How many Retainers

[cgbspender]

Please define hardcore crafting.

[Nutz]

I have 4 retainers total. 1 MNK, 1 MIN, 1 BOT, 1 FSH. This works out pretty well for ventures, though DoW/M seem to be much more useful and I'm constantly wanting more things from that retainer than the MIN/ BOT ones.

For storage I use the first retainer for misc items. Things that have no specific place or temp storage. I'll put collectibles there if I'm waiting for reset or for something to be 'starred', for example. I would put maps there, except they don't stack so everyone gets maps. Furniture and materia go here also. The second retainer is all glamour (that I'll probably never use). Third retainer is metal and gems (basically stuff for ARM, BSM, and GSM) mostly. Fourth is cloth, leather, and reagents (WVR, LTW, and ALC). I don't usually keep a stock of cooking supplies, but what I do have is on retainer 1.

Retainer 1 usually has a decent amount of space while everyone else is shuffling between 75% and 100% full. HW really made a mess of my inventory not only with the sheer quantity of items added, but the volume needed to do much of anything. Many recipes calling for 3-5 of a raw ingredient to make a nugget/ thread/ leather/ etc. and you end up with recipes that require something like 100 ingredients once you account for all of the steps between raw ingredients and finished product.

I'm way behind on crafting. It feels like blue/red gatherer scrips are just free and easy while collecting any reasonable amount of crafter scrips requires an enormous amount of time and planning, even if it's just keeping a huge supply of the ingredients for your one preferred recipe. Really the crafting scrips seem to require a Hell of a lot more gathering than the gathering scrips.

[panderin]

Please define hardcore crafting.

Primary reason for logging in spends majority of time crafting...is my own opinion. It is subjective ofc

[NinjaDecoy]

Im a hoarder, so I use 4 retainers. Each time i get a new retainer its empty for a short time then gets filled super quick.I have 1 for food ingrediants, another for ingots (Actual ingots leathers, lumbers, etc), the 3rd is gear and materia, and the 4th is raw mats such as ore or logs.
I lowered quality of all my duplicate items so that cleared up some space but i refuse to throw away items, cause what if i need it?

[RojGardoth]

I have 8 but it's not all about hardcore crafting. I am also a bit of a hoarder. My retainers are: 1 BTN, 2 MIN, 1 FSH, and 4 DoW. Fisher I usually just have out on ventures to try to get minions. The others are usually collecting crafting mats (when I have ventures). When I save up a bunch of ventures, sometimes I'll run a bunch of quick ventures. For storage, one retainer is for primarily processed items (ingots, leather, gems, etc.), two are for raw crafting items (ore, logs, fleece, ramie, sands, plants, waters, saps, etc.) and split up in no way I can possibly explain, one is for CUL items, one is for gear drops from dungeons and raids and old gear to be reused on new jobs (i.e. ironworks gear previously used for WAR now saved for DRK), one is for glamour items and furniture, one is for materia/demimateria and seeds/gardening items, and one is for special items (unidentified, coins, crafting gear from dungeons/raids/trials, favors items, etc.) and fishing gear/bait

[LineageRazor]

I have five retainers:
Retainer 1 - Wood, cloth, leather, alchemy materials, all NQ.
Retainer 2 - Metal, stone, gems, bones, all NQ.
Retainer 3 - Cooking ingredients and fish, all NQ.
Retainer 4 - Materia, potions and other consumables, a stock of assorted HQ ingredients.
Retainer 5 - Glamour, gardening seeds, fishing tackle, assorted tokens (Goblin dice and cups, favor mats, beast tribe tokens, etc)

Most of these retainers are full or nearly so. I could probably clean them up a bit, toss out some ingreds that I'm likely never to use, but even afterwards I'd likely still need five. They'd just have more elbow room.

[TaleraRistain]

5 on my main and 5 on my first alt who's into post 50 crafting. My other alts aren't high enough to worry about more than 2 yet. I also handle FC matters so I store overflow from our chest in some of the space.

[FoxyAreku]

I have 3 retainers, but I don't actually use any of them for materials anymore.

Hoarding materials (unless they are materials that are annoying to get like glass fibers or what have you) just feels pointless to me these days when I can just grab them off the marketboard for a few k or gather them myself as I need them, so I just sell any materials I don't immediately need.

[cgbspender]

I have 8.

Four of them are DOW / DOM and I use them for ventures like yak milk / dragon blood most of the time. Other times - when necessary for blue scrips / or for the sake of stacking mats that I think are relevant - I can send them on other items (deep tear eyes, etc...)
Two are botanist, and help me keep a continuous incoming flux for culinarian recipes.
One is miner, and I rarely need it, except sometimes for ores.
The last is fisher, I use it mainly for sweetfish, and dravanian bar (perch ? I never know what they're called in english) and desynth them into Skillspeed IV.
iner
I main culinarian, if I were to change anything, it would probably be remove 1 DOW and take another Bota instead. And swap my miner with another Bota as well.

That's not gonna happen, I'm constantly struggling to send them on ventures, because of tokens, and I won't spend another levelling up 1-60.

[Gemina]

I'm an aspiring crafter, but after getting my gatherers to 50+ I made it a point not to hold onto mats. I know how nice it is to have mats on hand, but the stress of inventory management just isn't worth it. More retainers = more management, so I currently have no additional retainers and acquire/craft mats as I need them. The only reason why I want additional retainers is to increase my ability to acquire mats, not really hold on to them.

Some mats, especially regents and other cross mats I will mass gather/produce HQ and hang on to them, but even these are thrown in the company chest after I am done for everyone to use. I'm hoping I can keep this up throughout the leveling process using the two retainers I currently have. I still need to level the classes I want to assign to additional retainers.