This is a guide to Gem Crafting in Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (XC1). Read on to learn how to make gems, the best gems to craft, support boosts, fever, best gem crafting pairs, and how to make the best gems!

What is Gem Crafting?

Combines Crystals and Cylinders to Create Gems

Gem Crafting is the process of refining Cylinders and Crystallized Ether to turn them to gems. These gems can provide bonus effects from adding unique attributes to your attacks to enhancing your character's stats.

List of Gems

Where to Craft Gems

Use the Ether Furnace

You can use the Ether Furance in Colony 9 to craft gems. It is temporarily unavailable at first, but it will become usable after the events of Chapter 2.

Use the Mobile Furnace

After progressing through the game, you can get the Mobile Furnace through a Quest called The Gem Man's Invention. This quest is given by the gem man himself.

As the name suggests, it's a portable surface that allows you to craft gems regardless of your current location. No need to warp back to Colony 9 to craft your gems!

How to Craft Gems

Choose Crystals and Cylinders of the Same Rank

You must choose Crystals and Cylinders from the same rank to combine. You cannot choose a rank 1 crystal then combine it with a rank 2 crystal, and the same logic applies to other ranks.

Combine Similar Attributes

To refine these crystals to gems, a quality must reach at least 100% for it to become a gem. Prioritize gems that have the same qualities to successfully craft a gem!

Choose a Shooter and a Engineer

Two characters will perform the gem crafting process. These are the Shooter and the Engineer. Their affinities towards each other increase the number of rounds available. Take their affinities into consideration when crafting gems.

Shooter

The Shooter is the one that uses their unique ability when crafting gems. These range from a chance to trigger a fever, to be able to use a single round to enhance multiple times.

Engineer

The Engineer is the one that adjusts the flames. The flames used during a crafting process depend on the Engineer.

How to Craft Cylinders

Combine 2 or More Gems With Low Attributes

Crystal's qualities that get refined beyond 100% will turn to gems. Qualities that weren't able to however, become qualities you can turn to Cylinders. These can be reused to craft gems more easily.

Increase the Cylinder Gauge

You can only choose a limited amount of qualities to turn to Cylinders depending on the Cylinder Gauge's level. This can be increased with a gentle flame.

Types of Flames

Strong Flame	Enhances a single quality greatly.
Medium Flame	Enhances all qualities by a small amount.
Gentle Flame	Increases the Cylinder Gauge.

How to Get Crystals

Harvest them from Ether Deposits

Crystals can be taken from Ether Deposits scattered around the world. Harvest these crystals and use them for crafting!

Defeat Enemies

Enemies drop crystals when they're slain. Crystals often drop from silver rank chests, so go and defeat a lot of enemies to get more crystals.

Gem Crafting Tips

About Fever

Fever is an ability that allows you to execute high quality enhancement multiple times in a single round. This is first exclusive to Shulk, but it can be shared with others via Skill Link.

Aim for 200% to trigger Heat!

100% is the first target to Gem Crafting. Making a crystal's quality allows you to reap the sweet reward of a good gem heading to your pockets. But this is only the first step, as increasing a gem's quality to 200% will increase the gem's rank!

Go for 300% if Possible!

Increasing a gem's quality to 300% will cause the gem to crack and split to two! What's better than an enhanced gem? Two enhanced gems!

Tips to Getting 200% and 300% when Crafting

Below are some tips to increase the probability of getting a 200% or 300% quality when crafting.

1. Improve Affinities - Improving affinities with your allies will increase the rounds available during gem crafting. More rounds = more increase to percentages resulting in better quality gems!
2. Craft multiple crystals with low but multiple qualities using a gentle flame. - This will most likely cause the cylinder gauge to increase, allowing you to turn all these qualities to Cylinders.
3. Combine two Cylinders with a single quality near the 70s to 90s and use a Strong Flame. - This will make the gem crafting process start at 140% to 180%. Enhancing a high quality with strong flames will greatly improve the chance of making that quality enter a heated status.

Use Suggestions

You will most likely get a bunch of gems during your playthrough. It will get harder to look for crystals with specific qualities. Choosing a crystal, then turning the suggestions on will sort all crystals with crystals that share the qualities of your chosen crystal taking the first available slots.

Improve the Affinity of all your Characters

Improving everyone's affinity with each other (not just the pair used for crafting) will greatly increase the options of gem crafting available to you.

How to Raise Affinity | Affinity Farming Guide

High Affinity Triggers Party Support

Party Support enhances the effect of a single round. Moral support always comes in handy!

Gem Crafting Best Pairs

Note: Possible spoilers about characters ahead! Proceed with caution if you have not completed Chapter 9: Prison Island yet.

Strong Flames Partners

Shooter	Engineer
Shulk	Reyn

Reyn can enhance the effect of strong flames. Unfortunately, no other character is extremely great at using strong flames aside from him. Partnering him with Shulk, who can get into a fever, can make some groundbreaking success when crafting single quality gems!

Shooter	Engineer
Dunban	Reyn

Dunban's ability allows him to enhance qualities further when a flame's temperature remains constant. Partnering him with Reyn who uses Strong flames constantly makes this pair a beast when crafting single quality gems!

Shooter	Engineer
Riki	Reyn

Riki's multiple gem crafting ability during a single round works well with literally everyone that is great with a single type of flame. Reyn is no exception, and partnering Riki with Reyn allows you to craft and heat the strongest gems available.

Medium Flames Partners

Shooter	Engineer
Riki	Fiora

Riki's ability to use a single round multiple times partnered by Fiora's terrible affinity to strong and Gentle Flames means multiple uses of Medium Flames for Riki. This is the best duo for crafting multiple qualities!

Shooter	Engineer
Melia	Fiora

Melia can enhance qualities when flames used are Medium Flames. Together with Fiora's natural affinity to Medium flames, they'll make a great team!

Shooter	Engineer
Dunban	Fiora

The Brother and Sister duo is great for crafting using Medium flames as well. Fiora maintaining a Medium Flame allows Dunban to use his Shooter ability.

Gentle Flames Partners

Shooter	Engineer
Shulk	Riki

The best duo for gentle flame crafting. Occasional fevers can often hump that cylinder gauge higher. But most of the time, Just having Riki as your engineer is the best way to maintain a gentle flame.

Shooter	Engineer
Sharla	Riki

Another viable option for Gentle Flames partner. This partner can consistently craft cylinders for your team. If you want a safer cylinder crafting, then these duo are the best option.

Best Gems to Craft

The following guide lists the gems that we ranked as the best! If you are unsure of which gems to equip, start there!
Best Gem Tier List

Attribute Gems

Attribute Gems such as Muscle Gems, Strength Gems, Ether Gems, and Agility Gems directly increases your character's performance. Beware though as gems have limits to the number of attributes they can give so don't craft too many!

List of Attribute Gems

Spike Defense Gems

Later on in the game, you will encounter pesky enemies with spike abilities. The nastiest spike ability is Counter Spike, which deals its spike property to your characters when you attack them. This gets even nastier if the enemy's spike ability deals damage so unleashing your barrage against enemies like this will spell your defeat. Spike defense gems give you an immunity (if maxed out) against enemies like this.

Night Vision Gems

A seemingly useless gem at first glance. You will slowly notice that aside from agility, there are no other ways to increase your character's accuracy. That's where Night Vision gems come in. These gems allow you to easily hit enemies whose levels are way beyond you (extremely useful for end game bosses). The downside is they only work during the night so make sure to fight them during this time.

Critical Up Gems

These gems are so broken for offensive characters like Shulk and Dunban. This gem allows them to deal astronomical damage to enemies.

Topple Plus Gems

Topple locking is great and Topple Plus (not to be confused with Topple Up) gems make it even greater. There's nothing much we can say for these gems except craft them! (unless you use a non-topple lock party). If you wish to know more about what topple locking is, see our guide about it!

How to Topple | Topple Lock Guide

Haste Gems and Double Attack Gems

Auto attacking allows you to use talent arts, which are extremely devastating when used right. Haste Gems allow characters to use their Talent Arts more often by being able to attack faster. Double it with Double Attack gems and they cause double the trouble!

Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition Guides

Back to the List of Gems

By Equipment Type

Gem Equipment Types
Weapon	Armour	All

By Gem Category

Gem Categories
Attack	Attribute	Defence
Field	Special	Support

By Color

Gem Colors
Red	Blue	Yellow
Light Blue	Green	Orange

Other Gem Articles

Gem Guides
Gem Tier List	Gem Crafting Guide