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.

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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.

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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.

Honestly I keep thinking about rolling alts for no other purpose than to quickly get shards by doing this. Is that a time-efficient method?

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Originally Posted by Deuxclydion

Honestly I keep thinking about rolling alts for no other purpose than to quickly get shards by doing this. Is that a time-efficient method?

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-Gathering Retainers can get them by venturing
-You can get them from doing crafting leves (just make sure to select the leve that gives you a better shard reward than it cost you to craft) Occasionally you'll see your crafting leves offer 50+ shards for 1 turn in item. So just browse them and see what is the good turn in and do that.
-You get shards for completing a treasure map. So if you do a map a day, you'll tend to be able to keep your shards stocked enough for general crafting needs.
-You CAN gather your own/Kill elementals for them

Buuuut really:

If Fire Shards are selling for 20gil ea on your server, just gather/craft something you can sell for MORE than that a stack, and then use profits to buy yourself the shards. 20gil each isn't expensive....people just don't like having to buy them in volume. But if you sold 1 stack of logs for 100 gil. That ONE stack of logs would earn you enough gil in profit to buy about 500 shards at 20gil ea. You can gather a stack of 100 logs in about 10 minutes as a level 50 btn.

If you don't gather, farm hides etc.

My point: Typically farming your own shards just isn't really worth it.

Well I just got in a pricing war with someone else and crashed it from 70gil to 20 in a few minutes. Thanks obama

I'm pretty sure this is what RMT used to, and possibly still, do.

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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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Do you realize how many RMT companies support themselves in part through the shard market? What some players do one time on their characters will hardly crash prices, and for any crafters out there who had not considered this .. well, more money out of the RMT companies' pockets.

If you watch shard sales histories, you can see people crashing the market every few days ... and then they recover ... Wind shards are never cheap for long on my server.

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Originally Posted by Deuxclydion

Honestly I keep thinking about rolling alts for no other purpose than to quickly get shards by doing this. Is that a time-efficient method?

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It's only time-efficient for alts who have finished the level 15 main story quest and have visited all three cities. If you have alts between that and level 10 who can join other guilds, you can hit the two to three crafting guilds in the city you are in for maybe 50k worth of shards.

As for starting off a new toon? Think about the time it takes to level from 1 to 15 and advance all that story line. For me? I can think of better ways to make gil. If just going to 10 and hitting the 3 guilds in your city sounds doable, I recommend starting in Ul'dah. It has 3 crafting guilds and the best mix of shards in terms of the ones that hold to higher values on the market.

That's nice.

I'm level 50 all crafts already and I have twelve million gil to make to buy a house.

Logically, wouldn't the RMT buy up all those cheap shards while the market is crashed, and relist them a few months later when people have gotten bored at this and rake in the double?

I wouldn't mind people doing this more. Personally, I don't buy from "suspected" RMT sellers (those with 10 or more stacks or a certain item, shards or fleece or whatever, listed) - so if more normal people would be there to supply me shards, you are welcome to do so.

Why not just do 6 gathering leves each day that give you shards as reward?

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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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What? What is left to be ruined? Send the retainers out every 50 mins = 120 shards.

I honestly wont lose sleep if the shard market crashes to the floor anyway...I'd feel bad about this if retainers/botters weren't digging thousands and thousands a day, but they do, so gathering them manually is currently a sad waste of time ( even though I love to do it for some masochistic reason...)

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Originally Posted by Felis

Why not just do 6 gathering leves each day that give you shards as reward?

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Tradecraft leves are a little like Russian Roulette. What you need to craft to fill them can hurt pretty bad or not at all. The 30 leatherworker leves available to me now at the Carline Canopy only have 2 with shard payouts over 30. One is a level 15 leve granting 36 earth shards for 3 aldgoat leathers. Crafting takes away 3 earth shards, so you come out 33 ahead. The other asks for a boarskin skirt with a payout of 56 wind shards. The problem isn't the 9 shards the boarskin skirt costs you, it's the 20 additional shards eaten by crafting components. It looks like 56, but it's only 27. I guess the moral is to look for low-level leves calling for basic mats and not component-heavy items.

Honest question because I never pay attention: do all the leves at all levels refresh when you complete one, or only the ones at the level you chose?

And about the market. The averages prices I posted above could have had a standard deviation of 15 gil either way. The higher the average, the bigger the spread. My experience says low-balled stacks of shards disappear before RMT traders take them seriously, and the names I see on the sales history tend to be the server's biggest crafters. But when it comes down to it, RMT companies have a big financial stake in making sure shard prices restock their gil supply, otherwise they lose real money. Anyone stupid enough to low-ball RMT sales is never going to make what the market is willing to bear.

You know, I'd like to suggest another use of this. In particular, this is for you FC crafters out there who have big shard costs and perhaps not enough support from your FC. Make this into an FC event.

Even if you only have a few people in your FC who do not craft and never will, getting a group together to run and do the level 1 quests can build some fellowship and give your FC mates a chance to feel they are paying the crafters back. If you can come up with some sort of incentive -- whatever would be meaningful in your FC's "rewards" for its members, such as credit towards a higher rank within the FC -- it could provide additional incentive to spend 30 minutes traveling with your FC en masse to 8 guilds in 3 cities to have 2 conversations each with 2 people at each guild. To convince them to stay at each for 10 more minutes to spam Basic Synthesis enough to hit level 5 and do 1 more quest, give everyone who does this an HQ 3-stack of the potion or ether that fits their level. If they go the extra mile and get 3 of those classes to 10, give them an HQ 5-stack of their favorite food. I'm picking potions and foods because most of them have no crafted components, so the shard cost is low. Finally, for those who put in the effort for perhaps 6, perhaps all 8 of the classes to get them to level 10, craft some of the new appearance gear that requires mats from treasure maps or ventures and do a random draw to see who gets them. Or give them a "ticket" for each class they get to level 10 so they can have up to 8 chances to win.

Oh, and if you do have some sort of contest for leveling crafts to 10, you might want to set a deadline several days in the future from the initial event. Getting 8 crafts to level 5 takes little time. Those other 5 levels take a bit longer. Report people's progress as a means to egg on the others. And have them convert any gear from quest rewards that gets spiritbound into materia, donating that materia to the FC.