Working with Materia - Need Crafting Help

[ElysiaGalandel]

Right, first thing first, does the item you want to put mateia in have slots?
Secondly, look at the items ilvl, lower ilvl items can't accept materia of a higher level.

Good gods it would be bad if I didn't know so much as to see that it had empty slots. This isn't my first Final Fantasy and I've got a good hundreds of hours into this one... it would be embarrassing if I didn't even check that much. I mean I know this section is for new players, but...

That being said, I never had to check individual item level for anything but the average item level of my whole outfit, and even then it took an embarrassing amount of time to find "item level" as opposed to level required for my character to equip it. Thanks for pointing it out for me.

And of course, my highest-level crafter gear I got from the Moogles right now doesn't have item slots, so I'm stuck with what I could get for waist and accessories. Disappointing that I reached my level cap at the moment and still don't seem to be able to equip even materia IV... at this point in my adventure, they don't seem to be adding that much to the numbers.

Each gear piece has a stat cap for each stat. If it's red, then the gear has reached this cap, or will exceed the cap when the materia is applied, so try using materia of another stat.

If all of the gear is capped on those stats then the only other thing you can do is see if you can get a higher item level of gear.

This is something good for me to keep in mind though, seeing as the red stats was in fact another thing I saw from this same scenario.

For battle jobs you can go to a materia melder NPC and meld it so having a crafter isn't required for those.

But to further clarify, I was talking about upping stats for a crafting job, not leveling a craft just to work on melding materia. I wanted to up my craftmanship stat so I'd be skilled enough to make a couple minions and skirts, as I mentioned in my original post.

[Brightamethyst]

Good gods it would be bad if I didn't know so much as to see that it had empty slots. This isn't my first Final Fantasy and I've got a good hundreds of hours into this one... it would be embarrassing if I didn't even check that much. I mean I know this section is for new players, but...

Some people come in knowing absolutely nothing, and that's okay too.

And of course, my highest-level crafter gear I got from the Moogles right now doesn't have item slots, so I'm stuck with what I could get for waist and accessories. Disappointing that I reached my level cap at the moment and still don't seem to be able to equip even materia IV... at this point in my adventure, they don't seem to be adding that much to the numbers.

What level are you talking about? You should be able to slot rank 4 materia into level 50+ items.