Diablo 4 is getting real crafting with the Horadric Cube, and even white loot could become legendary

Real item crafting is finally coming to Diablo 4. "Real" because the current ways to modify items look pretty bare-bones compared to what the Lord of Hatred expansion is bringing next month.

Two developers PC Gamer spoke with during a visit to Blizzard HQ back in January are convinced players will never look at loot the same way again.

Taking inspiration from Diablo 2's crafting, Blizzard is adding its own version of the Horadric Cube to Diablo 4 – essentially a magical crafting table dressed up in dark fantasy clothing. The concept is simple: put items in, get something better out.

There'll also be a recipe list for various item manipulations – like combining three identical uniques into a brand new one.

The biggest change, though, is to loot itself. Right now, low-quality items – commons and magics – basically vanish from the game once your character levels up and you start cycling through endgame dungeons.

In Lord of Hatred, those lower-tier items are coming back, but with a meaningful twist: any item can now drop with a supercharged "greater affix" – a modifier currently exclusive to legendaries. Drop that item into the cube and you can upgrade it all the way to legendary.

For a game built entirely around loot, this is a fundamental shift in how character progression works. Any item could be an upgrade if you have the crafting materials to work with it. The ground won't be covered in orange beams anymore – white, blue, and yellow items can now be that lucky find that reshapes your entire build.

This ties directly into the loot filter also arriving with Lord of Hatred. It lets you configure what shows up on the ground so only relevant items are visible. Need more critical strike chance? Set the filter to highlight items with that stat and tune out everything else.

Since launch, Diablo 4 has pushed players to pick up everything and salvage the junk for materials, on repeat. Systems design director Colin Finer told PC Gamer that salvaging isn't disappearing, but it'll become less and less relevant as you advance.

"We feel like the game just feels a lot more hollow now where you just don't really see anything except orange beams, and then you become accustomed to it, and it just doesn't feel like there's texture to it. So we felt like, OK, if the problem is that players don't want to salvage and it's not something that they're enjoying then we're just not going to keep moving forward with it. So we really just sort of moved past it, you're going to graduate past it."

"There's still going to be a ton of things that are going to drop that are rare, true items that the cube is going to use [for transmutation]. So it doesn't mean that we've removed all the loot drops from the game. It just means they're more concentrated," he added.

Beyond upgrading items, the cube will also let you convert a common item into a unique of the same type – skipping straight to the most powerful tier, with special effects you simply can't get on legendaries.

Whether that path extends to mythics – the rarest items in the game – is a "maybe," according to Finer. Some recipes and their outcomes are being kept secret on purpose, left for players to discover once the expansion is live.

The final step in the crafting process will feel familiar to anyone who played season 11. It's called Transfiguration, and it works much like Sanctification did last season. Find a usable item, toss it in the cube, and gamble on a set of random bonus effects.

The results won't be as extreme as season 11 – mythic items probably won't be able to absorb the effects of a second mythic – but they'll be powerful enough to offset the fact that your item becomes unmodifiable afterward.

As in season 11, there's never a reason to stop paying attention to drops. Anything can be an upgrade with enough luck, and a well-crafted item might even spark an idea for a completely new build.

Lord of Hatred launches on April 28.