CraftBuddy v5
Crafting optimizer for Ascend From Nine Mountains. CraftBuddy watches your live craft state, calculates the best next action, and shows you why — so you can craft with confidence instead of guesswork.
- Real-time recommendation for the next crafting action
- Expected completion, perfection, and stability gain preview
- Effective qi and stability cost preview (current + follow-up actions)
- Alternative action suggestions with comparative reasoning
- Lookahead search with presets and manual performance controls
- Condition forecast awareness and probabilistic branching beyond the forecast queue
- Harmony-aware simulation for sublime crafts
- Buff and mastery-aware simulation
- Large-number-safe parsing and formatting for late-game values
- Snapshot export for bug reports and optimizer debugging
Open any crafting activity (forge, alchemical, inscription, resonance) and CraftBuddy appears automatically. The panel shows:
- Recommended action — the best technique to use next
- Expected gains — how much completion/perfection/stability you’ll get
- Reasoning — brief explanation of why this action was chosen
- Alternatives — other viable actions ranked by quality
- Ctrl+Shift+C — toggle panel visibility
- Ctrl+Shift+M — toggle compact mode
- Ctrl+Shift+Y — export optimizer replay snapshot
CraftBuddy settings are accessible from a gear icon inside the CraftBuddy panel. Settings open as a slide-over panel.
Search Presets
If you’re unsure what to change, just pick a preset. Presets adjust all four search parameters together in tested ratios.
- Instant — near-zero latency, minimal lookahead
- Fast — quick results, good for simple crafts
- Balanced — recommended for most crafting
- High Accuracy — deeper search, better for complex or high-value crafts
- Max — maximum search depth, may take several seconds per recommendation
Manual Search Controls
For advanced users. These four sliders are coupled — pushing one much higher than the others can waste search time and sometimes reduce recommendation quality.
- Lookahead Depth
- Search Time Budget
- Search Max Nodes
- Search Beam Width
Search stops when either the time budget or node budget is reached first. Results vary by craft complexity and machine speed since the time budget is wall-clock based.
Display Options
Toggle visibility for predicted rotation, final state estimates, upcoming conditions, and alternative actions.
v5 introduces a new engine selector in settings:
- Legacy engine — the established lookahead optimizer. Reliable and well-tested for all crafting.
- Experimental engine — opt-in Rust/WASM search that can help with difficult late-game, sublime, and harmony-heavy crafts where previous versions had weaker recommendations.
Recommendation: Keep Legacy for everyday crafting. Try Experimental on tough late-game or sublime crafts. If Experimental gives a suspicious recommendation, switch back to Legacy from CraftBuddy settings.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Y during any craft to export an optimizer replay snapshot. Snapshots capture the full craft state, available techniques, and the optimizer’s reasoning — everything needed to reproduce and debug an issue.
Please send snapshots when:
- CraftBuddy gives a bad or suspicious recommendation
- You think a different action should have been suggested
- Something looks wrong with the gain/cost previews
- You encounter any unexpected behavior
Snapshots are the single most useful thing you can include in a bug report or improvement suggestion. File reports on GitHub[github.com] and attach your snapshot.
If you prefer not to use the Workshop:
- Download the latest afnm-craftbuddy.zip from GitHub Releases[github.com]
- Create a mods folder in your game install directory (same folder as the game executable)
- Copy the zip file into mods — do not unzip
- Launch the game
- ElderGPT Spirit Ring — AI-powered contextual advisor overlay. Chat with any AI model inside the game.
- Lucky All Around — Configurable pity-event luck weighting for Explore events.
