At what levels would you say gathering is profitable?

[Raygan]

I'm lvl 30 now and have gathered a multitude of different items just to see if they would fetch high on the market boards, but haven't had too much luck yet. A couple things sold decent-ish... but not more than a couple hundred coins. Does it get better? I picked botanist + alchemy to focus on right now. My alch is similar level.

[MistakeNot]

At low levels most things are easy to get for everyone - so not much demand for them.

I'd suggest you level all your crafting classes (leveling all of them at once is a good idea anyway), and see what items you are tempted to buy from the market boards because gathering them is such a hassle. Those are the items you should try selling.

[Dement]

Gathering is profitable at most any level because you only have 1 fixed cost and that's gear/materia. After that you can make money at any time that you desire. Some things are definitely more profitable than others but even a stack of 99 items that takes about 15 minutes to get and sell for 300 gil each is 30k. That being said, the higher your level the fewer people there are that can gather higher tier items, thus the supply is smaller and the prices higher. The new SB items are selling at very high prices from what I've seen. NQs of a regular 68 node is 3-4k per item while HQs are 15-20k per item (server dependent). At least that's where they're listed at right now... that doesn't necessarily mean that people will pay those prices.

I would focus on leveling up at this point while selling anything you get for whatever you're able to sell them for. It may not seem profitable but it will likely come close to being break even for what you pay in gear. If you're able to get a crafter friend to make you gear for cheap or free then it's all profit.

[ChameleonMS]

The market price and demand always ebbs and flows. The most consistent return is consumable items such as Food or Glamour Prisms e.g. Silver Ore > Silver Ingot > Goldsmith Glamour Prism.
The highest return is for the very high end timed nodes returns because the market supply is limited. This requires the most level/gear/materia investment though.

[Niwashi]

It kind of depends on whether you're looking at the amount of gil you get per item (which gets you a higher return compared to the time you spend gathering them) or at how quickly you can get a high volume turnover of items (which can get you more gil per day/week/month, provided you're willing to spend quite a bit of time gathering).

For high volume sales, that starts right away at level 1, since people want crafting shards by the thousands. You don't get much per shard, but sometimes getting say a fifth the price of other items but selling ten or twenty times as many works out in your favor. (I earned a significant portion of the cost of a house this way, since I was trying to build up my cash reserves in time for new housing wards opening. Anything else I could sell only in smaller quantities or it would flood the market, but shards would keep selling as fast as I could gather them.)

After that, various types of logs as well as cloth materials like cotton or flax are a middle tier of materials people want in significant quantities and whose prices tend to beat that of shards at least. Different types tend overall to go up in price as they go up in levels, but it varies by who's been farming which of them lately, so watch the marketboard for what's in low supply at the moment.

Then there are a whole lot of miscellaneous ingredients you can gather which are less predictable. Sometimes they might fetch a good price and other times they might just sit on the MB without selling until you drop the price down to next to nothing. I haven't spent much effort on figuring out which of these are most worthwhile. I usually just gather them when I need them for my own crafting and ignore them otherwise.

Once you reach level 50 there are nodes that only appear at certain times, which makes those items significantly rarer, and you can make quite a bit per item on many of them if you keep track of the in-game time that you can gather them. But since you can't gather them in bulk, you're limited in how many you'll have to sell.

(I'm only to level 50 myself, so can't say much about 51-70, but so far as I've heard, it seems to follow basically the same pattern as 1-50. Right now there will be particularly high prices for some of the Stormblood materials, but that's a temporary effect of it having just been released. Once more DoL get there and prices settle down, they're likely to be in line with the rest of the game, as there wasn't anything functionally new released.)

[Dzian]

I\\'m lvl 30 now and have gathered a multitude of different items just to see if they would fetch high on the market boards, but haven\\'t had too much luck yet. A couple things sold decent-ish... but not more than a couple hundred coins. Does it get better? I picked botanist + alchemy to focus on right now. My alch is similar level.

Theres 2 problems with dol

1- Everything\\'s easy to get. Thus everything is super cheap. Even things like adamantite or camphorwood and lumythryte. None of it\\'s that valuable. It\\'s all incredibly easy to get.

Even timed nodes for example. Most of those you can simply send your dol retainer out to get if you don't want to wait around too much

2- due to crafted gear being pretty much catch up junk only the demand for it is incredibly low. Which means the suplly of materials is always in a massive surplass thus lowering prices even more.

The exception being glamour items. But they typically require rare items from things like aquopolis and as such can\\'t be gathered anyway. If the materials could all be gathered those 10 million ponchos would have been pocket change due to the abundance of materials used to make them.

If you want to make money I would say intelligent selling is your friend...

Many people will go out and gather there own stuff simply because the people that are selling it are doing so in ridiculous quantities..

if I need 4 of something to make a piece of gear or something i'm not going to buy a stack of 99 from the market boards even if they were 100gil each.. I would however buy a stack of 5 even if they were 10 times the price at 1k each.. however when all the stacks are 99. i'll just go grab them myself...

I used to make loads on materials for colectables crafts selling in decent quatities. loads of stacks of 99 chimerical felts flood the markets at like 3.5k each. and i'd put up 5 stacks of 10 at 10k each and sell em all in a single night. while all the stacks of 99 went unsold