How to Transmute?

[Furry Eskimo]

I keep getting chaos shards. Idk what I'm doing wrong..

[AintJack]

Just bad luck. Also just transmute ember of same level and quality together as well. Greens with greens and blue with blue of same lvl. You can transmute gold ones one but generally a waste unless you got many 1-2% gold and magic find ones.

[Furry Eskimo]

I was transmuting the same type of the same level and still getting chaos like, 80% of the time..

[HiFive]

Are you playing the vanilla game or are you using mods? Some mods change how the transmuter works.

[Furry Eskimo]

Vanilla

[HiFive]

The transmutation system in Torchlight II is very different from Torchlight I. They wanted to discourage people from hoarding gems, and overly upgrading them. There is even a hint that appears on-screen in Torchlight II telling you to not save your gems and go ahead and use them when you get them.

So, in Torchlight II, the transmutation of any 3 gems will give you a random result. In my experience, that result is usually a gem of the same level as the gems you put in. If it's upgraded at all, it's to a chaos or iron gem of the same level (since Torchlight II considers those to be upgrades).

My primary focus when transmuting gems is to get those rare mana restore or hp restore gems. I don't try to get elemental gems from the transmuter because the RNG seems to favor chaos and iron gems, as you have noticed. Instead I hoard the elemental gems that previous characters have gathered, since the random drops in the field are often missing the very one I need. The game seems to prefer leaving your character with at least one weakness when it does its "random" drops.

It is my personal opinion that the supposed RNG (there is no such thing as a true RNG in the programming world) on Torchlight II is actually biased depending on the amount and types of damage you have been receiving, and the stats you have assigned to your character. I find that I usually receive more elemental gems when I play a character with a high focus stat, such as an Embermage.

Here is a good guide on gems in Torchlight II:

https://torchlight.fandom.com/wiki/Gems_(T2)

Also, here is a page about random number generators that you might find interesting:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/124233/why-is-it-impossible-to-produce-truly-random-numbers

[Furry Eskimo]

I guess that makes sense. I distinctly haven't been able to upgrade to the next level of gems; only get random gems of the same level that aren't the average, elemental ones. Some of the effects overlap though, like damaging armor or stealing health. Chaos gems seem like a common result.

I think I saw somewhere that including higher level gems in the crafting can result in a gem with the highest level, but that seems semi-random.

I guess I'll start using these gems then. I get so so many of them, and I can't upgrade them into anything substantially stronger. Even the special gems have stronger versions and I've only found one gem that I think is truly unique.