Crafting: Practice Mode

[Nezerius]

That's exactly what happened. I didn't think I'd have any trouble making the item and then I panicked at the first increase. The game said I met the craftsmanship and control requirements for the item and I didn't need to try to HQ it so I thought it would be straight forward.

At the end of the day, I doubt the developers want their players to run into a soul crushing experience. That's why there are Calamity Salvagers and the like. Losing millions of Gil from your own ignorance really is not fun.

Just because the game says that you've reached the stat requirements, doesn't mean that you can just go in unprepared. (Checking the difficulty, optimizing your cross-class abilities for progress gain.)

I've been in a similar situation, crafting the EX version of the Ramuh lamp when it was relatively new. (Mats are around 8 mil) I went in unprepared and didn't have Piece by Piece cross class. Fortunately, I did have Reclaim, and risked the 10% chance of losing the mats, and retained them.
Did I learn my lesson the hard way? Definitely, I always double-checked everything when dealing with expensive crafts now.

At the end of the day, the developers aren't here to handhold you through everything in this game, and you do need to be able to prepare for things. I'm not saying every crafter has to go through an experience like this, but it doesn't hurt to do at least a bit of research before tackling an expensive craft.

[Nutz]

Yeah, if you're not used to making high end furniture the very high difficulty rating can be a bit of a shock, since I'd imagine most people expect it to be about the same as anything else around that level, except that there is no HQ version so you can concentrate only on progress, which would make most other recipes quite a joke. Of course, if you're prepared these aren't hard either, but lacking PbP especially will make things difficult.