Craftaholics Anonymous/Guide/Gil Generation

Getting Ingredients
The initial process would involve gathering the ingredients you need for the synthing that you plan on doing.

The native ways which you gather ingredients would be:
 * Farming
 * The part about farming that is a challenge is that you have to get the items you need from the monsters that are easy enough to kill monsters. As a low level job you can accumulate crystals by ensuring you have your signet, but as you progress you will have to begin to harvest clusters.   Drop rates for some items can make it not worth the effort to farm.  You can increase your chances of drops by having a THF of Level 15 or 45.  These level THF have Treasure Hunter, which increases drop rate. ???


 * Hobbies (See icons below)
 * Hobbies can be helpful, but the draw back is getting the needed equipment, which hacthcets, pickaxes and and scythes are costly and will break as you use them.  If you get the gear for your hobby you prolong th elife of your tools.  Other hobbies like fishing and choco digging are almost crafts themselves.  Hobbies all get easier the more you do them.  There does appear to be skill to them, so the more you do them the greater your skill.   If this plays are role in how well you hobbie is yet to be determined.


 * Purchase through:
 * Auction House
 * Don't trust auction houses in cities. Often they provide highly erratic prices.  Jeuno has the most reliable supply of items.  Go to ffxiah.com and check the prices there.  Its best to cross-reference prices there.  I recently saw a piece of gear in someone's bazaar.  After talking, it became apparent the person paid far too much for the item in Bastok and was not willing to accept the price in Jeuno was a 1/4 of what she paid.  When in it comes to ingredients the cities can provide lower prices then even seen in Jeuno or a NPC.  For example Shell Bugs are often cheapest in Sandy.  Buying items from the AH is tricky business and should be done with forthought/  If you cannot compare AHs from the various cities it may be better to stick to NPC merchants.
 * Bazaar
 * As with the AH, I don;t recommend buying things from a person's bazaar unless you know the price variables. Sometimes you find people who know the prices and just want to sell what they have,  more often you find people trying to make money and it is highly unwise to waste your money buying these items.  They decrease the profit potential of the items you make.
 * NPC
 * The are three kinds of NPCs. The standard merchant who sells pretty much all the time, a regional merchant who only sells when a certain nation has control of a region and guild merchants.   There are even standard merchants that will only sell a particular item if their nation has an area under control.  Your fame in a city will p;lay a role the the cost of an item and the day of a week will play a role in the cost of an item.  My observation is that the day after a holiday is usually the day things will cost the most through a guild merchant.  As I dlarify these points I will.

Selling what you make
There would be three native ways of making gil from crafting:
 * Auction House Sales
 * Knowing what AH to sell to, keeping up with eratice prices is a slippery slope. There are definitely some givens that will sell well all the time, but most of those things are higher level recipes - so as you go along it is a challenge to determine what you can sell and how long you will wait for it to sell.
 * NPC Sales
 * This is the best way to make gil through sales. There is no waiting and the prices rarely vary.  Such as with Bug Broth, if you get all your ingredients through farming and NPC purchase then you can triple your money every time.   If you want to make gil then you want to find out what the NPCs will buy for the best price.
 * Bazaar
 * Sometimes you can make items so desirable people will buy them from your bazaar. To do good bazaar sales you pick an item, go to an area where that item is needed, and then you price it according to the people in that area who need it.   If things don't sell people cannot afford them. Selling foods in dunes or selling range items or gear take some research and trial and error, but you see people doing it.