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How good is gardening as a way of making gil? A lot of people say it's "random" and full of "luck" but I just think it's extremly complex. As far as rewards go, what kind of price is it to start out and how much money can you make from it? How much money can you lose from it?
To be honest it is pretty random even if you do everything right for the thing to be harvested.
Elemental ores on midgard still sell for 300K due to the lack of goldsmithers and gardeners on our servers, Tree saplings and crystals will hlep you for this, it takes ONE REAL LIFE month for it to grow, and its random, so you prolly want to use 4-5 pots and try to grow it. You can gett all 5 elemental ores if you put in the same watering/drying/crystal, and yet you can get nothing of importance at the same time. So its hit or miss.
I read something about a method of making money with ice ores or buying ice crystals or something like that and growing something or other.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Cause I sure don't.
Tree saplings+certain crystal+22 days of caring of it IRL time=random harvesting of elemental ore.
If you have luck, gardening might help on those long term purchases that you plan to spend months saving for, like ochiudo's kote and such. It's horrible for trying to make a quick gil. If you need money fast, I recommend never leaving home w/o a fishing rod and bait. That said, I got lucky and noticed a lack of Wild Onions for sale in the AH. Everyone needs onions for making mithkabobs, and I was able to strike it rich, farming 60k in wild onions while holding a monopoly on the prices till people caught on. Horototo ruins were a godsend. If you need money, that's what you have to do. Think of all the things you can farm, and look at the AH for what's not being oversaturated. Making gil in FFXI is all about finding your niche, and exploiting it for al it's worth untill the masses catch on, then looking for something else. Pretty much, you can completely ignore any get rich quick scheme in forums that entail selling certain items, as those items are sure to be flooded and undercut in days.
I only tried that gardening deal once and I got about 11 fire crystals, and were selling at about 250 gil at the time. I forgot how I did it, but seems to me that making some crystals can help making cash.
So far I've done 2 rounds of growing Tree Saplings, once trying to achive Dark Ores, once trying to achieve Fire Ores. My net result [Dark]3 Light Clusters, a stupid amount of Persikos (it's a fruit) [Fire]7 Ice Clusters, so much Cinnamon I had to rearrange my mog safe twice to pick it all, and 1 Fire Ore.
So, in 2 months I spent 60K for the 10 pots I used, 160K in Saplings for the Saplings I used in total. My returns I'm still calculating (sooooo much cinnamon to sell at 2.5K a stack, and the Fire Ore is still on sale for 250K... *cough*hint*cough*), however on both occasions I've sold my harvest for more than I've invested. This has been very profitable for me so far, however for the amount of time it took (one month each round) I could have earned twice as much farming Tree Cuttings and selling those to people who grow their own Saplings... I was just playing other games for a while, taking an FFXI break, so it was a simple matter to log in once a day and check a few plants ;)
All in all, I will continue to garden as I go about my days in FFXI, however it is far from being a reliable source of income. Some people have lost money doing it. I still highly recommend everyone try it out once, though. Never know, you may get an ore your first shot. For anyone interested, here's a link to the thread I used as a guide. In it you'll find good and bad results, as well as the tried and true method of getting these elusive rocks to grow --> http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?fitem=3984
I encourage ppl to grow more...more ores, less money for staves o.o)b