Quick and Dirty Gilmaking Guide

Retainers serve as your storage, your personal store, and gatherers.

Get 1 Combat and 1 Gatherer, typically a Miner is best. Any combat class will do. These will be your first 2 free retainers.

You can get a 3rd retainer by upping your subscription and it should be a Botanist if you have a Miner and vice-versa. Fisher is useless. A potential 4th should be another Combat Retainer. Any more than that should be an even split between botanist and miner. You can consider 1 fisher if you really want to.

Get a high enough rank in your Grand Company so you can do Expert Delivery Missions.

Have your retainers do the 1 hour Quick Exploration for two venture tokens each. Do this for every hour youre playing if you can help it. Turn in the items they bring back via Expert Delivery Missions to your Grand Company for GC seals.

This will make your retainers self-sufficient. They will be gathering the GC seals needed to pay them with venture tokens.

Next, use the excess GC seals to buy sellable items exclusive to the GC shop and resell it on the marketboard for Gil. At the lower ranks, Coke and Prisms are good investments. Later on Scheelite, peacock ore and Petrified Log are better. Any expansion after Dawntrail could change what sells best so doublecheck the items.

In the endgame, you'll be switching gears. You'll want retainers to farm mats that are used for the current endgame gear or shards and crystals used for crafting. Make sure you unlock all the new resource nodes by gathering them yourself. You'll still want your combat retainer to farm quick exploration gear for GC seals so you can keep hiring them with venture tokens.

When the next expansion drops, the prices for these endgame materials will probably crash as everyone will be moving on to the new content. You can go back to GC seal farming or shards and crystals while you figure out what the next hot items are.

Generally, you either want your retainers gathering "timed nodes", crystals or items to turn in for GC seals depending on if you're trying to craft something or want to go into auto-pilot and just keep selling Coke.

A Retainer at max level, doing Quick ventures has a chance to bring back Jet black Dye, which sells for around 750k a piece. More on this later.

Optimally you'd want to hire the full 9-10 retainers and have a mix of gatherers to do this for you, but that costs real money. For this guide Im assuming you have the 2 free ones only. it'll be slow going with just your 1 botanist/miner so it might be time to consider getting your 3rd retainer.

My method is 3-4 1hr Quick Ventures/resource gathering to get mats or try to get a jet black dye drop, and then I do the max lvl 18hr exploration when I log out for a chance to get the rare drop associated with them.

But its not necessary, theres a better way to make Gil.

Get to level 50 botanist and miner asap and finish Heavensward.

FInd out where and when Darksteel ore and Spruce log spawn. They spawn in Coerthas somewhere, at 1am and 9am in-game time respectively. You will also farm Dark Matter Clusters from these nodes if you decide to craft magitek repair materials.

These items sell a lot and sell often because of submarines and airships. That content is tied to Free companies and houses, which I wont be touching on because i know nothing about them.

Other items in this category are scarlet sap, grade 3 thanalan topsoil, and grade 3 shroud topsoil. tbh, darksteel ore and spruce log beat out dark matter clusters and scarlet sap, and theres a better method for topsoil farming. These items sell on the marketplace at 99 stacks and sell often.

Topsoil is used for gardening, which is tied to free companies and houses. Long story short, you need to grow certain crops of a level 3 outdoor garden on your property. Apartments dont count. These crops when grown beside each other, and have a chance of producing thavnarian onions when harvested.

The best method to farm topsoil is with poetic tomestones. Do your daily duties, khloe aliapoh's weekly adventure book (which has a chance to give you items worth millions of gil), etc. when you have near 2000 of them, go to idyylshire, a Heavensward expansion zone, and buy Unidentifiable shells or unidentifiable ore from Hismena and trade them in to Bertana for grade 3 shroud or thanalan topsoil respectively. Then sell those items on the market.

You could also farm Bicolour Gemstones. Once you have all of Endwalker's FATE zones maxed out, you can buy Gemstone Vouchers from the Old Sharlayan NPC vendor. These sell for 150k gil per PIECE.

Fortune Carrots also sell for a few million gil if you're willing to do the Occult Crescent grind. That might change when Evercold drops.

The real money though is grinding for endgame cosmetics like mounts and hairstyles. Selling 1-3 of those new, rare cosmetics is probably enough to never need Gil ever again.

Lastly, you can do Treasure Maps. You will need to set up a party to treasure hunt with you. This is best done on a Discord and/or with FC members. You will need to find level 70-100 Treasure Maps from Gathering Nodes. Make sure theyre marked as the ones that have a chance to open an 8-man raid portal by hoving over the item. These portals arent guaranteed, but a raid with 8 members will get a portal eventually. Note the optimal level range of treasure maps will change when future expansions come out.

You will typically need 3 maps of the same level as decided by your group. If you havent unlocked all of the region that the raid treasure map comes from, its better to do a lower one. Theres also a trick to storing treasure maps of the same name. You need your 2 retainers to hold one each and keep 1 in your inventory. When treasure map day comes, open one of the maps, and add the other 2 to your chocobo inventory and normal inventory for a full 3 maps ready to go.

Decide beforehand what the group wants to role need or greed on.

Here are the hot-ticket items that tend to sell well, in descending order:
Elemental crystals/clusters
Darksteel Ore
Dark Matter Cluster
Spruce Log
Coke
Hardened Sap
Peacock Ore
Mythrite Sand
Bomb Ash
Mythrite Ore
Scheelite
Petrified Log
Mithril Ore
Cobalt Ore
Titanium Ore
Magitek Repair Materials
Grade 3 Shroud Top Soil
Walnut Log/Lumber
Dravanian Mistletoe
Dravanian Spring Water
Scarlet Sap
Holy Water

You'll notice all of these items are tied to submersibles.

At some point you'll have enough money to "flip" items on the marketboard comfortably. As in, buy low, then resell at a high price.

You can start buying up things like the Darksteel Ore or Spruce Logs you've been farming instead of gathering them yourself.

Depending on your server, you can buy them when the prices go down during the week then mark them up and wait for the weekend when everyone logs in. When those dips and spikes happen is up to you to figure out and time.

Another method of flipping is reselling NPC furniture. You'll have to go to the housing merchants in your housing district and search up each item on their list. Some furniture items even though theyre cheaper to get from the NPCs, resell for a lot more on the marketboard. Why? who knows. Maybe players are lazy, maybe players dont know. Either way, each server will have different demands so you WILL have to painstakingly check each item if you want to go this method.

Typically you want to sell 1-3 copies of a single furniture depending on how fast it sells. and sell them as singles. nobody buys the same furniture in bulk. i typically have 1 retainer's entire shop inventory for furniture and the other for mats but you can go all mats or all furniture for both if thats what works for you.

Levequests are also an option. Once you get to Old Sharlayan, if you buy mats from the marketboard, particularly HQ foods for lvl 80-88, you will get 5k per turn in. When you can do 100 max turn-ins, thats a gross return of 500,000k every 2 weeks. The lower you can buy those food mats below 1k, the bigger your net return will be. To be clear, you can definitely try to find those items below 1k, but its going to be easier to buy the raw ingredients and make them yourself.

This one overlaps with farming crystals with your retainers but you could also flip crystals/shards. Water crystals in particular are very popular due to being tied to ALC and CUL, two crafting jobs that are related to raiding.

Other players swear by flipping minions.

There are also the beast tribes. if you have all their shop items unlocked, congrats you could be rich and not know it yet! Since those items are locked behind a rep grind, you might have access to items most people cant get that you can flip for profit!

Lastly, General-purpose Jet Black Dye are great items to flip once you have a few million gil in the bank. Depending on your timing, you can be making 100k net return per piece and is a sustainable way to make passive gil. Buy them on the marketboard when they're low. What that price tag is will be up to you depending on your risk tolerance.

Crafting Endgame and "cosmetic" gear tends to sell well. What those items are in your server changes per expansion and it'll be up to you to figure it out.

This requires the most research and I honestly dont bother. The "lazy" method is to craft HQ endgame gear for the current expansion and pay attention to what everyone around you likes to wear.

The safe crafting items are endgame HQ potions and endgame HQ foods. Also the mats needed to make those items sell well. These sell consistently since theyre needed for endgame raids, so long as your server isnt empty that is.

As mentioned above, Magitek Repair Materials are a good craftable item that sells fast and sells for a lot! Wooden Lofts sell well since they're used a lot in "glitching" second floors in a 1-floor apartment.

Some people craft Anima weapon components, others craft furniture, but again, that requires research and is based on whats popular on your server. If thats what you like doing, go for it. But I honestly cannot provide any meaningful advice on this topic, outside of maybe selling these items as singles.

I know someone in my FC sells all the story mats/turn-ins for lvls 1-50 for all the crafting jobs. Thats also a way to make consistent sales but might not be worth the time investment depending on your situation.

This is usually the part where people cave and buy more retainers. It helps with how tedious it is gathering materials for yourself.

You could also ask your FC for permission to craft Submersible parts and sell them on the market board. Shark parts tend to sell the most consistent by being the newbie pieces, but certain submersible parts only ever sell as certain types due to the meta submersible build.

If crafting is your passion, the more time you sink into this, the more it pays out so don't be discouraged. This method requires the most work but has the best payout in the long-run. Even moreso if youre an omnicrafter character.

That FC mate I mentioned? Ya she's capped the gil amount for her account and alts crafting things, totalling at 11 BILLION GIL..

A good chunk of this guide is based around the current meta of what sells and why. These materials sell because everyone is into raiding, crafting, glamour, decorating homes, gardening and airship/submersibles. Or for example, there could be a bottleneck like these items from this NPC sell on the marketboard because theyre popular and hard/tedious to get.
But all of that could change in a future expansion.

Be on the lookout for what the next "gardening" or "airship/submersible" or "GC mats" are. These mechanics could be replaced and the marketboard meta could shift to propping up that new mechanic thats come to replace them. (There might even be new mechanics that add to this formula and provide another avenue to make gil!)

Find out what the best-in-slot equipment are for raiders and crafters. What's the optimal materias in use? What's the new best food or potion? etc. What is optimal?

Each expansion brings in new cosmetics, furniture, etc that could upset the current demand for crafters. They could easily stick around as they are to go away in the next one.

Some people might be flipping endgame items because other players are flipping the same endgame items and you end up with an item thats not really in demand but is bloated from people speculating that its worth a lot. Until its not.

New NPCs and new currencies might pop up that make the current GC seal or poetic tomestone mats worthless.

Always be on the lookout for "the replacement." Pay attention to what the new expansion brings to the game and if it makes what youre doing obsolete. Then find out how they can fit in the different methods.

I know absolutely nothing about Gardening or Airship/Submersibles. These are methods tied to owning a home, which I don't care for. That being said, I thought it was important to at least mention why theyre a thing.

When you get a home, you can buy gardening plots. Those plots can grow fruits and vegetables. The most lucrative being Chocobo food that change their colour or increase their level like Thavnarian onions. Grade 3 topsoil is tied to all this somehow, which is why I assume it sells. The same with darksteel ore or spruce logs are tied to Airship/Submersibles, which you specifically need an FC Hall to have.

The ins and outs to these two mechanics I have no idea, but at the very least, I want you to know that they exist should you gain a House or FC Hall.

A fleet of Submersibles in particular, once optimized, can make you an average of 400,000gil per DAY!

Personally I think the prospect of owning a home in the first place is such a crapshoot. You need to wait for a player who owns a home to get evicted so their plot becomes vacant, then you need to pay millions of gil into a lottery for a chance to get the plot. And if you stop playing for an extended period of time, you get evicted next!

Theres a set pool of 9000 houses per WORLD. Everyone in your server will be fighting over the same 9000 houses. Considering how in-demand, limited, expensive and inconsistent it is getting a house, I don't bother.

If youre lucky enough to get one though, Id look into this more.

And then theres the island sanctuary. The content in it is becoming increasingly outdated and outpaced by more current content. But its an easy source of certain exlusive furnitures, materia and dyes you can resell.

If you find any of this information inaccurate, feel free to discuss below in the comments. I am by no means an expert. This is simply a compilation of what I've learned since I started playing and I'm open to learn more.