Who needs money? Crafters, who needs shards?

This could be about crafting, or it could be about markets, but it's really about making some gil fast.

This is something that will work once per character. It's very lucrative and simple for non-crafters to do. For crafters on alts, it's a great way to save money.

When you join a crafting guild, you are given two back-to-back quests that involve (1) talking to a receptionist, (2) talking to the guild leader, (3) equipping a tool, then (4) talking to the guild leader again. Doing so gets you 250 elemental shards of one type and 150 of a different type.

In the time it takes you to travel between the 8 guilds, right click through conversations and equip a tool, you can make over 165,000 gil. Sound interesting? Keep reading.

For you non-crafters, elemental shards are crafting components that every recipe needs. The higher the level, the higher the shard requirement. The normal way to gather shards, if you don't just buy them, it to go out and harvest them through mining or botany. The process, however, is pretty slow and extremely dull. Running these crafting quests -- including the level 5 and level 10 class quests -- can get you hundreds of shards in minutes.

How would you get 165,000 gil? Just completing the level 1 quests will get you 650 fire shards, 400 ice shards, 800 wind shards, 550 earth shards, 400 lightning shards and 400 water shards. I took the average price of shards sales histories on my server to find out the average current price at which these sell (not what people think they can get for them) and used that price (for each element separately) to determine the value. Respectively, those prices are 40, 67, 62, 36, 68 and 40 gil.

Want to spend a little more time to double your money?

Like any other class, crafting classes have class story quests every 5 levels after level 1. Grinding a crafting class to level 5 takes no real knowledge of crafting. You will have 1 skill you will need to spam over and over. All in all, it takes about ten minutes per class. Quest rewards from these will almost double your totals: 1200 fire shards, 750 ice shards, 1500 wind shards, 1050 earth shards, 750 lightning shards and 750 water shards coming in at a value of 310,000 gil using the prices above.

For the more dedicated, you can grind each class up to level 10 for the final quest that grants a large amount of shards. This takes closer to 30-45 minutes per class, so you're looking at a 6 hour commitment or so. If you stick it out, you end up with 1900 fire shards, 1200 ice shards, 2400 wind shards, 1700 earth shards, 1200 lightning shards and 1200 water shards. For my server, those all come in just shy of 500,000 gil.

Two things to keep in mind. First, shards prices are pretty volatile and vary not only by server, but often by the minute on any given server. Knowing how to view item sales histories on the market boards is essential for pricing your goods optimally. Second, this is a one shot per character deal. If you think you want to learn how to craft, selling the shards you gain means money you will need to spend to replace them down the road. If you're not going to craft? If you're on a non-crafter alt? Ch-ching!!!

The grind to level 10 does involve more than spamming 1 skill if you want to go as fast as you can. Additionally, there are perhaps a dozen other ways I can think of to reduce your costs and increase your average experience gain per craft (that means less grind time). Bottom line is that if people are interested in more information, I will post a complete guide in the Gameplay > Items, Synthesis and Gathering Forum. Post down below if you would like to see this and if there is enough interest, I'll take care of it.

And crafters ... you see the numbers of shards? You want to save yourself half a million gil? Well, you have any alts?

Thank you very much for ruining the crystal market, now we can watch how the price goes from 200 each one to 35 gil.

FYI: You can bypass the 1k limit by editing your post instead of multi-posting.

On-topic: This is hardly time-efficient but if you want a simple or pre-50 method of getting gil, by all means.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Keikun

Thank you very much for ruining the crystal market, now we can watch how the price goes from 200 each one to 35 gil.

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This has been known since launch. If I remember correctly, the quests actually used to give more shards but was nerfed due to bots abusing it. The shard markets won't crash from this because shard farming is one of the most boring things you can do in this game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Keikun

Thank you very much for ruining the crystal market, now we can watch how the price goes from 200 each one to 35 gil.

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shards are already worth 35g

Now that you've told me you can go ahead and delete this thread :P (Before prices drop)

Intrigued by this. Very well devised method of earning fast cash.