The real heart of crafting lies with exalted items, which contain tier 6 or tier 7 affixes. Exalts are valuable both on their own and as the building blocks for Last Epoch gold creating legendaries. To craft on an item, you'll consume its forging potential (FP)-a limited resource that determines how many times you can modify it. Once FP reaches zero, the item can no longer be crafted.

Glyphs

Glyphs are consumables that alter how affixes are added, upgraded, or modified during crafting.

Glyph of Hope: The most common and useful glyph. Each craft has a 25% chance to cost no forging potential, letting you stretch your FP much further. Use these liberally when upgrading or adding affixes.

Glyph of Chaos: Changes an affix into another random one from the same pool. Ideal for rerolling undesired affixes into something more useful. For example, you might cast off a weak stun chance suffix in hopes of hitting fire penetration.

Glyph of Order: Prevents the numerical value of an affix from rerolling within its range when upgrading. Useful when you already have a near-perfect roll on a stat you want to preserve.

Glyph of Despair: Seals an affix, removing it from the item's main affix slots while keeping it as a permanent "hidden" affix. This opens a slot for better stats. It's especially powerful when combined with advanced techniques such as shuffling affixes with runes of havoc.

Glyph of Envy: Consumes stability from an item to progress your Monolith timeline. Niche in use, but handy for farming or leveling alts.
It will be more convenient to have enough Last Epoch gold to upgrade.

Runes

Runes provide more specialized crafting effects.

Rune of Shattering: Breaks down an item and gives you a portion of its affix shards. This is the main way to expand your shard pool for future crafting.

Rune of Removal: Removes one random affix from an item and grants all its shards. Best used on items with only one or two affixes to increase your chances of targeting the stat you want.

Rune of Refinement: Rerolls the numerical values of all affixes within their tiers. Perfect for polishing T7 exalts to get maximum rolls before using them in a legendary slam.

Rune of Discovery: Fills empty affix slots with random stats at no FP cost. Extremely powerful during the campaign or early endgame, but less useful later when you're chasing specific affixes.

Rune of Shaping: Rerolls the implicit stats of an item (the properties at the very top). Particularly valuable on weapons like daggers with cheap Last Epoch gold high crit multiplier ranges.