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!
List of Contents
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
The Engineer is the one that adjusts the flames. The flames used during a crafting process depend on the Engineer.
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.
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.
| Strong Flame | Enhances a single quality greatly. |
|---|---|
| Medium Flame | Enhances all qualities by a small amount. |
| Gentle Flame | Increases the Cylinder Gauge. |
Crystals can be taken from Ether Deposits scattered around the world. Harvest these crystals and use them for crafting!
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.
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.
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!
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!
Below are some tips to increase the probability of getting a 200% or 300% quality when crafting.
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.
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
Party Support enhances the effect of a single round. Moral support always comes in handy!
Note: Possible spoilers about characters ahead! Proceed with caution if you have not completed Chapter 9: Prison Island yet.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
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 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!
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.
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.
These gems are so broken for offensive characters like Shulk and Dunban. This gem allows them to deal astronomical damage to enemies.
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
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!
| Gem Equipment Types | ||
|---|---|---|
| Weapon | Armour | All |
| Gem Categories | ||
|---|---|---|
| Attack | Attribute | Defence |
| Field | Special | Support |
| Gem Colors | ||
|---|---|---|
| Red | Blue | Yellow |
| Light Blue | Green | Orange |
| Gem Guides | |
|---|---|
| Gem Tier List | Gem Crafting Guide |
Riki shoots twice while the rest of characters shoot once, that's why he can shoot 20-30 times respect to the other characters who shoot 10-15 times with max affinity, that's why using any character for gem crafting but Riki is a waste of time unless you are looking for cylinders, in which case Sharla is the best with Riki as engineer. Riki/Reyn with blue affinity can do as well as Shulk/Reyn with pink affinity, so imagine how broken Riki is for gem crafting.
Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Gem Crafting Guide and Best Pair
Genshin Impact Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Pokemon TCG Pocket (PTCGP) Strategies & Guides Wiki
Honkai: Star Rail Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Call of Duty Black Ops 6 (BO6) Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Metaphor: ReFantazio Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Zenless Zone Zero Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet (SV) Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Palworld Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Pokemon Legends: Arceus Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
New Pokemon Snap Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
FF7 Remake Walkthrough & Guides Wiki
© 2010 - 2020 Nintendo / MONOLITHSOFT. Xenoblade Chronicles and Nintendo Switch are trademarks of Nintendo. © 2020 Nintendo.
The copyrights of videos of games used in our content and other intellectual property rights belong to the provider of the game.
The contents we provide on this site were created personally by members of the Game8 editorial department.
We refuse the right to reuse or repost content taken without our permission such as data or images to other sites.
![GFL 2 Review [Closed Beta] | It’s About Time](https://img.game8.co/4038975/c0175c6aba9a1b7f16711eb48fb88a82.png/thumb)
Yeah, I used that combo a lot in the beginning. I guess the game kind of promotes you do that... until you discover how broken Riki is for gem crafting... Holy cow. Riki/Reyn combo consistently surpass 450% and 2 out of 10 they go beyond 550% for me, it's nuts. They haven't failed a single time for me yet in breaking the 300% barrier.