Since you're reading this post I assume you are already at least considering doing some crafting. Just in case you are not sure it is worth your effort let me just give you a few good reasons to level crafting classes.

• Gil - If you are clever about what you craft and spend some time studying the market you can make serious amounts of gil from crafting, especially if you do your own gathering/farming. I will not cover what recipes you can make money off in this guide, mainly because it changes over time. If nothing else, being able to do your own repairs both saves time and money.
• Achievement points - There are a lot of points to be had from crafting achievements.
• Luminary tools - If you do the achievements you will also eventually get luminary tools.
• Crafting gear - Whether it is to make multiple copies of top level gear for double/triple melding, making gear for spiritbonding or making the class specific gear, making it yourselves will save you bundles of gil.
• Melding - Last but not least, you can meld materia to your gear and not having to pay others for that.

So, hopefully you have now decided that crafting is something for you. The next obvious question is how does it work?

Well, all you need to do to start crafting is to get your L1 tool from the NPC in the adventurers guild and then you are good to go. You will notice that the tools has 3 different stats so what do those do?

• Craftmanship/Magic craftmanship - These helps boost the likelihood of success each time. Some recipes are helped by craftmanship, other by magic craftmanship. Sadly, SE has refused to let us know which recipes are affected by which stat and all we have is lots of speculation. For each recipe you could try it out yourself but I have a much simpler approach, try to set them about equal with tool and gear and you will be ok. It's not optimal but it is much easier. You can chose between using a primary tool or a secondary tool and the primary will have higher craftmanship stats and the secondary will have higher magic craftmanship. It seems that regardless of which you use, you will get the benefit of the highest stat for each category as long as you have both a primary and secondary tool equipped but it does mean you need to use up an additional inventory slot for a secondary tool. I preferred to have more gear with magical craftmanship but this is more a matter of taste and especially effort. While you want to have a good set of gear at 50, while your leveling, a few points here and there will often not make that much difference.
• Control - Control in combination with the difference in level between your crafter and the recipe you are making determines if you get elemental instability while crafting. If you tend to get elemental instability more than once in a synth, try to boost your control attribute. Notice that you may want to get instability once, more about that in the discussion about skills.

To succeed with your synth, you need to get to 100% Progress without having the Durability get to 0. In addition, you want to boost Quality as each extra 100 quality boosts XP from the synth by 80%. In addition, if you get quality up over 300% you have a chance to get an HQ result. The higher the quality, the better the odds of getting a HQ synth. If you get at least 25 chance to get HQ result and do not get it you will get he chance to double-down with half the chance of HQ. The downside is that if the double-down fails, the entire synth blows up.

Once you start to craft, you will have 4 basic choices each time plus whatever skills you have set. The basic choices are:

• Standard Synthesis - This is the middle of the road alternative. Will advance your progress ~15-25 when the synth is successful but ~4-8 when it fails. The opposite is true for duration which will go down by ~7-10 when you succeed but ~15-18 when it fail. Standard Synthesis will give a small boost to quality as well.
• Rapid Synthesis - This does not affect quality but can give you a significant boost to progress. If it fails however it will make a big dent in your durability. As a rule, you should stay away from this.
• Careful Synthesis - This will give you the biggest boost in quality, the more successful the synth the bigger the boost. It will give you progress of 3-5 and durability will go down 7-10.
• Wait - This means pass on a chance to synth and take a hit of 2 to durability the first time, 4 the second time, then 6 and so on. I would recommend against using it.

When you start out with a new synth the orb will be white but there are 3 other color. From top to bottom they have the highest chance of success and will give the lowest boost to quality if it succeeds.

• White
• Yellow
• Red
• Flashing

In addition, you will sometimes get an elemental instability. This decreases the chance of success as well as lowers the quality and progress gained.

So now you want to level your chosen craft and you wonder which method is the best. Here are my personal preferences.

• Use leves! These can be hard to come by so they are a precious commodity.
• Use rested XP. I would say though that I personally think if you have a choice, use rested XP for gathering first, then crafting and finally DoW/DoM.
• Try to do recipes at least 5 levels over yours if you can do them reliably.
• When doing synths that much above your level, spend the time to boost the quality as much as possible. Every 100 quality gives a 80% boost to EXP so this will be well worth it. If you are doing synths around your own level because you have the mats or because you are working on achievements, just press enter and watch tv.

Notice that I am not including using the manuals you can buy from the GC. Personally I don't think they are worth it. If you do synths as I have suggested you should get 1500-2300 EXP per synth. A manual for 400 seals gives you a max boost of 9000 EXP so is worth about 4-6 synths. Unless you are swimming in seals or struggling to find mats, I don't think it is really worth it.

Finally, to find recipes to use, go to www.mooglebox.com. It is the only source you need. I will write additional guides for leveling individual classes and work on the luminary tools.

Any suggestions, comments or questions?