Some bits you should pick up as you go along since it unlocks the skills quite slowly to begin with.
Levels 1-4, bugger all will happen. All you have is the Synthesis skill. Unless you get very unlucky (90% chance of success) or try something a bit too hard for your current gear you shouldn't fail anything.
Levels 5-6(?) you'll have the Basic Touch skill but all that will really get you is extra experience at this point unless you get lucky and it turns out HQ. Try to use it twice for each craft (more for 60/70 durability items) as this can boost your exp gain up to 100-250% easily.
Level 7-8 you'll have Masters Mend but you are still quite limited on CP.
Level 9-10 make sure you pick up a Leather Choker (I think thats the one) for a boost to your maximum CP at level 9. Steady Hand makes your Touch skills much more likely to succeed and guarantees the Synthesis skill. Very important when you're going down to 10 durability.
Level 11-14 you'll have Inner Quiet so you'll have to use your own judgement as to whether or not you're better off using it or not as it costs the same as a Basic Touch.
Level 15 is where you unlock your first unique skill. You should have enough knowledge of the system to work out how to best use it.
At some point, I think its level 10, it unlocks 'Condition' of the item being Normal, Good, Excellent, Poor. Read the tutorial and it'll begin to make sense after a few crafts.
Always worth knowing just how much Progress you can get per use. That way you know just how many turns it will take you to finish the craft so you know how much you have to use on Quality.
Quality ramps the chance up massively towards the last 25% of the bar. It does go to a maximum of 100% chance of HQ but only at full. Even being 1 point off drops it to 98%.
Sods law is ALWAYS in effect in crafting.
If you go down to 10 durability, the next condition is always going to be Excellent.
Without Steady Hand, all touch skills chances of success are reversed, if it goes to Excellent its an almost guaranteed failure.
If you ever let it get to 10 durability with 1 Synthesis left, it'll probably fail without Steady Hand.
One thing to note is that the unique skills you unlock at level 15 (and 40/50) are usable by all other crafting classes. These skills can be seriously powerful when you unlock more of them. Carpenter gets a skill to convert the bonus' of Inner Quiet into CP. Alchemist gets a skill to gain 20CP if you use it when the condition is 'Good'. These are utterly invaluable for me at the moment.
Also regarding HQ components. The bonus exp is based on how much Quality YOU increased it by and disregards any HQ components. HQ components increase Quality to a maximum of 50% of the max. These are weighted in some bizarre fashion such that higher level ingredients are worth more quality but sometimes there is just no way to know what it classes as 'high level' ingredients.
