Good Morning Folks! This morning I am going to venture forth into a topic that I admittedly am no real expert on. However, I also know there are a large number of folks out there trying to figure out how to make money in Final Fantasy XIV. For me personally, it was a shift in my mindset and I am going to talk a little bit about that going forward. What I feel is extremely important as evidence is that when I returned to the game on the weekend of July 4th, I had roughly 100,000 gil to my name. Essentially the entire time I have played Final Fantasy XIV, I have hovered in that 100k-200k range and never really understood how people managed to make the sort of money that they did.
There are regular folks who have amassed over 100 million gil and the truth is… I have a feeling at some point I will join those ranks. As of this morning before sitting down to write this post, I am sitting on around 12.9 million gil. So in a little less than 3 months, I have amassed over 12 million gil. Like I said for the most part this has just been me being extremely active with the game and making tweaks to the way I interacted with it. This doesn’t involve a lot of effort or any significant amount of market manipulation, just changing how you view the game. Once again please note that I am by no means a gil making expert, I am just doing some simple things to hopefully someday be able to afford a house.
Sell Everything
At the end of a night of adventuring, you are going to walk back into town and open your bags and see a bunch of nonsense. The thing is there is something key that you need to understand in Final Fantasy XIV and once you do… it will shift your perspective. Nothing drops from a mob that is not used in some way, and most of these items are used in the game’s vast and complicated crafting system. Farming materials from mobs takes an awful lot of time… I know this because I have done it and it is oftentimes mind-numbing. As a result most crafters simply buy materials from the market board, because after about level 25 you can’t buy the items you need from vendors.
What this means is that all of those Teeth, Skins, Furs and countless other nonsensical drops have significant value. While my inventory in the above shot is pretty much pruned from these because I sold them all last night… I often time have several items that are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 gil apiece. Granted this is pricing on the market board and not vendors because the mistake is usually to just walk up to a vendor and liquidate everything for pennies on the dollar. Once I started actively engaging with the Market, I noticed just how freaking thriving it really is. So many times I will post an item and then in mere moments I get a message from the system telling me that item sold. As I have branched out into alts on other servers, I am experiencing the same sort of rapid turn on even low-level crafting materials so it is absolutely not just a Cactuar thing.
Ultimately you need to become acquainted with the Market Board interface because it is pretty powerful. When you go to list an item on your vendor it will bring up a dialog allowing you to set the price of the item you are listing. The challenge here is you are likely going to have no clue what the value of that item is, but the game provides you with a nice system in order to look up every item that is currently selling and view all of the recent histories of items that have sold. Check out the area I marked in green on the left labelled “Compare Prices” this is going to bring up the dialog labelled “Search Results” and show you all of the items currently for sale with the same name as the one you are listing. If you want to delve further you can click the item I have highlighted in green on the right side to bring up the History dialog showing the recent prices and when an item has sold.
Based on these and my knowledge that these items are needed for a quest in groups of 4, I priced my item at 6000 gil because someone buying them for the quest is going to be likely looking for the exact number. There is someone setting 25 for 3000 gil each, but that also means that a player is going to have to buy ALL 25 of them, and most people are not going to be willing to flip those slowly 4 at a time to make up the difference. There is another player that has 8 of them and 2 of them… but my listing would be the only one at the exact amount needed in that 6000 gil price point, which means more than likely my item is going to move extremely quickly. I will talk more specifically about the item I am selling later and how to acquire it, because it is pretty easy for even lower-level characters to get these.
Be Active In The Game
This is probably my single largest source of gil… just doing activities in the game and letting the game reward me for doing it. For example each day I do one of each of the roulette and collect the reward bonus both for levelling purposes and for gaining gil. This has been my key to leveling my alts as fast as I have, is that each roulette rewards a huge chunk of bonus experience. However, there is also a decent cash bonus as well. For example, yesterday when I completed my Main Scenario Roulette I noticed that the cash reward was over 16,000 gil. Do enough of these over time and it just adds up to a large sum of money. I’ve found that I have less and less need to actually spend the gil, and this steady trickle means that my bank account is constantly growing.
Another thing that you should be ignoring is the Challenge Log items. For example, I have not run a lot of FATEs this week, but in doing so I am leaving a ton of experience and a decent chunk of gil on the table. At some point, I need to go do some fates because if I do 10 that will be worth roughly 2.5 million experience and 3,000 gil. A good number of these happen organically while doing other activities, but you should probably spend at least a moment before the reset on Tuesday looking through your Challenge Log and seeing if there are any low-hanging fruit that you can finish up quickly. FATEs are absolutely something worth doing, so I have a feeling at some point I will do some of the ones in Il Mheg on one of my level 70 characters, since those tend to be pretty active and will be paid for doing so.
Don’t Cap Currency
One of the things that happen over time in this game is that you start to cap a few currencies. One of these is Grand Company seals, which are used to upgrade your reputation with your grand company but also can be used to buy a bunch of things. There are a lot of sources for earning these but probably the easiest and most overlooked is delivering gear that you don’t need that is green or better. Turning these in at your grand company rewards you anywhere from hundreds of seals to thousands of seals depending on the level and rarity. So as a result when I am running activities I always greed on gear regardless if I need it or not. Most players pass on everything because they don’t want the items clogging their inventory, and you can turn this instinct into paydirt by converting these items directly into grand company seals.
However, if you want to turn them into gil directly there are a few ways. I exclusively use grand company seals to make sure I have enough ventures in order to send my retainers out on missions. However, if you want to buy items to flip on the market you are given a few options. The best of these are the items I spoke about earlier and that I have highlighted in green. There is a step in the Heavensward relic chain that requires you to turn in 4 of each of the items highlighted. These can be crafted by trade skills but are annoying enough to make that crafter don’t usually do so anymore. So far I have had the best luck with Kingcakes, but in theory, each of these sells in the neighborhood of 5-6k gil each and you want to sell them in stacks of 4 at a time. As a result, this becomes a pretty easy way to convert 20,000 grand company seals into 24,000 gil.
What About Poetics?
This one becomes a bit more tricky. There are lots of things that you can spend poetics on, and in truth, I would highly suggest you buy tier sets for your alts as you level them. Having done a lot of this recently in my grind go 80 on all characters, I have learned that you can very easily make it all the way to the next major decade milestone in leveling off of the best tier set from the previous expansion. So when I ding 60, I outfit a character in the Shire gear from Idyllshire and that will take me all the way to 70 when I buy a set of Scaevan gear from Rhalgar’s Reach. Later as you get into the legendary weapon quests you are going to constantly find yourself needing poetics to buy various things and different steps in the chain. However, if you are just wanting to liquidate your poetics quickly and painlessly I do know a few ways.
This first method is by far the most direct and requires access to either Ishgard and the Rowena vendor near the teleport, or Idyllshire. Essentially you want to find an item for sale called Demicrystal. This costs 25 poetics each and sells for 50 gil, so you can buy 80 of them for your 2000 poetics and straight-up vendor them for a grand total of 4000 gil. It is sort of the most brain-dead option for converting poetics into gold and requires no access to the Market Board. However, there is a significantly better option if you are willing to put in the effort.
This will require you have access to Idyllshire at the end of the Heavensward story campaign. There are two items also available on Hismena called Unidentifiable Shell and Unidentifiable Ore. These can be purchased on pretty much any place a Rowen representative exists, but you are going to need access to Idyllshire specifically for the next part. These are used for a weapon quest eventually, but they serve another use. However, since we are specifically talking about them, you can buy them for 150 poetics each which means at maximum if you are capped you can get 13 at a time.
If you go next to Hismena over to Bertana, you can convert the Unidentifiable Shell to Grade 3 Shroud Topsoil, and Unidentifiable Ore to Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil. So to understand the value here, each time you need to plant an item in either your Housing garden or one of the individual Pots that you can place in apartments and personal rooms, you are going to need to consume soil. This means folks who are actively growing things are going to need a lot of this, and most folks are going to be seeking the highest grade soil available. In my experience prices fluctuate wildly on soil, but lately, it has been going for the neighborhood of 1000 gil each. That means if you can buy 13 items for your 2000 poetics you can potentially flip them for 13,000 gil.
What About Doman Enclave?
Earlier I said nothing drops in Final Fantasy XIV that does not have a purpose, and that you should avoid vendoring things if at all possible. Some of you were probably thinking “But Bel, What about the Gil bags? Aren’t they designed to be sold?” and on some level, you are absolutely correct. The Gil bags that you can get in lieu of items from quests are absolutely designed to be vendored. However, what if I told you that you could get twice the amount of value from them? At the end of Stormblood, an area opens up called the Doman Enclave, and you are effectively building a town by donating items to the cause. One of the best items that you can donate is the bags of gil, because you are given a gratuity for donating to the cause. This starts out being half of the value and over the course of leveling up the area eventually caps out at doubling your money.
There is a weekly limit to how much you can earn from this system, but it might benefit you to save up those gil sacks until the Tuesday reset and then pour those resources into leveling the Doman Enclave and essentially earning you some free gil for just teleporting there and doing some hand-ins.
Do Some of All of the Above
Basically, I am extremely active in the game and through doing my roulettes and some of the above I am earning way more cash than I can possibly spend. The biggest shift for me personally was to stop vendoring the trash in my bags, and instead first checking to see if any of it is valuable on the market. For me personally, I tend to sit a 100 gil limit to how much it is worth my time to actually flip. If an item is only going for 50 gil or so on the market, I am probably just going to vendor the item and be done with it. However, if I can turn 2000 gil for posting an item I am absolutely going to do that every single time. You will need to sort out how engaged you want to be in this process, and then there is also the challenge of market board space since each retainer can only sell 20 items at a given time. Most crafting materials flip pretty quickly, but you are going to need to keep evaluating your prices in order to make sure you move things.
I hope this helps someone out there. There is a version of me that used to hoard every single material I got, but in truth, the economy is so fluid in Final Fantasy XIV, that I have little to no doubt that I could easily buy back whatever I need whenever I need it. If you take nothing else away from this post, I would say the “Sell Everything” mindset is the biggest shift that put me on the road to riches. If you have any direct questions I am more than willing to field them, but also know that I am by no means an expert.
