The much awaited crafting is here, E2.News offers you a sneak peek from the test site before the official guide is released by Earth2 which may contain things in more detail.
New Jewel Types
If we go by the test site, we are set to witness new Jewel colors corresponding to other resources very soon. This is what we saw:
Crafting
Crafting seems to require knowledge of particular recipes, many of which are hidden and have to be discovered by users.
Recipes also require Jewel shards, which can be created by destroying Jewels.
We liked the ability to select Jewels in bulk, however we found no easy way to select a single Jewel - which can be done by splitting the grouped jewels in the 5 boxes above.
Discovering Recipes
Users can try to combine different Jewels to discover recipes but any failed attempts will destroy the Jewels and create more shards.
We ran a couple known recipes :-
Crafting a new Jewel type
We can create any Jewel type - a cracked Jewel which seems to be the least powerful Jewel type among Tier-1 Jewels, offering only a 0.3% boost versus a Common Jewel which we collect everyday and has a 0.5% boost rate. You can use 24 shards to conjure a 'Cracked Small Jewel' of any color.
Upgrading Jewels
You can upgrade this cracked Jewel to either a 'Clear Small Jewel' or a 'Luminous Small Jewel'. Upgradation require shards and similar amount of Essence.
Of course we are sure there are other hidden recipes. Also we did not have enough Jewels on our test site account to try more variations but we encourage other users to try if they want to. It will be interesting to see what is the recipe to craft a Tier-2 Jewel. If you discover something new please feel free to give a shoutout on our Twitter (@E2News).
What's Next?
With Jewel crafting coming the floor prices of 'Common Jewels' may inch up as demand for Jewels is expected to increase. The improved Jewels offer a higher boost to the resource production and thus we expect that users will slot improved Jewels. However its unclear what this means for the broader ecosim and whether consuming Essence makes up for the higher resource boost or not - we'll only know once Earth2 releases more information about resources and why should users choose to craft improved Jewels burning Essence in process. In any case, crafting has brought us an additional use case for Essence which adds to its utility.