If you are early to mid game then I suggest going up the volcano on the island

(I play ark mobile) as on top it has all the obsidian,metal and crystal you want. The volcanoe is much better than caves to get crystal I think because you dont have to think about all the possible threats as once on top off the volcano I found that there were no dangerous animals. I could suggest building a base their because off all the crystal and material but it would probably be late game

⬆️ this if you found it helpfull

Ankylo is better than metal pick

The funny thing is that it says that the metal pick gets more crystal than the Ankylosaurus. But the Ankylosaurus harvested more than double than my metal pick harvested.

If you are on the Island, crystal is found on top of every island but my personal recommendation is the one directly due East of the volcano. This mountain has a small amount of crystals, but they regenerate UNNATURALLY fast. If you hated this tip, flip your phone upside-down and push the down button!

Ankylosaurus harvest more crystal, obsidian, and metal than metal pickaxes… I don’t know why it says metal pickaxes are better than ankylosauruses at harvesting these.

Use an anky with high melee to maximize crystal

I tested on official 1x with a mastercraft mining drill, a 370 melee magma and a 919 melee x anky. And the results were 12 with drill, 24 with anky, 44 with magma. Magma is the best at gathering crystal, as well as metal and obsidian(I tested all three). Up this so everyone knows the truth.

In response to the commenter who noted issues with the mining laser, and followed up with commenting that the difficulty is getting it back to your base: bring an Argy. They get 50% weight reduction on Chrystal. I believe obsidian as well, but I would need to verify that, just to be safe.take you best Argy, carry your best anky, arrive at location, load up anky, move Crystal to Argy, return to base. You could even bring multiple argies and bring even more back.

On the island, there is a little mountain near the footpaw I think that has a few small crystal nodes. It isn’t much, but in the early game it’s the easiest source of crystal for spyglasses and water jars

Swamp

Never will understand all of the recommendations for the mining laser.

Testing on single player with an Ascendant +295% mining laser (which is better than anyone is going to ever find on official servers) vs my +300% melee damage character using a +700% metal pick vs my 300th level Anky with most of her levels spent on Weight (she's +488% melee damage). Results of hitting a single crystal node:

Mining Laser: 64 crystal

Metal Pick: 55 crystal

Anky: 160 crystal

And that's every time, day in day out. The mining laser is truly mediocre considering it weighs so much, takes two hands to weild, and uses up gasoline like mad.

Anky is far more effective than the mining laser, and frankly the metal pick will easily generate all of the 100 pound stacks of crystal you can carry *anyway*.

The difficulty isn't finding or mining crystal. It's in transport, same as with Obsidian, metal, even stone and wood.

Collecting thousands at once is easy. Getting even a good fraction of that to your base? Good luck.