Table of Contents

Synthesis

Time is precious so save it every way you can. If a recipe takes 0.2 days to do, then do 5 at once, it’s the same amount of time but you will use those extras later. Partial days are thrown away and rounded up to 1.

Synthesizing takes MP, when you run out it says you have a 50% chance of failure. In my experience this is more like 90%. You can save scum if you want but you will scream and break your controller doing it. Rest on the couch to refill MP, just do it only when needed. When assignment 5 rolls around, items from the Cafe can be purchased to refill MP without wasting time.

The synthesis system is very restrictive with a few key types. Getting anything on a (Liquid) is a pain in the ass, and if you have something on a Supplement, you can never get it back on a supplement again until super-late-game. UNLESS. You burn, baby, burn. Create a bunch of Pure Oil using Supplements with Traits you want to combine, but make sure you’re out of MP. Save. Try until you fail. Yes, you want to fail. It will create a burned Broken Item, but the Traits can still transfer. That Broken Item can then be put into a Supplement. Abuse the hell out of this.

Quality is the simple average of ingredients. If you throw 5 things in, quality 50 50 50 50 100, then the resulting item will have (50+50+50+50+100)/5 = 300/5 = 60 quality. If you put a Quality Lv3 on it, which raises quality by 20%, then it will turn 60 to 72.

Cost is not explained well at all. Every Trait costs points to transfer, the stronger the Trait, the more points. You have to have Cost+ type Traits on your input items in order to gain points during the synthesis. However, and this is critical, only the largest Cost+ single item counts. So if you toss in 5 items with Cost+1 and one with Cost+2, then all of the Cost+1’s are a waste and don’t count, only the one with Cost+2 matters.

What this means is that you should make one super-cost item and toss that into any recipe that you need to do Trait transfer. Use the burn process above to cobble together a Maximize, Enhance, Cost+3, Cost+1 on a single Supplement. It might take a few cycles. Try to get it to Q120, and put quality traits on it as well. Registering a Q120 Maximize, Enhance, Cost+3, Professional, Quality Lv3 for duplication will help a ton. Then use that to make some Q120 Zettel, Wild Scent or Magic Paint, Komet, and register those. Pure Oil as well, but due to the low quality Cobaltberry, you won’t get it to Q120, maybe Q80 max.

Likewise, once you have a cost supplement above, make a ton of Pure Oil… and burn it. Reload until it fails. Make a huge pile of Broken Items with all the cost and quality traits on them. Then, you can make 5 Supplements using one of those, plus 4 of whatever else you find. This is the best, maybe only, way to suck good traits out of found materials. You’ll eventually have a library of hundreds of Supplements with Q120, cost and quality, and one or two key traits each.

While I go into more general details on my Atelier Meta guide, make sure to make copies of important Traits so you don’t accidentally waste them. Periodically open up the Container, filter by Traits, look at what Traits you have, and actively scrape through to save or combine new ones. And stack ones that don’t combine.

Also a friendly reminder to always check whether that special Trait you’re trying to transfer actually transfers to the thing you are making. Not every kind of item accepts all Traits. Even Synth items. Ingots can’t take Traits meant for armor or accessories, for example. The Interior type items like Decorative Basket are actually useful though, as they’re pretty permissive, and many count as (Jewel) or something else somewhat useful. Flying Carpet counts as (Cloth), for example.

Note that forging weapons and armor with Hagel does not use CP. So you can put extremely CP-expensive things on each of two ingots, with no Cost+ traits, and they will be 100% available at the end of the forging process. Also note that when Hagel asks “this what you want?” before you pay the money, if you had more than 5 Traits on there, he will only show 5 of them; the others aren’t lost, they just cannot be displayed; if they were on the ingots, they will be selectable in the final item.

Stocking Up

Buy rather than make, when possible. If an assignment asks for food, go buy food and submit it. It doesn’t have to be hand-made. Same goes for quests. Time is more precious than money.

Always buy every book you come across, as soon as you reasonably can buy it.

Don’t buy anything from Hagel other than Fisk and Phlogiston and books. It’s a waste of money. Unless maybe you need a single ingot for a quest and are overflowing in money.

Do stock up on supplies from everywhere though, you’ll go through it. It’s harder in the first couple assignments as you don’t have much money, but you’ll notice that some ingredients run out quickly. Don’t be afraid to stock up on them and keep 20 of each at all times. Don’t scout outside for materials that you can easily just buy, unless there’s a really specific reason to do so. Note that some materials sold are higher quality versions, like the sundries store’s Q80 Water. You can stock up if you want, but only if you specifically need it, as the well water is free.

Vendors restock three times a month, on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of every month. That includes their wholesaling. So if you need to dup something, make sure it’s done by the 10th, 20th, or 30th for registration, so that it fills out to 10 soon. And if you need to stock up on something, drop by before a refill to buy them out, and then right after they restock.

Once Cort shows up, don’t sleep past or synthesize past or be out running around past the 15th of every month. He drops by to sell stuff and if you’re not in your atelier and available, you miss out. As soon as he has Sunny Crystal, buy them all. Twice. This is needed for Pamela’s store.

When you get the Decorative Basket (and Spring Cup) on your shelf, check it every day for a free material. It adds up. Also sometimes they have interesting Traits on them.

Vouchers

The extra optional things are to get stamps and vouchers. Do at least enough to get all the stamps; prioritize books, then Hom synth and gather lvl, then HP and MP, then everything else. Do all of them if it’s not too hard, as vouchers can be turned in for a few high quality items. You have to turn them in to get the reward – merely seeing the notification that you finished the quest is not enough.

Do periodically use vouchers, don’t hoard them forever. You can get high quality phlogiston and other stuff that is what you end up needing to make some of the high quality items needed for some optional quests. Don’t be wasteful, but don’t hoard them either, strike a balance.

When you can get Rune Stones and Gnardi Rings, get 3 of each and cycle them onto your active battle characters. This is sufficient to not have to make armor or weapons for 50% of the game.

When you get Bunny Tails available, get 2. Keep one for a quest later, arm the other on any character and never take it off for the whole game. They don’t stack, two won’t help, just any one character.

When Flour Q80 with Cost+1 and Quality Lv1 comes up, get a ton of it. Maybe 40 of them, yes really. They’re necessary for making Q80+ pies and useful in general. Save about 20 of them for pie-making unless you plan to skip that questline.

When the super expensive extra costume voucher items come up, make sure to cheat. Save your game. Buy the costume set for 100+ vouchers. Reload. You get to keep the costumes, because they’re in the system save, not the individual save. 🙂

Quests

Only take quests you know you can do on time. Do as many quests as possible. Literally check inbetween every synthesis for easy quests to jump on, especially ones you can easily just run and buy the item for and come back. And always grab every friendship quest if it’s doable (you’ll find some items are hard to make or use really rare ingredients – you will have to skip a few here and there).

Speaking of which, as soon as you get Lionne, add her as a party member and take her out foraging for a while and do every friendship quest you can for her until she’s friendship 10, otherwise she’ll leave permanently at some point; at 10 you’re safe.

That being said, you can cycle quests by accepting and then giving up. You’ll take a hit on popularity for this, but usually not too much. Don’t quit friend quests, or you will reduce friendship. However, periodically flushing out quests to get more friend quests in can be very helpful.

Once wholesaling is unlocked, register some high-quality items that come up frequently, so you can just buy them and use them for the quests. Prioritize friend request ones. And of those, prioritize Gio (until Friendship 60), Colt (until 10), and Pamela (until you unlock her store and warehousing there).

Rank matters for friendship quests. S > A > B > C > D. Try to make S-rank things that you intend to give to friends for quests. Non-friend quests don’t matter – occasionally you can make a little more money by turning in a high quality item for other quests, but it’s not a big factor. If you’re duplicating items for quests, the perfect item is one that’s S-rank but also has all the maxed out Price Down type traits, to make it as cheap as possible to buy.

Side note on wholesaling: each vendor has a group of stuff they can duplicate. Sundries: (Sundry) and (Medicine). Hagel: (Bomb) and (Jewel). Iksel: (Food), (Cooking), (Dessert), (Pie), and (Spice). Pamela: (Magic Tool). Nobody, and I mean nobody, can dup (Ingot) or (Cloth), nor some oddball ones that don’t fit the above like, ahem, damn Tar Liquid. 😛

Cory’s special high-value quests that cost you popularity but are necessary for her plotline are completely random and you do not have to do every single one. Depending on the chapter, your friendship with her, and your town popularity, this will determine which item she’ll put up on the quest board for you, and that might mean her “skipping” a few – this isn’t a problem. Just keep doing them as they come up and increasing her friendship. For many people, she’ll be way behind in giving these quests until assignments 11-12, and then she’ll suddenly give several Montblanc requests in a row.

In order to get more Pie recipes, you need to make one of every existing Pie with quality 80 or more. Many of these require high quality raw ingredients, so you have to have Hom gathering for quality, or use high quality seeds, or use high-effect tonics and collect those ingredients yourself. The pies actually get easier later on, as the ingredients are themselves synthesizable, rather than being 100% natural ingredients.

Outside

Before you go outside the town, check that you have any healing items or bombs in your basket but nothing else. It’s very time-expensive to do outings, but it’s necessary. And your basket is tiny, so keep it as empty as possible before heading out, as it will fill quickly. Speaking of which, puniballs and uni are trash – scrap most of them first when you run out of room unless they are high quality or have a trait you want. If you have a decent amount of meat and fur, low quality ones of those become trash next.

When Cort gets to friendship 10, go out in the field, fill your basket completely, and come back. He’ll give you a basket size increase.

The Spring Cup item will allow instant teleportation of items between Basket and Container even out in the field, essentially giving an infinite size Basket.

When you get the Traveler’s Shoes recipe and the one World Soul item from a stamp… try to make the absolutely best shoes you can, as you’re never going to get another World Soul until Overtime after the main game ends. Do not waste it on anything else.

Many gathering areas have multiple exits. In order to open a new exit, you have to go back to the place that has another exit, which yes takes time, and exit from a new direction. I.e. if area A leads to B and C, and A takes 2 days, you have to go to A, exit to B, go back to A (yes it takes 2 more days), and then exit to C. You can’t (unfortunately) open all exits at once.

Every single gathering area, always always gather every single item, and fight every monster that you can safely fight. Doing nothing and exiting an area takes the same number of days as doing everything, so don’t squander the time.

Take Iksel to each new location and forage around until you get a scene with him introducing a new ingredient. Some things don’t spawn until you find them once with him, and then they spawn normally whether he’s with you or not. He’s a good one to take for a while anyways, since he has a heal skill.

Throw Uni at enemies (use them as an item) for extra damage early on. They’re worthless otherwise but you can do double your normal damage in the first hours of the game this way.

Try to keep a stock of Tonic with decent effects on it, and use it in every collecting map. Also, once you get a Bunny Tail, keep it on one person for the whole game.

You need Bombs to blow up most boulders, Ice Bombs to freeze water to cross, Balbombs to break the more powerful boulders, Tera Bombs for the strongest boulders, and eventually Air Drops for underwater areas. You’ll need to beat the boss of the underwater area to get the recipe for Windrider, but you really want those.

Battle Items

Making your own weapons and armor with decent traits will always be orders of magnitude better than anything you buy, and more important than leveling at some point. However, there’s only so much you can do early on, until about assignment 5. You can make one piece of junk for an optional stamp, and go ahead and put what you can on it, but farming for decent traits won’t start until assignment 5.

At a minimum, if you can make a decent weapon for Rorona with HP absorb of some sort, and/or armor with HP regen, you’ll thank yourself. This, combined with the Rune Stones and Gnardi Rings from Esty’s voucher shop will get you through most of the game. And if you’re not trying to get every ending or something, and are willing to dodge or run away from things from about Chapter 9 onwards, you can literally complete the whole game with a True Ending without making anything else more complex.

Be on the lookout for Cost+1/2/3/ and Quality Lv1/2/3 first and foremost… then Stats+2/4/6 and HP+10/20/30 for your armor and accessories and Convert Lv1/2/3 (which becomes HP Absorb) for your weapon… then Forceful Lv1/2/3, Critical Lv1/2/3, Heal Lv1/2/3 for bomb and heal items… then Rank Bonus, Swarm Slayer, Loner Slayer, and Restrain Range when you have everything else you need. Somewhere along the line also collect the Attack/Defend/Speed ones and the Skill% and MP Cost% ones, depending on how you plan to build. I ignored the MP Cost% traits and just added Clever Heal to my auto-use (Pepped Up trait) Elixirs, so I keep getting all my MP back constantly, and was able to focus on putting more stat traits on things instead, but YMMV.

First and foremost, stack as many Stats+ on everything you can make, and some kind of HP Absorb on your weapons. These are more critical than bombs and healing items early on, as attacking normally is free, but replenishing consumables is annoyingly expensive in this game.

Tera Bomb will murder your own party unless you have strong Restrain Range traits on it. What a mean screw-you beginner trap to design into the game.

Hom

When you get Hom, have her always doing something at all times, everything she does is free, so it’s a waste to have her idle. One way to do this is to take quests for stuff she can make, and then assign her to it, and then go about doing something else while she does the quest item for you. If there’s nothing else to do, send her gathering for whatever the rarest ingredient is that you need.

Once Hom can create Tar Liquid, have her create a bunch, it’s a royal pain to make the hard way because they made the critical ingredient, Tar Fruit, an extremely rare find in the Dark Forest, and also made it impossible for Hom to collect for you… and made Tar Liquid impossible to duplicate. Grr.

If nothing else, send Hom out to the highest level area to gather, with focus on Traits, and you can flesh out your collection of Traits much earlier than normal. You can save-scum on her collection days to get Traits you want, though this is a bit overkill most of the time.

Seeds

These are terribly explained and terribly implemented. When you get seeds, use one for the assignment but do not waste the rest. Seeds are an incredibly rare resource, you can never buy them, and you’ll only get more randomly at the extremely rare “?” collection points or from mid- or super-bosses. You may never get any seeds than your first ones, ever. As soon as you get a new type of seed, register them and buy a few to make sure you do not lose them.

Here’s how they work: use a seed to craft itself (yes this is how it works), but bump up the effect. What’s the point of the effect on a seed? It determines what Traits come up on the things that grow from them. Usually you want the higher effect, but some seeds are useful with the low and high effect.

Example: plant an Ingredient Seed with Saccharine effect, you will get items with Clever Heal on them (which you cannot get otherwise except maybe in Overtime). Likewise if you get a Medicine Seed, the Panacea effect will get you Cure-All, and a Mystery Seed’s Mysterious Power will get you Cure-All as well. Those are the most important ones you might care about.

The quality of the Seed is the quality of the items that grow. Want Q120 berries? Plant a Q120 seed. Powerful.

Also, when you plant them, you can get seeds back by not harvesting them all. That is, if a seed grows 10 items, and you harvest 8 and do not checkmark the other 2, then those two become clones of the original seeds. So if you’re careful, you can keep a running stock of them, even without duplication.

Soil level seems to only affect how many items you get per seed.

Miscellaneous

Early game, if you run out of money, scoop 60 water out of the well next to the atelier and go sell it for 60g. It’s tedious but helpful. Also always have a good stock of water, it’s super useful, even if the water there is only quality 40.

Each assignment has 2-3 rows of red stars and one big row of white/gold stars. The gold ones are the ones that count, and if you get 8 in each assignment, you can get the best ending. The way you get gold stars is by getting red stars, and the way you get red stars is by submitting things with certain properties. So if there’s a red star row for item count and a row for item quality and you submit one item and you get 1/5 of an item count red star and 2/5 of an item quality red star, then those add up to 3/5 of a gold star. Get this to at least 8 every assignment, 10 if it’s easy to do and not a big time waste. As soon as you get 3 gold stars, you get the stamp in the middle.

When you bring up the teleport menu for traveling around town, if there’s a figure next to an area, there’s an event there. Always go see every event.

Screw Astrid. Not literally, she’d like that. She’s such a bully.

Also fuck Tar Fruit. But mostly Astrid.