Though you can upgrade your gear, there’s a downside. If you don’t know about it, you should. As you get more powerful weapons and armor in New World, you will want to upgrade them. Part of the crafting system involves cutting gems and using them to enhance gear in various ways. These raw gems are integral to the harvesting, mining, and stonecutting trade skills, so you will need to find plenty of them for those purposes.
Each gem has a unique effect, and it’s clear the developer intended to add a layer of decision-making around what gems to put in what gear. Players have to focus their builds in some way, and gems help with that. You wouldn’t put a DPS-focused gem that offsets Threat into a healing character. You wouldn’t want to have a bunch of gems that are useless, that’s a waste of a slot.
Related: All the Different Gems in New World
But what if you make a mistake, can you remove gems from items in New World? The answer is that you cannot get the original gem out. You can replace that first gem with a new gem with a different effect, though this deletes the first one.
The fact is, you cannot remove gems from items in New World. With that in mind, it’s best to plan your upgrades a bit. Because if you mess it up and put the wrong gem into the piece of gear, you cannot get it out again.
So unless the developers patch in a method, you currently cannot remove gems from items in New World. There has been no indication this will change as of yet. Maybe if the community hates the feature enough it will change, but it seems unlikely. This game is definitely built on the idea that players should face consequences for mistakes. Open-world PvP-focused games tend to do that.
And given how hard some of the rarer gems are to find and make, you don’t want to waste all that time gathering. But if you’re trying to speed things up, we have a few ways to help. If you want a fast way to find any resource, use the New World map that the community has put together. If you want to know without having to fiddle with it, keep reading. If you’re hunting for Motes, we have a guide on that too. There’s also a guide for finding Petrified Wood if you’re having trouble there. If you’re having trouble carrying all this, try expanding your inventory space.
