1st. As someone who cannot comprehend the damnable crunch, how good are the Alchemicals at the whole 'crafting' thing? Can they bring things to first age level when they come into creation?
This is a complicated question, because what little has been done to Give Alchemicals a measure of Craft in 2e misses the majority of their themes entirely in the process and tries talking out both sides of its face about "Alchemicals aren't using Autochthon's Charms or themes" yet "... but because they're the Chosen of Autochthon clearly they have the best Craft ever so there."
So on the one hand, they got written to be mechanically superior to Solars within a few Charm purchases in every reasonable way, sometimes deliberately breaking their own Charm framework to do it, and the various upgrades to those purchases making them the most powerful single-crafter teams you could think of hammering out Artifact 5s with rapid-iteration autosuccesses and little more effort than having the raw materials available.
On the other hand, this
isn't how they're supposed to Work. Rather than being a humanoid assembly line punching out warships in an afternoon, the ideal Alchemical should be a creature of logistics and workforce-management, capable of guiding several teams at once in the construction of multiple major projects designed to fit together and establish infrastructure bases. They're closer to designer-engineers than blacksmiths, because the force of their potency relies on dumbing-down complex magical technologies into basic units which even mortals can readily assemble and utilize without essence-use. They foster environments where craft is possible by the everyman by the measure of scope, rather than the exceptional man in terms of raw power, and therefore when you can assume an increased baseline of technological proficiency, you can gradually build atop that to better things, instead of hinging every effort on one-off miracles.
That said,
could they reestablish the First Age? Not for a long while even in the best case, because the First Age was in many ways
more than Autochthonia is. Part of the reason that Autochthonia is so advanced is because they live in a world which demands innovation or death on its own terms, so they have hyper-specialized their society to thrive in the context that survival is easier in a niche, even though large chunks of it are now failing as they can no longer keep such a breakneck pace anymore. The ways they have specialized aren't necessarily as adaptable to Creation as one would hope, because dragon lines within the earth are not tappable essence conduits, produce fields do not simply pour food into storage silos as a form of nutrient slurry, rivers are not ideal sewage runoff, and stone or brick make poor building materials when your understanding of architecture relies on riveted steel girders, water pumps and cable-driven freight elevators.
Any organized Alchemical "uplift" effort would need to build the
adapters for those technologies first to meet the primitive state of Creation halfway, the treatment plants, the smelting refineries, the agriculture necessary to feed the manpower requirements, the basic assembly of tools to
make the technologies they know how to make. Its a factory worker being given a coal-forge and tasked with making a modern day sports car, with zero knowledge of the interim steps which were never part of her job or knowledge base to begin with, having not been relevant to the process of "making cars" for generations.
By way of comparison, the Autochthonian method of manufacturing requires a basis of
this kind of industry, and trying to arrange something similar for the limited access to things like large equipment, steady workforce and metal resources
would look like this in Creation for quite a long time.
2nd. Also, what do the gods think of Autocthon? I know that the Solar exalted revere him, but what about those in Yu-shan?
By all accounts, the gods no doubt believe they are better off without him, and are afraid of his attentions and influence, because primordials of any stripe create a sense of uncertainty. Gaia is a known value to Yu-Shan, since she is "tamed" by her love of Luna and distant enough from the seats of power that she is largely a non-factor to happenings within Creation. Autochthon is a wildcard, because Yu-Shan has no hooks into his systems or loyalty because of shared history. Even an event like his reappearance could throw centuries of planning and scheming into disarray, as various ambitious gods see an opening for a sea-change in the status quo towards a more industrialized Creation, especially those who had First Age portfolios like Vanileth, the Shogun of Artificial Flight.
If Autochthon would start meddling in the affairs of Creation directly, it would cause a cascade of politicking the likes of which Yu-Shan hasn't seen in millennia.
