Anthem: here's a look at how gear and weapon crafting works

You can craft weapons, gear, and components in Anthem to make them more powerful. Here's how it works.

Loot in Anthem ranges from common, uncommon, rare, epic, masterwork and legendary. Once you move up to a higher level of rarity, loot will feature inscriptions. These are bonuses or stat boosts for components, gear, and weapons.

They will also come in numbers depending on the rarity of your gear, but these are randomly rolled when you obtain the weapons.

Should you like the weapon but aren't too keen on the stats, you have two choices. One is to farm for it out in the game world. The other is to craft it again and again using Blueprints until you get the inscriptions you want.

This is because you can't re-roll weapons in Anthem, but you can re-craft them multiple times. Basically, instead of re-rolling, you're re-crafting.

Materials used to craft gear and weapons can be found while out in the game world. The materials come from nodes which can be destroyed, and other means such as chests. Dismantling weapons, components and gear will also yield crafting materials - or specific parts for your weapon or javelin.

Once you've acquired the blueprint and materials needed to craft a specific item, head to the forge. Select the item you wish to craft, use the blueprint and materials to create your item. Providing it's a high enough rarity, it will give you a new inscription.

In the video Arekkz notes blueprints are available in all rarities up to masterwork. At present, he's unsure whether Legendary blueprints are out there. Once the game is released, we'll let you know whether legendary blueprints exist or not.

What's interesting about blueprints, is the more you use a particular weapon, the better blueprints you'll find. How this works, is once you have obtained a weapon, it will come with a set of challenges. Using the weapon and completing the set challenges will unlock higher blueprints all the way up to masterwork.

Challenges range from killing a set number of enemies, sometimes types, or performing a certain type of kill with the weapon.

If you're considering giving Anthem a try, give this video a quick watch as it explains things in a concise manner.

A VIP demo is currently live, and hopefully you were able to play despite connectivity issues. Here's some workarounds for the more common issues. It goes offline on January 27 at 6pm PT, 9pm ET, 2am UK (January 28).

Next week, the Anthem free demo goes live for everyone on February 1 and remain available until Sunday, February 3.

Anthem releases February 22 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The game’s EA and Origin Access trials kick off February 15. Head over to our main Anthem page for everything else we know.