Crafting in Warhammer

You can choose from several different crafts (skills, professions) in Warhammer Online:

• Apothecary
• Butchering
• Cultivating
• Magical salvaging
• Talisman making
• Scavenging

Keep in mind these few facts:

• Apothecary and talisman making are crafting skills, while the other four are gathering skills
• You can only have one crafting and one gathering profession at any given time
• Learning these skills is easy, simply visit one of the trainers throughout the world
• Switching skills is possible, but you will loose all progress with previous skills

Apothecary
Apothecary is basically what you might know as alchemy from other games. It enables you to make all sorts of potions, lotions and powders, which increase your character stats for a certain period of time.
For low level potions, you can get the ingredients from various merchants, but higher level potions will require items obtained with one or more of the gathering professions: cultivating, scavenging or butchering.
Apothecary works with a main ingredient which determines what kind of potion you will make (whether the potion will give you bonuses to healing, intelligence or something else), while other additional ingredients (mods) are up to you: depending on which ones you use, there can be a longer or shorter duration, greater effect, more doses, and they also affect potion stability. Basically, you get to mix your own stuff, and of course Tome of Knowledge will track it all so you don't have to remember the ingredients. More about Apothecary here.


Talisman making
Talismans are minor items of power which you can attach to other powerful and rare items obtained with RvR, PvE, quests or something else. Basic talismans give bonuses to armor, resistances or stats, while more complicated talismans will give more elaborate bonuses.
To make a talisman, you need ingredients from various crafting and gathering skills, but the main ingredient is a magical fragment obtained with magical salvaging.


Magical Salvaging
Magical salvaging is basically (dis)enchanting; it can convert magical items into component parts. You can actually choose which bonuses to extract from items, like strength or intelligence. Also, you can get different fragments which are used to make talismans.


Cultivating
With cultivating, you can grow your own plants and fungi, which are mostly used for apothecary. To grow the plants or fungi, you need various seeds or spores obtained from merchants, monsters or scavenging. When you have the ingredients, you put them in the pot and then the growth cycle starts. You can also add soil, water and nutrients to speed up the process. After it's done, you should be able to harvest the plant which will then appear in your backpack, and you can then use the pot to grow another plant.


Butchering and Scavenging
Scavenging and butchering are rather similar, since they both extract specific resources from the monsters you kill. However, scavenging can only be used on 'humanoid' type creatures, while butchering can be used on beasts (non-sentient creatures so to speak). If they got no clothes or pockets, then it's most likely you will have to butcher. The only items you can recover with butchering are meat, skin and bones; for everything else, there's scavenging.
If you're wondering, scavenging is supposedly the most profitable profession so take that into consideration also when choosing your skills. But both are pretty profitable, since you can sometimes just follow other players and scavenge/butcher the monsters they kill (you need to wait a few minutes though).

I hope this short summary explains a bit about the various skills in Warhammer Online, and helps you choose the ones you like!

Crafting skills in Warhammer Online - Warhammer Guides