A fancy new crafting/gathering game mode, Cosmic Exploration, is out in Final Fantasy 14 with some pretty enticing rewards, so the reasonable thing to do is… immediately look up macros to help you automate the process and ease the grind, right? Well, I have some bad and good news for you. The bad news is that each crafting job has dozens of items to craft, each with varying durability, quality, and progress requirements — which means there’s no “one macro” for everything, as there is for Ishgard Restoration. Rather, if you want to be able to macro everything, you’ll need tons of macros set up. The good news is that you don’t really have to keep all those macros on your hotbar. I’ll disclaim this by saying I’m not an expert crafter. I use macros and I know fundamentally what the crafting skills do, but I don’t have enough expertise yet to make my own optimal macros from scratch or anything like that. That said, my recommendation below may not be the best way to go, but it has worked fairly well for me. I’ll update this guide with better information if other strategies being to appear, though. (As of this writing, Cosmic Exploration has only been out for a day, so… y’know.) Below we explain how you can use macros to make FFXIV’s Cosmic Exploration easier, though it won’t heavily automate the process for you the way it would have in other crafting content. How do Cosmic Exploration crafts work in FFXIV? As mentioned above, Cosmic Exploration crafts all have varying levels of durability, required progress, and quality. You may need to craft scrambled eggs with 60 durability for one craft, but then you’ll need a solution that only has 20 durability for the next. Since these numbers fluctuate wildly, it’s impossible to make a macro that’ll work for everything. While you can definitely make a set of macros for each individual item (especially for the lower leveled crafts), even heavily melded crafters are going to have a tough time juggling the high level stuff, most of which requires at least two macros (30 lines) to make one craft. Your macro page will fill up pretty fast. On top of that, some of the Class-A missions have time limits, so your lengthy macro that takes 80 seconds to play out might not cut it. (For context, half my gear is pentamelded and the rest is still overmelded, and it takes anywhere from 30 to 32 lines of macros for me to complete the A-rank crafts with food and potions — and despite that, there are still a few crafts I haven’t hit gold on.) All of that said, it can be tough to make things work in Cosmic Exploration, but I have a kind of janky solution for you! How to make crafting macros for Cosmic Exploration in FFXIV Here’s what I did to both scratch my completionist itch, completing “Stellar Successes” (achievements), and minimize the number of macros I kept around: Find all your crafting stats on your character screen and plug them into Raphael, a website used to generate macros based on your stats and the item you desire. Open your “Stellar Missions” (the green button on the Cosmic Exploration UI) and select your mission. Input whatever recipe the mission says to craft into Raphael. Copy and paste the generated macro into the User Macros menu. (I pasted it over the same two macro slots because… my macro menu is pretty full already.) Use that macro to craft however many of the item you need to complete the mission. Turn in the mission. Repeat steps two through six to complete as many missions as you can with a gold rating and unlock as many higher-rank missions as you can. If your crafters aren’t maxed, you will hit a wall eventually. Once you’re done gold starring the lower-level stuff, you can wipe all those macros out, if you’ve been saving them. After you hit that wall (whether it’s from needing to grind out more levels or from just hitting the end), you’ll need to figure out which set of missions you can complete conveniently, taking your personal and differing factors into account. Do you want to deal with food/potions? How long does it take to complete one craft? Are you able to clear is consistently with a silver or gold rank? From there, use Raphael to make yourself a set of three to five macros for that tier of crafts. For example, if you’re max level, but you’re struggling to complete the Class-A missions, you can just opt to do the Class-B ones instead, ideally hitting gold for each one you complete. I have macros for the culinarian recipes “Stable Jelly Drink,” “Stable Ration,” and a few others and I just purposely make sure to select missions that I know I have macros set up for. Unfortunately, this specific strategy really only works efficiently on PC. While you can type out macros on PlayStation and Xbox, since you can’t paste them directly, it may be annoying to make new macros for each craft. That said, you can just literally use the skills that Raphael shows you in order, and then manually type up the few macros for the missions you plan on grinding. Also, don’t forget to enlist into Critical Missions as they pop up to get more loot and EXP. Ideally, you should just be crafting to pass the time and get EXP/loot between these events. Of course, you will ultimately need to figure out how to get the Class-A crafts done, if you want to make a coveted Cosmic Tool (the relic tool for Dawntrail). However, if you’re just looking to farm currency and EXP, crafting the easier stuff will get the job done. Looking for the short version? Plug your stats into Raphael and make macros to gold star everything, and then just keep a few for crafts that you can repeat.