How Does Auto Compounding Work in Star Ocean The Divine Force

Item Creation, Star Ocean The Divine Force’s crafting system, has some quirks. And most of those quirks don’t have any explanations. One of those quirks is a way to automatically craft items, and the way it works is absolutely bizarre. It works for two Item Creation methods, Compounding, and Engineering. So we’ll call it Auto Compounding for the purposes of this guide. Here’s how it works.

Related: How to Unlock Crafting in Star Ocean The Divine Force

In order to set up Auto Compounding you need recipes. And recipes are crafting items themselves, made through the Authoring method. Of course, in order to get to recipes you’ll have to level up Authoring for someone. Generally, it takes around level three to consistently get recipes. You can get multiple copies, but only need one in your inventory to use it.

Once you have a recipe, you can pull up the list with the Square or equivalent button in the Compounding or Engineering menu after you choose a character. This menu by default is just a reference, but if you press the R1 or equivalent button you’ll “equip” the recipe. This will set you up for automatically crafting these items.

HOWEVER

The process of actually triggering the automation is very silly. First of all, it won’t work unless you have the inventory space, which sounds reasonable except for this game’s whole automatic excess selloff thing. So you need inventory space and the ingredients for the “refills.”

Then you need to open the menu. You don’t have to go all the way to the Item Creation menu; just press the options button. Then cancel out. If everything’s the way it should be, you’ll see a bunch of notifications on the top-right area of the screen showing the crafting results. If something isn’t right, the game just won’t do anything. Fun!