PUBG Workshop Guide: How Crafting and Disassembling Work

PUBG's Workshop has run on the same three materials since Update 18.2 went live on July 6, 2022 — Imprints, Vouchers and Credits, in, cosmetics out. Four years on, most of how it actually works still lives inside KRAFTON's own patch notes rather than anywhere a player can read it in one place, and 2026 has been a genuinely disruptive year for the system: KRAFTON tore out the crafting-event structure its own developers flagged as too complex, deleted a chest that had been a standing material source for years, and — as of the update that landed September 9 — made a chunk of the catalogue up to five times more expensive to touch.

None of that shows up if you just open the Workshop tab and start clicking. Here's what each material actually does, what changed, and what an older guide might still be telling you to do that no longer works.

How Regular Crafting Works

Regular Crafting runs on three materials, and which one you're holding decides how you spend it:

KRAFTON last published a full cost breakdown by item tier in the Update 29.2 notes (3 May 2024), when items that had been sitting as "Basic" or unassigned were sorted into five value tiers — Special, Classic, Rare, Elite and Epic — with crafting and disassembly costs set per tier:

Treat that table as a sense of scale rather than this week's prices — the September changes further down moved a specific slice of the catalogue well outside these ranges.

Special Crafting Runs on Tokens

Special Crafting is a separate track from Regular Crafting, and it runs on Tokens instead of Credits. Tokens are minted for a specific set of items, usually tied to a collaboration or a seasonal event, and unlike Credits they come with an expiry date.

Black Market 2026 is the clearest recent example. KRAFTON's own announcement states that 18 items were craftable with Black Market 2026 Tokens at Special Crafting, on the same sales window as the rest of the event: 17 June–15 July on PC, 25 June–23 July on console. Once that window closed, the Tokens and the ability to spend them on those items closed with it.

Disassembling and Repurposing

Two ways exist to turn an item you don't want into something else, and they're not the same action:

• Disassembling converts Imprints and Vouchers into Credits.
• Repurposing — documented on PUBG's wiki.gg Workshop page — trades three Imprints or Vouchers of the same tier for one random item you don't already own from that tier, rather than Credits.

Disassembling itself got meaningfully less tedious in Update 36.1 (10 June 2025): the cap on how many items you can disassemble in one batch rose from 10 to 50, and a new Select in Order button auto-selects up to 50 items at once (skipping Record Files). The same patch tuned the warning pop-ups — Regular Disassembly now flags it if a Special Disassembly item slipped into the batch, and the "are you sure" prompt for high-tier items now triggers at Epic and above instead of Elite and above.

Where Materials Come From

Imprints, Vouchers, Credits and Tokens mostly come out of Chests, bought from the Store or earned, opened with a Key. Keys can be bought directly, or — per wiki.gg — crafted from three Key Fragments.

Right now the standing chest KRAFTON actually sells is the Hunter's Chest: the September 2026 PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass exclusive bundles are both built around "Hunter's Chests, Keys, and Contraband Coupons." If a guide is also telling you to go buy an Archivist's Chest, keep reading.

The Archivist's Chest Is Gone

The Archivist's Chest was a second standing Workshop chest for years. It isn't anymore.

KRAFTON discontinued it from sale in the July 2026 Store Update — end of sales 15 July, 00:00 UTC on PC and 23 July, 00:00 UTC on console — while letting players keep using any they already owned. The same notice set the removal date: "various crates, including the Archivist's Chest, are scheduled to be removed as part of the content overhaul in the September 2026 update." The September Store Update confirmed it happened: "Certain chests have been removed from the Workshop as of the September update." The Dorian Prime Parcel and Hanna Prime Parcel — bonus items that used to come from Archivist's Chests — were discontinued along with it, including out of the bonus list of any Archivist's Chest a player still had sitting in inventory.

If a wiki, an old post or an AI assistant tells you to go buy an Archivist's Chest for materials, that instruction is wrong now — not just outdated.

What Just Got More Expensive

KRAFTON announced this in the 11 August Store Update and put it into effect with the update that shipped 9 September: crafting and disassembling a specific list of collaboration and celebrity cosmetic items now costs substantially more Credits than it did before. The official numbers, current → updated:

The NewJeans/aespa/G-DRAGON group is a flat 5x increase, both to craft and to disassemble. The Mister Ma-through-Neymar Jr. group is 3x. Xiaohai alone moved the least, at roughly 1.7x. KRAFTON frames it as catch-up work rather than a one-off: the notice says these changes follow "the credit balance adjustments made to some Workshop items in Update 30.2," aligning the remaining Workshop items onto the same scale.

Black Market 2026 Retired the Double Gacha

If you crafted anything through a Workshop event before this June, you likely went through what KRAFTON itself calls the "Double Gacha" system: open a Loot Cache to get a Prime Parcel, then open the Prime Parcel for a chance at the item you actually wanted. Two layers of randomness stood between paying and receiving.

KRAFTON's own developer's comment on Update 42.1 doesn't hedge about why that changed:

As we mentioned in the 2026 Roadmap, we've been closely listening to player feedback regarding the Workshop's complex structure and the 'Double Gacha' system. As a result, we've improved the Workshop experience by removing the Double Gacha structure entirely. Black Market 2026 is the first seasonal event to reflect this direction.

Black Market 2026 replaced the two-step draw with a single Cargo, opened directly for 250 G-Coin (or 1 Cargo Ticket) individually, or 2,500 G-Coin (10 Cargo Tickets) for a batch of ten, from a new Workshop page called Supply Bay. Supply Bay also tracked milestone rewards for total Cargo opened on the same page — a Cargo Ticket at 15 opens, up through an Azure Smoke Grenade at 180 — instead of scattering that tracking elsewhere.

The catch for anyone reading this today: Black Market 2026 was a seasonal event, not a permanent fixture. It ran 17 June–15 July on PC and 25 June–23 July on console, and the Cargo storefront closed with it — Supply Bay isn't something you can open right now. What KRAFTON did confirm is that Black Market 2026 was built specifically to demonstrate the no-more-Double-Gacha direction for future Workshop events, so the two-step Loot Cache version some older guides still describe is what a future crafting event is confirmed not to bring back, whatever it ends up being called.

This Is Different From the Hideout's Contraband Economy

Easy mix-up: the Hideout runs its own separate cosmetic economy, and it reuses some of the same vocabulary. Hideout Contraband Crates convert into Scrap, not Credits, and during Black Market 2026 they could also be opened with Black Market Vouchers — a different item from a Workshop Voucher despite the shared name. KRAFTON's Black Market 2026 notes even let players spend Scrap at the Scrap Broker to buy Black Market Tokens directly, at 1,500 Scrap for 1,000 Tokens, which was the one point where the two economies actually connected. Outside that specific exchange, Scrap and Credits don't interchange, and a guide talking about one isn't talking about the other.

Quick Action Checklist

• Imprint + Credits crafts one item; a Voucher crafts its item alone; Set Imprints can craft several items from one set while letting you skip ones you don't want
• Special Crafting Tokens are event-specific and expire on that event's own sales window — check it before you sit on them
• Disassembling now caps at 50 items per batch (up from 10 since Update 36.1), with a Select in Order button to speed up the pick
• Repurposing trades 3 same-tier Imprints or Vouchers for a random unowned item of that tier, instead of Credits
• The Archivist's Chest is gone — discontinued July 2026, removed September 2026; the Hunter's Chest is the standing chest KRAFTON currently sells
• Crafting/disassembling costs on NewJeans, aespa, G-DRAGON, Mister Ma, Ailee, Daniel Wu, Lee Jung-jae, Son Heung-min, Jeremy Lin, Neymar Jr. and Xiaohai items rose 1.7x–5x with the September update
• Hideout Scrap and Black Market Vouchers are a separate system from Workshop Credits and Vouchers — don't mix them up