Running out of space - need buy/sell advice!

I've leveled my fishing to 50, and am now working on botany so I can gather many of my own ingredients for culinarian. The problem is - I'm out of storage space across the board. The HQ ones double up on everything!

Should I sell the things I have gathered to make space for what I need to level, then just buy off the market board in the meantime?

Thanks :)

If you plan on leveling your culinarian more i suggest doing that first. After you get it to 50 then sell off whatever is left of mats that you dont need (may want to keep the higher level ones for extra income)

If you dont plan on leveling your crafters sell off all your nq mats first. After that is done if you still dont feel like leveling crafts then sell all of your hq mats. Biggest regret i had when leveling crafters was selling all my HQ stuff because it made more money.

The more you level crafts the less you will need the HQ mats to make HQ recipes with the cross classing abilities.

The best is to plan ahead, if you level with leves, you can check on different sites which ingredients are needed and just store those.
Focus on a few recipes at first so you will not need too much different ingredients.

And as you are leveling your gathering classes, sell your mats to make space. You can harvest them again when you need them.

Check your fish stock.

Check for the following on the description: Crafting Material
If that isn't specifically stated, npc the fish. You can toss them, but by selling them to an NPC you'll at least get a little gil out of it.
As for the fish that carry that label, check the market prices and history.
If the fish sells for less than a certain amount (personally I put the line at 50 gil each) sell those to the npc as well and sell the rest on the markets.

My advise for leveling crafts:
Keep your inventory clear and only get the materials you need for the levels you need them at, crafting itself clutters your inventory more than enough. Keeping anything "you may be needing in the future" will only ensure that you won't have any inventory space at all.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

Keep your inventory clear and only get the materials you need for the levels you need them at, crafting itself clutters your inventory more than enough. Keeping anything "you may be needing in the future" will only ensure that you won't have any inventory space at all.

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Just getting what you need when you need it works well enough for materials gathered by botanist or miner, who can always go get specifically what they're looking for. For drop items or fish however, the plan to get items when you need them can turn into a major hassle if the RNG gods aren't looking kindly upon you that day. My criteria for whether to keep items has less to do with the likelihood of needing them than it does with the difficulty of re-obtaining them when I need them.

On that basis, the simplest thing to eliminate is items gatherable by botanist or miner. Within that set, some people may want to keep a few basic staple items like logs if they're leveling carpenter or ores if they're leveling armourer, blacksmith, or goldsmith. In the OP's case, however, Culinarian doesn't really have basic staples like that which are used on nearly everything. Its resources are more widespread, needing a few items of many different types. I'd recommend against keeping any of these, since there's far too many to keep all of them. Gather only as much as you're going to either use or sell immediately. Decide what you want to cook for the day's crafting session and then gather the ingredients you'll need for that in the amounts that you'll need. If just doing that doesn't keep Botanist leveled up well enough for your cooking, then add in a few fieldcraft leves or occasionally gather a stack of whatever sells well on your server.

The second consideration is whether the items are purchasable from NPCs. This could get you through the first few levels of crafting completely and still provide at least some of your items even at higher levels (since many recipes use the output of lower tier recipes for their ingredients). Within this set, you can prioritize them according to how expensive they are. If you have space enough to use a few slots for keeping dropped items that would be purchasable but expensive, you might save a few gil. On the other hand, there's little reason to keep items that are both purchasable and cheap. (If you aren't sure which items are purchaseable, you can look them up in XIVDB. It will show where items are sold and for how much. For instance, you can see that Buffalo Milk is available in any of the three starting cities for 4 gil. So that one's probably not worth storing.)

Once you've eliminated those two categories and are down to dropped/fished ingredients that cannot be bought from vendors, it gets a lot harder if you still need to pare down your collection much further. Hopefully the majority of these you can keep if you devote most of your retainer space to them. You may find some items drop consistently enough that they can easily be farmed when you need them, and those could be treated much the same as botanist ingredients, i.e. gather them when you need them. (You may also find certain items are regularly available from the market board, but the rule that they must be purchased in the quantity specified by the seller works against the plan here to collect just what you're going to immediately use, so I don't recommend that source if you're concerned about your storage space.)

If you've still got too many dropped and not easily available ingredients and don't have room for all of them, then you may have to resort to limiting your crafting. Each time a new tier of the crafting log is unlocked, pick out just a few recipes from there that look the most useful and make a list of their ingredients. Store only the hard-to-get items that are in that list and craft only those few recipes, ignoring all the other ones. Personally, I regard this as a last-resort option, as I really like being able to make anything, and won't consider myself to have mastered a craft until I've made every recipe available for it. There are some players, however, who do this right from the start and never try crafting the vast majority of items they'd be capable of. If you don't mind that pattern, you could get by with a lot less storage space.

http://craftingasaservice.com/

This site will help you figure out what you need for leveling any crafting profession. The fastest way to level a crafting profession is to use Leve turn ins and you can search each professions leves and their ingredients at that site. This should help you figure out what you should be harvesting to level and what is worth keeping.

I do certain things to keep my inventory clean:

1) Do not keep basic mats that are needed to be crafted into something else like for example fleece. Directly use them to craft the items you will really need.
2) Check prices regularly. Doesn't make sense to store items you can buy at vendors or very cheap at the market place
3) Do not store too much stacks of the same item. Rather sell a stack or use a stack for crafting.
4) Know what your DOH needs in masses (for leves or mass synthesis) and concentrate on these mats.
5) If you aim to craft each item at least once, get the exact number of mats you need and try not to get more because it will flood your inventory too quickly
6) Regularly check your inventory and retainers for obsolete mats and compare your retainers for double-ends

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Originally Posted by TomTom1968

1) Do not keep basic mats that are needed to be crafted into something else like for example fleece. Directly use them to craft the items you will really need.

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It's better for space to keep the basic mats rather than the intermediate ones. For instance, if you turn your current supply of fleece into yarn, and then get some more fleece, you've now got both yarn and fleece taking up inventory space until you craft it again. On the other hand, if you wait to make yarn until you're making a woolen shirt, for example, and then make only the three yarn that the shirt will need, you never have a need to store yarn.

Rules of Thumb

1: If it can be bought off a vendor, don't keep a stock unless you use it for almost -everything. This puts nearly all materials for items level 15 and below on 'no need to keep' status. Vendors are typically cheaper than players. If a vendor is NOT cheaper than players, there is usually ample supply.

2: 1-stage process raw goods into compressed forms, such as ores, logs, and fibers into ingots, lumber, and cloth. Sell off excess material or buy the 1-2 peices to round things off.

3: Don't pack-rat goods you can't use and are common to obtain. Mail it to someone who can use it, auction it, vendor it, or just trash it.

4: If you can HQ the finished goods in your sleep, you don't need to keep HQ ingredients. Auction them off in whatever form you please, but don't stuff your retainer.

5: Get rid of old consumables. Once you start getting your hands on ample supplies of hi-potions, you're never going to bother using regular potions again, ever.

6: Destroy old gear you don't intend to use for vanity. Whether you vendor it, destroy it, or convert it, remember that you really don't need to keep a full set for every level tier of every class you may or may not eventually level this year.


For Cooks: Don't hoard everything. Build a 'menu' of items you want a stock of, and focus only on those ingredients. You shouldn't ever need to maintain a menu of more than seven food items: Caster Food, DPS food, Tank Food, Craftsmanship Food, Control Food, Gathering Food, and Perception Food. Having more than one in any of these categories is redundant.

Clever cooks may be able to overlap the ingredients for these recipes to save space.


Things to keep:
- Rare drops or hard-to-obtain items, such as Blue Landtrap Leafs, high-demand fish, and ingredients you use often from remote vendors (such as Iron Ore). Also keep mid-process goods that incorporate these rarer goods, such as shark oil.

- HQ items for your ability range, minus 5-10. L50 crafters may want stocks of HQ L40-42+ materials they consume a lot of.

- Ingredients typically consumed in bulk, or are used in several recipes, especially if you can't make them yourself.

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Originally Posted by Zourin

2: 1-stage process raw goods into compressed forms, such as ores, logs, and fibers into ingots, lumber, and cloth. Sell off excess material or buy the 1-2 peices to round things off.

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Just keep in mind that this part only saves space if you have several full stacks of the same raw item. You will always be adding at least two additional stacks (a NQ and a HQ stack of the intermediate item you're making) any time you process raw mats into intermediate ones, so the only way it helps you on storage space is if you're gaining more slots than that from the condensing effect. If it's an item where 3 of the raw mats make 1 intermediate mat, then when you have 4 stacks of the raw item, you may be able to condense that. If it's an item where it only takes 2 of the raw item to make 1 intermediate item, then you wouldn't gain space by processing it unless you have at least 5 stacks of the raw item.

(Personally, I prefer simply not to gather that far in advance of what I need, but some people who prefer to focus solely on gathering for long stretches of time may wind up in that situation where processing mats is actually helpful for storage.)

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Just keep in mind that this part only saves space if you have several full stacks of the same raw item. You will always be adding at least two additional stacks (a NQ and a HQ stack of the intermediate item you're making) any time you process raw mats into intermediate ones....

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If you keep more than 1 stack of NQ/HQ of any item as a 'reserve for storage', you're simply hoarding, and should probably stop. Having it 'in the back' waiting for a spot on a retainer for sale is different, depending on the volume of sales you can expect.

I fully consume the raw material and discard excess when compressing into intermediaries. In the case of ores, I never 'store' ore other than iron (since it's used for three ingots). Therefore, those stacks of NQ/HQ ore simply do not exist on my retainer or inventory. Only working goods. I am not going to cry over throwing out a few scraps of material if it's uselessly consuming space.

This is even relieved further by removing HQ stacks of intermediates/ingredients that are 10 levels or more below mine. Those items have a minimal impact in quality during crafting and, if an HQ intermediary is advantageous, can be HQ'ed in my sleep with NQ ingredients.

You're saying I have 4 stacks of iron (NQ/HQ ore, NQ/HQ ingots) when in reality I have 1 stack of NQ iron ore. I don't have 4 stacks of Mythril. I discard excess ore, keep the HQ ingots I make for myself. I immediately process hides for LTW, immediately process lumber for CRP, etc.

Things DO get wierd for CUL's and ALC's, but that's a matter of controlling the impulse to casually buy too much of any one thing when you don't need it.

In regards to 'bulk' anything, there simply isn't the economy for people to think they can go around playing walmart and trying to be clever thinking there's any advantage to having a bottomless bag of everything laying around. It's just pack-ratting, plain and simple. If you're running around with 10 stacks of NQ and HQ moko grass "just in case", then you may need to re-evaluate what you're doing.

Glues, oils, and things, since I'm not an alchemist or weaver, I may have 2 stacks (Nq+HQ) since I'll take those ingredients however I can so I don't have to harass and chase people to have them made. If I have to buy something from the AH, it's usually in small quantities in a single stack.

Oh my god, I thought I was subscribed but didn't notice the email option, so I didn't see any of the replies. But thanks! Some great advice that I'll follow through on...having two extra retainers now certainly helps :o