welcome to our rootball.
crafting is a very complex art but here are a few pointers and i hope not too many spoilers
ramuller wrote:
Mat quality (basic, fine, etc): does this affect the characteristics of the product or just it's name?
each material comes in 5 grades. basic fine choice excellent and supreme. each grade has one high stat and 2 low stats and the rest in between. if you were to take an average of all the stats basic mats would be very low and supreme mats woudl be very high. the name of the final product depens on the majority of mats used
ramuller wrote:
[*]Mat level: I think I understand that the lowest mat level places a ceiling on the level of the product.
there are 2 limiting factors on the quality of the item. your crafting level and the quality of the lowest mat used the lowest one is what the final item will be (assuming no degrades). there are 2 classes of stats on the final product. quality dependant and quality independant.
dependant stats include damage on wepons and max vs stats on armour
independant includes most else eg speed of wepons and protection factor.
depending on the materials used you may or may not hit the maximum
ramuller wrote:Mat colors: what little I have seen of them has me totally confused -- it seems that mats have colors and some or all of the mats in a piece of armor affect its color, but darned if I really know what I just said.
it is only armour that has differnt colours. there are 8 (4 common 2 racial and 2 prime roots) the colour of the final prodect depends on the primary colour of the mats used.
ramuller wrote:[*]Mat stats: each mat type has a set of stats (e.g., Durability, Lightness, Dodge Mod, DMG, etc.), which can have values between 0 and 5 (is this even right?). Some how the combination of these stats from the various mats affects the final stats of the item -- how?
this is where it gets complicated. there are 3 stages to the crafting stats process
1. all the mats are put into the window and the stats for the diff things are added together. lets say you add 5 bits of excellent oath bark to a wepon that requires 20 mats overall.. damage is maximum on oath bark so in the final product the bark adds 25% adding other mats will add the stats up in a similar way
(spoiler alert)
2. a funky and mysterious bit of maths that no one is totally sure about boosts the higher stats by an ammount. the ammount all the stats are boost by is proportional to the average stat and the amount that each stat is boosted by proportinal to the deviation from the average. say for example you wanted to make a wepon that had maximum damage and maximum speed. this woudl not be possible unless the stats were boosted in some way or if all the mats used had maximum speed and damage stats (which no mat has) the trick is to get speed and damage as high as possible while keeping the rest of the stats as close to the average as posible. hence using fine and basic mats in recipies helps to balance out the stats
3. when you hit the craft button the post crafted stats are changed in the following way:
post craft = (precraft x 0.8) +20 this is why in jamela's example light armour has a protection factor of 5%-25%. the maximum is 25% protection so if precraft you have 100% then you will hit maximum. however if you had 0% you would get: 0x0.8 +20 so 20% of 25% is 5%. mind boggling i know 
