I also need large gems but i am cuting them now and dont have any yet, with a finite amount I was thinking, start making glass, so does it still work to make large glass gems , its just I checked the wiki and it says you cant however after reading this topic it seems like you can?
There's a screenshot in the thread showing large green glass gems in the stocks list. So yeah, you can make them.
I havent tried making glass yet, I hope it isnt too bad to setup
It's a pain in the arse to set up, and even more so to set up efficiently. You need a glass furnace, fuel, sand, item haulers to gather the sand, and bags for the item haulers to use. You want these things to be close to each other and to the population of the fortress, and sand tiles can't be moved (except straight down.
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The first thing you should do is build several glass furnaces and set each of these furnaces to Collect Sand (R). Workshops handle one order at a time, so if you have a single furnace it will be unusable for anything else while your sand collector walks to the bag and then to the sand (if it doesn't cancel halfway through the trip...). You might as well build your 'proper' furnace now as well.
Set each of your furnaces to Collect Sand (R). You'll know when you've run out of bags, because you'll get a cancel message from every single furnace. Check your stocks screen (sand is a powder). I'm really not sure how many bags of sand you'll need per mandated large gem, so start with twenty and see how many large gems you get out of it.
Keeping your 'proper' furnace and your sand collection furnaces separated is tricky. Manually ordering sand collection is a pain, but ordering it through the manager will interfere with any production jobs you have going. Manually ordering production jobs is also a pain*, and ordering it through the manager will lead to your glassmaker using your crappy collection furnace instead of the one close to the stockpiles (or, worse, a fuel-burning furnace instead of a magma one). How you deal with this is up to you, but what I'm doing is ordering production jobs manually and collecting sand through the manager once I'm finished, or once I'm in danger of running out completely.
*You can use the hotkey system to zoom to various locations in the same way you zoom to the gate, but that only helps slightly.
Another thing on the mandate it has large gems 1/1 does that mean I have met the mandate?
No. The only mandates you'll ever see are the unmet ones.