making money

[Dignified Pauper]

Are you poor, tired, running around with low-level gear because of unlucky drops and can't buy better gear? You're not alone.

So you veterans, have a heart and share with us about how you made your millions. Trickle-down is what happens when a girl pees standing up, not a sound economic philosophy. Teach us to fish.

Seriously, share how you made your millions.

[Aulayna]

I did all the roulettes everyday and made sure to get the role bonus.

I also got lucky with stuff I found from treasure maps and what my retainers brought back from ventures, which I sold on the marketplace.

Pretty much nothing more too it, got up to 4.1 million Gil just through those 2 things alone.

[o_O]

I've made more money from farming Ex primals and selling the drops than any other avenue in the game. Roulettes, and even just nont-rouletted dungeons are great too; dungeons drop a ton of cash.

I generally see the same two responses from the serious gil-makers in the game:
1. "You think I'm gonna post my secrets on a public forum?"
2. "Watch the market carefully and eventually you'll be able to tell when the right stuff is selling and you craft that like crazy."

Other good ways are to gear up and sell primal/coil clears. You need to be good at what you do but it's extremely lucrative, especially if you're selling the current tier of content. Spiritbonding level 45-55 gear for materia can be tedious and RNG-dependent but if you hit a Savage Aim/Might IV or two, you're rolling in cash. You can spiritbond crafting gear to eliminate that RNG - they sell for less but you're guaranteed SOMETHING you can sell. No chance of those elemental materia from crafting gear.

[Ouch!]

A lot of the really big money available in FFXIV is locked behind a "spend money to make money" mentality. Things like gardening and desynthesis, in particular, are very high-margin activities but both require significant investments up front. Crafting high-margin gear such as the new i110 crafted gear similarly requires significant investment (melded gear and expensive components).

Right now, the best money you can make that does not itself require a significant financial investment would be ihcatl sealant from the Ixal daliy quests. Stay up on completing those quests and you can get three sealants every four days, and they're currently selling for 300,000g each.

My biggest source of income projects to come from gardening. That's a lot easier to do when you have personal housing and access to your own garden exclusively. To get the money to buy housing, I did a lot of gathering. I'd hit a rotation every in-game day where I'd gather the following items:

Darksteel Ore
Crawler Cocoon
Ferberite
Native Gold Ore
Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil
Grade 3 Shroud Topsoil
Bamboo Stick
Waterfowl Feather
Gold Ore

This required some initial investment (max-melded accessories to reach minimums for the two-star items), but it's not as bad as crafting or desynthesis. I was pretty consistent about logging in for the 5-10 minutes every hour that it would take to run through that gathering gauntlet while I was working from home this summer.

Sending retainers out to gather crystal shards is also a reliable, if slow, way to make money. If you're lucky, you can make better money on the high level exploration ventures, but at least you know what you're getting with shards. Depending on the type, you can sell them for 60g a piece and if your retainer's item level is high enough you can get 60 shards every 40 minutes.

Getting groups together to farm the Binding Coil of Bahamut for the new crafting materials is also currently profitable, but obviously you'll be lotting against other people. Many of those materials are selling for several hundred gil each.

Honestly? If you don't have crafting or gathering jobs at 50, your options are severely limited for reliably gaining gil, so that should be the initial focus. They're easy (and cheap) enough to level through leves.

[Loony BoB]

It all really comes down to how much you want to make, how fast, how much gil/time you're willing to invest, etc.

Fastest big gil: Spiritbonding. You'll want an i90 weapon for this if possible, and if you can join a full party spamming CM's first area then you'll be able to spiritbond at incredible speed. The results, as Mike mentioned, are down to what you're willing to gamble. The investment is notable - you either need to craft or buy a lot of gear because you'll want at least two sets, if not much more. You can spiritbond solo, too, with a chocobo, at places like Mor Dhona's Garlean camp.

Biggest fast gil: Maps, the non-specific retainer ventures and a huge, big whopping amount of luck.

Steady gil: Regular gardening (huge investment: a house) and crafting (huge investment: getting to 2-4 star recipes).

Cheapest gil: Gathering, easily. Find out what's in demand (don't just check the price, but also how often it sells). Gather it. For any high level stuff, there's that big initial investment in melding all your gear, which you may not be able to afford immediately. But even if you are only level 1, you can still go for...

Fastest low gil: Shards. Gather them and simultaneously send out retainers for them and you'll pick them up like crazy. I'm pretty sure that if you gear your retainers (they'll have to be Botanists or Miners to get shards) once they are around L20 then you'll already be able to get that 60 shards per 40 minutes deal.

Most assured gil: Dungeon running. You won't get loads, but you'll get decent amounts that will boost your coffers to at least a noticeable degree if you run dungeons often enough, and if you're into battling more than crafting/gathering, then this is the one for you.

Biggest long term saver: Level all your crafts + gatherers to 50 and never spend any notable gil on the market boards ever again unless you actually feel the cost is worth the time you'd otherwise have to invest in getting whatever it is you're buying.

I might be a little off with some of these descriptions and most of it was already mentioned, but yeah.