From our thread on the Unity Forums

The majority of the framework for the professions and manufacturing system is now in place.

To work, you go the area in which the item you want to gather can be found for basic items, or for advanced items (armour, weapons, potions etc.) you go to the associated building for that profession and then you select the item from the list of products you can currently make/gather and your character starts working.

You can’t perform any other actions on a character whilst it is working, however, you can switch to another character or exit the game and when you come back your work session will have continued while you were away (courtesy of our proprietary, ahem! Temporal Phase Adjustment Technology) and you’ll be presented with a report of what you made during that time. However, it can be quite relaxing actually just sitting there and watching it tick away 🙂

Typically, low-level items can be gathered quite quickly, but higher level items will take considerably longer to produce and may require rare drops as one or more of the ingredients. Whilst lower level items will be available to buy from NPCs higher level items will only be available from mob drops or professions.

The benefit of making things like armour and weapons yourself is that as your skill in the profession increases you will have a chance to make better quality versions of the items than those that you can gain from mob drops, with better stats and higher durability.