Tailoring & Leatherwork

The two soft-armor vocations on Rookery Isles: Tailoring weaves Fabric into cloth armor for mages, Leatherwork tans Pelts into leather armor for archers and hybrids, here is every station, ratio, labor cost, and proficiency gate, verified against the live ArcheAge 3.0 server.

Requirements

This craft itself has no character-level requirement. You can smelt, process, and craft at any level if you have the materials. The catch on Rookery Isles is that the raw materials come from world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing), and all of those are gated at Character Level 52, so in practice a self-supplied crafting career begins at Level 52. You can still craft earlier from purchased or traded materials.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• What Tailoring and Leatherwork Are
• The Spelling Matters
• Processing: Fabric and Leather
• Where the Raw Materials Come From
• The Stations You Need
• Proficiency Gates and the Rank Ladder
• Bulk Processing
• Worked Example: Cloth Armor (Tailoring)
• Worked Example: Leather Armor (Leatherwork)
• Which Armor Type Suits Which Build
• On Rookery Isles

What Tailoring and Leatherwork Are

Tailoring and Leatherwork are two of the eleven production vocations on the Crafting tab of the proficiency window. They sit side by side because they do the same job for two different armor weights:

• Tailoring processes Fabric and crafts cloth armor, the lightest armor weight, worn by casters.
• Leatherwork processes Leather and crafts leather armor, the medium weight, worn by archers and melee-caster hybrids.

Both follow the same two-step rhythm every ArcheAge 3.0 crafting vocation uses on Rookery Isles: process a raw material into a refined one, then assemble refined materials into finished gear at a dedicated armor form. Tailoring carries 750 distinct recipes in the server database; Leatherwork carries 717. The third soft path, plate armor, belongs to Metalwork, covered in the Mining & Ore guide and the broader crafting guide.

This is the ArcheAge 3.0 "Revelation" build (AAEmu 3.0.3.0 NL0bP fork). The top crafted armor tier is Ayanad, there is no Erenor or Hiram gear in this build, see the gear progression ladder for the full tier picture.

The Spelling Matters

The in-game vocation labels are Tailoring and Leatherwork, note Leatherwork, not "Leatherworking." Likewise its plate-armor sibling is Metalwork, not "Metalworking." These are the exact strings the proficiency window uses, and older guides that wrote "-working" were wrong. If a tooltip or a fellow player says "Leatherworking," they mean Leatherwork.

Processing: Fabric and Leather

Every piece of soft armor starts as a processed intermediate. Both processing recipes cost 1 Coin plus the raw material and run for 5 Labor at their dedicated station. These figures are read directly from the live recipe tables.

The two Fabric routes are not equal. Both produce one identical Fabric (item #8256), but the ratios differ sharply:

• Wool route, 3 Wool → 1 Fabric. The cheaper, denser route. Wool comes from shearing your own sheep (Husbandry), so a tailor who keeps a few Lambs feeds the loom for almost nothing.
• Cotton route, 10 Cotton → 1 Fabric. Three-plus times the input. Use it only when cotton is abundant and wool is scarce, since cotton is a wild gathering crop you can pick anywhere.

For Leather there is a single base route, 3 Pelt → 1 Leather, plus a refined tier:

Fine Leather is the leather equivalent of Fine Lumber (a Logging product), a higher-tier intermediate consumed by mid- and high-level leather armor. There is no equivalent "Fine Fabric" item in this build; cloth armor consumes plain Fabric all the way up the chain (see the worked examples below).

Where the Raw Materials Come From

This is the single most important caveat in Leatherwork, and the one that trips up new crafters.

Wool is a Husbandry product. Shear an adult Lamb/sheep (item 16226) every 8 hours to collect Wool (#8053); the item tooltip says outright that it "can be processed into Fabric at Weaving Looms." Goats give Goat Wool, a separate item that feeds Tailoring, Carpentry, and Handicrafts. A happy, Combined-Feed-fed sheep can also rarely drop Golden Wool (#19952), and that bonus chance rises with your Husbandry proficiency. See the Husbandry guide for the full livestock loop.

Cotton is a wild Gathering crop (item #8357, a Textile). You pick it from wild Cotton nodes (1 Labor each) and denser Cotton Bundle / Cotton Field / Cotton Greenhouse variants. In the live world it clusters around Perinoor Ruins, with smaller stands in Two Crowns, Marianople, Solzreed Peninsula, and Halcyona (see the world atlas for these zones). See Gathering & Herbs.

Pelt is the leather caveat. Pelt (#8007) is not crafted, its tooltip states it is "a material found by butchering large livestock." So the leather supply chain runs through Husbandry's Butcher action on a mature animal, not through any processing recipe. There is an important nuance here:

Caveat on leather sources. The two named hide items in the database, Cow Leather (#8047) and Sheepskin (#8051), have zero recipe usage on this server; they are vendor/regional pelt items, not part of an active Leatherwork chain. The verified leather pipeline is Butcher a large animal → Pelt → process at the Leather Workbench → Leather. Treat any guide that says "shear a cow for leather" with suspicion, leather comes from butchering, which consumes the animal, while milk and wool come from collection cooldowns that do not.

The Stations You Need

Each vocation uses a processing station for the raw-to-refined step and an armor form for finished gear. Regal variants are upgraded versions with the same function.

A recipe whose station requirement is 0 needs no fixed station, it can be done from the proficiency window or on Mirage Isle. Most processing and armor recipes do require their station, so plan to work at a community crafting hub or your own housing plot.

Proficiency Gates and the Rank Ladder

Crafting on Rookery Isles is gated by proficiency points, not character level. Every recipe carries an actability_limit, the cumulative proficiency you must have in that vocation before the recipe unlocks. The base processing recipes (Fabric, Leather) have a limit of 0: you can weave and tan from your very first point. The gating that matters lands on top-tier armor.

The proficiency rank ladder is identical for every vocation, Tailoring and Leatherwork included:

Rank 1 is Amateur, not "Basic." Master is the 50,000 cap; Authority is 70,000. Rank-up itself is free in this build, you advance simply by spending labor on the vocation. Higher rank means cheaper crafts (the exact labor-reduction percentage per rank is not server-confirmed, so treat any specific number as community-reported).

For both Tailoring and Leatherwork, gated recipes span roughly 25 up to 130,000 proficiency. As the worked leather example below shows, Epherium-tier leather opens at 40,000 (Expert), Delphinad at 70,000 (Authority), and Ayanad at 130,000 (Herald).

Bulk Processing

Once you reach Master rank you unlock bulk processing recipes that fold 10x or 100x output into a single action. The trade is purely click-saving, labor scales linearly, with no efficiency bonus.

The single-Fabric recipe (3 Wool → 1 Fabric, 5 labor) costs exactly the same labor-per-unit as the 30 Wool → 10 Fabric bulk recipe (50 labor for 10). Bulk recipes exist so you can convert a full cargo of wool in one click, not to save labor.

Worked Example: Cloth Armor (Tailoring)

Crafted cloth armor follows a linear upgrade chain, each tier consumes the previous tier's item plus escalating Archeum and Fabric. Here is the verified low-to-mid chain for one head slot in the cloth "Ocean Hood" line, all crafted at the Cloth Armor Form with the Craft Cloth Armor skill:

The full ascending tier names for crafted soft armor are: Apprentice's → Craftsman's → Artificer's → Artisan's → Conqueror's → Illustrious → Magnificent → Epherium → Delphinad → Ayanad. Note the two distinct mechanics:

• Craft tiers (Apprentice → Conqueror) are classic recipe upgrades at the Cloth Armor Form, consuming Archeum that escalates Dust → Shard → Crystal. This is pure Tailoring.
• Reforge tiers (Illustrious → Ayanad) are "synthesis" steps performed at a Salvage Forge, consuming Mana Wisps salvaged from gear. Those steps are a Machining-stationed mechanic, not Tailoring, see the gear and crafting articles.

Archeum is the recurring bottleneck. It refines downward (Essence → Crystal → Shard → Dust, x4 each step) at the Archeum Workbench, an Alchemy mechanic detailed in the crafting guide.

Worked Example: Leather Armor (Leatherwork)

Leather armor follows the identical Apprentice → Ayanad ladder, crafted at the Regal Leather Armor Form (doodad 2236), consuming Leather and Fine Leather instead of Fabric. Here is the verified high-tier chain for one leather head slot (the "Typhoon Cap" line), where the proficiency gates become real:

This chain illustrates everything that makes endgame soft-armor crafting expensive: rising labor (650 → 1,000), rising proficiency gates (Expert → Authority → Herald), an exotic refined hide (Wind Spirit Leather) at the top tiers, Gilda Dust, and a one-time Ayanad Armorsmithing Scroll to seal the final tier. The leather chain consumes Fine Leather where the cloth chain consumes plain Fabric, budget your hides accordingly.

A note on "test" recipes. The database contains a legacy family of leather and cloth armor recipes (skill 11088 for leather) that point at unnamed or placeholder items. Those are not the live player crafts. The recipes above (skills 19794/19795/24583) are the real ArcheAge 3.0 gear path.

Which Armor Type Suits Which Build

Armor weight in ArcheAge 3.0 maps to a defensive/offensive trade. The exact stat formulas are not server-confirmed numbers worth quoting, but the role mapping is canonical:

If you are building a class around the three caster skillsets, train Tailoring. If your three picked skillsets lean on Archery or the agile hybrids, train Leatherwork. Many players keep both at a working rank because a single character often wants a cloth piece or two for stat-stacking. Remember the Rookery passive-spending rule for your skill points, but proficiency is a separate, labor-driven track that has no tree gate at all.

On Rookery Isles

• No character-level gate on crafting. The recommend_level: 52 label on virtually every recipe is upstream metadata, not a lock, Tailoring and Leatherwork are usable from Level 1. Crafting gates are purely proficiency (actability_limit).
• World gathering requires Character Level 52. Every gathering and animal-handling skill (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing) carries a Character Level 52 requirement, and the client enforces it. So you cannot pick Cotton, shear a Lamb, or butcher a cow for Pelt until Level 52. The craft itself stays ungated, you can weave, tan, and assemble armor at any level from purchased or traded materials, but a self-supplied supply chain begins at Level 52.
• The leather source is butchering, not shearing. Pelt comes from the Husbandry Butcher action on large livestock and processes into Leather at the Leather Workbench. The named items "Cow Leather" and "Sheepskin" have no active recipe use on this server; do not build a supply plan around them.
• Fabric has two ratios: 3 Wool (cheaper) or 10 Cotton (when cotton is plentiful) → 1 Fabric. Older guides listing cotton as a flat 3:1 weave were wrong.
• Top crafted tier is Ayanad, there is no Erenor or Hiram gear in this 3.0 build.

See also

• Gearing Supply Chain, the full path from gathered material to best gear
• Crafting & Gathering Overview
• Metalwork, Armorsmithing & Weaponry
• Husbandry & Livestock
• Gathering & Herbs
• Labor Points & Proficiency
• Gear Progression
• Mining & Ore
• Classes & Skillsets Overview