The Silver Art of Craft
The craft system in Exalted assumes that you are frequently making things.
That might seem odd to point out, but it’s a crucial assumption here. In a lot of games, you can invest into the craft skill and never use it except for once at the end of the story when you disappear for a couple weeks and make THE BEST SWORD EVER.
Exalted does not work like that.
If you want to craft, you’ve got to craft. Look for problems that can be solved my making things, and make them. Make lots of little things, and lots of big things. You’ll be good at crafting if you actively, frequently choose to build.
The Basics of Craft
The Craft Ability behaves a little weird. Unlike other Abilities, Craft is scoped to a specific profession. So you can have Craft: Armorer 4 but Craft: Tailor 1, for example.
The core of the Silver Art is crafting projects. Any time you are making something with Craft, you are doing a project. Doing project gets you Craft XP, which you spend to complete bigger projects.
You get the ball rolling, and then keep it rolling.
When Do You Not Use Craft?
Lots of skills can be used to make things. Medicine can be used to make a poultice or herbal tea, Survival can be used to make lean-tos and bear traps, and Linguistics can be used to make poetry, illuminated manuscripts, and woodblock prints.
However, most of the time, those things don’t need rolls. It is rarely fun or dramatic to know if you are able to, say, brew an herbal tea as part of a treatment – you’re a doctor, you know how to do that. You can probably do it without rolling.
When things get complicated enough that they involve rolling, then you’re probably going to engage the Craft system.