When your Heart is set on an Item in Rune Factory 2

I probably should add this as a postcript to an existing post about Weapons and Accessories but for those who like posts that deal only with ONE topic, I will keep it separate.

If your heart is set on a specific Weapon or Accessory in Rune Factory 2, but it is not sold by Tanya and you haven't the skill to make it yet, you have two options:

1. Make Weapons/Accessories that require LESS skill until you raise your experience level to the point where you do have sufficient skill to make the desired item; or...
2. Stubbornly attempt the project at your Forge or Workbench again and again until it is successful.

The first option is the obvious one, but the second actually is a possible choice. You may see a '0% success rate' when you first begin to attempt the project but that WILL change. Depending on your current Skill Level and the Skill Level required to create the item successfully, it may appear to take FOREVER before your attempts meet with success but success WILL occur at some point.

Remember that the Success Rate percentage displayed in the Forge or Workbench box when it reaches 100% is that required to gurantee success. At any lower percentage, that simply represents your chances of success when you attempt the project. At 0% success, you have NO chance of succeeding, but each attempt will increase your Skill levels.

Although the next percentage level from zero is only 1% success rate, the level after 1% is 10%, a significant increase. I have made many Weapons and Accessories successfully with nothing more than 10% success rate in the box.

It is a very tedious option, however, and I would recommend that players raise their skill levels by making items that have good success rate percentages, then upgrading them to Level 10 at the Forge or Workbench as advised in my General Guide. Using those upgraded items as ingredients to create better items will result in a new item with a higher Level than Level 1, so your labours will not have been wasted.

The only reason I have attempted Weapons or Accessories when I still had only a zero or 1% chance of succeeding was to use rare ingredients that I did not wish to store any longer. Storage space ALWAYS is a problem for me in Harvest Moon. It can be even more of a problem in a game like Rune Factory or Rune Factory 2, where War Trophies are not always Level 1 and therefore may not be stackable, even when they are the same generic types. That can be a problem both on the field of battle and at home. The Skill Seals that you obtain from Barrett in the 2nd Generation quickly can fill your Rucksack and leave your character with few empty slots when he/she goes out to fight. When you then obtain three items that are the same type but all at different levels, that makes your life even more difficult. Other players may not have a psychological problem where tossing out items is concerned, but I do. Trained by other Harvest Moon games NEVER to litter, it is difficult for me to toss out a Level 1 War Trophy or a piece of ore when there is no slot for it in my Rucksack. My packrat instincts further limit my choices.

In any event, the reason for this post is to assure players that, if they actually salivate at the prospect of obtaining a specific Weapon or Accessory when their Skill levels remain insufficient to create it, provided always that they have a supply of Rune Points in their field to restore energy levels lost a the Forge or the Workbench, they can attempt the ambitious project again and again and again, ad nauseum, until they emerge with the item of their dreams!