Within an hour or so of starting up your journey, Cloud will receive a👍n important new piece of equipment in the form of the Item Transmuter. At its core, the Item Transmuter is simply a stand-in for this RPG's crafting system, but there's more here than meets the eye.

Between increasing your crafting levels, knowing where to find recipe ingredients, and getting down the basics on what you ought to craft (and when), the Item Transmuter can be a bit daunting in the early hours. We've dabbled with it as ex🦩tensively as the game allows, so heed our a♋dvice!

What Is The Item Transmuter In Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth?

Cloud obtains the Item Transmuter, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's answer to a crafting system, from Kalm Inn's owner, Broden. You'll meet Broden at the start of Chapter 2, which is to say, quite early on.

Broden's more than meets the eye - but importantly, he also thinks Cloud will get more mileage out of the Item Transmuter than he will. And he's not mistaken. You'll use the Item Transmuter hundreds of times throughout FF7 Rebirth, crafting several dozen items.

Craftsmanship Ranks

These items are acquired through two main means. The first, and most common, is when they automatically appear in the menu itself. You'll see the next 'batch' of items every time you raise the level of your Craftsmanship stat.

Technically, the newcomers to the Item Transmuter's list reflect the next Craftsmanship rank, rather than the current one. This gives you a nice little sneak preview of🧜 what's to come.

Transmuter Chips

The second way, which involves the more special additions, is via Excavation Intel. When an Excavation Intel quest appears in your World Intel screen, you'll hop on your chocobo and dig for new Transmuter Chips.

These chips will add new tiers of upgrade recipes for your armor and accessories, so they're among the most sought-after component꧙s.

You will often locate a key quest item for a current or upcoming side quest as well, such as the Windmill Gear in the Grasslands region.

Crafting Categories

We've gone over the two overarching varieties of Item Transmuter recipes, but there are several categories within each. Getting a feel for these will help your understanding of the process, especially since not every category will be visible to you from the start.

Items

These are the most straightforward, and also the most numerous. Items will always increase in quantity in correlation to Craftsmanship rank, and they consist of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's exhaustive number of consumables.

Examples include the subgroups of Potions, Ethers, Debuff Cures, and the Cushions required to heal your party at Chocobo Stops and other benches.

Armor

Crafting armor is a great way to save cash at Rebirth's weapons and armor shops. It also allows you to craft higher-tier armor than you'll currently find at these sho﷽ps - at least, it does more often than otherwise.

You will probably see quite a few pieces of armor you cannot yet craft, which will change over the course of the game. Even as this changes, you'll keep seeing more that can't yet be crafted, as is common among the crafting categories.

This also applies to every category, but note that you'll also see the necessary ingredients, including those you can't acquire until you unlock a new regionꦍ. A string of question marks will pop up fo⛄r these.

Armor Upgrades

Here's where those Transmuter Chips come into play. But some Armor Upgrades, particularly the earliest ones, will likely display before you locate and dig up the requisite chip.

Always keep an eye on this category, because an Enhanced Elphadunk Bangle is superior to an Elphadunk Bangle; an Enhanced Wisefox Armlet is superior to a Wisefox Armlet;🏅 so on and so forth.

These improvements typically involve boosting the basic stat perks for ar🎃mor, so there's no reason not to invest in them. You'll need a copy of the base item as well as the separate ingredients.

Accessories

Similar to armor, most accessories can be obtained through shops, but are preferably crafted. Some are unique to crafting, while a few more can only be found through overworld, dungeon, and hub treasure chests, 🤡making additional copies all the more beneficial.

A good example of this is Psychic's Charm, which not increases max MP and Magic Power by five percent; it also grants immunity to Silence. A pretty good fit for Aerith and anyone e꧂lse whose Materia sloꦿts you're filling up with magic.

Accessory Upgrades

Finding those Transmuter Chips also nets you access to accessory upgrades. Like the armor upgrades, these confer advanced versions of the stats and immunities found in the base models.

Hi-Power and Supernatural Wristguards, for instance, don't just raise the Strength Stat by a set amount. The former increases HP by 250, while the latter gives a big boost to the Strength stat uptick.

Key Items

Key Items include the side quest items needed to complete certain quests. We mentioned it earlier, but the Windmill Gear fixes the broken windmills in the Grasslands. Th🌜ere's something not-quite-working in each re🐠gion, and amending that gets you great rewards.

Amusingly, if somewhat unintuitively, even if you have key items like the Windmill when initiating their side quests, you will still need to go through the motions in the dialogue as though you haven't yet constructed it.

This might go without saying, but just chat with the NPC again after agreeing to craft the key item, at which point the game will register that it's already in your possessioꦚn.