A Beginner's Guide to PoE Crafting Currency

Path of Exile's economy runs on currency orbs, and almost all of them are also crafting materials. The game also has Gold (since 3.25), but Gold pays for services like respecs and currency-exchange fees. It doesn't craft anything. If you're new, the number of orbs is intimidating. This guide covers the ones you'll actually use to craft gear, and a sane order to learn them in.

Choose a base before choosing currency

A cheap item is fine for practice. For a craft you will actually equip, its base and item level must cover the complete finished target. Ilvl 75 can roll Tailwind on a Hunter donor; it does not unlock natural 35% movement speed on your final boots. Common starting points are 86 for those boots/endgame body armour, 85 for many glove crafts, and 83 for natural physical-prefix two-handed axes. These are slot-specific examples, not a promise that 86 unlocks every T1 modifier. See the sourced base-selection guide.

For a small practical project, medium cluster jewels demonstrate a different case: a lower level can deliberately limit competitors while still allowing both chosen notables.

The core crafting orbs

• Orb of Transmutation — turns a normal (white) item magic, with one or two mods. The start of most crafts.
• Orb of Alteration — rerolls a magic item's mods. The workhorse for fishing one specific mod.
• Orb of Augmentation — adds a mod to a magic item that only has one.
• Regal Orb — turns a magic item rare, keeping its mods and adding one.
• Orb of Alchemy — turns a normal item rare, with several random mods at once.
• Chaos Orb — rerolls all the mods on a rare item.
• Exalted Orb — adds a mod to a rare item with an open slot. More common since 3.28, so it's used more freely than it was.
• Orb of Annulment — removes a random mod.
• Orb of Scouring — strips an item back to normal, ready to start again.
• Divine Orb — rerolls the numbers on an item's mods, not the mods themselves. The main high-value trade currency. See Divine vs Exalted.

Then there are the specialist tools: Essences guarantee a mod, Fossils with Resonators bias the mod pool (Delve-only since 3.28), Harvest reforges guarantee a mod type, and the crafting bench adds a chosen mod for a fixed price. Since 3.29 the bench also sells cheap Chaos-Orb rerolls of three random mods or one random mod. See the 3.29 changes.

The mental model

Crafts have different starting routes; they are not one mandatory ladder.

1. Magic route: Alteration + Augmentation to a target, then Regal and add mods with Exalts or the bench.
2. Rare reroll route: Chaos, essences, fossils or Harvest reforges replace the existing explicit mods, apart from protected modifiers such as fractures or compatible locks. They do not simply fill the rare produced by a Regal.
3. Finishing: use metacrafting where compatible, and consider Divines only if rerolling values within the existing tiers is worth the cost. Divines can make good numbers worse.

Choose the route for the modifier, base and budget. Simulate an expensive sequence before spending.

Where to start

• Pick a cheap base and practise the Alteration + Augmentation loop for one target mod.
• When you're comfortable, try essences (a guaranteed mod) and fossils (a biased pool). They're less pure luck.
• Learn when to chaos spam and when to build up a rare.
• Use a simulator like Craft of Exile to see the odds before you spend.

Don't waste currency

• Set a budget per item and stop when you reach it.
• Decide your minimum tier. Keeping a low roll and starting over later is how currency evaporates.
• Don't hand-count. Rolling the same orb hundreds of times is exactly what a tool like Exiled Bench is for. Pick the mod and the lowest tier you'd keep, set a Safety limit, and it stops when the item hits or the budget is spent. Its Past crafts log shows what each run spent, priced in chaos, which is a good way to learn what crafts really cost.

Crafting looks complicated because there are a lot of orbs. But you only need a handful to start, and the core loop is the same every time: fish cheap, then finish.

Sources

• PoEDB: currency descriptions
• GGG: 3.28 patch notes
• GGG: 3.29 patch notes
• Craft of Exile: metamod interactions (check before spending)