Gamer Corner Guides

The majority of recipes fall into one of three recipe types: standard recipes, material recipes, and upgrade recipes. Each type has its own typical breakdown of difficulty, durability, and quality, which vary by level. The crafting strategies (and particularly crafting macros) differ between different recipe types. I will cover the basic types here, as well as several common exceptional types.

Standard Recipes

Non-material recipes are called "standard" because their values are used as the basis for all recipe types. These recipes have the maximum amount of durability, meaning that you have the most available actions to complete them. High-level recipes always have 80 durability, but this number actually starts at 60 and increases with level as seen in the table to the right.

Material Recipes

Material recipes generally create items that are used in other recipes, rather than finished products. They have a reduced amount of durability, 40, which is constant regardless of level. They have the same quality requirements as standard recipes, but only half the difficulty. Basically, you are losing 2-4 actions (depending on level) in exchange for this drop in difficulty. This isn't a great tradeoff in most cases, as quality is usually harder to get quickly.

Upgrade Recipes

Some recipes take a finished product and revise it into another finished product of the same type. For instance, an Iron War Axe can be crafted into an Inferno Axe. These recipes have a difficulty 50% higher than standard recipes of the same level, but with a quality cap only 75% as high. This generally makes an HQ result easier to obtain, and punishes you less for not having an HQ item to upgrade. However, it's very easy to come up short on the difficulty if you're not paying attention!

Other Recipe Types

Aspected (Vintage) Recipes

A number of recipes starting at level 35 have an elemental aspect. These are generally recipes that require dungeon drops with below-average attributes, turning them into above-average items with an increased item level. These recipes use the same stats as standard recipes, but the elemental aspect makes synthesis abilities less useful. You will only get half the usual progress from them, effectively doubling the difficulty of these recipes. However, the elemental brand abilities allow you to gain progress normally at the cost of some CP. These abilities are gained at level 37, and every class that requires them with the exception of Goldsmith gains the ability required for the lower-level aspected recipes of that class. Higher-level recipes may have aspects of other elements and require cross-class abilities (or extra synthesis!) to be created efficiently.

Housing Recipes

There are no high-quality results for any housing recipe, so to preserve the challenge of crafting them they have greatly increased difficulties. Durability is unchanged, but you will need 3.2 times the progress (rounded down) to complete the recipes. They also have half the usual maximum quality, which will affect experience earned (and possibly other factors like spiritbond) even though the recipe cannot yield an HQ result.

A small number of housing recipes have an elemental aspect; these have less stringent progress requirements (1.8 times normal difficulty). With normal synthesis abilities, these recipes are slightly harder to complete than other housing recipes, but not by the same degree as aspected non-housing recipes.

Beast Tribe Recipes

Beast tribe recipes are unlocked while doing quests for the Ixal. While the recipes only range from level 1–18, some of these recipes are much harder than their level would make them seem. In all, there are six types of recipe, though not all are found at every level. The table to the right shows which recipe types are used at which level, and what the difficulty and quality modifiers are for those recipes. Generally you must create high-quality results to complete these quests, though this is not necessary (or possible) for the level 1 recipes. With the exception of material recipes, all beast tribe recipes use standard durability for their level. All three standard recipe types are used, as well as the following:

• High-Difficulty Recipes: Found only at level 3, these recipes require 180% of the progress but only 50% of the quality to complete. This is a more extreme version of a typical upgrade recipe.
• Extreme-Difficulty Recipes: Like high-difficulty recipes, these recipes only require 50% of the usual quality for their level, but the progress requirement is 320% (!) of its normal value.
• Advanced Recipes: These recipes are the most difficult, as they require 180% of the usual values for both progress and quality. Fortunately, these recipes do not appear until the final two tiers of Ixal quests. On the other hand, you may be seeing these recipes a lot because these are the same tiers that offer Ixali Oaknots as a reward.