I would like to pre-empt this post by pointing out that I completely understand why items that have inherent magical properties require the rules as writ in gold cost and time. Incorporating magical elements into crafting of any kind will invariably take longer and cost money in materials or expertise from someone who can tell you "not like that, Idiot, you'll blow us all up."
With that said, I do not understand why mundane items, especially things like simple weapons, require a full 4 days and 100% gold cost for an expert or legendary crafter.
My arguement is three-fold. Time. For a barely trained or master crafter I could understand basic items to take a fair amount of time, however it is horribly impractical that an expert or legendary crafter is incapable of mounting a shaft to a spearhead in a day, even after acquiring raw materials. If you went to a proper weaponsmith as said a spear should take 4 days, they would laugh in your face. If I play a 15th level Dwarven Paladin of Torag, who wants to spread the good word of Torag by crafting defensive weaponry for a town on the verge of being assaulted, it makes no practical sense that it should take me a minimum of 4 days to outfit a single person with a simple weapon. I would have stood better time to make them something absurdly magical far beyond their capabilities to wield and sent them off to fight as a singular hero to the town... who is then immediately overrun by enemies and killed, because a horde of simple weapons would have served a better purpose.
The second part of my arguement, Cost. My Dwarven Paladin of Torag notices the local town has a mineshaft with raw ore to make steel, and lumber for cutting down to make perfect spear shafts... Who am I paying money to for crafting the spear? Getting all the raw material myself I expect to take time, but where do my gold and silver coins go if I have everything I need and the Artisans tools of both woodworking and metalworking? Acquiring materials naturally and using them to create is the hallmark of a professional crafter, as an adventurer my character carries tools with him, and as a player I know exactly how to create without spending a single copper, it seems strange that procuring food is well detailed but procuring special material for crafting isn't even a whisper mentioned in the core rulebook.
The third and final part of this fairly long winded argument, Collaboration. If I know that another character is capable of crafting a portion of a weapon, and I'm capable of creating the other portion, why is collaboration a circumstance bonus instead of a much more functional reduction in time, the way manufacturing works normally? When you attempt to build an item of many complex parts across many craftsmen, you don't wait individually for each piece to be done before another is started, you both work for less time to complete the same amount of work. If my Dwarven Paladin is accompanied by another crafter who would like to aid in my endeavour, they can either craft alone and produce a second piece of equipment in the same time, or... aid me in producing one piece with a circumstance bonus irrelevant to my overwhelming legendary crafting ability, in exactly the same time. A second example, in one of the first adventure paths, players can find themselves in possession of a suitable place for crafting. There is also a fairly deep staircase the leads to an open cavern and a forest nearby. As a player I would like to start a logging and mining group using paid labor to procure raw material and then a team of crafters to produce non-magical weapons to outfit the town and tower. I would understand paying labor, but where am I spending money on making the item, and again, why does my team of crafters take 4 days on a single item? For the sake of story having a team of dwarves singing hymns to Torag as they craft weapons and armor for the local garrison sounds epic, but the rules as writ make those dwarves, and my character, sound like bumbling children that need an absurd amount of time to do the most basic of things.
In essence, for crafting, I feel as if the rules were created for selfish makers to craft only the best of items for themselves and maybe their team or companions, but not much thought was given to characters built around crafting generously by simplifying the process of crafting to an assembly line process for ease of cost and time.
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If you're playing PFS, there are Boons that can lessen or eliminate the 4-day requirement, extend your days of Downtime between adventures so you can save more on Crafting, and swap out skills so that you can craft using skills like Nature or Herbalism Lore.
If you're not playing PFS, talk with your GM about doing something similar.
I'm about to start up a homebrew PF2 Campaign and one of my players wants to craft poisons, and harvest materials from venomous creatures. I'll be setting a Survival DC based on the CR of the creature to "harvest" the venom as part of its "treasure bundle" that can then go towards the crafting materials.
The rules are fairly robust to allow GMs to accommodate their players.
In your example of wanting to outfit an entire town for battle, I would say it would be better to run that as a Victory Point(see GMG) skill challenge encounter rather than pure crafting. Sure one of the skills that could be used is Crafting, but you could also have tasks people can be doing such as Survival/Appropriate Lore to scrounge for parts, Diplomacy to enlist the efforts of other people in the town, Intimidate/Warfare Lore/or even just basic Strikes to instruct the townfolk, etc.
For your second example of wanting to gather all your own supplies, in a home game, yes I would typically allow that. However you'ld probably be spending downtime to do so and its likely to end up about the same level of effetiveness. Sure, if you find a collection of (non magical) staves that are perfect for spear shafts as part of loot that would bypass the need to spend downtime finding them. Trading time for money is definitely a thing and something I would allow, just expect the cost savings to be in line with the earn income table, and you might not be using your best skill to gather some mats (if you're a specialty trained blacksmith and you're looking for non-metal based things, you might be falling back to survival or nature in some cases instead of crafting... this is a place I would allow those skills in place or lores)
The third case, I would also probably turn into a Victory Points style endeavor or stick with normal crafting rules, for each regular component and then a final single crafting check by the final crafter that puts the pieces together.
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Reminds me of the time our Ranger asked our dwarven Fighter to craft him some arrows because we were (and still are) days away from any settlement and the Ranger was running low on ammo.
"Well", said the Dwarf, "First I need to reverse engineer the formula (did not buy the basic crafter's book at level 1 and mostly used crafting to repair his shield) and second I can make you a total of 10 arrows if we set camp and pause our exploration activities for a full 4 days."
"Erm...", said the Ranger while looking at all the feathers and arrow heads he has collected, "You know...that is what I am using in, like, one battle?"
"Yes", said the Dwarf, "However in comparison I can also craft a set of Full Plate armor within the said 4 days, so what do you say?"
Ranger: "Never mind..."
If you're playing PFS, there are Boons that can lessen or eliminate the 4-day requirement, extend your days of Downtime between adventures so you can save more on Crafting, and swap out skills so that you can craft using skills like Nature or Herbalism Lore.
If you're not playing PFS, talk with your GM about doing something similar.
I'm about to start up a homebrew PF2 Campaign and one of my players wants to craft poisons, and harvest materials from venomous creatures. I'll be setting a Survival DC based on the CR of the creature to "harvest" the venom as part of its "treasure bundle" that can then go towards the crafting materials.
The rules are fairly robust to allow GMs to accommodate their players.
2 things about this, and a personal aside.
First, thank you for information about the PFS boons, what I genuinely don't understand is why that function isn't in the core rules under any section about reputation or character growth. It feels like they know it's obnoxious to adhere to those rules and patchworked a fix in PFS.
Second, harvesting food, gold, and valuable materials from monsters feels like something that should already exist but, again, partially doesn't. Procuring food during exploration activities is fleshed out, acquiring malaria because your tent wasn't made to withstand mosquitos in a jungle exists, but stripping monsters of material to craft weapons, armor, or ammunition is weirdly absent. I will defer to another example of absurd craft times being arrows. Heaven forbid you forgot to stock up before you went diving through the jungle, and good luck getting more than a couple bundles out of your crafter before it's been over a week and everyone's itching to get a move on. Hope those 20 arrows last you through all of the encounters you'll hit on your hex crawl of sadness. A simple, non magical item that might take a day to gather resources for, and another day of piecing together at most, but definitely not four minimum or longer if you need to save your silver pieces.
Now for the personal aside. My GM wants to run this new system as close to the book as possible, with errata, to understand the function of the core game before making wild adjustments to core rules. The fact that the rules offer no alternatives to the function of crafting, while almost every other skill has a myriad of different executions, feels like anyone with an interest in making things got thrown under the bus. Even saving throws have 2 different ways they operate, some effects using a flat check against your save DC, while others ask you to pray to the dice gods to save you with a rolled saving throw. The system has invariably evolved in many ways, but crafting feels like it took a massive step backwards from PF1. That's not to say I don't appreciate being able to hammer out a godly level magical item in only 4 days, but again, it feels like the system was designed for people to exclusively craft items of their own level for themselves or their party. Meanwhile, you can earn yourself an entire level with diplomacy in an adventure path. Like reading off of the same page number in 2 different books so some things happen to coincide, but mostly it feels cobbled together.
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One thing about Crafting that I think people either forget, or don't realize, is that you don't need to complete the activity in one go. You can take breaks during the process.
Remember when you spent days in the village "preparing" for your excursion into the wilderness? You bought your food, a bedroll and arrowheads. Took about 4 days to get everything together.
9 days into your 7 day hex crawl and you've run out of arrows. Time to gather up those pine twigs and raid the wild goose nest for fletchings.
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A few months ago, I reached the same conclusions as Baskettcaseinc. I wrote some houserules to handle it: Mathmuse's Houserules comment #1. The module practically demanded it. However, my players have not tested my replacement Craft rules, because the module has not given them enough downtime. They did test my Harvest and Snare rules and like them.
I have been adapting the Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2. The 1st module, Trail of the Hunted, leaves the party and many refugees trying to hide and survive in the forest. No towns nor stores nor merchants are available until a deep gnome merchant Novvi showed up. The ranger and two rogues in the party are archers, so I figured that they would need to make arrows.
However, they found another method of obtaining arrows. Each Hobgoblin Soldier carries 10 arrows. Even though fighting one might involve archery on both sides, the final looting yields more arrows than the battle consumed.
In addition, the party had to feed the refugees. The Subsist activity can feed at most 2 people per hunter, no matter how skilled the hunter is. My players had to feed 35 refugees! Trail of the Hunted has a provision point system that I could have adapted, but I prefer houserules that I can used in other modules. And the same houserules that I used in PF1 to let the PCs gather raw materials could be adapted to gather food. That Harvest activity worked as expected. I do worry whether I have the right numbers for butchering an animal for food. My followup research reveals that deer yield a lot of meat.
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The 4-day preliminary period for crafting is mysterious and unexplained, so modifying it could run into unanticipated problems. I had been involved in the PF2 playtest back in fall 2019. The playtest had the 4-day period, but being higher level than the item crafted could trim a few days off the time. The Doomsday Dawn scenarios of the playtest had no downtime, so downtime activities were not ordinarily tested. The final version of PF2 fixed the perliminary period at 4 days always, but I don't know why.
I have deduced a single game-mechanic reason for 4-day preliminary period. Without the delay, a highly-skilled crafter could fish for a Critical Success.
A 3rd-level expert crafter ordinarily adds value to a crafted item at 5 sp per day. If he rolled a critical success on crafting, he would instead add 8 sp per day. Imagine the crafter wanting to make 2nd-level item, full plate armor worth 30 gp. He pays 15 gp up front for raw materials. On an ordinary success, he would finish it in 30 days at 5 sp per day. On a critical success he would finish it in 19 days at 8 sp per day. It would be worth a couple of rerolls to try to save 11 days. If full plate has DC 16 by TABLE 10–5: DCS BY LEVEL, and the crafter has +11 to Craft checks, then he has a 30% chance of a critical success, 50% chance of success, 15% chance of failure, and 5% chance of critical failure. A critical failure essentially adds 2 days to the crafting, but a 30% to save 11 days outweighs a 5% chance to lose 2 days. But because each reroll takes 4 days, fishing for critical success is not worth the effort. (Mathmatically, fishing for critical success is still barely worthwhile in this example with a 1-day minimum, because on average it saves 2 days.)
Unfortunately, the 4-day minimum also penalizes crafters who are not fishing for critical success.
As for harvesting raw materials, I have had houserules for that since December 2013 in my Jade Regent campaign: Raw Materials for Crafting Magic Items. I adapted the rules for technology for my Iron Gods campaign. The houserules for PF2 gave me a new chance to formalize the scavenging as the Harvest activity.
The Craft rules say, "You must supply raw materials worth at least half the item’s Price. You always expend at least that amount of raw materials when you Craft successfully. If you’re in a settlement, you can usually spend currency to get the amount of raw materials you need, except in the case of rarer precious materials."
Oddly, buying raw materials in a settlement is the only method defined in the PF2 Core Rulebook for gaining raw materials. We GMs also have the flexibility to add raw materials to loot. Therefore, the only way that the adventurers could get lumber in a forest or ore in a mine or meat off a deer carcass is by the GM declaring these raw materials as loot. "Woodcutting" and "Mining" and "Butchering" are not activities in the Core Rulebook. Maybe they showed up or will show up in a supplemental rulebook. PF2 Ultimate Campaign would be a good place.
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Also, arrows are one of the items we're told can be made in batches.
Arrows are made in batches of 10... per 4 days or more spent crafting. Consumable items are produced at 4 per craft session, these effects do not stack on each other as writ. Deciding to finish a single crafting session later doesn't address the major glaring issue involved with producing ammunition as a whole. It still takes 4 initial days to produce a single batch of 10 arrows, which your ranger will probably burn through in less than 2 combats. This lack of foresight in the core crafting rules makes Rangers and any bow wielding party members a near liability in any story situation where arrows aren't readily available from an outside source, especially in places like deep jungle where you are significantly more likely to find wildlife to hunt rather than enemies with bows, and telling the party you need them to hex crawl all the way back to a village for arrows will cause division amongst the party.
I have deduced a single game-mechanic reason for 4-day preliminary period. Without the delay, a highly-skilled crafter could fish for a Critical Success.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this inbetween work and other games because I couldn't quite put my finger on what bothered me about it. Something felt wrong and I just realized what it was. The crafting day minimums don't actually need to exist to stop crit fishing, because half of the gold cost is spent -before- you roll. For every attempt you are burning half the gold cost, so if you attempt it even twice, you've burnt as much money as finishing it immediately would have been. The craft day minimums make sense for a system that allows you to gather materials, but the core crafting rules don't have that option in the first place. Using the 4-day preliminary for items that the GM has ruled can be crafted for free by substituting material gathering is fine, but that's not standard and this system of using 2 methods (gold cost -and- 4 day minimum) to break people who abuse crafting is putting even more strain than necessary on GMs who want to try and run this with rules as writ.
I would love Paizo input on this, I feel like the APG being so fleshed out means there will be updates for other sections of the game, and I have my fingers crossed for some sort of crafting compendium.