Please increase crystal sand amounts

[Mayoyama]

Before I begin, I really want to say how much I appreciate the halving of costs for umbrites. It makes it that much easier for people, such as myself who have less time to play, to finish that stage of the relic.

Having said that, I now find myself struggling to acquire a decent supply of crystal sands, and my umbrites are stacking up faster than I can acquire sands ):

I am, to be honest, rather shocked that they didn't ease the requirements of the crystal sands (perhaps by doubling the amount given when trading items in, or adding crystal sand to an existing repeatable quest?)

Could we please have the number of crystal sand obtained increased also, to be in line with the changes made to the umbrites?

Please and thank you!

[Rongway]

You're probably just not using the most time effective method of obtaining sands. I have on many occasions helped friends obtain 50-60 crystal sands in as little as two hours with minimal effort (i.e., a lot of standing in one spot and not even moving).

Crystal sands have never been a major limiting factor in relic completion time. The umbrite change was expected because there was literally no other way to get umbrites than to buy them with lore. Crystal sands have many sources, one of which is absurdly easy and abundant.

[seekified]

The sands were by far the easiest part of the quest for me - I had 75 sands by the time I bought my 40th umbrite. I just did vilekin farming and blue crafter/gatherer scrip trading. The GC squad helped a lot with the latter since I get 200-2000 scrips daily from their chemistries.

Still, I was also a bit surprised they nerfed one and not the other.

[Bacent]

Try cheesing the levequests. Get one levequest. Start it up. Fly around and look for a chest. No chest? Fail the levequest by giving up on it. Keep doing this until you find a chest. Each chest has 1 amberkin. One amberkin = one sand. When you get the chest, fail/cancel the levequest. Keep doing this until you no longer have levequest allowances.

Alternatively if you have money to spare, buy rank IV elemental materia and trade those in


And if you can bother to desynth?


dSkill 42-65: Tortoiseshell Armillae (r49) [36% - 79%] (1-2x BC1)

That's from GSM, it needs 3 adamantoise shells, and 6 wind and 6 fire shards

dSkill 55-80: Aetheryte Ring (r55) [50% - 92.5%] (1-2x FC2) (only if you can make them for under 3k)

GSM, needs 1 rose gold nugget and 1 water cluster, when you desynth you'll only get a field craft II/Clear Demi II/rose gold nugget(I actually got about 47 from this, 9 field IIs from the end result)


LTW dSkill 60-80: Militia Choker (r55) [60% - 92.5%] (BC2)

LTW dSkill 53-60: Raptorskin Ring (r48) [60% - 73%] (FC1)

Both are really easy to make
After an hour or so I had enough mats to in total get about 30+ of each demimateria

[Atlaworks]

Snip

Dude this post is super helpful, thank you.

[Bacent]

Those numbers are from the Desynth guide that's on the forums, so thank them for that~

[magnanimousCynic]

Those numbers are from the Desynth guide that's on the forums, so thank them for that~

Brass Ring and Brass Ring of Crafting are VASTLY faster sources of BC1 and FC1 Demimateria. They're also from the main city vendors so they're much faster (and probably cheaper) to desynth.

[Xlantaa]

I think sands are not much problem. I have like 170 sands and only 50 umbrites with my current Anima :S. Sands are really quick to obtain due to the big number of sources available. I must says that Vilekind and Scripts are probably the fast ways to obtain. With blue scrips which have no weekly limit is pretty quick.

[Nixxe]

You can probably get like 4,000 scrips in a single gathering Diadem if you know where to go. I routinely get 2,500-3,000 in a group of three, which means we spend a lot more time farming the primary objective and less time doing unspoiled nodes. Granted, this requires level 60 botany and mining to take advantage of each unspoiled node. 4,000 scrips = 80 tokens = 16 sands.

[HyoMinPark]

Like others have said, the sands aren't really that concerning if you know fast/effective ways of obtaining them. I use a mixture of leve farming and gathering blue scrips for my sands.

I just wish there were more ways to get the umbrite. I'd like to be able to buy them with poetics as well. :x I have all the sands needed to finish my AST relic (it's the fourth one I'm doing), but I can't allocate the points because I gotta grind out lore for the umbrites. I am thankful for the reduction in cost, but I still would like to see SE allow us to buy them with, at the very least, poetics. And maybe GC seals.

EDIT: if you aren't so much into gathering, you can still do diadem to get the lockboxes. They can contain elemental tier IV materia, battlecraft and fieldcraft demimateria, moonstones, and vilekin. You can also get the crafted items (High Allagan Chimera Leather, Celestine, Garlean Steel) from them as well. All those items can be used for sands, too.