How does one break into crafting?

[Dement]

If you come to terms with the fact that you aren't going to go from casual crafter to 3 star crafter in the span of a few weeks without dropping millions of gil, the barrier of entry isn't nearly as high. If you level your gatherers, you can get all of your materials for free, it will just take time. The driving costs for the crafter gear are the favor items which you can get quite a bit of relatively easily, only you are capped on how many you can get per week due to gatherer red scrips. I did 5 MIN (received from 1 red gatherer favor) and 5 BTN favors (received from 1 red gatherer favor) on Saturday night and over the course of 2 hours I had 35 Odorless animal fats which would make 7 griffin leathers for items, if you don't spend the gatherer red scrips on gatherer gear, you can get 9 red gatherer scrips per week. Alternatively, you can also just cap your red crafter scrips per week and buy the 180 gear as you are able to.

The next hurdle is materia overmelding. You can spend a fortune getting the materia off of the market board, or you can make a few sets of 55-60 white crafter gear, meld them with very cheap materia, and spirit bond those sets while you quick synth large stacks of raw materials. You then have your own stacks of materia to meld your gear with.

The key is to trace back to the materials you need and see how they are originally acquired if you don't want to spend a fortune. You will likely miss the incredibly lucrative phase of the 3 star crafter boat in this patch cycle but you have plenty of time to get them geared before the next cycle begins.