Lunagems and lunastones are items that you use to enhance your weapons and armor. While they both enhance your gear, how they do it is somewhat different. So let’s dive into the details of this.
Lunagems
Let’s start with lunagems since you most likely came here with questions about them. Lunagems are items that you can use to enhance your weapons and armor. To enhance a piece of gear you need to socket the lunagem into one of the gears’ empty sockets.
To do so you need to open up your inventory and press the “Gear Upgrade” button which is in the lower-left corner of your inventory screen. In the “Gear Upgrade” screen you then open the “Lunagem” tab. You can then place the item you want to enhance into the “Equipment Item” slot and the lunagem you wish to add to it into the “Lunagem” slot.
In the image above to the left, you can see the lunagem tab, where a chest piece is about to get its first lunagem. It costs 500 labor to get the gem socketed and some gold. On the right, you see a weapons’ information screen where you see it has six sockets to place lunagems.
The next gem added to this piece of gear will then cost the same labor, but considerably more gold. This gold cost then increases for each additional gem place in the same piece of gear.
Getting Lunagems
The easiest way to get Lunagems is probably through the Honor Shop. There you can get high-end lunagems for 7,000 honor each. This, of course, means that you need to farm a lot of honor points to fill all your sockets. The honor shop has five types of lunagems as you can see from the image below. Each type has a theme and some gems can only be attached to specific gear pieces.
When you uncloak a lunagem you get to select the type of gem you get. Be careful to select the correct type you intend to use for a specific piece of gear. For example, an earthglow gem gives a bonus to toughness if attached to a leg piece, but a bonus to resilience if it is attached to a chest or feet piece. So if you want to get higher resilience you need to have sockets available in your chest or leg pieces. This also means that to optimize your character you need to map out beforehand which gems you want to place in which piece of gear.
Instead of using the honor shop to get these gems, you can see if you find the lunagem you need from the auction house. You can also ask in the trade channel if anyone is willing to sell you their honor for gold, meaning that they spend 7,000 honor on a gem which you then buy.
Sunglow and Evenglow Lunagems
As far as I know, these two types of gems can only be attained from Greater Dungeon Bosses.
Removing Lunagems From Gear
You can take unwanted lunagems out of your gear. There are two way to do that, either by removing it and destroying the gem in the process, or extracting the gem whole. Extracting a gem costs some honor so it is advisable to be sure when you are socketing the top end lunagems, the lower end gems don’t give such a great benefit that it’s worth bothering with extracting them.
To extract lunagem you need to first purchase a Mornstone. You can get a Mornstone from the honor shop. Once you have the Mornstone you again open up the lunagem tab in the gear upgrade window and select the Extract option. Then place the gear with the unwanted gem into the “Equipment Item” window and place the Mornstone in the “Catalyst Stone” window. You now need to select which lunagem you are going to extract and once done just press the “Extract” button.
To remove a lunagem and destroy it in the process you take the exact same steps, but now you can use a dawnstone that you can buy from a general merchant and use the “remove” option from the “lunagem” tab.
Upgrading Lunagems
Once you have socketed a lunagem you can upgrade it (plus it) by using a Luna Charm Rank 1 which you buy from the honor shop and later Luna Charm Rank 2 – 5 which you craft using your handicraft skills.
Now, this is something I have not yet tried so take it with a grain of salt, but as I understand it, once you have upgraded the lunagem you no longer can remove it from the gear without destroying it.
You can also make higher tiered lunagems. To do so you need at least 20,000 points in Handicraft to make a tier 2 lunagem and 70,000 points to make a tier 3 lunagem. Doing this is more expensive than upgrading the gems with a Luna Charm, but you can remove the higher grade gems without destroying them.
The difference between a tier 3 and a tier 1(+5) gem is not all that much as you can see from this document. For example, for a six socket weapon with just a melee attack fireglow lunagem the difference will be only +2.4 attack power, which is not a whole lot once you are at the point of begin able to have six tier 3 lunagems. Then again, at that point you might not have anything else left to upgrade.
Lunastones – Lunadrops, Lunatears and Lunafrosts.
Lunastones behave differently from lunagems. They do not need a socket but you can only ever have a single lunastone in a piece of gear. To place a lunastone into a gear you do pretty much the same as with a lunagem, except now you use the “Lunastone” tab in the “Gear Upgrade” window. Again you place the piece of gear into the “Equipment Item” box and the lunastone in the “Lunastone” box. Once ready you press the Equip button.
Unlike lunagems, lunastones cannot be extracted from gear once installed. Instead, the previous lunastone will get destroyed when a new one is installed. So be careful when installing them so you don’t accidentally install a lunastone into the wrong piece of gear and destroy an already installed good lunastone.
Getting Lunastones
Getting good lunastones is a bit harder. They can drop from various mobs but the best lunastones come from crafting them using alchemy. However, to do so you will need a regal alchemy table (easily obtained through the BSB quests) and some skill in the alchemy profession. You should open the alchemy selection in your folio and take a look at the lunastones you can craft there. As far as I know there is no way to upgrade lunastones.
So that’s about all I know for know regarding Lunagems and Lunastones in Archeage Unchained. If you found this guide useful them please share it with your friends and allies and check out my other Archeage guides.