On Crafting by Fumbleweed

This thread was originally posted by Fumbleweed@Europe, additional thanks to Talamek@USWest and PrMoriarty@Europe for clarifications and corrections.
Some Notes On Crafting revisited Last update: 15/06/2007

* Still under construction, but mainly done *

The part "Determining ilvl of the input item" still needs a litte brush-up, and I've planned to add good hints around crafting I've read, but the important parts are done.

I you feel the need to make grammar notes, well, don't hesitate to make them.

Preface
The point of crafting is, plain and simply, to get good items, preferably such items that can *only* be gotten via crafting.
It's pretty easy to find out how crafting works - and on the other hand it's pretty hard to find out how crafting works. That means that it's very easy to read a crafting recipe, to put some items into the cube and to hit the "mutate"-button, but on the other hand it's rather difficult to say what the outcome can look like, and what it can't look like.
The main purpose of these notes is to give an answer to these two question.
(Although we'll approach the problem from the opposite direction as well.)
Note:
The crafting recipes can be found here: http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/crafteditems.shtml

What is crafting
Crafting is a special case of item generation. In the case of Diablo an item is something that alters the statistics of a character or that gives certain abilities to a character. So in a certain sense an item is nothing but a set of certain attributes, and item generation in general and crafting in specific are about the rules how attributes are attached to items.|||

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Q u o t e:
This thread was originally posted by Fumbleweed@Europe, additional thanks to Talamek@USWest and PrMoriarty@Europe for clarifications and corrections.
Some Notes On Crafting revisited Last update: 15/06/2007

* Still under construction, but mainly done *

The part "Determining ilvl of the input item" still needs a litte brush-up, and I've planned to add good hints around crafting I've read, but the important parts are done.

I you feel the need to make grammar notes, well, don't hesitate to make them.

Preface
The point of crafting is, plain and simply, to get good items, preferably such items that can *only* be gotten via crafting.
It's pretty easy to find out how crafting works - and on the other hand it's pretty hard to find out how crafting works. That means that it's very easy to read a crafting recipe, to put some items into the cube and to hit the "mutate"-button, but on the other hand it's rather difficult to say what the outcome can look like, and what it can't look like.
The main purpose of these notes is to give an answer to these two question.
(Although we'll approach the problem from the opposite direction as well.)
Note:
The crafting recipes can be found here: http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/crafteditems.shtml

What is crafting
Crafting is a special case of item generation. In the case of Diablo an item is something that alters the statistics of a character or that gives certain abilities to a character. So in a certain sense an item is nothing but a set of certain attributes, and item generation in general and crafting in specific are about the rules how attributes are attached to items.

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Where did the rest of this all go?