Quote Originally Posted by Shirai View Post
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.
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.