Nexus Clash

Among the big hits to non-innate gear this breath is the fact that crafting is an absolutely awful process. Mundane gear is already underpowered, crafting components are inordinately heavy and since crafting components can no longer be transmuted, this means several locations' drop tables are functionally worthless.

Under the current system, if you want gear crafted, you need to spend search cycles in a tile with a fairly low chance of getting the specific components you need and very low chances of incidentally finding alchemy components. Alternatively, you can hope someone added some crafting components to the safe, but between how rarely they're used, how rarely people search crafting component tiles and how heavy the crafting components are, it's rare to have any of those in the safe either.

So while crafting components probably shouldn't be allowed to be transmuted to alchemy components again, perhaps an alchemist should be able to transmute crafting components to other types of crafting components.

This sounds reasonable to me

Making crafting a lot better was one of the main goals I had when applying to join the dev team, as even before this breath it was deeply unsatisfying to play a dedicated crafter. I definitely think this sort of thing would help, though I'd probably allow certain crafting components to work as both crafting components and alchemy ones.

I really don't understand why so much effort was put into separating them in the first place.

This has large approval among the dev team.
Promote.

This feature has been coded and will be included in the next patch. It will have the same AP/MP costs as alchemy component transmutation and will require only the base Alchemy skill. Crafting materials (iron, steel, brass, wood, leather, plastic, gunpowder) will only be able to be transmuted into other crafting materials. There are no rarity tiers in crafting material transmutation; all of these seven material types are considered to have the same rarity.