Pure Quartz
Material · MaterialOre0★Common across snowy fields and similar terrain, and Circuit Board cannot be made without it.
Pure Quartz feeds 8 different recipes, which is why it is worth farming past the point you think you need it.
Details
It stacks up to 9,999.
Where to Find Pure Quartz
Pure Quartz comes out of the ground: there are 607 pure quartz nodes on the Palpagos Islands, and each one grows back a while after you break it, so a good cluster is worth remembering.
1 Pal drops Pure Quartz when defeated or captured, which is usually the faster route if you are already out hunting — the drop list below is sorted by how reliably each one gives it up.
Sending a team on the Astral Frost Cavern and PAL Genetic Research Laboratory expeditions brings some back without you leaving base.
The 607 nodes are not spread evenly — one snowfield pocket holds far more than anywhere else. Measured against our own node pins, the single best base site is roughly 120 m from the Unthawable Lake waypoint, where 16 quartz nodes fall inside one 75 m circle; four more circles of 7 to 11 nodes each sit within 320 m of the same waypoint, and 83 nodes in total (nearly one in seven on the map) are within 300 m of it. Pack cold resistance before you settle there.
If Unthawable Lake is taken by another base or you want a second quarry running, the next densest waypoints by node count within 300 m are Pristine Snow Field and Land of Absolute Zero (28 each), Thawtide Cape (26), Garden Beneath the Astral Mountains (23), then Garden Beneath the Cliffs and Icy Weasel Hill (13 each). Pristine Snow Field also carries two tight pockets of 6 to 7 nodes, one of them only 117 m out, so it is the best of the alternates for a compact mining base.
| How | Where | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Mining and gathering | Palpagos Islands — 607 pure quartz nodes | Respawns after you break it |
| Expedition | Astral Frost Cavern | Hard · 60 min · 100% chance · 20–40 at a time |
| Expedition | PAL Genetic Research Laboratory | VeryHard · 120 min · 100% chance · 10–20 at a time |
Using Pure Quartz Well
Once you clear technology level 52 you can stop travelling for it entirely: the Pure Quartz Quarry is an ancient structure costing 5 technology points, and it is built from 100 Pure Quartz, 70 Stone, 30 Paldium Fragment and 10 Ancient Civilization Parts. That buy-in is the point of the snowfield trips — mine one stockpile by hand, spend it on the quarry, and quartz becomes a passive base output like ore or coal.
The quarry is not self-running: it is a Production facility that only outputs while a pal with the Mining work suitability is working it, and the requirement is Mining rank 1. Every one of the 57 pals that has Mining at all clears that bar, so there is no reason to hold a top-tier miner back for it — a Cattiva (Cattiva), Depresso (Depresso), Fuddler (Fuddler) or Rushoar (Rushoar) staffs it just as validly, and higher Mining ranks only make it faster. Keep the good miners on ore and put a spare Mining-1 body on the quartz.
Pierdon Cryst (Pierdon Cryst) is worth hunting rather than stumbling into, because every one of its mapped spawn points sits in a single snowfield pocket: 47 of the 50 are within 300 m of the Azure Covenant Tower Entrance waypoint, and the closest is about 20 m from The Azure Tapestry. It spawns there day and night, so one lap of that pocket with a strong Ground or Fire team is a repeatable 4-5 quartz per knockout with no mining pals involved.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Other crafting materials at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
