Guide:Crafting 101

Crafting is the act of combining one or more materials into a different item, usually at a specific crafting station.

Crafting Basics
The crafting aspect is slightly different across different versions of Terraria. To access the crafting menu, press the key while in-game. This will bring up the heads-up display, showing your inventory, equipment slots, and other options. The crafting menu is located in the bottom left of your screen, as indicated in the image below. On, press  /. From there, switch tabs on to access the crafting interface and on, switch menus ( / ).

The items that can be currently crafted will appear in this menu. Your crafting options are determined by the items you have in your inventory, as well as your proximity to various crafting stations. Next to a selected item's icon in the list, its crafting recipe appears.

To navigate this menu, you can click or use the mouse wheel to scroll through items. You can also see all craftable items at once by clicking the hammer icon below the word "Crafting". To select an item (as depicted by a yellow border), simply click on it, and to craft it, click it again. The newly crafted item will attach itself to your cursor, and from there it can be placed in your inventory or dropped by right-clicking outside of your inventory space. Large numbers of stackable items can be crafted by right-clicking and holding the icon, which quickly creates and stacks that item until the stack is full, you run out of materials, or simply let go. To exit your inventory, press the key again.

Upon crafting, there is a 75% chance that the item is provided with a random modifier, slightly altering its quality. There is no way to predict what modifier will be applied on an item, and many items cannot get modifiers at all.

Crafting Stations
Many recipes require that you have a crafting station to craft them. The first crafting station available is the Work Bench, which can be crafted without any crafting station. To use a crafting station, it must be placed in the world, and you must be standing close enough to it (see image). Items you can craft using the station will then be added to the list of items you can currently craft. It is possible to stand near many crafting stations simultaneously to craft items using any of these stations. Additionally, some items, such as the Copper Watch or Waterfall Blocks require that you stand next to multiple different crafting stations to be able to craft them.