There are 110 ways to reduce the cost of crafting magic items. There are also many ways to reduce the time it takes to craft magic or mundane items.
However, is there a way to reduce the cost to craft mundane items?
One way to reduce cost is to use the Ultimate Campaign rules for Downtime. One activity during downtime is generating capital. One kind of capital you can generate is Goods.
The mechanic works like this: you use a skill (most Craft, Performance or Profession skills as well as Diplomacy and many others) and make a check (you can take 10); for every 10 in the final check you have the potential for 1 Goods. You have to spend 10 GP/Goods to actually receive the capital. This is all an abstraction representing your PC working their skill for a day of Downtime, using materials and paying for extra tools and such with the result being a collection of raw materials useful for future projects.
You can then spend the Goods you've just generated to pay the costs for mundane crafting. Every 1 Goods is worth 20 GP worth of crafting costs. Let's use an example:
Your dwarf fighter 2 wants to craft a dwarven longhammer. He has a 14 Int and 2 ranks in Craft: Weaponsmithing for a total bonus of +7. He also has a set of masterwork crafting tools for an additional +2. Day 1 of Downtime he rolls a crafting check to generate Goods and rolls an 11, for a total Craft: Weaponsmithing check of 20.
The dwarf pays 20 GP and earns 2 Goods. He immediately spends 1 of these to pay the 23 GP cost of crafting a longhammer. He pays an additional 3 GP of his own and banks the extra 1 Goods for another project.
Essentially what the dwarf did was work with a smith in town. He did some odd finish work for the smith earning wholesale pricing on some steel for the longhammer he'll be making. In essence he spent 13 GP instead of 23 GP for this project, saving him 10 GP.
hmmm. I've been avoiding learning that whole new rule set. Looks like I can no longer.
In short, from your description, it looks like you pay 10 gp per goods to later sell those goods for 20 gp each. All of this assuming you make your checks... I currently can roll with a +30 alchemy, so I think I should be fine... Thanks Mark, that was a pretty helpful explanation!
Any basic rules set options? Like a feat/trait/item/racial feature?
no? that's pretty much what I thought.
To bad...