Materials - resources | Crafting Guild Wars 2 Guide

Before you start crafting, you need to find proper materials. In Guild Wars 2 one rule should be applied: collect all resources you can find. You never know when you'd like to change your profession and your current materials became useless. Even if you don't plan this, you can sell additional materials via Trading Post or exchange them for what do you need.

Collected silver will be used for few rings and amulets.

First and the simplest method of collecting materials is collecting them by yourself from the map. To do so you need tools which can be bought at almost every merchant in the game. After completing mission or killing few monsters you should have enough money to buy copper harvesting sickle, copper mining pick and copper logging axe, what let you collect materials in the beginning locations. To do so, just equip the chosen item (in inventory you have a place for each of them), go to the source of material and press F. Your hero will automatically collect one or more materials. In case of rich metal vein you can repeat it to pick up more materials.

Full set of tools: sickle, mining pick and axe.

Depending on the place where you want to collect materials, you'll use different tools. Every of them has a different number of uses, so it's worth to carry a spare one.

Icon on the map	Required tool	Number of uses	Materials
	Mining pick	100	Metals, precious stones
	Logging axe	100	Wood
	Harvesting sickle	50	Plants (ingredient)

Besides that it's worth to know that your tools have different levels. The higher level, the rarer ingredients you can get. But using more expensive items on the sources with lower level doesn't give you anything. A type of tools, the materials you get thanks to them and lumps required to ingots (you can buy them also) you may find in this chart:

Level	Tool	Ore	Lump	Ingot	Log	Plank
1	Copper	Copper	Tin	Copper Bronze	Green	Green
2	Iron	Iron Silver		Iron Silver	Soft	Soft
3	Steel	Gold	Coal	Steel Gold	Seasoned	Seasoned
4	Darksteel	Platinum	Primordium	Platinum Darksteel	Hard	Hard
5	Mithril	Mithril		Mithril	Elder	Elder
6	Orichalcum	Orichalcum		Orichalcum	Ancient	Ancient

You have to also remembered that while mining ore you can sometimes get a precious stone, needed by the goldsmith. But it's rather random so, as I mentioned, you should collect all materials you meet.

A precious stone mined while collecting the iron ore.