Crafting in Final Fantasy XIV is quite different from that in Final Fantasy XI, which some of you may be used to. In FFXI, you would simply select a crystal to use, input your materials, start the synth and hope for the best. In FFXIV there is more skill to it. Your equipment, tools and abilities play a much more important role.
Some recipes will require special training in order to have a good success rate, while others will require secondary classes. A secondary class is another discipline of the hand that you can level up to support your main crafting class, whereas training is bought with guild points that are earned from local guildleve quests.
Crafting Tools
In order to start crafting in your chosen discipline you must first equip the tool that belongs to that class. You're probably wondering where you can get hold of these tools. In each starter city there is an NPC for each class that sells the basic tools they need. In cities where the class' guild is located, the NPC will be here; otherwise it will be in one of the shopping areas. The list of NPCs and their locations are as follows:
| Discipline |
Limsa Lominsa |
Gridania |
Ul'dah |
| Alchemist |
Zuzudesu (5-6) |
Mumuko (3-8) |
Jemimi (6-5) |
| Armorer |
Joellaut (7-7) |
Matheonien (3-7) |
Allenaure (4-7) |
| Blacksmith |
Smydhaemr (7-7) |
Ahldiyrn (3-8) |
Doesdornn (4-7) |
| Carpenter |
Sysley (5-5) |
Osgar (5-6) |
Barryn (4-7) |
| Culinarian |
Jossy (3-7) |
Stanilde (4-8) |
P'sonjha (4-6) |
| Goldsmith |
Teteu (5-5) |
Gagaulu (4-8) |
Pamisolaux (6-6) |
| Leatherworker |
Arnald (5-6) |
Spaerfedar (3-6) |
Elgiva (4-6) |
| Weaver |
Eosilie (5-6) |
Foinine (7-4) |
Norbettaux (6-7) |
Once you have bought your crafting tool you will be able to equip it and start crafting items. See our recipe lists for details on what you can craft. There will come a time when you need to upgrade your crafting tool to a better one, as your rank gets higher. These better tools can be obtained through crafting one or from local guildleve quests.
Before You Start Crafting
Before you get to work crafting your first items it is a good idea to do a bit research on recipes and see which ones will be the most cost effective to use for skilling up on. This is because you may find yourself having to sell crafted items to NPCs for less than the cost of the materials. You will want to find the recipe that minimises this gil loss. You may even be able to make a profit if you can skill up on items that other players are willing to buy. However skilling up on any expensive materials is a risk because if you fail a synth you will lose all of the materials. You should expect some fails when skilling up.
The main things you need to research are what materials you need to perform a synth, where to find these materials, how much they are going to cost you and the amount of money you may gain or lose per successful synth. Finding recipes like the Alchemist's Distilled Water is where the benefits come. You can buy the material for this synth for 76 gil and synth 3 items worth 25 gil each. This results in a 1 gil loss per successful synth, making Alchemy easy to skill up to 10. Other disciplines may have similar synths, you just have to look for them.
Once you have done your research, gather the materials and get ready to start crafting.
Beginning a Synthesis
To begin your synth, simply select "Synthesis" from the right side bar of the game. You will be presented with a screen that allows you to select a bunch of materials from your inventory. There is also the option to use requested materials, which is how you will complete your local guildleve quests.
That was the easy bit, now you're probably wondering what the Main Hand and Off Hand options are for. They basically decide whether you use your primary or secondary tool. The tools affect synths in different ways, for example performing an HQ synth on your primary (main hand) tool will give you a +1/2/3 item, while performing an HQ synth on your secondary tool will give you more of that item. It is a good idea to use the secondary tool on synths where multiple items can be obtained, for example in the Distilled Water recipe mentioned earlier you will be able to get six from an HQ instead of three in the NQ. HQs are hard to get however unless you are levelled a lot higher than the recipe you are producing so it is a good idea to stick with the primary crafting tool. This makes skilling up easier.
Once you have decided which materials and tool to use, you are ready to craft your item. You will first be shown how many shards or crystals the recipe requires and then you will be given the crafting menu as your synth begins.
Crafting Mechanics
The crafting menu gives you a number of options and pieces of information about the item you are creating. It gives you your progress, its durability and its quality. The progress is obvious, once it reaches 100% you have completed your synth. The durability number is the opposite, it decreases over time and when it reaches 0 you have failed your synth. The goal is to get your progress to 100% before your durability reaches 0. Failing an option on your synth will make durability decrease faster so be careful. More on that later. The quality number tells you how good the item you are producing is. The higher it is, the more likely you are to obtain an HQ item.
The four default options available are called Standard, Rapid, Bold and Wait. I say default because as your class rank increases you will be able to gain more options to use during synthesis. These typically give you benefits when performing certain kinds of recipes such as parts or finished products. There is a timer that ensures you must select one of these options within a certain amount of time or you will lose some durability.
Standard - This option is the most balanced when it comes to your progress. You will gain around 20% progress on a successful synth and lose around 20% durability on a fail. Quality will increase a similar amount on a success.
Rapid - Rapid focuses on getting the recipe completed as quickly as possible. As a result you sacrifice quality for extra progress. You can gain up to 30% progress on a successful rapid but will gain very little quality as a result. However, durability loss on a fail is cut to as low as 10%, making this the ideal option for skilling up.
Bold - Bold is useful if you wish to produce an HQ item as the quality gains can be massive. However, failing a bold attempt will result in a massive decrease in durability, up to 30%. This means it is bad to use unless you are very close to completing a synth and have a lot of durability to spare.
Wait - Waiting allows you to take more time to decide which option to use. It is better than letting your timer run out because the loss of durability is a lot less. It is also useful to use when your element becomes unstable and can help stabilise it again. An unstable element results in very high durability losses on fails.
When your synthesis reaches 100% you will have finished your item and be given the option to simply finish it or to touch it up. Touching it up allows you to increase the quality and potentially turn it into an HQ item.
Alchemist
