just started mining, any tips?

[Corkafish]

Doing leves as a gatherer is a waste of leveallowances. I would HIGHLY suggest against doing that. Save them for your crafting job. The leve allowances for gathering are only SLIGHTLY faster than just grinding it out. Also, you can self-sustain crafting by leveling it and selling HQ items along the way, then buy the mats for the next tier. Ect.

The sad truth is, if you're adamant about gathering to self sustain.. You'd have a better go of it just gathering shards, and selling Shards for gil and then buying materials you need.. Than puling up ore and stuff.

If you go the route of farming shards for gil, make sure to get both Botany and Mining up to 20 first. That lets you spend 400 GP to farm 15 of any kind of shard out of the same node (with an extra gathering attempt proc).