Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout

• Item quality affects damage/healing/other. Get quality as high as possible.

• The secret to getting quality as high as possible is to stack quality / quality + / quality++ traits and find a synthesis loop. I don’t recall the loops for the first game, but there should be a way to e.g. turn neutraliser into water, and use the water to make neutraliser. By going through this loop you should be able to stack Quality-increasing traits all the way to 999 if needed (or other traits).

• Eventually you’ll be able to make seeds. Materials spawned from seeds have quality of up to 100% the quality of the seed, e.g. you can get 999 quality materials from growing them yourself and making max quality a lot easier to reach.

• The series' older system of merging traits has been abandoned in favour of trait levels, e.g. you no longer combine quality and quality + into well made, but you stack quality+ until the number goes high enough.

• Every time you recipe morph, the number of items you can add to the cauldron resets. You can abuse this e.g. by making your weapon from the basic recipe and morphing multiple times. The + Gear Atk effect from each ingot stacks across morphs, and you can add many more ingots than you would by making the item directly.

• Speaking of recipe morph, a lot of amazing synthesis helpers with high element values, or even values that spread to neighbouring nodes, are discovered through recipe morph. Things like Melting Oil, Amberlite, or later-game synthesis intermediaries like the Spirit Bottle are hidden in there - get them.

• You can charge your gathering tools (hold the button) to get all resources from nodes that can take more than one hit (some trees and crystals) at once.

• Item duplication comes quite late in this game, abuse Item Rework until then. You can rework items up to your alchemy level, so the more you synth, the more you can update your gear by dropping more materials in. Or replace traits with bigger ones.

• You can hit select with your cursor over a node or a material to quickly open a reference menu. There, you can see e.g. where to gather materials you lack, or to check whether the trait you’re looking at can actually be used on weapons / armour / healing items.