At GamesCom 2010 Bliz­zard revealed how crafters will be able to cre­ate their own gear. In Dia­blo II, you had the assis­tance of the mys­ti­cal Horadric Cube to cre­ate new items. In Dia­blo III, Bliz­zard intro­duced the Arti­san, a new char­ac­ter who does the work for you. You just need to enlist an arti­san and pro­vide some mate­ri­als and he sets out to cre­ate your new gear.

To add an Arti­san to your ret­inue you have to help him out – usu­ally by doing a quest for him. After you gained his trust he will fol­low you on your trav­els. They will set up show in the near­est town and you will be able to inter­act with him there. There are three types of Arti­sans that will be avail­able to your hero: black­smith, mys­tic, and jeweller.

• You can sell and repair items at the black­smith, as well as have him cre­ate weapons and armor for you. He can also add sock­ets to any weapon or armor.
• The mys­tic cre­ates mag­i­cal imple­ments like scrolls, potions, runes and charms, and enchants items.
• The jew­eller is an inter­est­ing fel­low: He cre­ates gems for you and allows you to com­bine gems to cre­ate one of higher qual­ity. This Arti­san can also remove gems from items.

In order to increase the qual­ity of the items you have to train the arti­sans so that they too can level up. Skilling up your arti­sans will also unlock unique recipes. For the arti­sans to do your bid­ding, you have to pro­vide them with cer­tain mate­ri­als. These mate­ri­als dif­fer from arti­san to arti­san. You can get the nec­es­sary mate­ri­als by sal­vaging items you find while play­ing. Every player will gain an arti­fact that allows you to break down items into mate­ri­als so that you don’t have to go to town repeat­edly just to sal­vage the items. The mate­ri­als stack and thus only take up one square in your inven­tory each. Of course, higher-level items are sal­vaged into higher-level mate­ri­als. Con­trary to the Horadric Cube, the arti­fact so sal­vage items doesn’t take up any inven­tory space. Last but not least, Bliz­zard says that many rare craft­ing recipes and mate­ri­als are only found as world drops.

If you want to take a loot at the Arti­san for your­self, enjoy:

What else did we learn from Bliz­zard at Gamescom? Well, quite a bit. Here’s the short form because I’m lazy:

• There won’t be town por­tals any­more and the design­ers are focus­ing on way points instead.
• Bliz­zard isn’t explor­ing con­sole ports. For now.
• Hard­core play­ers will gain fancy effects in their pro­files that make them stand out in Battle.Net.
• There will be a stor­age lim­i­ta­tion with your stash but it will be ridicu­lously large.
• There will be set Items in Dia­blo III.
• Enhanc­ing and sock­et­ing items will require gold. Actu­ally, almost every­thing will require gold.