Item Creation

**Item Creation** is quite obviously (assuming you have basic reading comprehension) the place where you go to create tags and submit them to the site. It is the birthplace of all the legends, shitposts and crisp, crunchy memes the site has to offer; the glorious, the diarrhea, the 211-item-long sets, the Mystery... they all came from this little refined metal icon.

## How does it work?

To bring up the item creation menu, simply click the Refined Metal icon with the word 'Create' slapped under it in the top toolbar of the site.

Creating items is a *six-step process*. As a point of comparison, it takes about eight steps to make an omelette. (Perhaps tastier, and a good source of protein, but *not* a good source of Crits!) This may sound a bit long, but most of the steps are just navigation; creating the item itself is piss-easy.

* Step 1 - Class
* Step 2 - Slot
* Step 3 - Item
* Step 4 - Name/Description
* Step 5 - Item Options
* Step 6 - Keywords.

## The Procedure

Let's say you want to name a Brigade Helm with a Burning Flames unusual effect "OH GOD WHAT IS THIS", along with the description "I'M NOT BEING A WIKI MODERATOR VERY WELL".

Yes, I know that's a very specific example, but it includes *all* of the things you may want to apply to your tag.

When creating a post, the first thing you have to do is find the item you want to name (assuming you have one in mind, which you *should*). This involves a bit of navigation of the sorting system; the first thing you'll be doing is **picking the class your item belongs to**. When you enter, you'll see 10 Class Tokens on-screen; from left to right, they are Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, Spy, and All-Class. (During April Fools week, another class token is available.)
In this case, we're looking for a Brigade Helm (a hat for Pyro), thus we're gonna click the Pyro icon.

Next, **choose the item slot of the desired item.** From left to right, you'll see Primary, Secondary, Melee, PDA1, PDA2, Misc, and Action.
Finding your item can be a bit nebulous at this stage unless you're familiar with how they're classified in TF2 itself. For the most part, their placements are intuitive, other than a couple of exceptions:

* Spy revolvers are *secondaries*, not primaries.
* The Spy's sappers are PDA1, while his watches are PDA2.
* Note that a lot of 'all-class' melee reskins are in fact unusable by Engineer and Spy. Thus, you won't find them in All-Class, but *any* of the other classes that can use them will have them.

Here, we're looking for a cosmetic, so we'll click the Misc icon.

When you click this, *all* of the items that fall under the criteria you've selected will now appear at the bottom of the screen. Following our example, we would scroll through all the Pyro cosmetics until we got to the Brigade Helm. Note that the items are sorted in *alphabetical order*, from *left-to-right*.

Once you've clicked on your desired item, you can now name it and give it a description. Gee, that took a long time to get to the *real* business. This part is pretty straightforward; just click inside the text boxes and type what you want to type.
*An important note*, however: the name only allows a maximum of 40 characters, while the description allows a maximum of 80 characters. Spaces count as characters. Trust us, you'll be running into these limits a *lot*, so keep them in mind.

Once you're satisfied with your name/description, go ahead and click "Name It!". If you've accidentally clicked it, that's okay; if you look at the diagram below, you'll notice that there are Name Tag and Description Tag icons below where the Class tokens are (highlighted by the green arrows in the picture). You can click any of these at any time to go back one or more steps.
At this step, you can now add all kinds of things to your item, like Quality, Particles, Paint and Style. We'll go more into those later. For now, we're gonna add a Valve quality to this item, since proper unusual effects are still missing due to the site bugging out during the making of this wiki page, and Valve quality makes it kinda look like it's on fire.

Here, you have the choice of clicking 'Confirm' or 'Create Set'. In 'Create Set', you are able to add more items similarly to how you made your current item, that will be displayed as a 'set' when submitted to the front page (instead of individual items, which is clunky). This can be used to make lists/posts that take longer than the net maximum of 120 characters. It's also used for announcements, contests, song lyrics, Epic Rap Battles, reenactments of various show/movie/game scenes etc. The possibilities are endless. But we're not doing that here, so let's just click "Confirm". Beware, from here you will not be able to edit your post anymore, and you'd have to start form scratch again were you to notice a typo or something. Horror!

Now, you are given the option to add keywords (Sometimes referred to as "Tags". I know. A tag within a tag. The miracles of modern science.) to your post. Although it's not necessary, it is highly recommended you do. Usually keywords aren't actually used to be searched up (unless it's a contest submission); they're more often used to add secret messages, or explain a joke/reference if it is a little too obscure for some people to get instantly. Additionally, you can also "sign" your post by adding your name to the keywords. This makes it easier to find a tagger in the future, since the site does not have a proper "Search for a Tagger" option. You can separate tags with commas.

Aaaaand you're done! Just hit the "Submit My Creation" button, sit back, relax, and watch as the crits roll in!

## Wait, what were the Item Options?

Explaining all of the Qualities and other stuff you get to play with in Step Five would have bloated up the section immensely, so we're describing them separately.

### Quality

This allows you to choose the Item Quality, natch. Any quality (apart from Decorated) can be used, however there are some exceptions to certain items. For example, you can't create Unusual weapons, or at least not yet. (This changes during April Fools' Week.) You can however create an Unusual Ghostly Gibus or any other cosmetics that typically cannot be Unusuals. Don't ask. The usable qualities, and their additional effects, are listed below. *Note that the actual prefixes will only appear if you haven't already given your item a name!*

* **Unique** - This is the default setting.
* **Vintage**
* **Strange** - If you make an item Strange, you will get the additional option of appending Strange Ranks and Filters to your item's name.
* **Unusual** - This will allow you to add any Unusual particle effect behind your item. Doing this will also append 'Effect: XXX' onto the description, regardless of whether you have already added a description or not.
* **Genuine**
* **Haunted**
* **Collector's**
* **Community** - Adds the Community Sparkle effect to the item and description.
* **Self-Made** - Effectively identical to Community, apart from the prefix.
* **Valve** - Adds the Flying Bits effect to the item and description.

### Particle

Particle is only applicable if you have selected the Unusual quality for your tag. If you have, clicking the Particle button will spawn a list of effects to choose from.

### Paint

Paint is applicable to all items that can be painted in TF2. Team-coloured paints (such as Team Spirit) have separate choices for RED or BLU varieties.

### Style

If a weapon or cosmetic has different styles of appearance (e.g. 'Summer' or 'Winter' for the Fast Learner), this button will let you choose which one you want to use. *This includes Australium weapons and Decorated weapon skins.*