Expert Crafting in FFXIV

This guide will focus on opening with Muscle Memorywhich allows you to quit early if a craft goes badly. The goal with this phase is to be 1-2 reliable skills away from finishing the craft with Basic Synthesis. Bad luck can ruin this so if at least one Rapid Synthesis occurs under Muscle Memory's buff you can still recover later.

Start your craft with Muscle Memory and apply Veneration unless a condition you can benefit from appears. You want to limit how many skills you use so that the Muscle Memory buff does not expire.

Condition	Advice
Centered, Sturdy or Normal	Just use Rapid Synthesis. Nice and simple.
Malleable	Check the calculations tab or use Final Appraisal to ensure you do not finish the craft early. After that use Rapid Synthesis.
Pliant and Primed	Use Manipulation or Immaculate Mend if possible unless Muscle Memory is close to wearing off. If so use Rapid Synthesis. It is better to use Manipulation on Pliant than it isPrimed.
Good	Rapid Synthesis or Intensive Synthesis if you need to. Otherwise Tricks of the Trade or Precise Touch.
Good Omen	Rapid Synthesis generally speaking, Good Omen simply allows you to prepare for a Otherwise Tricks of the Trade or Precise Touch.

Keep repeating until Veneration runs out. You can make up for any missing progress with Malleable conditions later in the craft.

Here is an example of the opener:

In this phase the aim is to get to 10 stacks of Inner Quiet as quickly and as efficiently as possible so that the majority of your CP can be used in the final phase.

If your durability is low, use Immaculate Mend then use that to regain missing durability. You can still use Manipulation under Pliant if it appears. Some people may not feel comfortable with less than 20 durability while others may be okay with 10, it is entirely up to preference and experience.

You may also want to use Heart and Soul now so that you can benefit on normal conditions during this phase.

Condition	Advice
Normal	Prudent Touch is going to be your main action but you may consider Manipulation or Immaculate Mend if you are low on durability or Innovation if you have a lot of IQ stacks. If you used Basic Synthesis you can use this step to combo into Refined Touch to gain an additional IQ stack. You can also use your free Tricks of the Trade or Precise Touch from Heart and Soul.
Centered, Malleable	If you still need progress, go for Rapid Synthesis. If not just treat it as a Normal condition.
Sturdy	You can use Basic Touch and combo into Standard Touch and Advanced Touch if you get very lucky. It is essentially a cheaper Prudent Touch. The other option is Prudent Touch so that you can slowly gain back durability over time.
Pliant	You want to use this for your big CP skills. Manipulation is the go to, Immaculate Mend if your durability is low so you gain more or Preparatory Touch if you have the durability to spare. Otherwise just treat it as a Normal condition.
Primed	Manipulation if you do not have any stacks remaining, Innovation is also a really good skill to use here.
Good	Precise Touch is generally the best option but if you have low CP or feel like you need more then you can use Tricks of the Trade.
Good Omen	Prudent Touch and just treat things as a normal skill if early in the craft especially if you plan on following up with a Tricks of the Trade, otherwise you could prepare buffs such as Innovation to gain more out of the Good next step. Late craft you may also want a Great Strides to then roll into Precise Touch or even Preparatory Touch for a large amount of quality.

Once you reach 10 stacks of Inner Quiet, you want to progress to the final phase.

Once you have 10 stacks of Inner Quiet you can move to the Finisher phase. This will involve you using all of your remaining CP to gain the majority of your quality and then apply buffs to finish the craft.

As a general rule keep 106CP and 25 durability to the side to end the craft. the full amounts you need may vary such as needing only 99CP if you can end the craft with a Basic Synthesis or needing 35 durability if it will take you two synthesis skills to end a craft.

In this stage, Good Omen is incredibly useful to allow you to plan ahead by buffing skills pre-emptively or even giving you extra touches under Innovation because you do not need to Observe into Advanced Touch combo you can use any touch and then Precise Touch.

To use up the remainder of your CP you want to apply Innovation if it is not already on and then either spam Trained Finesse if you have a lot of CP but not a lot of durability. Or you can combo two lots of Observe → Advanced Touch which is a really powerful combination and also allows you to fish for Good, Pliant and Sturdy procs such as in the below example.

Some examples of adjustments you may want to make are:

Once you are down to the CP you left to the side. You can end with something such as the example below which also uses Careful Observation and Crafter's Delineation to fish for a good proc. Another use for your delineation would be Quick Innovation if you lose your innovation stack. You could even try and plan around using this.

Another powerful finisher using Quick Innovation is if you have a Good Omen before using Great Strides. Quick Innovation does not eat your Good proc meaning it can be used for a big hit.

Great Strides > Good > Quick Innovation > Byregot's Blessing. Alternatively, this could be used earlier in the finisher stage using Preparatory Touch instead of Byregot's if you have plenty of spare CP.