Does teleporting back and forth between Old Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han have your coinpurse feeling a little light these days? Are you dreaming of being yet another catboy in an expensive Rebel Coat AFKing in Limsa? Or are you aspiring to become an Honest Gillionaire? No matter your reasoning, we’re here to teach you the best ways to make gil in FFXIV.
Let’s get started!
The Hard Truth
Unfortunately, there is no one easy method to make gil. There are many ways you can earn lots of gil in FFXIV. However, it’s essential to understand that gil-making methods change over time. This is because the best way to earn gil in Final Fantasy XIV is by selling items on the market board.
The market board is subject to the whims of the player base. Different worlds and data centers will have different supply and demand. Whenever you see someone popularizing a gil-making method that relies on farming or mass-crafting a specific item, they inevitably wind up inflating supply. When the supply outpaces the demand, that method stops being effective. It might not become completely defunct right away, but it won’t make you a gillionare overnight.
But don’t worry! There’s a method to this madness. There are also other ways to make gil that don’t involve spending all of your time having a one-on-one about price changes with your retainer. In this guide, we’ll teach you how to identify ways to make gil on the market board and highlight some other sources of income that FFXIV has to offer.
Making it Big on the Market Board
This might sound a little bit like an economics class, but Final Fantasy XIV is an MMORPG, and it does have an economy. The best method for making gil in FFXIV is by studying the market board and identifying good niche markets.
The number one rule for figuring out what to sell on the market board is this: people will pay for convenience. Everything that can be bought on the market board can be obtained through other means. Some people would rather pay for items rather than spend time crafting, gathering, grinding, or traveling to see an NPC vendor in the game world.
That brings us to the second rule of selling items on the market board — some people don’t know where to get things. Final Fantasy XIV is a huge game with four expansions worth of content under its belt, and every few months it gets bigger when new patches drop. There are people who have made it all the way to the endgame that probably don’t realize you can buy Glamour Prisms with Grand Company Seals from your company’s Quartermaster.
Flipping prisms (and dispellers) is one of many ways to make a quick buck on the market board. It won’t make you a ton of money, but there will always be players buying prisms off the market board because they can’t be bothered to get them from somewhere else.
Now, checking the market board in game can be a bit time consuming if you’re trying to do extensive research. Thankfully, there is a neat community tool called Universalis that you can use to browse any market board on any server without logging into the game!
With that out of the way, let’s talk about some of the popular methods for making gil on the market board in FFXIV.
Diadem Materials
If you’ve read our crafting guide, you’ll know that crafting items for the Ishgardian Restoration in the Firmament is the best way to level up your crafter jobs. Where do the materials for those items come from? The answer lies in the Diadem, which is, consequently, the best place to level your gatherer jobs. Once you reach Level 10 on any gatherer, you can enter the Diadem and start harvesting its spoils.
While it’s well-known that crafters make money by selling their goods on the market board, it may not be immediately obvious that gatherers have the same gil-making potential. Crafting and gathering are entwined in Final Fantasy XIV, but it can take a very long time to level them side by side. Gathering your own materials is a long and tiresome process.
This brings us back to the principle of convenience. Most crafters would rather purchase materials off the market board than gather them. Diadem materials are the easiest to sell. Crafters that are leveling will always need those materials for their Restoration turn-ins. If you want to start making gil right away, get a gatherer to Level 10 and hop in the Diadem. You’ll walk away with plenty of materials that are pretty much guaranteed to sell on the market board.
How much they’ll sell for is up in the air and depends on your server’s economy. Selling Diadem materials is a great way to become familiar with how market board culture works. This is a market where there is always good demand, but also decent supply. You will see large amounts of people trying to sell their materials at the same time.
Undercutting is the process of selling goods at a lower price than your competitors in order to sell them faster. You will see it all the time with Diadem materials. Whether you choose to undercut your competitors or make a hopeful attempt to drive up prices is up to you. Just make sure you’re pricing your items at a reasonable level, and they will sell…eventually.
Other Gathering Opportunities
Diadem materials are a very straightforward and easy way of making gil in FFXIV. If you’re already leveling your gatherers, you can find plenty of other opportunities to make money. Hard-to-find crafting materials will sell for high prices. You can also gather Treasure Maps and sell those — or you can use them yourself, which we’ll get to later.
You also don’t have to have gathering leveled to find materials to sell! Overworld mobs will drop crafting materials when killed. Some of these are commonly used and can be sold for a pretty penny. If you aren’t using the materials you get from combat drops, you should be selling them. Sometimes they’re not worth putting on the marketboard, but you can still get some quick gil for them from NPC vendors.
Furnishings
If you’ve got a somewhat-leveled Carpenter and the ability to craft basic furniture items, congratulations! You can tap into a market that has a pretty steady customer base. Lucky homeowners in FFXIV are always spending gil to purchase more furniture to decorate with. They often require items that are pretty low level and easy to craft. These basic items are commonly used for furniture glitching. This is another market where there will be consistently good demand.
You can start crafting furnishings after you hit Level 11. From there on, there are furnishing items available at low levels that will sell for decent prices. If you want to craft for gil but only want to focus on one job, Carpenter is a great option.
Other Crafting Opportunities
Telling players that crafting is a good way to make gil is broad and kind of bad advice. It requires a large time investment and can sometimes cause you to spend more than you earn. Like we said earlier, most crafters prefer to buy their materials. Crafting can become very expensive if you want to do it quickly.
That said, our advice for crafting will echo points we made earlier in this guide — identify a good market and capitalize on it. If you’re really interested in crafting, pick a single job to level that has good profit potential. We’ve already mentioned furnishings, but other good paths to go down would be:
- Weaver for glamour items.
- Goldsmith for accessories.
- Blacksmith and Armorer for weapons and gear.
It’s important to note that the crafting and gathering jobs in FFXIV are deeply intertwined and often require items from each other. At the same time, there is some crossover between crafters and what they can create. Weaver isn’t the only job capable of crafting glamour items, just as Blacksmith isn’t the only job capable of crafting weapons.
If you aren’t an aspiring omnicrafter, look at the crafting logs for each job to figure out where their money-making potential lies. Choose one based off what you think you’ll enjoy most (or what will sell best). Keep in mind that supply and demand change over time, so there’s no “best crafter job” to pick.
Rare and Hard-to-Get Items
There are tons of exclusive items in Final Fantasy XIV that you can only get by participating in certain kinds of content. They are locked behind different currencies or require a large investment of time. Many of them can be sold on the market board.
Circling back to selling convenience, if someone doesn’t want to participate in content but wants the rewards anyways, they will buy them off the market board if they can. A good example of this would be minions. Not all minions can be sold on the market board, but there are plenty that can be. There are plenty of rare minions that drop in dungeons. If you don’t want them for yourself (or you already have them) you can sell those on the market board. Other sellable minions can be obtained with Khloe’s Certificates of Commendation that you receive from completing your weekly Wondrous Tails.
Another example worth mentioning is dyes. A lot of optional content offers up hard-to-get dyes as a reward, and — just like prisms — people will always be buying dyes.
If you like participating in a certain type of optional content, check the item descriptions of the purchasable rewards for it and see if you can sell any of them on the market board. Then, check the market board itself to see how much the item is selling for. This is a great method to get some extra gil while doing something you already enjoy in FFXIV!
Doing Your Dailies
Admittedly, this won’t make you rich, but you do get gil from running daily roulettes! If you’ve come to this article because you often find yourself scraping together gil for teleport fees, you should probably be running more content.
Daily roulettes will get you more than enough gil to keep you on your feet — especially if you pay attention to the “adventurer in need” bonuses. More often than not, roulettes are in need of tanks or healers, but there are rare DPS opportunities if you look for them.
If you’re not shooting to become a gillionaire but you don’t want your Warrior of Light to have empty pockets, dailies provide a steady stream of income.
Levequests
If you are a high level crafter, Tradecraft Leves are a great way to make reliable gil in FFXIV, while cutting out the market board middle man. Levequests have been nerfed a bit, as they were previously quite busted during Shadowbringers. The days of endlessly crafting coffee biscuits might be gone, but you can still make quite a bit of gil with the new Level 90 Tradecraft Leves.
Tradecraft Leves ask you to craft a certain amount of a particular item, but if you turn in high quality items, you get double the reward. The materials usually aren’t too troublesome to acquire and can sometimes be fetched by retainers.
The best leves to take on for crafters in Endwalker are “Practical Command” (a Level 86 Alchemist leve) and “The Mountain Steeped” (a Level 88 Culinarian leve).
As a bonus tip, leve turn-ins don’t need to be crafted by you. You can buy the necessary items off the market board to turn them in, but this may not be the best way to make money.
Sending Your Retainers on Ventures
If you haven’t been spending time with your retainers, shame on you! As a subscribed player, you will have access to two free retainers that you can customize and assign jobs to. You must complete the quest “An Ill-conceived Venture” in order to send your retainer on ventures. The location of this quest will vary depending on your starting city.
You can assign any job to retainers, but that job will determine what they can gather on ventures. They also cannot outlevel you. A retainer’s level cap for a given job is determined by your own level in that job. Therefore, if you are a Level 50 Botanist, your retainer can only hit Level 50 until you progress further in your own job. You will need a currency called Ventures to send your retainer on a venture. You can obtain Ventures from Guildleves, Tribe Quests, and your Grand Company Quartermaster.
Retainers will bring back all sorts of items from their ventures. Sometimes they’ll even return with straight up gil for you. It’s not the best method of making gil outright, but you can maximize your return on investment by making your retainer a gatherer. They’ll bring back materials you can either use to craft items to sell, or you can sell them on the market board. Everybody wins! Except your retainer, who is doing all the hard work for you.
Treasure Maps
We mentioned gathering and selling maps earlier in this guide, but doing the maps yourself can also be a good source of gil in FFXIV. Deciphering a Treasure Map allows you to participate in a Treasure Hunt. To unlock this content, you’ll need to complete the Level 36 quest “Treasures and Tribulations.” However, you don’t need to do this quest to participate in someone else’s Treasure Hunt.
Treasure Hunts should be done with a group, as they can eventually lead you into a special dungeon. It’s possible to solo this content, but only for skilled and experienced players (or high level players doing low level maps). The map will lead you to a certain location in the overworld where you must Dig to uncover a chest. Chests will spawn a large amount of monsters you must fight within an allotted time. After you defeat the monsters, you will receive a bounty of awards (EXP, gil, tomes, and much more).
But it doesn’t stop there! After you defeat the monsters for a higher level map, there’s a chance that a portal will open up leading to a Treasure Dungeon. These dungeons offer branching paths and games of chance that can lead to even more rewards.
You’ll get a good amount of gil from Treasure Hunts, but you can also sell some of the rewards on the market board for large sums of gil, as they are usually quite rare.
Join the High Ground
That’s all for our guide on the best ways to make gil in FFXIV! We hope you were able to glean some golden information from this glorious guide. Navigating the market board economy of Final Fantasy XIV can be hard at first, but once you figure out the supply and demand on your server, you’ll surely uncover a market to capitalize on! And if you just need a little extra teleporting around money, there are easier ways to find a source of income.
If you have any more questions or think we should include another gil farming method in our FFXIV guide, leave a comment below. For more Final Fantasy XIV guides, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media!
Happy gaming!
Final Fantasy XIV Online Navigation
- Final Fantasy XIV Sage Guide
- Final Fantasy XIV Scholar Guide
- Final Fantasy XIV Gunbreaker Guide
- FFXIV Samurai Job Guide: Leveling, Rotation, Tips (6.x Endwalker)
- FFXIV Job Changes for Endwalker and Beyond
- FFXIV Machinist Guide (6.x)
- FFXIV Dragoon Guide (Endwalker 6.x)
- FFXIV Warrior Guide (Endwalker 6.x)
- FFXIV Leveling Guide (6.x)
- FFXIV Reaper Job Guide: Leveling and Rotation (Endwalker 6.x)
- FFXIV White Mage Job Guide: Leveling and Rotation
- FFXIV Paladin Job Guide: Leveling and Rotation
- FFXIV Monk Job Guide: Leveling and Rotation
- FFXIV Bard Guide: Sing Songs, Sling Arrows
- Final Fantasy XIV Dark Knight Guide
- FFXIV Summoner Guide: Leveling, Rotation, Tips (6.x Endwalker)
Do your dailies.