Acquiring Formulas to Enable Scrounger Archetype

Question

The second paragraph of the Scrounger Dedication states:

You can Craft temporary items out of anything, anywhere, with whatever materials happen to be on hand, spending only 10 minutes to perform the initial Crafting check. The temporary item must be common, non-magical, 1st level or lower, and must be a weapon, armor, or a nonconsumable piece of adventuring gear. Instead of a single item, you can create 10 pieces of a single type of ammunition. This is a shoddy item, but you don't take the normal penalty when using shoddy items you made using this feat. Your temporary item lasts for 1d4 hours before falling apart into its raw components; the GM rolls the number of hours secretly. You can create only the physical item, not any information or magic, so for example, while you could create a blank journal or one of random pages, you couldn't use it as a scholarly journal or a religious text.

To best make use of this ability, it seems crucial to have as many formulas memorized as possible since many of these items -- especially the adventuring gear -- are intended for very specific use cases. The Basic Crafter's Book is a good first step. According to the AoN, this grants access to 148 formulas, including 72 pieces of adventuring gear. How would a player character go about acquiring the other 148 formulas eligible for the Scrounger ability in a similarly cost and time-efficient way? How about the 52 formulas made eligible when a player character takes the High Quality Scrounger feat?

When you Craft a temporary item using Scrounger Dedication, it can be an item of up to 3rd level (though the item must still be a weapon, armor, or a nonconsumable piece of adventuring gear). You can instead Craft it for someone else's use, allowing them to avoid taking the penalty for using a shoddy item when using it, but causing you to take the penalty if you use it. For example

Answer 1

Purchasing Them

The primary method for acquiring formulas is to just purchase them as any other item, with prices given in the full rules for formulas.

For your case here only the first few levels of formulas matter:

Item Level	Formula Price
0	5 sp
1	1 gp
2	2 gp
3	3 gp

Acquiring a hundred of any item at one time might be tricky depending on the campaign, but any particular formula should be available in a 3rd-level settlement or on order by a 3rd-level character.

In a given settlement, a character can usually purchase any common item (including formulas, alchemical items, and magic items) that is of the same or lower level than the settlement’s.

If a character’s level is higher than the settlement’s, that character can usually use their own influence and leverage to acquire higher-level items, as they convince shops to place specialty orders or artisans to craft custom goods, though it might take a bit of time for such orders to be fulfilled.

Gathering a vast quantity of these formulas quickly would require a larger settlement, with an unlimited number of 3rd-level and lower formulas generally being available in a 5th-level settlement (city+) according to rules for marketplaces.

Usually, fewer of the highest-level items are available—you can use Table 10–9: Party Treasure by Level on page 509 of the Core Rulebook as a guideline for how many of the highest-level items might be available, using the Permanent Items and Consumables entries for a level 1 lower than the settlement’s actual level.

Answer 2

Inventing Them

The other method for acquiring formulas, alongside Brandon's excellent answer for purchasing formulas, is to develop them yourself.

There are two ways to do this. The most straightforward option is to make use of the Inventor Feat to come up with new formulas during downtime.

You can spend downtime to invent a common formula that you don’t know. This works just like the Craft activity: you spend half the Price of the formula up front, attempt a Crafting check, and on a success either finish the formula by paying the difference or work for longer to decrease the Price. The difference is that you spend the additional time in research, design, and development, rather than in creating an item. Once it’s complete, you add the new formula you invented to your formula book.

Essentially, if you don't have access to a settlement that will allow you to purchase formulae for some reason, at the expense of a skill feat, you can expend downtime and roughly the same amount of coin to learn any eligible formula which you don't know but would like to know.

Alternately, if you already have one of the item in question, you can simply Reverse-Engineer the item you have to learn it's formula.

If you have an item, you can try to reverse-engineer its formula. This uses the Craft activity and takes the same amount of time as creating the item from a formula would. You must first disassemble the item. After the base downtime, you attempt a Crafting check against the same DC it would take to Craft the item. If you succeed, you Craft the formula at its full Price, and you can keep working to reduce the Price as normal. If you fail, you’re left with raw materials and no formula. If you critically fail, you also waste 10% of the raw materials you’d normally be able to salvage.

Essentially, this works much like the Inventor feat, but doesn't require spending the feat. (Also, you have access to this method at level 1).

The Scrounger archetype also includes additional feat support for this method, providing a bonus to the crafting check, and the opportunity, on a critical success, to keep the original item intact after learning it's formula.