We hypothesized that the strength and range of particle interactions plays a crucial role in modulating the crystal formation pathways we observed, a phenomenon also noted in various other colloidal and molecular systems. To explore this, we concentrated on designing experiments that allowed us to gradually, and in a controlled fashion, scan different particle interaction strengths over time. Because the interaction strength is highly sensitive to salt concentration, we modified our experimental setup to allow for gradual and continuous variation of the salt concentration. These experiments begin with a high salt concentration (short Debye length), maintaining the particles in a stable gas-like state. We subsequently reduce the salt concentration by connecting the observation cell to a deionized water reservoir (Extended Data Fig. ). As salt diffuses out of the sample into the reservoir, the Debye length (λ D ) and interaction strength between the particles increase, eventually initiating crystallization (Fig. ). This design provides spatiotemporal control over the salt concentration because we can predict how the profile of ions should look given the initial inside and outside concentrations and the geometry of the capillary (Fig. , Methods), and allows us to monitor and capture images of the crystallization front (Fig. and Extended Data Movie 5). The gradual decrease of salt concentration enables us to pinpoint the relatively small window of interaction strengths where the formation of amorphous blobs is completely suppressed and where instead classical crystallization takes place. We observed similar qualitative trends conducted at fixed λ D in both experiments using sealed capillaries and simulations (Extended Data Fig. ), where at short λ D our simulation remained gaseous, but with increasing λ D we first observe a small window of values where classical crystallization takes place, then two-step crystallization, and finally random aggregation in that order.