Xenoblade Chronicles Guide- Walkthrough Part 32b: Ether Gem Crafting (part 2)

When you’re crafting Ether Gems, it’s important to make the right choices.

The first choice you make is who to use as Shooter, and who to use as Engineer.

The Shooter is the party member you will be watching when you craft, and the one who has the most distinct effect- they will add their own effects, alter your chance of Fever, improve the effects of the various flames, or other similar effects.  The Shooter’s ability is passive, and activates on its own.  After choosing your Shooter, you will choose your Engineer.  When you do, the screen will indicate between the images of the Shooter and Engineer how many ‘turns’ they are going to take at the Forge.  This becomes important during the Ether Gem Crafting Process.

The Engineer also affects the strengths of the various tones of flame that you will be triggering during the crafting.  Each character has a different rating for the three kinds of flame- Strong, Medium, and Gentle.  A Strong flame chooses one of the Qualities from your resources and improves it a large amount.  A Medium flame improves all of the Qualities from your resources, but to a much smaller degree- on average about a third as much.  A Gentle flame won’t affect the Qualities at all, but it will fill the Cylinder gauge on the crafting screen.  Different engineers will affect the strength of the various flames, thus changing what you want to reach for and whether you want to try and focus on one Quality in order to get a strong Ether Gem or grab a variety of Qualities so you can refine your Crystals into single-Quality Cylinder form.

This brings the topic to the second choice- which materials to use.  When you’re using an Engineer with a good Gentle Flame rating or good Gentle and Medium Flame ratings, particularly with a Shooter who either Fevers a lot or boosts Gentle or Medium Flame in particular, you’re going to be really good at making Ether Cylinders.  That makes this the choice if you want to take your Crystals (which often grant more than one Quality) and convert them into Cylinders (each of which only grants one Quality).  An Engineer with a high rating for Strong Flame, on the other hand, particularly with a Shooter who also improves Strong Flame somehow, is your best choice for making a high-rated Gem- and should probably be working with a batch of Cylinders that give a high starting rating in a Quality.

The final choice is how you’re going to operate.  If you’re looking for a high Cylinder Gauge level, perhaps because you have a variety of Crystals with a variety of Qualities in the forge and want to make a lot of Cylinders, then Speeding Up as many times as you can as early as you can is your best option.  This will also help you trigger Fever more often, which helps with Cylinder crafting as well.  If you’re looking for a high Quality rating to make a single strong Gem, then you’ll want tobe patient and time your button presses- more on that in the discussion of the Crafting Process.