Question for the Crafters

[CodeCass]

I strongly advise you to level your gatherers as well. It saves you a ton of money if you are able to get your own materials. Plus, every piece of gear you spiritbond, convert and save the materia. You will need them later to meld yourself.

Uh oh.....I haven't been saving any materia T_T....I've been selling it as soon as I convert my gear from my DoM/DoW classes to build up some gil. Have a hurt myself in the long run?

I have been saving 90% of the drops I get from mobs though...skins and whatnot because I figured having those might help later on.

[baopee]

if you do not farm or gather the materias, get ready to spend over 50 mil gils to get to 4 star crafting or maybe I just really bad at crafting..

[Kael_Raiju]

Food: Agree but I'd still use it regardless. Just out of habit for me.

Crafting for you: this doesn't preclude you from making items. The tactic behind this is to level everything quickly. If you don't want the grind and/or don't have money to waste on crafts IE NQing stuff routinely due to lack of cross class skills. I used this method to level every crafter to 50. Once I got there, I learned how to craft 1* items. You can make so many mistakes and still be fine. On another note, it is a good idea to craft various items of various levels. I say this because the more you understand your abilities the better you will be at crafting. Someone can post a rotation but I can assure you RNG will insert itself at the worse times. This is where your knowledge comes in; what abilities do you have and how much CP. What can you do to work around RNG. Sure you can reclaim but you risk losing your mats and if you want crafting to be interesting then challenge yourself to work around RNG.

[CodeCass]

Quite a bit of great information to be had here, and I appreciate all the help folks!

I do have one more silly beginner question though:
When I've worked on crafting before, I notice the item itself seems to glow and change colors. I've seen it white, and red I think, and I know I've seen it purple with a dark core (looks rather ominous :P ) I was just curious what this actually was and if it means anything. I'm sure the tutorial told me and I just missed it when I was reading it (there is quite a lot to take in for the crafting world)

Thanks again everyone!

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I generally don't look at the item, but I've seen what you are talking about.

The various highlights correspond to the various Conditions. There is Normal (no highlight), Good, Excellent, and Poor.

Normal is, well, normal. Nothing special happens.
Good, two things can happen. One, you can pop a Tricks of the Trade (if you have that skill available, level 15 ALC cross class skill) to get up to 20 CP back (its always 20, unless you're under 20 from full). Two, any Quality adding action (any Touch, or Byregot's Blessing) will add 50% more. If you're working Progress, nothing special happens.
Excellent does two things. One, any Quality adding action adds quadruple the normal Quality. Two, it automatically makes the immediately following Condition to be Poor.
Poor can ONLY follow immediately after Excellent. Any Quality adding action only adds half the normal Quality.


I want to say a brighter White glow is Good, a lot of rainbow colors is Excellent, and the Black/Purple is Poor. But, I'm not 100% positive on that.

[Niwashi]

When I've worked on crafting before, I notice the item itself seems to glow and change colors. I've seen it white, and red I think, and I know I've seen it purple with a dark core (looks rather ominous :P ) I was just curious what this actually was and if it means anything. I'm sure the tutorial told me and I just missed it when I was reading it (there is quite a lot to take in for the crafting world)

The color indicates the condition (which is also listed by name in the crafting window). It may be Excellent (alternating rainbow of colors), Good (red), Normal (white), or Poor (purple).
The better the condition, the more Quality will be added by a Touch action during that turn.

[Snootles]

Uh oh.....I haven't been saving any materia T_T....I've been selling it as soon as I convert my gear from my DoM/DoW classes to build up some gil. Have a hurt myself in the long run?

I have been saving 90% of the drops I get from mobs though...skins and whatnot because I figured having those might help later on.

Spiritbond, my dear. Spiritbond! It's not as bad as it seems.

Drops always worth saving: Diremite webs (base product for velveteen cloth which is a glamour prisms ingredient), boarskins, Gigantoad skins (glamour prism ingredient), raptor skins. Don't forget the sinews either.

Setting yourself to quick synth with food + manual and afking is great lol.

[ChameleonMS]

Join a Free Company that has Material Supplier house merchant, if you haven't already. The Materials Supplier has 90% of all crafting mat you will need below level 20. The sales price from Material Supplier is a small fraction of the price on the MB. And, you do not need to spend time gathering.

You will, as other have mentioned, want to level your gatherers, as they will enable to you obtain mats above level 20 with only a small time investment.

[CodeCass]

Join a Free Company that has Material Supplier house merchant, if you haven't already. The Materials Supplier has 90% of all crafting mat you will need below level 20. The sales price from Material Supplier is a small fraction of the price on the MB. And, you do not need to spend time gathering.

My FC actually has this already. I was going to ask if buying from him would be better than buying from the MB or the Guild Merchants.

[Niwashi]

My FC actually has this already. I was going to ask if buying from him would be better than buying from the MB or the Guild Merchants.

The Materials Supplier has what the guild merchants do, but consolidated in one place rather than spread across eight different crafting guildhalls in three cities, so it's a significant convenience advantage (though no actual change in what is or isn't available). If you've built up reputation with the beast tribes, however, some of the crafting mats they sell are not available from other NPC merchants, not even your Materials Supplier, so as you start to out-level the supplies the Materials Supplier has, you'll need to consider when it's worth traveling around to the beast tribes to buy the next tier of mats.

The market board is more variable. Occasionally you can find items there that are actually cheaper than what an NPC would charge you for them, but more often it's more expensive there. People buy mats from the MB either for convenience when they don't want to travel around to find the NPC who sells an item, or when it's an item that isn't available from any NPCs.

XIVDB.com or the Libra Eorzea iOS/Android app can tell you which NPCs (if any) sell a given material (and for how much). Personally, I think the Libra Eorzea app has the better interface of the two for finding things.