Farming Recommendation

[Chukkaque]

Hello!

Im casually just passing the days before Stormblood arrives. As such I started doing the weekly gathering "quest" for the orphanage and collecting weekly red scripts.
Im mostly just gearing myself in 200, minus weapons, before 4.0

Ive been farming crystal to sell, but does anyone have recommendations for other things to farm and sell? I'm not heavily interested in timed nodes and having to fly out to places. But something simple and time consuming I don't mind doing.

Just not sure where the market is these days for craters and such. Haven't watched it since 3.2.

[Berilein]

https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Ephemeral_Nodes

You'll want to hit these, they are timed, but there is always one up, and they last 4 hours and you can respawn them for the whole 4 hours. Anyway, on my server the yellow sand is 4-10k, red sand is 10k NQ and 20k HQ, the green/brown/blue sand, the 8/8 stuff, is worthless. The light kissed sand is 10k a piece.

The yellow sand you can even farm without spending GP. You also get the crystals and clusters you are farming anyway. I really hope you were not going around just gathering crystals on there own.

[Elamys]

on my server the yellow sand is 4-10k, red sand is 10k NQ and 20k HQ, the green/brown/blue sand, the 8/8 stuff, is worthless. The light kissed sand is 10k a piece.

Yellow = Duskborne, Red = Dawnborne, Green = Leafborne, Brown = Landborne, Blue = Seaborne. Leaf/Land/Sea are from BTN/MIN/FSH respectively. Landborne sand has actually been somewhat valuable on Balmung, but that's mostly for glamour gear and it's a hard sell. Note that with SB coming these may no longer be valuable at all, as they're used for either high end soon to be outdated gear or consumables.

Also note that every server's market is different. It's very difficult on Balmung to make a profit on gathering alone because you have to invest so much time, since there's so many people.

My biggest advice is not to put all your eggs in one basket. There's plenty of steady sellers you can always rely on - crystals, the aethersands above, flax/ramie/-blank- cotton boll, all of the ores, grenade/bomb ash, etc. If you like to fish, the corals and mogpoms are fairly easy to get and profitable.

Search the MB for items you enjoy farming and put up decent amounts of them. You might find a great, profitable market on something, but don't count on that lasting for long, because someone is going to find that market too, and then someone else, and someone else...and pretty soon your advantage is gone. So the keyword is to diversify!

Hand in hand with diversifying what you sell is to make sure you don't flood the market. Posting 100 stacks of something will drive down the price very quickly. Remember that you are never the only one gathering an item, at least, not for long.

Also, in regards to stacks? You will sell faster, and make more money, if you split those stacks of 99 up into smaller chunks. Most crafters are casual crafters, they don't want 99 titanium ore, they just want the 10 they need to make a new weapon. By selling in smaller stacks, you can also mark up at a slight premium per item compared to the people selling in large stacks, because the final price of the amount you put up is still going to be lower than their total.

Your biggest tool, especially when farming rarer items, is the history tool. It's the icon that looks like a page in the top right corner of your search results. That will show you the time, date, price, and buyer of an item. You don't want to waste your time farming an item that sells once a week for 1k gil.

Happy gathering!

TL;DR: ores, sands from HW mining nodes, flax, stuff used to make gear, mostly. Check crafting logs to see how often an item gets used. Don't rely on selling most CUL items as a lot can either be purchased from a vendor or are used in recipes that have no value.