Craft Construct requires CL 5 - is it useful at that level?

[unseenmage]

Oh, I guess you can easily keep clockwork constructs healed up with a clockwork servant.

that's kind of a feature.

It is supposed to be yeah, but for that price hike the darned things just aren't worth it. For comparison, Robots have the same price hike built into their subtype too, they get sentience, skills, and feats. And they require an artifact to build.

That they can potentially benefit from minor healing AND require constant maintenance/winding is not worth paying for them by CR, let alone with the additional cost.

Robutts are nice. Pity they're so expensive in price and basically impossible to actually make.

Unless maybe a Reclamation Robutt can make another Robutt without a lab, letting a non-Robutt version make Robots?

The Reclamation Robot could potentially recondition broken or timeworn robots one imagines. We ruled that at our table the Reclamation 'bot by itself can only rebuild the body, not reactivate the bot proper. For that it'd still need the Robotics Technological Laboratory.

Remember too that that tech artifact requirement can totally be hacked via making a Simulacrum of an Animated Object of said tech lab.
It's just dangerous because there are other, much less innocuous, tech artifacts that one could access in this fashion.

On the one hand, I agree; it would make sense to limit Enter Image to paintings no smaller than the canvass from which they're spawned. On the other, there's something nifty about carrying a tarot deck with a Trompe L'oeil minion on each card.

I say go with Rule-of-Cool. That Tarot Harrow card idea is pure gold. Just be sure to double check with your GM first so it all pans out okay.

It will require a convo about what, exactly, qualifies as a painting.
Does paint spilled under a door then dried count? What about several layers or lines of paint? What about Shrink Item on an actual painting for 'cloth form' then sliding that under the door? What about Shrink Item on a Harrow deck's worth of paintings then gluing them to the cards?


Edit:

Yeah... it's something of a problem with Shield Other - multiple castings don't reduce the target's damage any further, just gets the 'donors' more hurt. It's CR 3 and caster level 9. At 9th, it's essentially 14.5 k market / 7.5 k crafting for what amounts to 42 temp HP and two extra (weak) attacks. Has some use, as long as you don't let it get completely destroyed and get it fixed up with (Greater) Make Whole after battle. Hopefully you don't regularly take 80+ damage in a fight.

Which is precisely why I prefer to combine it with higher HD creatures via the Amalgam template and the Price by CR rules. Is loads of fun AND lets you wear magical tattoos of your favorite monsters.