showing every step and ingredient it needs. Selecting an inventory item shows 'what can I use this for?' — every recipe it feeds. |
| Stations have types and tiers | Inspecting a crafting station shows its type and tier, whether it crafts instantly or processes jobs over time (and the processing capacity), and examples of what it makes. |
| Experimentation is the point | The official pitch is mass production plus artisanal crafting with the ability to experiment on stats for unique results, and to brand and visually customise your goods for game-wide fame. |
Harvest → refine → component → finish
Stars Reach does not hand you finished materials. Nearly everything walks the same four steps, and each step is a different skill box — which is why Refining is a profession in its own right rather than a verb.
- Harvest. Gather with the Harvester. Besom Scrubs, for example, were updated in 8.3.0 to drop branches when harvested.
- Refine. Turn raw stock into usable material. The Wood Slurry recipe is obtained through a Refining skill box.
- Component. Grip and Stock recipes were changed in 8.3.0 to take wood rather than planks — a live example of why an old recipe list goes stale.
- Finish. Assemble at a station of the right type and tier, either instantly or as a queued job.
Reading a crafting station before you commit
Inspecting a station tells you four things: its type, its tier, whether it crafts instantly or queues jobs over time (and how many it can hold), and examples of what it can make. That last field is the fastest way to find the right bench without walking a settlement — and the queue capacity is the number that decides whether a station is worth building at your homestead or worth walking to a public one.
Why old recipe lists go stale fast
A concrete example from a single patch cycle: Grip and Stock recipes were changed to take wood instead of planks, Besom Scrubs began dropping branches when harvested, and the Wood Slurry recipe moved into a Refining skill box. None of those are cosmetic — they change what you gather before you sit down to craft. This is also why this page documents the system rather than reprinting a recipe database: Stars Reach does not publish a recipe database, so this page documents the systems and the rules the patch notes state outright. Individual recipe ingredient lists are read in game from the recipe tree view rather than reproduced here.
Durability and repair
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Items decay | Many newly crafted and gathered items carry durability, shown in the item description. |
| Inspect before you repair | The context menu carries an Inspect option that tells you whether something is functioning or needs repair. |
If you are hunting for how to use a repair kit: the route is the context menu, not a dedicated repair screen. Inspect the item first — the description carries its durability value — then use the repair option from the same contextual menu that exposes Inspect.
Crafting systems checked against patch notes: