BDO Basics - Cron Stones

Introduction

This is a Cron Stone guide intended for newer players learning enhancing 

• Cron Stones are used as a protection from enhancement downgrading 
• They can be used on Weapons, Armour and Accessories when enhancing
• Accessories have their own set of rules when using Cron Stones for upgrading 
• Cron Stones are also used when attempting to create a Dream (Tier 9) horse. 

 

It's recommended not to use Cron Stones for Seasonal Tuvala gear due to how easy it is to enhance. 

 

Using Cron Stones

As mentioned above, there are a few different ways to use Cron Stones, the most common will be for enhancing your weapons and armour. 

 

If you fail using Cron Stones your fail stack will increase by 1 and the Cron Stones will still be consumed. 

Using your Cron Stones is really easy, when you're going to enhance something by talking to your Black Spirit (,) you'll see the option to "Use Cron Stones" 

 

 

You'll be able to see the amount of Cron Stones required and the amount that you own or currently hold in your inventory here: 

 

The amount of Cron Stones needed varies depending on the equipment you're trying to enhance, if you're not sure how many Crons you'll need, we've got a tool for that, 

 

You can check out our Cron Stone Cost tool here which lists the different item requirements.

 

In some cases, it can be cheaper to enhance at different stages using Cron Stones compared to others. 

 

For example, it's generally considered cheaper to Cron DUO -> TRI Blackstar Weapons rather than TRI -> TET simply because of the Cron Stone cost.  

 

Cron Stones for Accessories 

Normally when enhancing accessories, they'll be destroyed if the enhancement fails. By using Cron Stones you can prevent this from happening. 

 

Like with weapons and armour, enhancing accessories with Cron Stones will increase your fail stacks on failure by 1. 

 

 

Generally this is reserved only for the highest value accessories, at high enhancement levels, otherwise the Cron Stones cost is too high to be considered a viable method. 

 

However, while accessories won't be destroyed using Cron Stones they can still downgrade. 

 

There's a 60% chance when using Cron Stones that the accessory won't downgrade, which is still a 40% chance that it could downgrade. 

 

That's worth keeping in mind when deciding if you'd like to enhance accessories. Again, Tuvala accessories are not a good option for using Cron Stones. 

 

Cron Stones for Horses

When you have a Tier 8 horse with a set of specific skills, the horse will become a courser, this allows it to attempt to become a dream horse (Tier 9) 

 

I won't go in to too much detail, but the skills a Tier 8 horse needs are Charge / Drift / Sprint / Instant Accel / Sideways / S:Instant Accel / S:Sideways and needs to be at least Level 30. 

 

 

If your horse meets the requirements, you'll see the above screen when attempting to make your horse a tier 9. 

 

When using Cron Stones in this way, you'll preserve 50% of the materials needed to attempt a dream horse attempt. 

 

Horses do still increase your fail stacks towards future tier 9 attempts while using Cron Stones. 

 

The Cron Stones cost is also really affordable compared to combat gear, I'd recommend using crons for dream horses as crons are faster to gain than horse materials in a lot of cases. 

 

Obtaining Cron Stones

Now that we've went over how to use Cron Stones, here's how to obtain them in the first place. The simplest and likely fastest way to get Cron Stones is by purchasing them. 

 

Blacksmith NPCs

You can grab as many Cron Stones as you want from Blacksmith NPCs for 3 million Silver each. 

 

 

This is definitely expensive, but it'll actually be one of the quickest methods to gain them depending on your region.

 

With increasing levels of Silver per hour, there's few ways to get as many crons as just dumping your silver into the Blacksmith NPC. 

 

Marketplace Outfits 

A way of obtaining Cron Stones that might not be immediately apparent to new players is melting down outfits at Blacksmith NPCs in exchange for crons. 

 

Depending on your region, it's more efficient to purchase costume boxes from the Marketplace to do this. 

 

Some of the most common outfit boxes to do this, the Premium Outfit Box provide 993 crons for around 1.63 billion Silver at the time of writing. 

 

Comparatively, 1000 Cron Stones from the Blacksmith would be 3 billion, so it's not difficult to make a case for melting outfits. 

 

 

To extract outfits, head to a Blacksmith NPC and click the Extraction button seen in the image above. 

 

Next click Extract Outfit, and the Extract Cron stone. You'll need to open any Outfit box and then melt the costume rather than melting the box outright. 

 

 

Karlstein Outfit

As previously mentioned, you can stock up on Cron Stones from melting down Pearl shop costumes, but did you know you can also craft a Pearl Shop Costume in game to do the same thing? 

Check out our guide on crafting the Karlstein Outfit to see how you can craft it to turn into Crons here: 

 

 

Pit of the Undying 

If you've never done Pit of the Undying before, it's useful for grabbing some extra crons and loot scrolls. We have a guide on it, too! 

You can get anywhere from 33 to 165 Cron Stones a day when at PEN rank. If you're interested you can access the guide here: 

 

Doing this can help accumulate some extra crons while being free, while giving you something to do other than grinding to obtain crons.

 

Once you know what you're doing the bosses can be completed pretty fast too, usually in under 20 minutes when you're comfortable. 

 

Season Pass 

If you like playing on the Season server or playing alts, the Season Pass does reward a few crons even without purchasing the Black Spirit Pass. 

 

At the end of the Permanent Season pass you'll receive a new box containing 500 Cron Stones. It's a fair amount for how quick the pass can be completed. 

 

 

This can be done once for every Season Character Ticket you have, as the Season Pass is based on Season Character Tickets rather than actual time gated seasons now. 

 

If you do want to buy the Black Spirit's Pass and want to know what you'll get from it in terms of Cron stones, at the time of writing its 1000 Cron Stones and a Classic Outfit Box. 

 

The [Season] Seals of Journey can also be traded for Crons but it's not recommended to do. 

 

 

It is available as an option, but i'd argue its one of the weaker exchange options when compared to everything else on offer. 

 

For example for 20, you'd gain 20 Cron Stones. Even if you'd already used all of the 1 time exchanges, the Memory Fragment Bundle gives you at least 20.

 

Depending on your region, Memory fragments are usually similar priced or more expensive than crons, so you could even take those and sell them and buy crons if you really wanted to. 

 

Dark Rifts

While not an option I'd recommend or something that could even be considered a consistent way to gain Cron Stones, it technically can provide them. 

 

By completing Dark rifts you can get reward boxes, in these reward boxes you can get a few crons, usually around 5. 

 

 

If you like your bossing content though, the Dark rifts obviously give other rewards too, which you can sell to buy crons. 

 

So at the very least, it could be an alternative for making silver if you don't feel like grinding, it's just not a efficient method. 

 

Login Rewards and Coupons 

Usually I'd say that something like this couldn't be considered a consistent method either, as events come and go and aren't guarenteed. 

 

But Cron Stones are a popular, easy event reward and come up pretty often, so it's something to keep track of. Here's an example of a grindable event. 

 

 

For events like this one, you don't have to do anything other than your regular grind for a chance to obtain more crons. 

 

Login rewards can get pretty high, especially special login events like the ones around developer updates. 

 

 

A lot of the time we're also given [Event] Advice of Safety that can provide Cron Stones too. Another method is the Black Spirit Adventure special board. 

 

To access the Black Spirit's Adventure you can hit Esc and search for it in the search bar. 

 

 

When reaching the special board, you'll be able to see all of the different Cron Stone squares available. 

 

 

Coupon codes can vary from small amounts to pretty large amounts as well, here's an example that's current at the time of writing: 

 

If you want new coupons sent directly to your discord server so that you never miss out, we have a guide on how you can do that here: 

 

 

So there's what you can use your Cron Stones for and how to obtain them, got any methods we missed? Let us know!  

 

 

-- Change log - Added Black Spirit's Adventure Special Board  - 10/10/2023

-- Adjusted to include that Cron Stones now provide +1 Fail stacks upon failure  - 20/12/2023

-- Added Karlstein Outfit crafting as an additional method for Crons - 09/01/2024