Crafting

Crafting is the process of creating new items without buying or finding them. It is mainly done at the Room of Requirement, although you can access a Small Potions Station on Potions Class and a Potting Table with a Small Pot on the Herbology Class before then.

A subset of Crafting is the upgrading of your gear through the Enchanted Loom, which also must be placed in the Room of Requirement. See that page for more details.

As you cannot sell any item in Hogwarts Legacy other than gear and captured Beasts, there is no need to craft more than you personally need. And you may need to be strategic on your shopping at first, since this is a large initial investment. However, crafting your own potions and tools will be, on the long run, much cheaper than buying them on the shops. See #On_Tome_Prices section below for a full discussion.

Spoiler Warning: This page discusses in-game mechanics and data in depth, though it doesn't cover any story, quest or plot points. If you prefer to discover all details and optimizations by yourself, you should stop reading now.

What you can do[]

Crafting allows you to get:

Plant Ingredients for potions using a Potting Table or a Chopping Station
Plant-type combat tools, using a Potting Table
Fertiliser using a Dung Composter, to increase yield, specially for the plant Tools.
Moonstone using a Material Refiner for more Conjurations.
Specific potions using a Potions Station
Random potions using a Hopping Pot

Note that, after unlocking the Room of Requirement, you are limited to plant ingredients, and you cannot craft animal ingredients. Those you have to collect in the world, or buy them.

Conjuration limits[]

There are separate limits for each conjuration

Up to 3 of each: Dung Composters, Material Refiner, Chopping Station and Hopping Pot
Up to 7 of each: Potting Tables and Potion Stations.

That is, supposing you have enough moonstone for all, which is a distinct limit.

You have an extra Small Potions Station at the Potions Class and an extra Potting Table with a Small Pot at the Herbology Class, which are not conjurations, do not require moonstone, and do not count for your 7 stations conjuration limit, though in practice you won't need to use them.

The limit of 7 potting tables is for all of the types together. So, 3 Potting Table with a Small Pot plus 4 Potting Table with a Medium Pot is the same as 3 Potting Table with Five Small Pots plus 4 Potting Table with Two Large Pots, while the latter allow for many more plants being grown at the same time. Same for the Small Potions Station vs. the T-Shaped Potions Station. We'll discuss this further at #On_Tome_Prices.

On tomes, recipes and seeds[]

There are three kinds of requirements for crafting. All of them are bought with gold.

Conjurations, bought from Tomes and Scrolls (most of them unneeded, see below)
Recipes for potions, bought from J. Pippin's Potions
Seeds, bought from The Magic Neep and Dogweed and Deathcap

The three of them work the same way: To create certain items, you need the requirement. Once you have the requirement, there is no further expenditure needed. So, no need to "buy more seeds".

You get your first ones for free on your first Hogsmeade visit, the Welcome to Hogsmeade quest:

Seeds and Recipes Prices[]

Potion recipes, buy as needed, preferably after unlocking the Room of Requirement to power-up the Hopping Pot

Combat tools: Buy at leisure

Ingredient seeds

Mallowsweet Seed: 200 gold. Buy ASAP for Merlin Trials
Fluxweed Seed: 350 gold. Buy at leisure.
Knotgrass Seed: 350 gold. Buy at leisure.
Shrivelfig Seed: 450 gold. Buy at leisure.

On Tome Prices[]

Specially at the beginning of the game, money can be a little tight (though see Gold and Disillusionment Chest). Thus, some optimizing is needed.

The simplest recommended setup is:

Hopping Pot + Material Refiner for 4500 gold. This gives you unlimited Wiggenweld/Edurus + Moonstone to Conjure the rest.
Potion recipes for Maxima and Focus (1700 gold, see above) for Professor Sharp's Assignment 1 are recommended. Unless you prefer to burn 800 gold buying them in shops just for this one quest.
Rest of the potion recipes, as funds allow.
Potting Table with Large Pot (1000 gold), once you have the seeds for either Chinese Chomping Cabbage (600 gold) or Venomous Tentacula (1050 gold), meanwhile the Mandrakes (800 gold) can be grown on Small pots.
All else is accessory / can be left for later.

Guiding principles

All plants that can grow in a certain Pot, can grow in a bigger pot too. Since you can grow all Medium plants on Large Pots, the three Medium Pots conjurations (Potting Table with a Medium Pot, Potting Table with Two Medium Pots and Potting Table with Three Medium Pots) are practically useless.
Potions require ingredients, both animal and plant, plus recipes, plus seeds if you want to grow the plant ingredients. Hopping Pot bypasses most of that, only requiring one Tome and the needed Recipes. In fact, it's so good, you shouldn't even use it if you're going for a challenge.
Fertiliser only adds 1 unit to the yield, thus it's only useful for plant combat tools: Mandrake, Chinese Chomping Cabbage and Venomous Tentacula.
You can do everything with a Hopping Pot and a Potting Table (large pot). It only takes more time. Thus, "pay with time", if you cannot spend gold.

Name	Cost	Category	Advice
Hopping Pot	3000	ASAP	Best value for price, buy ASAP unless going for extra challenge.
Material Refiner	1500	Accelerator	You can collect moonstone in the world and pay with time... but it's much more time that the rest of the options. This is the best value-for-time-saved.
Potting Table with a Large Pot	1000	Second best	Allows Chinese Chomping Cabbage and Venomous Tentacula, even Shrivelfig and Fluxweed if needed, and it's affordable. If you have enough money and/or you think for the long run, buy the 2x version, else pay with time with this.
Potting Table with Two Large Pots	3000	Accelerator	Second best value for money, but pricey. Consider paying with time with the smaller version, or buying smaller first, better later when you'll have more gold.
Dung Composter	1000	Accelerator	Fertiliser useful only for combat plants, else pay with time.
Potting Table with Three Small Pots	400	Accelerator	Do you really need to grow 21 plants at a time? At least it's cheap.
T-Shaped Potions Station	2000	Afterthought	You can brew 7 potions at the same time from the beginning, with times from 15 to 90 seconds... there's not much time to be saved. And will you really brew so many potions? Besides, animal ingredients are scarce at the beginning.
Potting Table with Five Small Pots	2500	Afterthought	6.25x price for 1.66x speed vs. the Three Small Pots. Pricey and not much useful.
Chopping Station	1500	Afterthought	Only potion ingredients, 1 at a time, better with Hopping Pot.
Medium Potions Station	1000	Useless	For speed is better the T-Shaped, for price is much better the small one.
Potting Table with a Medium Pot Potting Table with Two Medium Pots Potting Table with Three Medium Pots	750 1500 3000	Useless	Anything you can do with these, you can do with Large Pots, see "Timers" below for more.

Timers and optimization[]

If you want to craft as much as you can, as fast as you can, this is the place to read.

First of all, buy all Accelerators. Medium Pots are still a waste of space, but 2x Large are needed.

T-Shaped Potions Station is your go-to solution for Potions. Just spam 7x of them, and brew at your heart's desire. You won't cycle through 21 stations on 90 secs. Obviously, the cheap-but-slow option of the Hopping Pots won't cut it here, but may reduce time somehow. Make peace with the fact you'll have to buy ingredients, or fly to collect them / fight for them. The shops restock, and the world respawns both enemies and resources, all on a three-in-game-days schedule. So, if in a hurry, just "sleep" 6 times in a row, then go to buy / collect again.

Now, all of the Small plants, Mandrake included, take 10 min to grow. You cannot accelerate this, you can only parallelize with more pots (Potting Table with Three Small Pots or even Potting Table with Five Small Pots). Reserve the Fertiliser for the Mandrake, among these.

The Medium plants (Chinese Chomping Cabbage and Shrivelfig take 12 min each. Same as before, reserve Fertiliser for the Cabbages.

The Large plants (Venomous Tentacula and Fluxweed), take 15 min each. Same as before, reserve Fertiliser for the Venomous Tentacula.

All Ingredients plants, no matter the size, give 5 resources at a time (plus whatever random pieces you get from the Chopping Station), so after a batch or two, you'll have plenty for Potions. I told you, Potting Table with Five Small Pots was overkill.

Dung Composter has a timer of just 4 min, so you can create 12 Fertilisers on the timer of a Medium plant, or almost 16 on the timer of a large one. Anyway, you'll have enough to keep fertilised all or almost all of your 14x growing Large spots (7x Potting Table with Two Large Pots), specially if you stock a little bit in advance. So, since Mandrakes can be grown in Small pots, it's practically a joke to keep it at full stock. We have 24 places for plant tools left, and 14x growing spots producing 2 plants at a time... so, in short, you can restock all of your Plant Tools in just 15 min of playing time tending plants, or 27 min/2 visits to the Room in relaxed, no-fertiliser mode. Easy, really.

To compare: Ingredients and Potions prices[]

Compare with #Seeds_and_Recipes_Prices section above.

Note that for some potions, ingredients cost more than the finished product. Also, rarer ingredients cost less than common ones, because it is expected that you'll grow your own common plant ingredients and recollect the common animal ones. No, it doesn't make any economic sense. It's a game, folks.

Name	Price	Ingredients	Ingredients price
Focus Potion	500	Lacewing Flies, Fluxweed, Dugbog Tongue	100	150	100
Invisibility Potion	500	Leaping Toadstool Caps, Knotgrass, Troll Bogeys	150	150	100
Thunderbrew	1000	Leech Juice, Shrivelfig, Stench of the Dead	150	150	100
Edurus Potion	300	Ashwinder Eggs, Mongrel Fur	150	50
Maxima Potion	300	Leech Juice, Spider Fang	150	50
Wiggenweld Potion	100	Horklump Juice, Dittany Leaves	50	100

On Random Items[]

Both the Hopping Pot and the Chopping Station create a random item of the appropriate type. Both of them, however, require that you buy the appropriate Recipe or Seed to generate that item. So, e.g. if you don't buy Thunderbrew Recipe, you'll never get a Thunderbrew from the Hopping Pot, and if you don't buy Shrivelfig Seed you won't get Shrivelfigs from the Chopping Station. Thus, by default, if you don't buy any extra seed or recipe, they'll only generate Wiggenweld Potions, Edurus Potions and Dittany Leaves.

This can be used to manipulate the probabilities so they don't generate unwanted items, though for the Hopping Pot it is of great advantage to have all Recipes, and the Chopping Station is not really needed unless going to forsake the Hopping Pot.

On Full Inventory[]

If any Conjuring (though this specially applies to the Hopping Pot, for its randomness) generates an item for which you're already at your limit (25x for Wiggenweld Potion, 12x for all the other tools), there is no way to "clean the desk", not even Evanescoing the pot. You have to use up your inventory first. This can be done on the Room for anything but the Wiggenweld, where you'll need to be hurt first.