There aren’t a lot of ways to get new gear in Final Fantasy XVI; finding new weapons, equipment and accessories in treasure chests is somewhat uncommon, and completing the odd side quest will reward you with various accessories, but for the most part you’ll get new gear when you buy it from shops, or craft it via the blacksmith in 
The Hideaway. Knowing how crafting and reinforcing gear works is essential to keeping your gear up to snuff, and this page will cover both of these services offered by 
Blackthorne.
When Do You Unlock the Blacksmith in FF16?¶
You’ll unlock the ability to craft items during the main quest Hide, Hideaway, where you’ll need to interact with Blackthorne, the blacksmith at 
The Black Hammer on the eastern end of The Hideaway. This introduction will detail the basics, but it’ll probably be a while before you actually access to anything worth crafting - new arms and armor will be introduced as you advance through the main questline, although these are little more than stat sticks rather than mechanically complex, strategically significant upgrades.
(1 of 3) You can expend resources to craft gear at the blacksmith. Crafted gear will usually start out with a +1 enhancement.
How Crafting and Reinforcing Gear Works in Final Fantasy XVI¶
Interact with Blackthorne and opt to use the forge to get two options: Craft and Reinforce. Crafting gear is pretty straight-forward, you’ll get a selection of gear recipes unlocked (mostly by main quest progression, but some gear unlocks via side quest progression) that you can craft if you possess the required materials. Crafting doesn’t require any gil expenditure. The crafting materials you’ll need can often be dropped by enemies (including Notorious Marks, AKA Hunts), found by approaching item pickups on the field or in dungeons, plundered from chests or given as quest rewards. Some materials are one-time drops from bosses and these can make unique items, but since all gear are, again, just stat sticks, aside from having bigger numbers and a different color icon, there’s not much to these.
Unique weapons and equipment have a fixed quality and can’t be upgraded - this pretty much includes any purple or gold colored weapon, and these recipes are reliably unlocked when you acquire new 
Eikons. More mundane (green colored) gear, however, has variable quality and can be upgraded. If you purchase green gear you’ll get the base-quality item (functionally +0, although no modifier will be shown, a 
Bastard Sword, for example), but crafting green equipment tends to yield a +1 variant (ie, 
Bastard Sword +1). During your first playthrough, green quality gear can be upgraded to +2 whether it was crafted or purchased (purchased gear will have to upgrade to +1 first), although the upgrade cap for gear is generally higher on Final Fantasy Mode, but this is reserved for New Game+.
Reinforcing gear doesn’t cost gil, but it does consume resources, albeit less resources than would be required to craft the item outright, so if you end up with more gil than you need and less crafting materials than you’d like, buying an item and upgrading it can be a viable way to get what you want for a price you prefer. Enhancing gear will further improve its stats, at the expense of more and/or rarer resources. Generally you shouldn’t care about enhancing gear too much for most of the game, as just advancing the story will unlock new, superior gear for you to craft. Maxing out gear should be reserved for endgame items, unless you end up with a wild surplus of materials.
For more information on the various equipment available to Clive throughout the game and the rare materials you’ll need to craft it, check out the following pages:
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