Trove

Warning, this is a grind.

New players tip: Your first class should be one that can quickly grind resources. The Neon Ninja, Dino Tamer, and Shadow Hunter are great classes for grinding dungeons. If you plan to play the game for a while your secondary class should either be a heavy hitter (Gunslinger/Ice Sage) or tank (Revenant/Candy Barbarian).

Edit: Following the U-10 update gem charms will no longer be required to prevent gems from cracking. U-10 will also introduce some more options for obtaining bound brilliance and empowered and standard gems.

First, the basics. Stellar gems drop in U-9 adventure worlds from U-9 gem boxes (the air, fire, and water worlds will drop their respective gem box type in addition to standard boxes), to enter a U-9 world you must be at least 10k power rank. Empowered gems drop from empowered gem boxes, which can be obtained through class power rank leaderboards, club adventurine merchant, and shadowy market (by using up lunar souls).

Each gem has three stats; for this achievement you must upgrade all stats on nine stellar gems to 100% and upgrade the gem to level 25. To upgrade a gem stat use must use any of the three builder's focuses on a gem at the gem forge. To craft builder's focuses use the adventure's crafting bench, the materials are located under the 'gems' tab. To level up gems you need gem dust (red for fire gems, blue for water, and yellow for air), and flux. Charms (jade clover, glittering horseshoe, lapis luckbug, or ninth life) are useful to cut down on dust and flux spending.

How fast you progress towards this achievement depends largely on how much bound brilliance (material required to craft any of the three focuses) you can get. Since you can only earn a certain amount of bound brilliance a week here are some tips to get max bound brilliance a week asap.

Get all classes to at least 5K power rank. You will earn up to 20 bound brilliance, and 12 empowered gem boxes a week from the class power rank leaderboards from this.

Craft the legendary tome 'Book of Bound Brilliance' at the adventure's crafting bench. This will net you 5 bound brilliance a week.

Make sure to log on during the holiday event periods and do the special event quests, you will normally be rewarded bound brilliance from this.

Pay attention to the leaderboards to see which ones you need to do to earn gem charms and empowered gem boxes.

Purchase the 'Jade Clover Journal' from the store. It is a legendary tome that will net you 100 jade clovers a week. Unfortunately it costs credits. So spend that doe or grind some flux to purchase credit pouches from the marketplace.

Additonal tips:

Grind out gem dust on Gem Day (Wednesday). Make sure to level up radiant and stellar gems to level 15 before deconstructing them. This will cost you flux but the dust received is worth it.

You will also be able to earn up to six lustrous gem boxes on Gem Day, which may drop any of the three focuses.

Only equip standard gems of at least 550 initial power rank, and empowered gems of at least 800 power rank. This will start the gems out with a higher stat % and cost you less focuses in the long run.

Not all of the gems have to be maxed on the same character. You can track your progress by viewing the in-game badge associated with the achievement. Thank you KiRrayne for the information.

This game is subject to updates and I am no longer an active player. Please leave comments below so I can keep this guide as helpful as possible.

I've finally taken the plunge into Trove and have learned enough to want to write a solution on this. There's some helpful tips that could easily streamline the process. A lot of players I've asked are old hats and apparently played during a time where gems could break. Dark-sounding timeline. So this will be more current. Longtime players of Trion Worlds' (former) games may remember when I wrote this for Defiance 2050's gem system, which is somewhat similar to this: Synergy Matrix Overview so I guess we're finally coming full circle.

Firstly, acquisition of useful gems can take a little while. At first, you'll just be using whatever you get that's highest. You should be closely following along the Gems tutorial as this will get you a substantial bit of catch-up. Access to U9 will quickly propel you to U10 under the right conditions. For your basic six gems (excluding Cosmic from this equation as Stellars aren't going to be available until U10, so those two will be on the struggle bus for awhile), focus on getting *any* Stellar gem and pushing it to or as close to 15 as possible (although, you want to save your gem upgrading for Wednesdays ideally, which is gem day). If it ends up being something useful, all the better. But it's not uncommon that your gem's stats might either be unsuitable for your class/playstyle, or the base stat upgrade percentages is just too low to justify keeping it over another (this can be checked at a Gem Forge). Although replacement that fine-tuned probably won't happen until you hit U10 and get Stellars much more commonly.

The other important thing is to ideally (it's not necessarily required but helpful) make sure it has 3 stats by default at level 1. A gem receives a stat and power rank boost upon reaching levels 5, 10, and 15 (which is why you need to level a gem to 15 to see if its power rank or stat range is "good" as per RNG the boost could go to a "bad" stat) and one of those will be wasted when it adds a third stat instead. I wouldn't worry about whether a gem has "good" power rank or good stat ranges for our purposes however (especially since that starts to get into some very rare drops), focus more on upgrading gems which are mostly or all aligned with your build and/or have base stat percentages that aren't too too low (otherwise you'll need many more focuses to level it up). Do keep in mind that there are twelve gem slots and only nine need to have the stats maxed to 100%, however. So a few duds are acceptable. Relevant to your class damage type, there's also Fierce and Arcane gems which cannot have Magic or Physical damage respectively.

Beyond those six, you'll also have a Wind, Fire, Cosmic and Air Empowered Slot. There's a few ways to fill these, but by far the easiest is your weekly Delves. At a Delve depth of 25 or deeper, you'll get a Shadowy Soul Vault every 3 layers. Getting your weekly Lunar Souls, Titan Shards, and Despoiled Divinity will require you to open six, and it's crucial to pretty much anyone to do this for a multitude of reasons. These will take keys, but you will have PLENTY of the materials to make the keys AND the crafting bench for them can be found in the room whenever you get one of these chests (also in the Shadow Tower and Shores of Everdark).

For our purposes, you're specifically looking for Lunar Souls - these can be used to craft Contained Chaos Sparks for rerolling stats (3 per, with 4 Binding Darkness and 2100 Eyes of Q'bthulhu, more on these later) but MOSTLY for buying Empowered Gem Boxes from the Shadow Tower's Shadowy Market. You'll get all four colors of Empowered Gems from these in either Radiant or Stellar quality. And by breaking down the ones that you don't need at the Loot Collector, you can get Empowered Gem fragments to craft Stellar Empowered Gem boxes at your Adventurer's Crafting Bench (which is where you'll get most of your auxiliary gem stuff) to guarantee a Stellar variant of any of the Empowered gems. You can't get more by upgrading them and then loot collecting like you can dust, so I wouldn't bother unless you need the dust. I'll explain the bit about dust later.

You can also get a Class Gem for one of your four Empowered Slots. I'm maining Gunslinger and was lucky enough to get a Crystal from the U8 Shores of the Everdark. Obviously unsuitable for the achievement but it went into my wind slot since my water and fire had adequate gems for me in them already. A Stellar would have worked too though. You may not want a Class Gem for your build depending on your class, this is just what I did. The Cosmic Empowered, you're likely to have the most difficulty filling with a Stellar gem. These are slightly different from the regular ones. There's four different ones, and you're fighting RNG to get a Stellar variant of the one you want. In order to use the one that I wanted, I previously had a Radiant which I put all the way up to 23. This can be done VERY easily as it costs much less flux and gem dust than leveling a Stellar. It had half the power rank of a 25 Stellar, but I was using it for the effect more than anything else. Cosmic Gems are also different in that they'll have Light (essentially armor piercing for higher grades of enemies; easily the most valuable stat) which you need some value of to reach the higher Uber levels at all. This is a good trick to help you get to U10 as well (if you have some regular Cosmic gems at Radiant quality).

Onto leveling, aka "what you do on Wednesdays". Wednesdays are Gem Day, and it's on this day that you want to farm dust and level gems. You'll get a few Lustrous Gem boxes from doing dungeons (although, not quickly) and these can contain Sparks for rerolling or Focuses for stat leveling, and there will actively be an increased bonus gem box drop chance as well as a reduction to the dust cost for leveling gems up. So on this day, you want to spend as much time as you're able farming out the color of dust that you need by blowing through the highest level dungeons you can reasonably clear. Besides getting Dust Sparks, which can be broken down into 30,000 dust at your Adventurer's Crafting Bench, you'll get a lot of Stellar gems at U10, where you're most likely to be farming dust. It's prudent to keep these for getting more dust as you acquire the flux to make proper use of them.

Essentially, you want to level a Stellar Gem to 15 before you Loot Collect it. This will net you a profit of 4-5k dust, depending how lucky you are. Crystals also should be leveled to 25 for a more severe profit, but you're unlikely to be getting many of those before this achievement as those are a U11 find. This is a bit of a drain on your Flux for a newer player, but if you need dust it's consequentially more worth it to farm something to sell for Flux than it would be to farm more gem boxes. Flux can also be farmed on any day but Wednesday, but gem boxes are most easily acquired in bulk on Wednesdays. Selling Paragon Pinatas is a pretty easy way for newer players to make Flux once you've hit Level 30 as these regularly sell for 50k Flux or more per, depending on the day.

The leveling itself is fairly simple. But the critical thing I had to learn is HOW to level your gems. There's three tiers of "boosts" that increase how much level up you get: Glittering Horseshoes, Lapis Luckbugs, and Ninth Lives. Ninth Lives are rare and expensive and honestly shouldn't be used on anything but level 25 and higher Crystal gems. If you really, really don't care, spend them to bring a Stellar from 24 to 25. As far as Horseshoes and Luckbugs, these should ONLY be spent to help you level gems after you hit Level 22. Before that, it's a much more expedient use of resources to not spend ANY boosters on a gem until your gem is at least 22. After that, clicks get noticeably smaller and the level up chance drops like a rock and you'll really want to be using boosts of some kind for your clicks.

As far as acquisition of those three items (and the fourth, Jade Clovers, now only used for crafting Glittering Horseshoes at everyone's favorite crafting bench) these can be found as a reward for some of the weekly Contest leaderboards. Bound Brilliance can also be acquired this way. The class-specific Effort leaderboards are pretty mission critical to getting a good amount of weekly Bound Brilliance, but other types of leaderboard will carry it too. Jade Clovers can also be acquired weekly from a Tome in the store, which does require Credits to purchase. Since you can use a tome forever though, it's not a bad purchase. But you may also not need that many more resources if you choose to push leaderboards every week instead. Pick your poison.

Besides their use in leveling, Flux and Dust are also used for crafting the middle tier of Focuses, Precise, the one you'll be using the most of, to upgrade gem's stats. Crafting the lowest or highest tier isn't really worth the resource cost for either. You'll get some Focuses weekly from your Lustrous Gem Boxes on Wednesdays, and you can also get 3 Superior Focuses from a weekly PVP reward purchase, as well as 3 Bound Brilliance from another (but prioritize the superior focuses). 5 can also be acquired weekly from the Bound Brilliance tome, easily crafted at the Adventurer's Crafting Bench. As mentioned before, they can also be found on weekly contest leaderboards.

Focuses and Chaos Sparks are both used at the Gem Forge for the final kind of upgrading, your stats themselves. Pushing the stats up to 100% is a much longer endeavor than getting them to 25. All 3 flavors of Focus give varying tiers of ups, but even the middle tier can give as low as a 1%. Needless to say it'll take a lot of focuses to get all the stats on nine gems to 100%. If you have a stat you don't like, that's what the Contained Chaos Sparks are for. You can use those to reroll a single stat to another stat. Fairly simple. They're expensive to craft so what you get from your weekly Lustrous is liable to be all you have. For that purpose and like... thirty others, I would HIGHLY recommend anyone trying to get this game done quickly to drop a bit of money on some Patron. Like any other game, the 'premium subscription' is very useful to have. Sadly you won't see the game giving much out. But at minimum, having it active is having it active - there's no tiers to pay to win your way up to like some games.

So, the gist: on Mondays, get your six Shadowy Soul Vaults from Delves and claim all your leaderboard rewards (this day is weekly reset when contests end). On Wednesday, do any gem level upgrading or gem box farming from the appropriate regions for the kind of dust you find yourself needing, at the highest difficulty you can reasonably clear. On any other days (besides, you know, anything else you need to do in the game) try and perform actions which lead to you getting Flux (farm XP from daily adventures for paragon levels to sell pinatas, gather resources valuable to endgame players, etc.) Stay in Bomber Royale queue wherever possible while doing other stuff on the game so that you can complete the daily Bomber Royale adventure at minimum (found in either hub at the Bomber Royale desk) - this will net you some guaranteed coins even if you aren't placing very high. Just try and stay hidden/alive as long as possible, kills are secondary for getting coins. Contained Chaos Sparks and any tier of Focuses can be freely used on any day without consequence, although you're most likely to have the largest concentration on Wednesdays.

And I think that's about it. Very clear to see that right now it's easier than it's ever been. Get gemming, friends.