FFXIV Gil-Making Methods: The Big List

Updated for version 6.18 on July 31, 2022.

On my home server’s Novice Network, I see a lot of questions from folks who are trying to get up to speed — or catch back up — on the game’s basic systems and mechanics. One of the most frequent questions is “how do I make money in-game to buy gear/housing/mounts/pets?” Here, I’d like to offer a list of ways to answer that question, whether

• you’re a crafter, gatherer, both, or neither
• you’re max level in one class, many classes, or none
• you have Free Company resources to work with or not

I’ll say right off the bat that I’m not going to cover RP-based money-making opportunities. If you can make gil running a cat café, casino, or nightclub, more power to ya — but I don’t know of any simple way to keep tabs on the scope and profitability of available opportunities, or to compare them across servers and data centers. Some folks I know have made millions a week in this line of work, but the time and effort invested to get that gil varies widely. If RP services or venue management appeals to you, there’s lots of ways in-game to learn about the opportunities on your server.

And now, the list! It’s broken down by sections, starting with the bread and butter of MMO money-making: gathering and crafting. Starred items are good “starter” suggestions because they require little time to see a return.

Gathering and Crafting

⭐ Gathering Shards is perhaps the definitive “quick-start” money-making method in FFXIV. Because crafting consumes shards (and, at higher levels, crystals and clusters) these reagents are always in demand. Pricing a stack of them just a gil or two below the current market price (e.g., 55 gil apiece vs. 56) usually leads to getting bought out pretty quickly. Check your server’s Market Board (MB) to see which elements are selling for the best unit price. There are, of course, more lucrative things to mine or, um, “botanize” at any given time, but shards can be gotten quickly by even the lowest-level gatherers. As you level MIN or BTN, you’ll unlock skills that further speed up shard and crystal gathering.
[Required: BTN or MIN 1]

Cookie Leves (“A Cookie for Your Troubles”) are a great option if you have a decently geared max-level culinarian. Because the levequests pay you directly, the revenue is reliable: about 15k to 18k gil per leve allowance for HQ turn-ins. If you have the leve allowances to spend, this is a fast and consistent way to cash them out as gil.
[Required: CUL 78, access to Crystarium. Preferred: CUL 80, BTN 80, access to Kholusia (upper and lower sections) and Il Mheg, good level 80 crafting and gathering gear.]

⭐ Steel Ingots are used in just a huge assortment of crafting recipes, from armor to airships to house furnishings. They can be made by fairly low-level armorers and blacksmiths, are consistently in demand, and frequently sell for significantly more than their ingredients cost. (At the time of writing, high-quality (HQ) Steel Ingots were selling for over 500 gil on several NA servers, while the materials — including shards — sold for roughly 200.) In fact, most of those ingredients (everything but the shards) can be bought from NPC vendors.
[Required: BSM or ARM 26. Preferred: higher-level BSM or ARM, Kobold Beast Tribe starter quests completed]

Making a Spare is more of an ongoing side practice than something you sit down and do all at once. Here’s the idea: any time you are crafting something you need for a quest, GC supply mission, or leve, consider making an extra and selling it on the MB so that the next person who comes along can buy it instead of making it. A lot of people would rather buy their turn-ins than go to the trouble of crafting them.
[Required: Any Disciple of the Hand class unlocked. Preferred: multiple DoH classes at high level.]

Treasure Map Gathering is perhaps the fastest 40k gil you can make in a day, taking just a few minutes on average. The prices of individual map types fluctuate, so it’s worth checking your MB and/or a tool like Universalis to see what’s selling well on any given day. That said, even the level 50 maps (Timeworn Peisteskin Map) will often sell for 40k or more. The higher level your gathering class is, the more options you have for what to collect.
[Required: BTN 50 or MIN 50. Preferred: BTN 90 or MIN 90.]

The Diadem is a special Heavensward zone that has gone through many different incarnations over the years, but is currently devoted to gathering (including fishing). Materials gathered here sell well because they are used in special collectible crafting recipes. The Diadem is a double-dip, though, because gathering there also generates Skybuilders’ Scrips, a currency used to buy glams, dyes and materials that are frequently worth about 200+ gil per scrip. If you are going to do the classic “gather and sell” routine common in many MMOs, the Diadem is a great place to do it because of this combination of consistently in-demand drops and bonus currency.
[Required: BTN, MIN, or FSH 10; Heavensward; Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic 60; completion of Main Scenario through 3.3]

Timed Gathering Nodes (e.g. “Unspoiled” nodes) can yield a fair bit of gil in not much time, but you need to get to know your times and routes. A tool like FFXIVClock is super helpful for this. Some evergreen items that are available prior to Heavensward include Darksteel Ore, Gold Ore, Spruce Log, and Dark Matter Cluster.
[Required: BTN 50 or MIN 50. Preferred: BTN 90 or MIN 90.]

Combat Jobs

⭐ Duty Roulettes reward you with gil and Allagan Tomestones to join the queue for a random dungeon, trial, or raid. The gil reward itself is a pittance for the time invested, but the Allagan Tomestones that drop from the Level 50/60/70, Main Scenario, Normal Raid, and Alliance Raid Roulettes are tradable for items that are in consistent demand on the Market Boards. The Tomestones of Poetics and of Allegory can both be traded for a variety of crafting reagents that sell well on the MB. All in all, you can get about 30k worth of loot for a level 50/60/70 run and about 50k from a Main Scenario run.
[Required: Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic 50, iLvl 42/45, completion of relevant dungeons/raids. Preferred: Higher-level DoW/DoM.]

Mob Farming can provide a decent amount of gil (100k–270k/hour) if you focus on mobs whose drops sell consistently on the Market Board at a good price.

• ⭐ Myotragus Farming is a viable option from around level 20 onward. The skins and horns from the goats in Eastern Thanalan sell well, and it’s easy to hit several spawn points in a fairly tight loop. [Required: Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic ~20, access to Eastern Thanalan, Market Board. Preferred: Higher-level DoW/DoM, mount speed bonus or flying mount.]
• Karakul Farming is a somewhat more profitable choice after level 40. The Fleece from Ornery Karakuls is a staple of mid-level Weaving and usually sells briskly on the MB.[Required: Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic 40+, access to Coerthas Central Highlands, Market Board. Preferred: DoW/DoM 50+, flying mount]

Treasure Hunts are what the Treasure Maps mentioned above are for. 🙂 In a sense, using treasure maps (whether bought or gathered) is a gamble, since the good stuff (glam and housing ingredients, mostly) isn’t guaranteed to drop from any given treasure hunt. However, if you can score the maps cheap on the MB and/or spread the risk out across a group of treasure hunters, you can come out ahead on average, especially with the higher level maps.
[Required: Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic at appropriate level (50+ for ARR maps, 60+ for HW maps, etc.)]

Shadowbringers FATEs drop a currency called Bicolor Gemstones that is shared across several vendors. The items bought with these gemstones still (as of 5.58) frequently sell on the MB for 2k gil per gem or more, and a single FATE can drop as many as 12 gems per participant.
[Required: Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic 70; Shadowbringers. Preferred: DoW/DoM 80+, all Shadowbringers areas unlocked, friends or allies to run with.]

Housing, FC, Teamwork

Gardening is a great option if you have access to a personal or FC gardening plot (small houses can have 1, mediums up to 2, and larges up to 3). Most of the money to be made in gardening requires the ability to cross-breed seeds, which can only be done in these plots and not in the smaller flowerpots available to apartment dwellers. If you watch your seed and produce prices, the flowerpots can still turn out tens of thousands of gil per growing cycle (Thavnairian Onions are a common single-pot cash crop).
[Required: Access to flowerpots through apartment or FC house. Preferred: Access to garden plot through personal or FC house.]

Voyaging for Materials is perhaps the most consistently profitable use of your company airships and submersibles. Some of the best-selling things you can get from airship and submersible voyages are … mats to make other airships and submersibles, like Pure Titanium Ore. It takes a while to get set up with these, however, and they are much better treated as a long-term investment for an FC to work on together.

Shard Farming can be another good choice if you don’t mind rerunning (or speedrunning) low-level content. The idea is to create an alt, rack up the many crystal shards that you get as a sign-up bonus for joining crafting guilds, stash all those shards with a friend, and delete your alt. Strictly speaking, you don’t need an FC to make this work, but you do need another trusted player who will hold your items for you.

Defunct or Dormant Methods

Finally, for returning players, here’s a section on moneymaking tactics that used to work, and may one day work again, but don’t work well as of version 6.18.

Lanolin Leves: Running “A Real Smooth Move” (ALC 40) in Coerthas Central Highlands used to be very profitable because, on average, the leve gave significant amounts of Pudding Flesh per turn-in, and Pudding Flesh was an otherwise hard-to-come-by alchemy ingredient, dropped only from other leves and a few out-of-the-way mobs. However, in 5.3, Pudding Flesh became available from Grand Company quartermasters for 200 GC seals, which means prices will not likely go above a few hundred gil most of the time. Pudding Flesh may still be worth looking into as something to buy with GC Seals and resell, but it’s not worth spending a leve allowance on.

Voyaging for Rares: This is a very cyclical pursuit. Every time a new set of submersible or airship destinations has been unlocked, a race has ensued to send subs/airships out and collect the rare loot. Usually, this loot includes such drops as housing decorations, minions, and orchestrion rolls. As time passes, however, the market gets flooded and what used to be rare becomes cheap. A great example is the Benben Stone minion, which is available only from the very end of the submarine voyage map. These minions sold for 2M gil or more early in 5.5, but by the end of Shadowbringers they sold for 200k or less, and in Endwalker they are selling for only about 5k. It is true that voyage rares occasionally sell for more than their current low prices, but this is a reason to buy low and sell high, not a reason to deliberately send your ships out to Devil’s Crypt trying for a rare drop. Of course, the cycle will reset with any patch that introduces new dive/flight destinations, and at that point the race will be on once more!

Tomestones for Topsoil: The question “What do I do with all these Allagan Tomestones of Poetics?” comes up at least weekly in NN. The standard answer used to be “Buy Unidentified Ores, trade them for Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil, and sell the soil on the MB.” Although Grade 3 Topsoils are still in demand on the MB, prices have gone down to the point that this is no longer an ideal way of getting gil out of extra tomestones.