I have tried not to think too much about crafting with recipes, and yet I need to if I'm going to be creating new ones. People get over a forge with a hammer and tongs and bang on metal and the result is a sword or a chestplate or whatever. That makes sense. Hit the metal, the metal deforms/reforms, and you've made something. Or, run a threaded needle through cloth and stuff's fastened together. Or put organic ingredients over heat and they turn into safely edible food.

But Eorzean recipe crafting is more simply putting all the necessary parts together and making it happen. Yes, we start with easier recipes and work up to more complex ones, but the guildmasters don't really teach the mechanics that we know in this world. Tsu'na is a master class tailor, but I don't know if she even knows how to thread a needle.

There's a couple ways to rationalize this. One is that This is the Way the Developers Made It, and therefore it's simply normal for Eorzea. It's how people know to do things there. It's not exactly causal, but it's consistent.

The other way is to think in terms of materia, which is crystallized experience you can extract from gear you've used long enough and apply to gear to boost its stats. So perhaps recipes are crystallizations of skill knowledge...that enough metal-banging and thread-pulling and ingredient-heating happened over long enough of a period that these knowledge bits can be encapsulated into mechanisms of creation.

That may be total fiction, but it's a fiction I can tell myself to make what I'm doing a reasonable thing to do. Because I can't deny that recipe-based crafting works, but if I don't have something in the back of my head that explains to me how or why it works I'm afraid of progressive cognitive dissonance that'll manifest itself as doubt. That it worked in Eorzea isn't enough since we're not in Eorzea any more. I need a reason for it to work here.

I'm thinking it may qualify as aetheric manipulation. In the same way that we're extracting crystallized aether when we harvest, we're re-shaping aether into new forms when we craft. Thus we're applying crystallized aether in the form of, say, fire shards to the other ingredients in the recipe -- which, after all, are also crystallized aether -- and getting a different crystallization of aether. And that every recipe requires shards as part of the process so as to have aether in a more raw state acting as solvent for the aether in the more material state.

I think this may help me sleep at night.

Then there's the part where locating the ingredients is typically the hardest part of the recipe-crafting process. No, Tsu'na does not love baking and neither do I, because back in Eorzea getting the ingredients for cooking was often a major pain in the ass. Go to a particular place and kill this critter, go to a different particular place and harvest that tree. If it was for an artisan story it meant getting "high quality" ingredients, which usually meant filling up your inventory with normal quality ones until you got what you needed.

I suppose this could be part of the process too, even if you're just buying them off the market board, since you're doing it with gil that you earned doing something else. It's about intent. The gathering of the ingredients, then the applying of the process to the ingredients, is a collective act of will. You want this thing to exist. You are willing to go through this effort to make the thing exist. If making something is in fact an act of will, does it really, from a cosmic perspective, matter what form your effort takes?

This gets back to Mage and paradigms and stuff. I am solidifying my Eorzea on Earth paradigm. It's a kind of magic and all that.

Though I note with some smugness that I in fact do know how to thread a needle.