Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn – How do Crafting Classes Work?

There are several crafting classes in Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. Once you complete the level 10 quest for your starting class, you can head over to the guild for the crafting class you’d like to unlock, and start the quest to get the class. At the moment, you can play as an Alchemist, Armorer, Blacksmith, Carpenter, Culinarian, Goldsmith, Leatherworker or Weaver. As with all of the classes and jobs in FF14, you can change jobs on the fly without having to switch characters or create a new account.

Once you unlock the crafting class(es) of your choice, it’s time to start leveling them up. You can look at the in-game crafting log at any point, even when you’re not playing as a crafting class. From the crafting log, you can look up recipes for every item you can make within your level range. The recipes are divided by levels, with each list containing all of the recipes for a five-level block. At first, you will only have access to recipes from levels one through five. As you level up, you’ll gain access to the next block of recipes once you’re within two levels. For example, when you reach level four, you’ll gain access to the recipes available in the level six-to-10 block.

When you’re ready to craft an item, you must have the materials listed in the crafting log required to make the item in question. Once those materials are in your inventory, select the item from the crafting log to begin the crafting process. The crafting log shows the difficulty of the item you’re about to craft, as well as the durability of the craft. The higher the difficulty, the harder it will be to craft the item, and the higher the durability, the longer you’ll be able to spend working on completing the craft.

The crafting process consists of watching the durability of the item, the progress of your current craft and the condition of your next attempt, and the current level of quality for the item. You need the progress bar to fill up completely before the durability reaches zero. As you level up, you learn new abilities. All crafting jobs have the same abilities aside from what you learn at level 15, 37 and 50. These three skills can be used by any crafting class once you unlock it.

Some crafting skills increase progress (Synthesis), others increase quality (Touch) and some impact durability. Using skills requires CP, and some skills will even replenish your CP. In order to craft a high quality (HQ) item, you need to use skills that increase quality. The higher the quality, the higher the chance your craft will be HQ. If you fill the quality bar completely, your craft is guaranteed to be HQ upon successful completion. Keep in mind when using skills that increase quality, you are not increasing the progress bar at all. It’s best to know how many turns it will take to fill the progress bar and complete the craft before you attempt an HQ craft, then stop increasing the quality once you only have enough turns to fill the progress bar.

The condition of the craft is directly tied to how much quality you can obtain. The condition can be Poor (purple), Normal (white), Good (red) or Excellent (multi-color). The default condition is Normal, but an Excellent condition is always followed by a Poor condition, then a Normal condition. Beyond this pattern, the condition changes at random, so you must adapt on the fly. Do not use a Touch ability to increase quality during a Poor condition turn, because the quality increase is only 50 percent. When the condition is Good, the quality increase is 150 percent, and when it’s Excellent, the increase is 400 percent.

In most cases, it’s best to level multiple crafting classes. For instance, Armorer and Blacksmith work well together, and Weaver and Leatherworker go hand-in-hand because both classes are required to make a good amount of gear. While it’s not necessary to have both items, it can save you from having to buy crafting materials from the market board that you could have made on another crafting class. You can always start a new crafting class and use the crafting guildleves to quickly level up, or just continuously craft the items in the crafting logs, selling them to NPCs or through your retainer.