Crystals and Fuel

So simply walking around Eorzea, we see plenty of fires fueled by wood, and lamps lit by oil. Some things may be powered by electricity, but I'm not sure how people would generate electricity without using living battery mages, so that's one of my questions. Ceruleum is also used to power airships and regular ships, and the trains we have are fuelled by steam engines fed with coal?

My main question is, how are the elemental crystals used as fuel in Eorzea? Is there any particular reason why traditional fuels such as oil, wood, and coal seem far more common than crystals? Do the beast tribes use those crystals exclusively for summoning, or do they also have more mundane utilities for them? How recent is the use of crystals as a fuel source?

Going to hop all over the place here, and I would say in advance maaaybe don't take it as gospel. The trouble is that crystals are made of aether. [Neil DeGrasse Tyson cadence, slow hand motion] aether is the foundation of everything in our cosmos [grumpy Lalafellin cadence, shaking fist] also known as phlebotinum. The number one use aether and crystals have as a fuel is plot fuel.

Unfortunately, this means that some of the information can feel contradictory in its vaguery. Thankfully, most of it is in terms of spiritual aether / corporeal aether / soul / anima / the Lifestream / the aetheral rivers, and so on. Crystals are clearer...ish.

When we use crystals for something like synthesis, it doesn't seem to be the aetherial content of the crystal that matters per se (aside from its density), but the class and strength of the elemental aspect trapped within it as it solidified. A neutral crystal seems to only have value if you only need aether (as a catalyst). If that aether has been imbalanced, it holds a "charge" of the element(s) it has been imbalanced towards.

Imagine a hexagon oriented with a point facing upwards, and that a spring bridges each of the hexagon's points to its center. As you stretch out a spring, it imbalances the aether towards that element, trapping that energy within. When you dissolve the crystal and allow the aether to return to the land, the spring releases its energy and you can harness it for that brief window.

Not to over-complicate the metaphor, but there's also a dimensionality to it; the springs can be "tilted up" (astral) or "tilted down" (umbral), which can affect the behavior of the elemental energies. Astrally-tilted elements tend to be more sharp and energetic while umbral-tilted elements tend to be more deep and passive.

However, if the crystal is pulled too far from neutral, it can "over-charge" and become unstable (aka over-aspected aka chaotic - the orange ones). These are essentially the aetherial equivalent of radioactive. Such crystals are powerful, but dangerous and difficult to harness properly. We've used them in the past in emergencies, using them to nullify Garuda's wind barrier with over-aspected ice and generate a barrier that nullified Leviathan's water with over-aspected lightning.

Ceruleum is aetherial...ish, as well, but it's more like "dirty" crude oil compared to the "clean" crystalized mist we're used to. It can be refined into a liquid and used by those who have no aetheromanipulative skill, hence why it's so powerful, so unstable, and pollutes the environment with noxious haze and gives rise to plasmoids (allegedly).

Compared to fuel like oil and wood, crystals would thus be more potent, but also likely more rare, more expensive, and more valuable. The value of a fire crystal to a smith might be equal to a pile of wood capable of providing your home more heat. And let's not forget that beast tribe hoarding and robbery has made crystals rarer, and their trade more tightly controlled.

It seems that there are many ways to convert energies and harness the energies; the Garleans are able to use ambient lightning-aspected aether as radio waves, and Allag was able to use Bahamut as a transistor of sorts to convert the energies of the sun into energies stored by the Crystal Tower. If his Calamity was anything to go by, the aetherial component was every element at once, "tilted up" to the volatile and energetic astral "wavelenths".

Seeing as crystals can be formed when even the planet Herself is wounded, and that crystals can become aspected naturally, and that it's so patently obvious when they are, I would imagine that they've been harnessed for tasks for a long, long time. Perhaps even as far back as the the First Astral Era or even Prehistory itself. Allag, of course, was able to crack the nature of aether as matter and assimilate its study into the basic sciences, forming aetherochemisty (aka magic-science aka magismologie). Notice the "Centrifugal Crystal Engine" in Azys LLa, where the nigh-infinite energies infused in the Warring Triad by their desperate summoners were siphoned off into synthetic crystal to be used in aetherochemical chimerobiology.

Mor Dhona actually has (or at least HAD, once upon a time) a strange property whereby crystals buried there tend to lose their elemental aspect but retain their aetherial luster. The Beast Tribes preferred using these crystals as aetherial catalysts for summoning, at first. They were considered "pure". Did they also use them for synthesis? Maybe. Probably. At least as long as they could justify not saving them up for their primal.

Crystals aren't used as a big power source because though we can find them in abundance, in-story they're rather scarce. The beast tribes hoard them for summoning, and there doesn't seem to be a steady supply of pure crystals elsewhere.

There's plenty of corrupted crystals around, but using those is... risky, to say the least.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

Crystals aren't used as a big power source because though we can find them in abundance, in-story they're rather scarce. The beast tribes hoard them for summoning, and there doesn't seem to be a steady supply of pure crystals elsewhere.

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In an example of questionable canonicity, Gilgamesh managed to buy enough crystals on the marketboard in Ul'dah to accidentally summon Enkidu.

I get the impression that crystals are scarce in the sense of gold being scarce (in the real world; I know in-game supply varies by server marketboard). The average person is not going to find them easily, in any great quantity. However, we have implied cases of crystals being at least abundant enough that shipping sizeable quantities of them is common enough to be unremarkable. They have enough uses that House Fortemps was able to ship them to Revenant's Toll as part of an aid package, and there were enough crystals in there for Iceheart's crew to hijack that shipment.

And then there's the mention of the Ashcrown Consortium trading goods for crystals from the Beast Tribes, which implies the Beast Tribes are willing to part with the crystals for goods in the first place. The challenge in this trade mentioned by the owner of Ashcrown is not that the crystals are expensive, since he mentions being able to turn an impressive profit, but that he's trading with beastmen at all.

So I think crystals (of the non-corrupted variety) are scarce enough that only organizations have the resources to obtain enough of them to do anything useful, but they're not so scarce that the average person will never have seen one at all in their lifetime.

I've often wondered just how difficult it is to get crystals out of the land, for people who aren't us. Obviously, we can just wade out into the wilderness with a pickaxe/hatchet/sledgehammer/scythe, activate our Mary Sue player powers, and gather enough crystals on our own to fuel all the summoning rituals, ever. But Amajina and Sons doesn't seem to include crystals as a major product of theirs, and the only substantial source of crystals we get in-game, seems to be either the beast tribes, or the Ascians (and even they probably get it from the beast tribes).

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Originally Posted by Mysterysword

and the only substantial source of crystals we get in-game, seems to be either the beast tribes, or the Ascians (and even they probably get it from the beast tribes).

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Raising the question: where the the beast tribes get their crystals in the first place?

I think the Moogles can certainly gather crystals themselves (when they can be arsed), but the only concrete example I can think of are non-elemental crystals (from the Kupa trees), so maybe they're limited to those. For everyone else, I have no idea.

And we don't even know if it's all Beast Tribes, or just the ones who summon Primals. Do Qiqirn have crystal stockpiles? Do Mamool Ja? Do Namazu? Do Lupin?