Can the sapphire crushed as part of the Drawmij's Instant Summons spell be mended and sold for the original price?

Question

The spell Drawmij's instant summons states (emphasis mine):

[...]
Components: V, S, M (a sapphire worth 1,000 gp)
Duration: Until dispelled

You touch an object weighing 10 pounds or less whose longest dimension is 6 feet or less. The spell leaves an invisible mark on its surface and invisibly inscribes the name of the item on the sapphire you use as the material component. Each time you cast this spell, you must use a different sapphire.

At any time thereafter, you can use your action to speak the item’s name and crush the sapphire. [...]

The spell does not explicitly state the sapphire is consumed, which makes me wonder whether the sapphire can be mended with the mending spell¹ and then sold. Rules designer Jeremy Crawford replied to a tweet asking whether the sapphire is consumed, stating:

Yep. You crush it: "Each time you cast this spell, you must use a different sapphire" (PH 235).

However, Jeremy Crawford's tweets are not official rulings, and the quote he refers to only indicates that mended sapphire cannot be used as a component to cast Drawmij's instant summons.

Would it be possible to mend the sapphire and sell it to a shopkeeper? If so, would the sapphire still be worth 1000 gp, or would the price be less because it lost the ability to be used as a component in Drawmij's instant summons?

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^{1 I had missed that this would require a casting of the mending spell for every single broken link within the gem. Unfortunately this means mending the gem takes a little longer -- a sapphire broken into 1000 pieces will need to be mended 999 times, which will take about two 8-hour-work days. I'd say 500 gp per day remains worth the cost.}

Answer 1

The question seems to boil down to the ability to mend a crushed gem. The Instant Summons spell is not relevant to what you're ultimately asking.

Mending states:

"... repairs a single break or tear in an object ..."

The examples are equally clear and simple. Crushing is not a single break or tear in an object.

If you went with an interpretation that one could use Mending for each break endured by the gem; have you seen a crushed gem? Natural crystalline structures shatter. One would spend the next few weeks, 1 minute at a time, trying to put it all back together.

It would appear that a Mending spell would not work on a crushed gem, either by a strict reading of the Mending spell or for practical reasons, regardless of why it was crushed.

p.s. What a shopkeeper offers for "used" gems is entirely up to the DM.

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The D&D game designers might not have had this in mind, but sapphires are nearly as durable as diamonds. They are highly resistant to scratching, chipping and cracking. So, the only way to "break" it is to apply a lot of force to shatter it.

So, "crush" is an appropriate term for sapphires. The result being quite a lot of dust.

Answer 2

As other answerers have said in more detail, mending only repairs a single break/tear in the target object, making repairing the sapphire by that means questionable. That said, I wanted to comment on the following:

[...], or would the price be less because it lost the ability to be used as a component in Drawmij's Instant summons?

I actually don't think it has lost that ability. Drawmij's instant summons puts the restriction of re-using the sapphire on you:

Each time you cast this spell, you must use a different sapphire.

(Emphasis mine)

Someone else casting the same spell doesn't appear to have to worry about the fact that the sapphire has been used by a different spellcaster for Drawmij's instant summons- if, for example, a sapphire has had the spell dispelled off of it (or if you find a successful way to repair a crushed sapphire), another spellcaster seems like they would be free to re-use it themselves without violating that text. I don't think you being unable to reuse it would significantly impact the value of the sapphire.

Answer 3

There are no mechanics for mending crushed gems, so it’s completely up to the DM.

There are just no mechanics for mending crushed gems. There is nothing to tell us if the damage is compatible with the mending spell either. Is it “crushed” into two pieces or a gazillion pieces? So the DM decides if it can be done, and if so, how it can be done, be it with mending or some other method.

What's it worth at market? Up to the DM.

Further, we aren't even sure of the value of the resulting pieces and dust of the crushed sapphire - this is explored in this Q&A: How can we determine the cost of ruby dust?. So even if you can put it back together, there is nothing to tell us what it is worth, or even what the pieces are worth. This whole thing is a pile of "ask the DM".

Answer 4

Mending Won't, but Fabricate Might

Here is the related quotation (emphasis mine):

Fabricate. You convert raw materials into products of the same material. For example, you can fabricate a wooden bridge from a clump of trees, a rope from a patch of hemp, and clothes from flax or wool. Choose raw materials that you can see within range. You can fabricate a Large or smaller object (contained within a 10-foot cube, or eight connected 5-foot cubes), given a sufficient quantity of raw material. If you are working with metal, stone, or another mineral substance, however, the fabricated object can be no larger than Medium (contained within a single 5-foot cube). The quality of objects made by the spell is commensurate with the quality of the raw materials. Creatures or magic items can’t be created or transmuted by this spell. You also can’t use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan’s tools used to craft such objects.

Depending on your DM, and if you have proficiency in jeweler's tools, you might be able to recreate the gem from the dust it was crushed into, so long as you save its pieces.