Anthem Ember Piece locations - where to find Embers and what Embers are for
How to easily find Embers and what they're used for in Anthem.
Ember Pieces in Anthem become pretty integral to your crafting, grinding and general collecting progress as you make your way further into the game, but they also come up pretty early on as part of one or two missions and challenges.
You'll need to collect Embers for Prospero in order to get your Legion of Dawn armour if you picked up a special edition for Anthem too, so below we'll run you through some quick tips on both general Ember Piece locations for finding Embers with relative ease, as well as explaining what exactly Embers do in Anthem, too.
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Anthem Ember Piece locations - where to find Embers easily
If you fancy doing yourself a spot of crafting, or just collectable-hunting in general, then it'll be pretty helpful to know how and where you can find Embers, the small, colour-coded crystals that help make all that good stuff possible.
The best way to find Ember Pieces in Anthem so far:
It's early days, but the best way we've found to find Ember Pieces so far is to do some good old fashioned exploring, heading out in freeroam mode in search of a harvestable plants, minerals or chests, as it's those which have a decent chance of giving you an Ember Piece.
There are quite a few different types of plant - and similarly minerals, which look more like unusual rock formations or crystals - but they're quite noticeable as you go, glowing slightly and generally appearing as more distinctive fauna than the regular, non-interactable rest of the world. We found a trail of five or six of the red crystal cluster mineral at the location in the images above, in the Tarsis freeroam area which is easily accessible.
Simply find one of these plants, minerals or chests, interact with it, and see what pops out - we found it was a roughly one-in-three or one-in-four chance of an Ember appearing, and it's also worth noting that we're pretty sure that no Embers would appear when we searched these objects until we picked up the quest "Lighting a Fire" from Prospero, early on in the game after you've finished the tutorials. Lighting a Fire actually tasks you with finding Ember Pieces itself, serving as an introduction to them and their uses in general - more on that in the section further below!
Other ways to get Embers in Anthem
There are actually several ways to pick up Embers in Anthem - some more reliable than simply farming minerals, plants and chests out in the world.
One option is to dismantle equipment. Dismantling a piece of equipment, like a weapon, will give you Ember of that tier of rarity. So dismantling an Uncommon rifle will give you Uncommon Ember, for instance, as well as a few other bits of crafting material.
The downside to that of course is that you need to get those items of that rarity in the first place, which can be just as time-consuming as farming Embers themselves. If you already have that level of gear though, then this is by far the easiest and most reliable way to get Embers - in fact as the game progresses it'll likely be the main way you think about crafting, as the loot-dismantle-craft-repeat cycle becomes exactly that, a cycle.
The other way is to complete Challenges. From what we've seen so far it's only the monthly challenges - highlighted as Trials - that have promised us Embers as rewards, but the promise is pretty great: for a Bronze tier Monthly challenge in the Path of Glory line it's 25 Masterwork Embers (even when we're a low level). For Silver it's 50, and for Gold it's 100!
Looking for more Anthem explainers like this? Our Anthem tips page is a great place to start, or our Anthem guide and walkthrough mission list hub, which has all our Anthem pages in one place, including in-depth looks at Anthem Javelin classes, how to unlock Javelins and some Colossus, Storm, Interceptor and Ranger builds, another in-depth look at Combos, Primers and Detonators and Elemental Effects and debuffs explained, or specific advice on how to Deactivate the Barrier for the Triple Threat puzzle solution. Here's where to find Anthem Collectibles, Anthem Ember Pieces and Anthem Treasure Chests, and how to get your Anthem Legion of Dawn armour and other pre-order bonuses, how the Anthem Alliance system works too. Finally, for levelling and grinding, here's an explainer of Anthem Pilot Level, XP and how to level fast, Anthem loot, gear, and the loot system explained and finally a deep-dive on Anthem Masterwork and Legendary gear explained, a Masterwork list and how to farm them.
Anthem Embers explained - what are Embers used for in Anthem?
Embers, in brief, are used for 'infusing' gear and weapons that you craft in Anthem. Using an Ember of a specific rarity will make that item that rarity - so say I used a purple, Epic Ember when crafting an Assault Rifle, that rifle would be Epic quality.
Other than that, you'll find the odd challenge or quest will task you with finding Embers - Prospero's early-game Lighting the Fire quest being one of them.
We haven't fully dug our teeth into the crafting system just yet, but it seems that it's gated according to your Javelin's Gear Level - so if you only have an Uncommon-tier level of gear equipped, then you can only craft gear up to Uncommon level.
Similarly - although we can't confirm this with absolute certainty yet - it seems as though the Embers themselves are gated, according to either your Pilot Level or your Gear Level. After opening dozens of Plants, Minerals and Chests out in the wild, we've only ever found Uncommon-tier Embers. Maybe that's bad luck, of course, but at least at this early stage it seems as though Embers' rarity are capped at one tier above your own suit.
We'll update this page with more info as we test it out, of course, but for now things are fairly simple: use Embers for crafting gear of a certain quality, and find them by looting everything in sight out in the real world, dismantling gear of that rarity, or completing big monthly challenges!