| Skill Enhancing Attachments for Fun and Profit |
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| Written by Ryph Blackfeather | |
| Sunday, 29 July 2007 | |
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A Skill Enhancing Attachment (SEA for short) is an item attached to either a piece of armor or clothing or a weapon that improves one or more statistics (Strength, Constitution, Stamina, Precision, Agility or Luck) or a skill (such as Artisan Assembly or Combat Offense: Strikethrough). SEAs used to drop as loot before the New Game Enhancement introduced in November, 2005. They were completely random as to whether they would attach to armor or clothing or what they would modify. With Chapter 5, they are back. Now, instead of hoping for a good looted one, Traders build them using a Reverse Engineering tool which they craft. (Note: the terms Reverse Engineer and Reverse Engineering are often abbreviated as RE.) They can also make powerups that act as temporary but more powerful SEAs. Step One: Get a Reverse Engineering Tool If you want to make your own Reverse Engineering Tool (RE Tool for short), first get 30 units of metal with a high Conductivity—960 or better. Usually, this will be Polysteel Copper. If you have two points of Resource Processing and two points of Advanced Refinement expertise, you can make a perfect RE Tool with a 10.0 Experimentation Bonus with ease. Engineering Traders can usually make these tools more easily, so if you have trouble getting a perfect one, have one of them make it. These tools are containers (like Travel Packs or Toolchests) into which you can put items that are to be reverse engineered. You can double-click them in your inventory to open them, drag items from other inventory screens into them, and then open the tool’s radial menu to do the reverse engineering. Step Two: Lots and Lots of Grot Every SEA needs a Modifier Bit and a Power Bit, both made from loot. Power Bits are extracted from looted clothing, armor or jewelry with at least one statistic modifier; these are collectively referred hereafter as looted wearables, or just wearables. The statistic modifier(s) on a looted wearable determine how good a Power Bit will be; a Power Bit determines how good the modifier bonus on the SEA will be. Modifier Bits are made from a combination of two items that until Chapter 5 had no purpose other than decoration or selling to Junk Dealers. There are dozens of these looted junk items: Medical Devices, ID Chips, Chassis Blueprints, Hyperdrive Units, etc. Hereafter, this article refers to them as grot, after the old British slang for junk. The Modifier Bit determines which statistic or skill will be modified. You can spend plenty of time testing which grot combinations produce what modifers, or you can visit web sites with searchable databases for grot cominations and what MOB drops what grot. A good one is at The Junk Yard. Step Three: Modifier Bits The Modifier Bits are easy to make—just take two different items of grot, put them in the RE tool, and select Reverse Engineer from the tool’s radial menu, and out pops your new Modifier Bit. Examine the bit and you will see it has the following:
This last number is very important: the Power Bit is the dividend; the PCR is the divisor. This means if you make a SEA from a 19-point Power Bit and a Modifier Bit with a PCR of 4, the 19 is divided by 4 and rounded down (always) to give an SEA with a skill or statistic modifier of 4. IMPORTANT: When planning which Modifier Bits to make for an SEA, remember that only sockets on chestplates, shirts and weapons will accept SEAs made with Modifier Bits that exceed 1. Sockets on all other items only accept SEAs made with Modifier Bits whose PCR equals 1. Modifier Bits for statistics (Strength, Constitution, Stamina, Precision, Agility or Luck) always have a PCR of 1. Only a few skills, such as Camouflage or Block Value, have a PCR of 1. Step Four: Power Bits Making a Power Bit is also easy; just put a looted wearable in the RE tool and select Reverse Engineer from the tool's radial menu. The wearable is destroyed and a Power Bit is created. If you are lucky, you will get a Power Bit with a higher score than the highest stat on the wearable. The maximum possible value for a Power Bit is 35, but the only way to get that is through a process commonly called Power Bit "breeding"—a complex process that is discussed later. The best Power Bit you can expect to get from a wearable with a 25-point modifier (the highest you can find) is 31, and that's if you have a Reverse Engineering Chance score of 145 or better, and that means having SEAs AND powerups (see below) that modify those scores. If you RE a looted wearable that has two modifiers on it (or if you get lucky with an item with one modifiers), you'll get a 2nd-Order Power Bit. These are used to add a second statistic or skill enhancement to a single SEA. Likewise, wearables with three or four modifiers can be reverse engineered to make 3rd-Order Power Bits, which add a third enhancement to an SEA. No SEA may have more than three enhancements. You must have an Attachment Upgrade skill (part of Trader Expertise) to use second- or third-order Power Bits to upgrade a SEA. A higher order Power Bit can be used in place of a lower order one but not vice versa. Step Five: Making the Attachment Once you have a Power Bit and a Modifier Bit, you can load them into the RE Tool and select Create Skill Enhancing Attachment from the tool's radial menu. The Modifier and Power Bits will be destroyed and a new SEA will appear in your inventory, ready to trade to someone or to drag onto a item with a socket in your inventory. What your Trader specialization is determines what type of SEA you make: Domestics Traders make only Clothing SEAs, Engineering Traders make only Weapon SEAs, and Munitions Traders make only Armor SEAs. Structures Traders cannot make SEAs at all; they RE ship parts instead—but that's a separate topic. Step Six: Attaching the Attachment Almost all clothing and armor and all weapons made by Traders after Chapter 5 have a single socket on them. (Most items made prior to Chapter 5 were converted to have a single open socket, including items that had pre-NGE SEAs on them. Such items are very valuable now.) It is this socket which accepts an SEA. Most items can only accept SEAs that modify statistics. Weapons, shirts and chestplates take SEAs that can modify skills as well, including profession specific ones. To attach the SEA, simply drag it in your inventory on top of the armor, clothing or weapon for which you made the SEA. Answer Yes when the game asks you if you want to combine the two items. “Breeding” Power Bits—Getting That Very Last Point A Power Bit usually has a value somewhat higher than the looted wearable from which it was made, depending on the crafter's Luck and RE chance scores. If the maximum possible Power Bit is 31, then how, one might ask, do you get higher ones? First, you have to do some preparation:
When you have all that, you’re ready to begin:
Ackrid also has this advice: “breeding” is too expensive to mass produce 35-point Power Bits, but it is helpful for adjusting Power Bits for a Trader's crafting suit or a SEA for combat that needs a specific value. The PCR (divisor) can reach 18 for some skills, so calculate exactly what Power Bit values you need as fractional values are lost. For example, the PCR for a Modifier Bit for RE Chance is 10. A Power Bit of 30 will give you +3 to your RE Chance; using a Power Bit of 35 will not improve the result. If you had a 28-point Power Bit, breeding is the way to make it a 30-point one. Keep in mind that to make a SEA with three modifiers on it, you will need at least one Second-Order and one Third-Order Power Bit. “Breeding” can change the order of a Power Bit: just re-engineer the Power Bit you extract from your crafted item with a LSW with two or more statistic modifiers. In this case, the values of the wearable loot modifiers do not matter when making Second- and Third-Order Power Bits—any junk wearable loot with enough modifiers will do. Making 2nd and 3rd-Order Power Bits You need 2nd- and 3rd-Order Bits to make SEAs with more than one statistic or skill. You can advance a 1st-order power bit to a 2nd-order Power Bit, and you can advancea 2nd-order power bit to a 3rd, but you can’t advance a 1st-order bit directly to a 3rd:
Retrofitting It’s also possible to take some (but not all) looted or quest reward weapons, armor or clothing and create a socket to accept a SEA on them. Such items must already have a skill or statistic bonus of some sort, even if it's an obsolete one, like Berserk. Traders can take an expertise skill that allows them to create a Socket Retrofitting Tool. After an item is placed into that tool (which is a container also), you can open the tool's radial menu and create the new socket. The tool disappears, along with the old stat on the item, and the item's new socket is ready to accept a SEA. So far it seems that bio-linkable items, even if they are not yet bio-linked, cannot be socketed in this manner. There may be other items that won't work--the tool won't let you place an item that can't be retrofitted into it, so feel free to try it. Powerups Modifier and Power Bits can be combined to make powerups instead of SEAs. Powerups are created in RE Tools just like First-Order SEAs, except you select Create Powerup on the radial menu instead. When double-clicked in your inventory, a powerup is activated and applied to either the shirt, weapon or breastplate you are wearing, based on whether the powerup was made by a Domestics, Engineering or Munitions Trader respectively. Such powerups typically have triple the points of an SEA made with the same Modifier and Power Bit and last 30 minutes. SEAs and powerups can both modify statistics, but SEAs can modify more skills than powerups. For instance, one can make SEAs and powerups to modify assembly chances, but only SEAs can modify experimentation chances. Getting the Deconstruction Cyber Arm The High Quality Resource Collection is completed by getting five pure samples each of minerals, chemicals, gases, water, flora, and geothermal energy. You can collect these by sampling each of these resources looking for the event that occurs when you find a deep concentration with your survey tool while sampling. Instead of just attempting to recover the concentration, you can now seek a sample of high purity. Doing so is automatically successful. When you gain all thirty samples, you get a cybernetic arm that, when attached, grants +5 to RE Chance and +150 to Luck. You can have it installed by a technician on the upper floor of major medical centers in cities such as Theed and Coronet. The cost is 5000 credits to install the arm or put a regular arm back and recover the cybernetic arm for later use. As with all cybernetic arms, you can't wear arm armor such as bracers or biceps on it. Fortunately, you won't need to: you can attach it before you start a major Power Bit breeding session and have it replaced when you're done. Table of Low Level Grot Combinations Sentient creatures in Star Wars Galaxies with Combat Levels of 5 or less typically drop fourteen types of grot, or loot that can be reverse-engineered to make Skill Enhancing Attachments (SEAs) for armor, clothing or weapons. The lists below list every Modifier Bit that can result by combining any two dissimilar items dropped by these NPCs. Always consider the items in alphabetical order to find the resulting Modifier Bit. Combinations that are listed in previous lists are not repeated in later lists, so each list is one combination shorter than the one before it. Resulting Modifier Bits that are followed by an asterisk (*) have a Power Conversion Ratio higher than one and should never be used for breeding Power Bits. Comlink Combinations
Control Box Combinations
Droid Battery (Black, Green) Combinations
Emergency Reactivator Combinations
ID Chip Combinations
Impulse Detector Combinations
Launcher Tube Combinations
Ledger Combinations
Magseal Detector Combinations
Mark I Circuit Board Combinations
Outdated Aeromagnifier Combinations
Remote Transmitter Combinations
Transceiver Combinations
Reverse Engineering Chance Modifier Bit Combinations Power Conversion Ratio: 10 Medical Console and...
Used Notebook and...
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