Here is the newspost from Shinarae about the upgrade weapon/armour/item skills and primal materials:

Group: guilds.merchant (#512/512)
From: Shinarae (Lvl: 200 [Wizard] Age: 4y, 330d, 4h, 13min and 14s)
Subject: three new skills added to guild
Date: Tue May 02 19:41:40 2023
Rating: 0 Votes: 0

At reboot (maybe sooner) three new skills will be available: upgrade arour,
upgrade weapon, and upgrade item.

There's a LOT to discuss here.

The skills in question permanently improve an item's quality. But before we
talk about anything else, it's important to know that the better an item
already is, the less you can improve it. Standard or worse items can have more
quality added than something already exceptional. Very strong items will be
much harder to upgrade, if they can be upgraded at all (there is a max
quality, items already there can't be improved, because that's what "max"
means.).

Okay, so the skills themselves have two components: parts, and material.

Parts are found by using the cannibalize skill on weapons and armour. The
better the item you destroy, the better the parts you get. There are three
types of parts: weapons, armour, and "grips" which come from held-slot armour
and shield weapons only. In other words, there is no "longsword parts" or
"great cloak parts". Parts of the same type and quality stack.

Upgrading an item takes five parts. As a safety feature, you cannot use
higher-quality parts on a lower-quality item.

"repair item" only works on non-armour, non-weapon items. I...don't really
know if you'll use that. Besides chests, I can't think of what you'd upgrade.
Gems, maybe? In any event, "repair item" does not use armour parts, weapon
parts, or grips. Just materials.

Speaking of which, materials. Low-quality items need 5kg of exceptional
material (of the same material as the item). Mid-quality items need 5kg of
divine material. And high-quality items need _primal_ material. Yes, the
strips from the event will now be used to upgrade items. So, you'll need to
find those. They are rare, but they are also tradable. It's up to you if you
insist that your customers bring their own primal material, but it could be a
while before anyone has the materials they actually require to upgrade
highbie/UHB eqsets.

Obviously, these new skills are involved codewise and, while I did check them,
I can't 100% promise they're perfect yet. I _strongly_ recommend, therefore,
that you practice on worse items first. That'll not just bugtest, but also,
give you some idea how these work. Find and scrap some decent-quality armour
and weapons to get some parts, refine some materials, and upgrade some garbage
items. Don't waste primal materials on testing!

Primal materials are going to be rare for a while. Some players will find them
exploring, but this is the merchant channel, so that should be a clue where to
find the rest of it.

I will also point out that getting the most out of these skills, a "5/5
upgrade" as the skill calls it, will require a lot of XP and a lot of
time/effort spent. Low-level merchants should not expect to instantly upgrade
the best eq in the game. Knowledge of the material in question is super
important, so even UHB merchants won't be able to do max everything instantly.
But if this works, master merchants will hopefully become very important to
their eq-seeking friends.

Please please PLEASE let me know if the skills aren't working as intended.
Again, test on garbage first.

Shinarae Lluminus