Crystals and Fuel

[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.

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

[YianKutku]

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.

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.

[Mysterysword]

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).

[YianKutku]

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).

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?