Materia and crafting question

Hello

I have been running around adventuring Eorzea for a few months now but I have stuck to the main story quests for the most part. I just reached level 60 Paladin and I think its time to put to use all this Materia and crafting materials I've gathered.
I don't know where to start or what crafting class I should take up? Do they all make use of Materia? What sort of things can I craft? I seem to never have room in my inventory or retainers because I don't want to throw away some materia or crafting material that may be useful in the future...

I feel like I'm missing out on many great things in Eorzea by not crafting, thanks for your help :o

Long story short? Level all of them. As far as items go, just research them on someplace like ffxiv.gamerescape.com. If you can easily obtain the item, sell it to an NPC. If it requires a little work to obtain, sell it on the market board and then if you need it in the future just buy another one. Essentially you can use the economy as massive storage ;)

The choice of crafting class is much like the choice of which battle class to start as. What do you want to do? Make equipment that gets used in battle? Make yourself a better looking outfit to wear? Cook yourself/your friends good food to provide a boost? Make your own potions to help yourself in a pinch? Decorate your home/room? Turn a profit? How you answer that question should help you decide where to begin. The game has thousands of crafting recipes(5015 current entries in the crafting log, to be precise), everything from shoes to hats, axes to guns, chairs to decorative lawn ornaments, and a lot more than i could ever remember. One thing to keep in mind though, if you want to get to the highest levels of crafting then eventually you do end up having to level pretty much all the classes up. Cross class skills make a huge difference in getting the best results as you go up in levels. All your crafting classes get CC skills at 15(mostly good), 37(mostly bad), 50(mostly good), and 54(mostly bad), and the best results in the highest level crafting use up all the open slots with skills from multiple classes.

So my standard advice to a new person interested in crafting is take 1 class that interests them for personal or lore reasons, and take it to level 15 or so(this can be done quickly and typically without straying far from the crafting guild - their supplier should sell most/all of the mats you need for those lower levels). If you like it, it wouldnt hurt to get the rest of the classes those same 15 levels for the bonus skills. That should give you enough of an idea of whether or not youll want to invest the time to level them all. If you do level them all, it helps to keep them kinda close to each other for material synergy(for instance your weaver could make the thread your leatherworker needs to finish their boots) and because they can share all gear except main/offhand tools. You can also save money on leveling crafting by leveling botanist/miner(and for a couple crafts only, fisher) and providing some of your own mats. Your grand company will have a daily item request for crafting exp(from 1/8 to 1/2 a level per day per class, also available for gatherers), and the ixali(1-50) and moogle(50-60) beast tribes have crafting quests available too. Add to that a few leves and at higher levels Rowena, and youve got a roadmap to leveling up.

As for materia, every crafting class except culinarian gains the ability to meld materia into gear based on their own designs(so an armorer can add it to armor, for instance). Theres a quest in central thanalan that gets done around level 20 that explains it all. And if you dont mind gambling a bit and have extra, the NPC who teaches you about materia can also transmute it. You give him 5 pieces you dont want, he gives you 1 random new one back. Sometimes you get better then what you gave, but its a random thing. And if you want to clean up your retainers and inventory a bit, take the pieces youve been holding and check the market prices on them. You might have some that are readily available from merchants or very low level and easy enemies, and those will only sell for a few gil each. As a level 60, its usually safe to get rid of those items, because if you need them again you can readily resupply them. You can also look them up on the lodestone, or a similar website and see what theyre used to make.

Theres a LOT more info available on ALL of this, but for a starter/crash course, this feels like a decent place to stop. If you have more questions, feel free to ask. And a tentative welcome to the crafter community!

Frizze covered most of the basics. Pick one or two to level to 15 to see how you like crafting and whether it's worth continuing. If you're going to continue, then get all the rest up to 15 for the cross-class abilities. Beyond that, Culinarian also gets an important cross-class skill at 37. (The other classes' level 37 skills are rarely useful.)

As you continue further, either level them all in tandem so they can share gear as well as provide materials for each other, or at least level them in groups that support each other for materials. For instance, Weaver, Leatherworker, and Armorer could make a good group as they provide each other with quite a few mats. (Not so much between weaver and armorer, but both of those two coordinate quite a bit with leatherworker.) Culinarian and Alchemist are the least tied in with the others in terms of materials, so they could be leveled individually or as a pair.

As far as material storage, that will remain a problem (especially if you're against the idea of paying extra for more retainers). But check which materials can be simply bought from NPCs. If you have access to a house or apartment, the Material Supplier you can have there combines the inventories of the vendors at each of the crafting guilds, so it's a good place to get supplies as well as to verify which of your stockpiled items are worth storing.

To begin with, you're going to want to keep any High Quality materials you have (even if there's a vendor who will sell you the Normal Quality version). Using high quality materials makes it easier to produce high quality finished items. (It also helps you level faster, as you get more XP for a product if you get its Quality rating high before finishing it.) However eventually, once you level up enough that you can reliably make high quality products even from normal quality materials, that pattern will reverse and you can start selling off HQ materials and keeping the NQ ones to use.

Also, while the Material Supplier's inventory is a good measure of what's worth storing or not, don't feel like you necessarily have to buy those materials there. Sometimes the Market Board has better prices. And it can be worth gathering stuff on your own if you're going to want a lot of it. For later materials, it will help to have Botanist and Miner leveled up enough to gather materials not available from vendors and expensive through the MB. If you're going to be leveling them up for that anyway, you might find it worthwhile to level them by gathering rather than purchasing your early level crafting mats as well.