[Taskmage]

So you've followed a leveling template you found somewhere and you have a respectably leveled crafting skill. Now what? How do you use that number to make money? The following is what I've learned from roughly 250 levels of crafting and my efforts to leverage that to make some gil. My main crafts are cooking, alchemy, and woodworking, which I use to produce mostly fast-moving consumable goods, but I imagine most of the same rules apply when making equipment and the like. If someone from a craft that is light on consumables would like to add their insight, I would be most appreciative.

Basically, there are three steps to synthing for gil:

1. Research
2. Synthesis
3. Profit

Yes, research. If brute force is more your style, I'm afraid you may have just wasted a bunch of money leveling a craft. Effectively making money this way takes some thinking and poring over numbers.

Identify Potential Profit Synths

Obviously it's not efficient to analyze every synth at your disposal every week or so with market values constantly shifting, so the first thing to do is narrow down your search. Here are some things to consider:

What makes you unique as a crafter? This is a big one. Do you have any guild key items? Do you have another craft leveled that your main craft uses as a subskill in any recipes? Are you able to get ahold of certain materials more easily than another player might? Anything that you have that other crafters might not means less competition for you, and a higher value on your products. Synths that are more unique to your abilities have the most potential for easy profit. Identify those first.

What can you HQ consistently? As a broad generalization, NQs tend to sell for a loss or at best a very minor profit, whereas an HQ of the same item will sell for a significant profit. Find a useful item you can regularly HQ and you've probably found a profit synth. Roughly, the HQ tiers are:

51+ levels above the skillcap: ~50% HQ rate
31+ levels above the skillcap: ~25% HQ rate
11+ levels above the skillcap: ~12% HQ rate

In my experience those numbers are fairly accurate when referring to a large sample. Remember that they are averages. If you are doing a synth that you are in the 25% bracket for, it's entirely likely that you may do a dozen synths one day without getting a single HQ, while another day you might strike it rich with six HQs out of twelve. Overall it comes out to 25%.

If you are lower level, what synths near your level have no HQ? Because of the last two questions, you can expect other crafters to try to distinguish themselves by crafting higher level things that others cannot, or lower level things that they can HQ. Lower level things with no HQ will be mostly avoided by higher level crafters with better options. Often these will turn a fair profit to a crafter who is near the synth's level. Good examples are Poison Potion and Jack-o'-Lantern.

What sells quickly? Items that are in high demand sell fastest. Often there is a situation of high demand filled by high supply from other crafters rushing to fill that void. These are easy to identify by scanning the AH list and picking out goods with a high number of items in stock, and checking the price history on those items to make sure they are actually moving at a reasonable pace. These markets tend to shift often and require a lot of attention and shrewd pricing to succeed in, but if you can ride the price line and beat other crafters at harnessing that high demand, you can make a lot of money in short order.

Calculate Your Profit

With that list in hand, start figuring up your costs and profit. When calculating the cost of ingredients, it pays to look up the items on ffxi.somepage.com and see if any of it can be bought cheaper from an NPC.

Your Profit for 12 synths = (StackPrice x YieldPerSynth) - CostOfIngredients

If you're shooting for HQs, it's slightly more complicated. First figure out what your profit would be from synthing all NQs or all HQs.

Profit with HQs = (AllHQProfit x YourHQRate) + (AllNQProfit x (100% - YourHQRate))

So now you know how much money you would make from 12 synths of each of your candidate recipes. Don't rush off yet, though, the synth with the highest number isn't necessarily the best. Consider these things:

Return on Investment (RoI) Simply put, how much money do you get back compared to the money you put in?

RoI = Profit / Cost

If you're short on cash, RoI is king because you want to get the most profit from the least amount of money. Once you build up enough capital that your gil doesn't limit what you can synth, RoI takes a back seat to:

Gil per hour, meaning how much money worth of product would you make if you spent an hour doing nothing but that one synth, including the time it takes for you to collect necessary materials. Time is money, and in order to make money as quickly and efficiently as possible, you want to focus on synths that provide a maximum return for your time. There are some cases, however, that you shouldn't strictly favor gil/hr, since it can be limited by:

Gil per day, which is the term I use to refer to how quickly your goods can be turned into spendable gil; how fast you can sell them. Even if a synth makes a million gil of product an hour, it doesn't do you any good if the item sells so slowly that you won't be able to spend that gil for months. On the other hand, even if a synth has a relatively low RoI or gil/hr, it can still prove to be a worthwhile synth if you can move it through the AH fast enough.

Figure out which factors are most relevant to you, and choose your profit synth(s) based on which perform the best in that area.

General Tips

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. If you only synth one thing, it only takes a slight shift in the market, either from a conquest change, someone deciding to use that recipe for skillup, or any number of other factors, to drop the price below your selling point, strand your goods on the auction house, and shutdown your cash flow. Invest in two or three synths, and keep your AH slots stocked with each of them. That way even if you get screwed on one synth, the others can continue to sell.

Don't overstock on items. That is, don't synth too many at once, for similar reasons as the above. The more inventory you keep on hand, the more useless junk you're stuck with if the market shifts and the synth becomes unprofitable.

Synth at optimal times. This is a complicated issue, but there are known influences by day and moon that affect your chances to HQ, skillup, or fail a synth. In general, Darksday new moon is the best time to get HQs, while Lightsday full moon gives you the least chance of breaks. This timer may prove useful.

Minimize your traveling time. When collecting items from NPCs or getting guild support, traveling time from one town to another can start to seriously cut into your gil per hour. Always look to improve your options in that area. Airships and teleports are a major boon early on. Personally, I've stopped using either in favor of outposting everywhere I need to go.

Build your fame. This is especially helpful if you commonly use a relatively expensive material sold by an NPC. The difference in price of Ground Wasabi for example can be quite substantial depending on your fame. Remember that once you obtain "hero" fame in a nation, that doesn't mean your fame is capped. You can still obtain more fame and continue to reduce vendor prices down to minimum levels.

Take advantage of guild point items. The guild point item of the day will often sell for a huge profit, especially the Veteran level item. The risk is that any stock you have left over at the end of the day is likely to be a loss. Use this handy tool to keep track of the current GP items for your guild.


Hope that's helpful and makes some vague sense to everyone. I intend to follow through with some examples of the synths I regularly use, so that should make things clearer. At the moment, though, I'm sleepy and I don't feel like looking up all the hard numbers, so I'll get to it tomorrow. If anyone has anything they'd like to add or correct, please feel free. /bow

[Balfree]

Cool guide TM

[Kutu]

Very nice guide ^^

[sarlos]

Excellent advice for the starting crafter. For those that have the option, another tactic that I put to good use is owning a mule with the sole purpose of acting as a bazaar. In an average week, I synth (and sell) upwards of 50 stacks of bolt quivers. I also sell at far-below-AH price so I make a smaller than optimal profit, but I have a serverwide reputation for what I do, and I can move vastly more per week than my competition.

Another key is to diversify. Research multiple different profit synths and do each in small doses. I primarily do Holy Bolts, as those are the main ammo of choice for Crossbow Rangers, but I also do Bloody and Acid bolts, along with random durables and whatnot. If you get yourself into a situation where all your efforts are focused on one item, if competition moves in driving the price down, or a new source for a material pops up, you could wind up losing a great deal of money.

Finally, I counsel patience. Always, always check before you synth anything, and if the market seems saturated, or at the point of collapse, resist the urge to synth it anyway. It's easy to get into a mentality of "Well, I have to do this to make gil!" while overlooking all the other options available. To give another perspective, it's the same thing scam artists count on when pulling a bait and switch. They are preying on the natural tendency that, well, you're there anyway, and you don't want to walk away empty handed, so you're willing to pay premium for a sub-par product.

[zagex]

For some crafts, making ingredients is nice and profitable. When I was just starting, I made all my money from Linen Cloths, Wool Cloths, and later on Velvet and Silk Cloths. The same can be done for Ingots and Leathers. For the other crafts, you're on your own there.

In fact almost all my money comes from crafting ingredients. It's a sure way to make money (unless the market has some drastic price changes)

And personally, I think that following guides is a very bad way to skillup. They can be used as reference, but you should do your own research. Prices change from server to server, and from time to time, and new recipes are introduced. What was the best synth then could be a horrible synth now.
One example was that someone in my LS followed a guide that said to make (I think) bronze sheets out of ingots, then scales from the sheets, but then I told them it was better on the wallet to sell your ingots, buy sheets, then synth scales.

[Rodin]

I have to put this link here, it's very good at explaining days to synth on for a certain outcome. It's posted on my HNMLS site, but it's credit goes to Asmoranomar of SeraphKnights.

Asmoranomar's Daily Crafting Guide

Also, I've noted that I do have higher success when using the right elemental staff.

Not sure if the Elemental Obis from Sea will affect anything though.

[Caspian]

Nice guide TM, and thanks for the link Rodin, I'll be bookmarking it when I get home tonight.
I always heard people say Full moon was good for HQ's, but I knew the bad day for successes was good for HQ's and couldn't figure out why the good moon for successes would be good for HQ's too.

[Rodin]

Yeah, this guide has helped me make a lot of gil.

Anyways, I have a Japanese friend who is hardcore at everything in my linkshell. He has 98+3 Leathercraft, and 62+1 Clothcraft. He's Tier 2 for making Byrnie+1s.

He's crazy, he levels and delevels his main craft on how the market fluxuates. Not only that, but he'll wake up at like 4AM JST just to craft. He uses the clock that's also located on our site to figure out the best crafting times. I've never seen him with less than 10,000,000 gil, except for this last month, where he can't play due to school.

Not only this, but he has 75DRK, 75THF, 75NIN, 75MNK, 73RNG, and 61BLU. He's crazy I tells ya. O.o

Anyways, he's taught me a lot about crafting. If you have any questions about when to HQ or whatever, then feel free to PM me.

[Asmoranomar]

I have to put this link here, it's very good at explaining days to synth on for a certain outcome. It's posted on my HNMLS site, but it's credit goes to Asmoranomar of SeraphKnights.

Asmoranomar's Daily Crafting Guide

Also, I've noted that I do have higher success when using the right elemental staff.

Not sure if the Elemental Obis from Sea will affect anything though.

WTF!? I really wish people would contact me before ripping the information. They didn't even recoginize the proper contributors.

Oh well, its not like the information is new anyways. It is old tho, and the new guide can be found at:
http://ffxi.asmoranomar.com/index.ph...=display&pid=1
or
http://ffxi.asmoranomar.com/uploads/synth/

maybe one day I'll actually get around to finishing that guide...

I've actually got a crafting guide, dynamis guide, chocobo guide, among other things...
I just have a hard time finding the time to actually write up and publish my guides -.-

[Asmoranomar]

Figured you guys might be interested in something i posted on somepage:

Subcrafts are also affected by tiers. If your 51 levels over main craft and 31 levels over sub craft, your overall synth will be a 31 teir craft.

Keep in mind tho, that results change when you have subcrafts, I believe the correct formula is +5% loss per craft. So a craft that has 2 subcrafts will have a 15% loss rate. This obviously decreases the impact of the tier.

These are my results over 4,000 logged synths:
Single Craft Tier
0-10: 5% Loss, 93% NQ, 2% HQ (?)
11-30: 5% Loss, 87% NQ, 8% HQ
31-50: 5% Loss, 65% NQ, 30% HQ
51-70: 5% Loss, 48% NQ, 47% HQ
71+: 5% Loss, 32% NQ, 63% HQ

Dual Craft Tier (moderately tested)
0-10: 10% Loss, 88% NQ, 2% HQ (?)
11-30: 10% Loss, 83% NQ, 7% HQ
31-50: 10% Loss, 63% NQ, 27% HQ
51+: 10% Loss, 34% NQ, 56% HQ

Tripple Craft Tier (very little tested)
0-10: 15% Loss, 83% NQ, 2% HQ (?)
11-30: 15% Loss, 79% NQ, 6% HQ
31-50: 15% Loss, 65% NQ, 25% HQ
51+: 15% Loss, 46% NQ, 39% HQ

A little warning for those of you that want to comment on this:
4,000 synths is NOT enough data to figure much out. It\'s also up to the person looking at the data to interpret what it all means. These are not totally exact numbers but they are all within +/-5%. These are the numbers I suspect are the most correct, based on different assumptions I\'ve made (which many not be the same assumptions everyone would agree on).

If your intrested in seeing the raw data, I made a post on alla\'s tradeskill forums a while ago - but not too many people said anything about it. The problem with narrowing things down is - if you make it too simple, people accuse you of lying, if you make it too complex, no one understands it.

I\'ve had a few terrible outlashes from people in the past and its the main reason I\'ve kept things under the table for so long. If no one cares about the information then I\'ll just keep it to myself and a few friends.

I post it here because there seems to be a lot less flexing of the e-peen than most other areas.

Oh, and about the direction facing - while I haven\'t been able to prove that directions do anything, I also haven\'t been able to disprove it either. Its unusual to note that if I group all the crafting done in one direction, and compare it to a group done in a different direction, more often then not the \"HQ\" direction does have a better HQ rate. But this rate also lies within the rate of error, which means that:
1) HQ directions could be +1-3% HQ rate.
2) Crafting directions are a percieved fallacy due to a +/-5% HQ error margin.

It\'s worth to note that days and moon DO appear to affect crafting rates, but I can\'t split the two up. I can say that New Moon + Day of the week crystal is weak to offers the Highest skill up rate, but I\'m unable to narrow down HQ, Success or Failure rates.

Of course, (outside of tiers) crafting is all about luck - cheers!

[Asmoranomar]

Ugh....I posted the above in a different post and it appeared here....now the stupid edit applet wont load and I cant remove it.

It kinda applies, but I intended it to go in another post where it would be better suited. Sorry.

[Taskmage]

Coming back to this waaay later ... I ran some numbers today trying to figure out what kind of sushi to make with all the rice I recently gardened and thought people might be interested in the math I did and the numbers I came up with.

The first thing I did was figure out how much each synth would cost me in ingredients:


This part is pretty straightforward. Ingredients for sushi recipes are pretty symmetrical so that made this part of the spreadsheet much simpler. Prices are all unit prices figured from the median stack prices listed on ffxiah.com. The price in the wasabi row for tentacle sushi is different because that synth uses ginger instead of wasabi. I just didn't label it.

So the next thing I did was figure out how much profit I would make per synth making each type of sushi:

Profit/Synth formula

Profit per synth = NQUnitPrice x NQYield x (1 - HQRate) + HQUnitPrice x HQYield x HQRate - CostOfIngredients

Again, prices are unit prices from ffxiah.com. I only took the tier 1 HQ results into account because HQ2 and HQ3 results are so rare and unpredictable in the 11+ and 31+ brackets. Where you see the same price listed for NQ and HQ, that's because the HQ1 for that synth produces the same item, just more of it. Based on this data, if I wanted to make the most gil per synth, maximizing the gil per hour I get from the time I spend synthing, I would use all my rice to make dorado sushi. Dorado is the hardest type of sushi to HQ; getting into the 11+ bracket for that synth is only possible with some 100 skill and multiple skill-boosting items. The huge amount people are willing to pay for the rare product kicks the gil/synth way up. I may do that, but I know something about dorado sushi that tempts me to diversify.

How fast does each type of sushi sell?


ffxiah keeps track of the dates and times of the last 25 sales of each product. Probably it keeps a lot more, but that's what's visible on the website. Anyway, I dropped the most recent and least recent times into excel, told it to find the difference between the two and divided by 24 (24 intervals between the 25 transactions) to figure out how much time goes by on average between one stack of sushi selling and the next one. That data is marked as MTBS for "mean time between sales." Then I divided that number into the number of hours in a day to figure out how many stacks of each type of sushi sell in a day. Less than 20 stacks of dorado sell in a day, one about every hour and thirteen minutes. If I price smart I can maybe claim a third of those sales and move 6 stacks of sushi a day. If I undercut aggressively I could take a bigger chunk of the sales, but people would catch on, buyers would bid lower, other sellers would undercut the new already-undercut prices and the profit would get squeezed out of the market. I want to make as much money as I can, so I don't want to be responsible for that if I can avoid it.

On the other hand, over 150 stacks of sole and squid sushi sell every day, so if I divert some of my resources into that fast-moving market I can get product out of my safe and gil into my pocket faster without flooding and crashing my preferred market of dorado. I don't like having a bunch of stock hanging around, taking up inventory space, running the risk of profit loss from deflation and market shifts, so I'll probably make as much dorado as I think I can sell in two days and use the rest of my rice to make equal amounts of squid and sole sushi. 12 stacks of dorado gives me a good shot of finishing a stack of dorado +1 in the process, so it seems like a good plan.

This last part is mostly for fun, but the numbers are still kindof interesting:

formulas used

# of synths to make a stack of NQ = 12 /(NQYield * (1 - HQRate))
Profit per day = NQSalesPerDay * SynthsPerNQStack * ProfitPerSynth

This is how much gil cooks of my level make each day selling each type of sushi. Basically the size of the market in gil. That's the number you're trying to take a piece of every time you put a stack of sushi on the AH. No wonder gilsellers try to control that sole sushi market, huh?

I attached a zip of the xls I used in case anyone wants to modify it for their own use. If you're just concerned with sushi then all you have to do is fill in the cells highlighted in yellow with recent data from your server and you're good to go. If you've got a wider area of interest, it'll take a bit of work to make this more flexible, but basically the calculations are the same for any synth in any craft. Use a column for each of your favorite recipes and fill in the data to find out "what's good today."

[kiffkin]

Nice info Taskmage .

One thing to add - keep your eyes open for bargains. Buy staple ingredients when they're cheap and stock up. Check out bazaars, especially in the starter towns. Also, check the Region Info on a Saturday and see if an area is going to lose its vendor the next day - and if you aren't buying from vendors, you should be . Stocking up on in-demand items while they're cheaply available can save a lot of money.

For example, if Derfland is about to go to the Beastman, you'll lose the vendor for both Derfland Pears and Ginger. That means that supplies of Pears au Lait and Ginger/Wizard Cookies are going to be increasingly scarce as people's stocks run out, and gardening becomes the only way of getting them. A few weeks ago, my server (Hades) didn't have Derfland for a couple of weeks, and the price of Wizard Cookies was up to 60k+ per stack (I think it may have gone as high as 80k) from it's more usual 35k-40k.