Forum

Gathering and crafting in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

SE has today released a video with game play from the Alpha revealing how gathering and crafting works in A Realm Reborn and I was pretty sure you would be interested in seeing it.

First of all a link to the video

Gathering
As you can see from the video the main skills of the botanist: Triangulate and Arbor Call are still in the game.

Triangulate "Allows you to discern mature trees and lush vegetation from normal foliage". In other words it will locate all gathering locations in the area and display them on the minimap ei not only second hand gathering is visible now but main hand gathering as well once you activate Triangulate.

Arbor Call will "Survey the landscape to locate the highest level mature tree or lush vegetation within your skill range". So this basically tells you where to go if you want trees that will give you XP.

So how does gathering work? Well once you find a tree you click it and you will be presented with a list of the items that can be gathered from the current gathering node (mature tree as it is called). This could be logs, branches, feathers and so on as we are already used to. Besides the normal gathering items you will also see shards. I don't know if crystals will be available down the line as well once higher level mature trees are found, for now we can only guess. But the new system is that you simply select the item you want to log. It is your choice. Along with the list of items you can see what the chances to obtain the item is. 80 % seem to be the highest possible chance of obtaining an item but that may be subject to change.

So that is how easy it is. You find a tree containing what you want and then you simply click it. Then depending on level and gear you will get the item or not.

At the top of the screen you can see a bar that will show how many times you can log the mature tree. This is currently 6 times but may also change and may change depending on gear and level.

Once you start gathering you will also get XP. The XP will be based on whether or not you obtain an item. Also the level of the item will influence the amount of XP; the higher the level of the item; the more XP. Lastly you will be able to get Chains. Each time you succeed obtaining an item the chain will continue giving you more and more XP until 1: you fail or 2: the tree has been depleted.

So that is how gathering works in 2.0. It seems to be much simpler and no mini game any more. It also seem a lot faster and shards (and crystals?) will have to be actively chosen and is no longer a by product of gathering.

Crafting

Crafting has been changed a lot as well. Instead of having actions you perform all choices are now skill based. In this video you can see the first three skills of the woodworker: Standard Synthesis, Standard Touch and Masters Mend.

Standard Synthesis will add progress to the synth. A synthesis finishes once progress is full. The amount of progress needed may vary from recipe to recipe.

Standard Touch will add quality to the synthesis and get you closer to HQ'ing the result. The amount of quality needed to get an item varies from recipe to recipe.

Master's Mend restores durability. During the crafting process you use durability and this skill will let you regain some of this making it possible to make items of higher quality.

When crafting you will select one of the skills available to you in order to create the item of the recipe with as high quality as possible. While Standard Synthesis only will cost you Durability Standard Touch will cost you both Durability and Crafting Points (CP - can be seen below the skill bar). Master's Mend will not cost you any Durability (as it restores it instead) but will cost you a lot of CP. This means that you will have to foresee how you will use your abilities as you may run out of Durability before completing the craft and not have enough CP to cast Master's Mend. If instead you do cast Master's Mend to get more Durability you may not have enough CP to cast Standard Touch to efficiently use all of the Durability.

As you level crafting I would imagine you get a lot of other interesting skills to help improve quality or finish crafts in one actions etc.

Also notice that a Crafting Log is available. This will show you ALL recipes available to you when you craft along with information on level of craft and what items are needed. It will also display whether or not you have completed the craft. When observing the log you can also see how many of the ingredients you have for the craft both in normal and high quality. This will allow you to select if you want to you high quality items for the craft if they are available. Finally the log will also tell you the difficulty of the recipe even though I don't know if this is relative to level or not.

So there you have it. A look at Gathering and Crafting in Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn, based on the video SE shared with us to day. Also let me know if I left out anything that can be deduced from the video...

Edited by user Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:36:05 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

It seems there is a problem with shards and crystals when it is done this way. First of all the XP you gain from shards is very low as these are level 1 items. As you can see in the video the level 10 botanist only get 21 XP when going for a shard. I would think this would be zero xp before getting to level 20. This means that very quickly gatherers can not level up on shards and will not get any unless they are actively targeting shards for use in recipes or for selling.

I don't know about you but my main concern during 1.0 was to level and not to get items I actually needed. I would level and then sell the items I gathered and then buy the things I needed. If this is the general strategy in 2.0 as well there will be a very big shortage of shards. This in turn could raise prices and get more people to go gathering these and as they are easy and fast to come by the problem could be solved this way but I think it's too early to know yet.

Short version: I believe that shards will be way pricier as they will be harder to come by as people don't want to go gathering without getting XP.

Maybe I can add some more information (from watching the video of course...):

- The glass breaking effect you hear sometimes is when a status wears off (for example Arbor Call)
- If you hover over an item a window pops with more info, including how much you can NPC sell the item for

Crafting:

- There is a recipe log that shows what items you can craft and the requirements
- Before you click the synthesize button note in the list of requirements that both NQ and HQ material is available
- Standard synthesis advances progress only and consumes durability
- If you reach zero durability and 100% progess at the same time, the synth is still a success!
- Standard touch advances quality only and consume CP points and durability, so keep an eye on both (need durability for standard to do progress)
- As you gain levels more abilities will become available, also consuming various amounts of CP so you need to keep careful count
- The higher your quality the more your HQ chance increase

Gathering:

- There is a gathering log that show you which items are available to find
- The little yellow squiggle you see on the items list stands for HQ, and the value next to it is % chance
- You will get abilities as you level up to help with gathering, but they will probably consume GP points (similar to CP points in crafting)

This is just a sneak peak and there is probably more to it than they show in the video.

I can only hope that on higher-level trees, an option is something like "5 shards" or something to speed things up.

Interesting video crafting seems cool a little bit easyier deffinitly. At first i thought it was way easyier but then i realized they nerfed durability, it's no longer 100, so those restore durability abils will be much more important i think. Very interested to see how materia works.

now for DOL kinda a kick in the balls, all that time spent on those mini games plus just being able to select a item means my large stacks of saved up electrum ores probably not worth as much </3

final thought: about kida's concern that shards will cost alot more well that depends on wether or not you can still buy whole crystals from npcs cheaply and break them down with alch.