Crafting in PF2 now takes one or two days. Where does more than two months of downtime come from?
It comes from wanting to make Crafting actually do something useful and sensible, like save money.
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PF1 Iron Gods... so they invested in crafting feats and often took two months of downtime to craft the gear they wanted themselves. ... Sadly, crafting occurs much more slowly under PF2 rules, so players have less reason to become crafters in PF2 adventure paths.Huh? Much confuse. Do not compute.
Crafting in PF2 now takes one or two days. Where does more than two months of downtime come from?
The PF2 Craft activity has the line, "After any of these downtime days, you can complete the item by spending the remaining portion of its Price in materials." (The Player Core remastered version is, "You can pay the remaining portion of the item’s Price in materials to complete the item immediately, or you can spend additional downtime days working on it.") The PF1 Craft skill had no such shortcut built into it, so it took several weeks to craft a mundane item and several days to craft a magic item. I was running the PF1 Iron Gods adventure path before PF2 was published.
Thus, PF2 crafting has the advantage over PF1 crafting that a crafter willing to play full price plus the price of the formula can finish the item in merely four days. That is assuming that the formula is available, which is not likely for high-level items. PF2 Remastered cut that down to 2 days and does not require the formula for common items. However, Paizo has not yet published an adventure path that uses Remastered rules, so we don't know how much Remastered adventure paths will give opportunities for Crafting. The Remastered Craft activity does require: "You have an appropriate set of tools and, in many cases, a workshop. For example, you need access to a smithy to forge a metal shield, or an alchemist’s lab to produce alchemical items."
It comes from wanting to make Crafting actually do something useful and sensible, like save money.
Well, having a useful thing you can't get otherwise is useful and sensible for me. And the moment you've spent an additional day you've saved some money.
That crafting can't be made the best way to get items (or shouldn't, probably) has been discussed several times alreasy, so I won't go there.
Also, Magical Crafting requires a feat. Crafting a 9th-level item also requires master Crafting and crafting a 17th-level item requires legendary Crafting, so that costs two or three skill increases, too. To require that the PCs invest a feat and skill increases so that the PCs don't fall behind in the gear expected by level means that they cannot spend those benefits on the original character concept, unless the character concept included magical crafting (or technological crafting as was the case for two Iron Gods player characters).
On the other hand, the party probably needs a magical crafter to transfer runes, so someone has to take the Magical Crafter feat.
Crafting and earn income and anything else that lets you convert downtime into cash is just generally a pain to balance. Because although it's not as silly as PF 1 (where you'd often rather be level 10 with an extra 100k gold than level 13), money is still the best superpower.
The players in my Iron Gods campaign limited their downtime themselves. The 1st module, Fires of Creation, had some urgency, and so did rushing over to the 2nd module, Lords of Rust. After Lords of Rust they spent weeks of downtime in Scrapwall, and just as they finished their goal, I had a team of Technic League wizards show up to chase them away. The 3rd module, The Choking Tower, was a two-part adventure and they needed the black market in order to sell their technological loot after the first part. Then with cash in hand, they spend two months crafting gear appropriate for the level of the second part.
When a party runs out of cash in PF1, they cannot buy the raw materials for crafting, so they have to stop crafting. In PF2 they could switch to Earn Income, but going off to loot a dungeon earns money much more quickly in internal game time, and the players want to adventure anyways.
My Iron Gods party took another two months of crafting downtime between The Choking Tower and Valley of the Brain Collectors. For the 5th module, Palace of Fallen Stars they cleverly avoided the notice of the Technic League by giving up their technological items and pretending to be ordinary people (Inconspicuous PCs Unmotivated in Palace of Fallen Stars), so they did not craft before that module. They fled the 5th module with the Technic League chasing them, so they immediately rushed into the mile-long crashed spaceship Divinity, the setting of 6th module The Divinity Drive. In that module, instead of fighting the final villain Unity, they asked Unity for employment as repair crew, so they had immense amounts of repair crafting during that massively rewritten adventure. After work hours, they sneaked into a forgotten science lab in an especially deadly part of the Divinity in order to have their own secret workshop for their own crafting. My campaigns get weird, and this time the weirdness made crafting part of the plot.
I apologize for diverting this thread from the availability-of-runes topic. I had brought up The Tarnished Halls black market as an example of the extremes that GMs go to in order to provide a market for the PCs when the adventure path fails to do so.