[Greyfist]

From what I've been able to tell, the FFXI tradeskills are full of hurt, requiring lots of time and investment to get anywhere, and the NPCs are about as helpful as rocks when it comes to getting good advice, so instead I decided to inflict my noobishness on y'all with these questions:

What does one need to do with tradeskills and gathering skills to make the most profit while adventuring? I don't mean to ever spend hours forging swords, I just want to be able to make the most of the random things that fall off of monsters. I've got insect wings and lizard tails and other assorted junk, none of it's worth anything to the NPC stores. I'd like to be able to actually use the monster junk for stuff that's useful to me, or stuff that's better to sell, and that's as far as my tradeskill aspirations go.

Ditto for the above with HELM; not looking to spend a whole evening mining, but if there's decent money in mining a rock that I'm walking past anyways, I'd like to mine it. But the tools to mine and harvest seem a bit pricey to my level 8 finances, and I understand they have a bad habit of breaking, so I'm leery of buying pickaxes to carry around with me.

So I guess you could call me a casual tradeskiller, I want to make the most of gathering and tradeskilling opportunities that I find during my travels, but am not looking to go down a pure tradeskill path and forge legendary weapons and armor or spend the hours of time and millions of gil involved in that dedication.

Any advice would be appreciated!

[Mhurron]

http://ffxi.somepage.com/recipedb/
ffxiah.com

Find recipes, check profitability, make.

[Nuriko]

Without making an effort to skill up, you likely won't get anywhere. It can certainly be something you work on for a change, but the vast majority of drops aren't going to be something you can synth, and might not be worth it anyway.

As for the various drops, consider putting stacks of 12 on the AH, check the price there and how fast it moves versus how much you'd get for NPCing it.

[Jei]

I'd say, check out the guilds in your starting town and play around with the level 0-10 recipes they offer. Those levels usually requires common drops from monsters, and will give you a very good idea what items to keep or drop while you level up. And once you have a better way to travel between every cities (chocobo, airship) it's worth to check out every guild and try them to level 10 or 20.

I won't recommend going further than 20 for now, not while you haven't got a way to make lots of gil yet.

Generally, no one try to make money while EXPing, it's better to focus on EXP while you're levelling up. And make a seperate trip to farm ingradients/make money later on.

[kosuke101]

Im so nooby with my noobishness i'm not even sure how to obtain professions