Question for the high level crafters

[Vyuru]

I would like the advice of a high level crafter (80+) although any and all comments and suggestions are welcome.

Right now I am debating whether or not to keep on leveling cloth craft. Right now I am about... lvl 54 clothcraft I think, give or take a few levels.

What I see happening alot lately is that once profitable synths are decreasing in value to the point of making little to no profit. A good example of this would be a stack of wool threads. They once sold for about 30,000 a stack, they now sell for between 18,000 to 20,000. To make them, you can either buy sheep wool, or farm/steal it, or synth it from sheep skins. If you buy sheep wool from the cloth guild, it costs about 700 per piece, so it costs roughly 16,800 to make it. And really, if I am going to go through all of that running around and synthing, I want more than a mere 3,200 profit per stack, which isn't even counting the AH fees.

Now, that is just one example, but that is happening with alot of the profitable synths right now, and it has been happening for quite some time.

I am pretty patient and very careful of my gil when I craft. but even so crafting in the 50+ range gets expensive when you consider what the ingredients could have sold for. Silk Cloth used to go for about 150k per stack, and I made and used up 3 stacks for a few skillup points. It may have only cost me maybe 100k at most to make them, but I gave up on 350k profit from that, and it seems that it will only get worse the higher I go. Although for some things like Rainbow thread/cloth I am willing to go and farm spiders for the spider webs, or buy them from the AH when they are nice and cheap.

My main concern though is that there seems to be an influx of crafters into all of the crafts that just... completely trash prices on almost everything. I'm partly worried about them, and I am worried about prices coming down to the point where I have to HQ things to make a profit, and when you are talking about expensive items that cost a few million gil to make, this is very risky to me. Simply put, I am a relatively casual player and it takes me awhile to make that much gil, I'd be happy if I could make a normal synth and sell it for a slight profit, but this does not seem to be the case, although I haven't checked lately. Selling a +1 for a ton of gil is highly attractive, but the probability of failing the synth, or making a NQ synth that sells for dirt cheap like the Amemet Mantle is just a bit too much for me right now.

I'm not worried about the cost of leveling a craft to 100, well, if I was leveling goldsmithing I might However I want to see a return on the investment of taking a craft that high, and I just don't know if I will see that because I know that by the time I take a craft to 100, there will be a whole bunch of other new 100 crafters who I will be competing with. Some of them will be legit crafters who worked hard to get there, and I could be happy competing with them, but I suspect alot of them will have bought gil to get where they are and that they will trash whatever profitable market I may find, even if it is the HQ synths.

I enjoy crafting especially cloth crafting although I don't want to sit there synthing for hours at a time. I am mostly worried about not seeing a profit once I level it high, however there is no way to know if I will or not without doing it, so I am at a slight loss as to what to do right now.

I plan on eventually taking all crafts to 60, but right now clothcrafting is the only one I want to take past 60.

So I guess I'm asking, how did you guys decide to take the plunge and take a craft up high? Any words of advice you might be able to give me?

[Jei]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

100 fishing, 100 cooking, 80 smith 80 woodworking here. Personally, I like making consumables just like your example of wool thread. However, with the market price these days I can't really make profit if I buy my ingradients anymore. Resources will need to be cheap, or even free. By farming them, fishing them, BCNM them or whatever mean you can think of.

Like my main income these days. I still fish. Fish sells for crap. But buying fish to cook won't give me much profit either. So I cook my own fish, sell the product and still making enough to be happy.

Originally, I planned to take smithing to 100 and discard my woodworking. However, I don't like to rely on HQing equipment for income : / And mining is in a very very sad sad state right now. All my income are still purely wood/food consumables.

[Blowy]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Just a few points...

You make money crafting by being able to craft something better than the next guy. This means that if there is a HQ possible, the crafters in the highest possible tier are going to be the ones making money, because they can HQ more than other crafters (and therefore can afford to sell the NQs at more of a loss).

It's hard to make money crafting skillup items. People see skilling up as an investment. Because the profit is at high crafting levels, players are willing to take a loss to get to those high levels (and therefore the profits) faster.

Prices are dropping, and have been for sometime. Where an item can be crafted from both bought ingredients, and from farmed ingredients, the bought ingredients may no longer be profitable to use. All AH bought items are dropping in price, but NPC bought goods are fixed. On the plus side, with AH prices dropping, NPC sold goods are becoming more viable again.

Wool thread is one of the cheapest and easiest skillup ithems in it's level range. Because of this, you'll be lucky to make much profit off it anytime (but at least there is no HQ synth, so you not at a disadvantage from higher level crafters).

Crafting for profit at lower levels is often a matter of finding a niche, and riding it until it's no longer profitable. Being on top of a group of synths, and being ready to drop them when others find out there's profit there is the key. Unfortunately, as a low level crafter, there's a lot of people with exactly the same skills as you (and a number whoe can do most synths a lot better...)

[Caspian]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Basically already been summed up. There are exception to every rule (i can make all my ammo for free after selling the surplus, or just use it, sell everything, and make more money per hour than I can doing anything else at this point.) Like Blowy said, Its the highest levels where the real money comes in, and even then you take losses here and there to HQ for the big money. For instance, making elemental staves NQ is a HUGE gilsink, thats why noone does it for skillups. Infact you won't even make enough HQ's to overcome the loss until you actually hit 100 with all your +skill GP items and advanced synth support before you can break the 2nd tier and HQ enough to see a profit, but once you do, there is a lot of money to be had in it. Basically, its not hopeless and there are plenty of things you can do to make money with a craft and really enjoy the profits later on. I say stick with it.

[Icemage]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

There's two paths to money in crafting.

(1) Consumables. Everything from food to ammo to potions. These are generally low-cost, as players are not generally going to want to blow a lot of money on something that only helps them short-term. On the plus side, such items are always in use, and thus there is always demand of some sort for them.

(2) Rare non-consumables. Since most HQs are pretty rare, the HQ version of any good item will generally fetch a good price, as will even NQ synths if the materials are scarce. Unfortunately, the rarity depends on how many people can actually produce that item in quantity, and if too many are produced, the price will eventually fall as the supply will eventually exceed demand. You can make a lot of money this way if you have enough skill and work the markets to your advantage, but such crafters are always working under a time-clock.

Sooner or later a synth will "dry up" and most everyone that wants one will have one - this happened to NQ elemental staves after about a year once new methods to obtain elemental ore were introduced. I bought my Dark Staff years ago for around 350K - nowadays you can pick one up for a song on most servers.

So your choice is really between making small to moderate amounts of money from consumables, or gambling and hoping for HQs on rare synths before the window of opportunity closes on non-consumables.


Icemage

[kiffkin]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

I agree with all that's been said so far, and will just add a couple of things.

In answer to your question, I'm a 97.5 cook (I will get round to finishing it one day ) and a BST. I can make my own pet food and a lot of my jugs; I generally make more than I need and sell the rest. I make a selection of other foods too, switching between recipes as they become profitable.

A lot of high level crafting is about research. You have to know where to get the best deals on ingredients and where the profit synths are. This involved keeping an eye on all 4 AHs, regional info (e.g. if an area is about to lose it's regional vendor) and checking bazaars. You'll probably also need to garden and/or farm, and you'll know where the spawn points for various elementals are.

To be honest, it really isn't for everyone, as there is a lot of work involved. Of course, you can always stick to the straightforward stuff - for example, people are always going to be wanting mithkabobs - but that usually involves a very small profit margin on NQs. If you're really unlucky, NQs can actually make a loss - squid sushi hit 9k a stack on my server earlier this week, down from 20k last weekend, and I reckon cost to be around 12k. If you can be adaptable, however, you can make a good income from crafting, so don't get discouraged .

[Sabaron]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Some of the things I've seen in the markets most recently absolutely baffle me. People on Asura are dumping virtually everything into the AH. It used to be, that when I skilled up on something, I'd sell a portion of it on AH and dump the rest onto a merchant. Now I see people listing crazy, crazy stuff likes 100gil Mamushito. The sword sells to merchant for more than that and if you sell it in Jeuno (which this one was) the AH tax is 51! Why? Why do people do this kind of stuff?

It seems to me that this "new generation" of skill-up crafters aren't even attempting to make money... They just want the skill, which to me is quite odd since I made money all the way up in Alchemy. Of course, this stuff is not confined to my consumables markets either--some very nice things like Scorpion Harnesses are now so overstocked that you couldn't possibly make any money on them--even the HQ--without farming the ingredients.

One of the biggest problems with crafting in FFXI is that huge quantities are basically requisite. For example, in order to get me from 85 to 86 Alchemy, I made 8 Stun Kukri, 4 Stun Jamadhars, 6 Espadons, 18 Composite Fishing Rods, an Icarus Wing, a Bloody Lance, and 2 Super Ethers. I sold a few of the Stun Kukri at 30k each--a profit. The Jamadhars all sold for a profit (albeit slowly), the Espadons tanked while I was selling them dropping from a cozy 25k down to an abysmal 5k each over the course of something like 3 days, and Composite Rods held pretty steady from an initial 15k down to around 8k. I gave the Wing to a friend, and kept 1 of the ethers selling the other at a very slight (<1000gil) loss, and I've still got the lance. Now, within 5 days of this someone was selling Stun Kukri at 10k--less than 200gil above sell-to-merchant. I started buying these and selling them to the Flower Shop Girl down the stairs along with the remainder of my inventory of Kukris (barring 2 which I retained--I have a habit of always retaining something if I perceive it as valuable at least for a couple of months). This oversupply is absolutely awful. If you do this, you will ruin every market that you do it in especially durables as Icemage says. The only durable goods controls we have available are the Desynthesis Line Price and the Sell-to-Merchant Price. The former is the price that a durable good has to drop to in order for it to be worthwhile to buy them out of the AH and then process them back into their constituents. The latter is, obviously, the price at which you can profit by buying the items (from idiots) on the AH and then selling them to an NPC merchant. This is not a good control and you're better off controlling the supply by selling to merchant and making your money off of a few sales rather than a giant wad of really cheap crap that tanks your price for the foreseeable future. There are several products I've encountered that don't do this... The Composite Fishing Rod is such an oddity. For some reason there appears to be a bottomless pit of demand for them. Only the most skilled fisherman can break them and occasionally, these fishermen will sell the broken rods back for more than a new one so that skiller-uppers will buy them and take a 2-4k hit per synth at a level when it takes 30-40 to get one point of skill... No matter how many I put up, it seems like they just "disappear". It is not like that with most durable markets. Consumables usually hit a niche where no one is willing to make them. Oddly enough, Prism Powder is still a popular synth on Asura despite the fact that making the Glass Fiber used for them and selling it is significantly more profitable than the powder made from it and has been so for many moons (even if you max HQed virtually every synthesis at one point). I can only assume that the volume of powder on the market is wholly representative of the current population of new alchemists coming up through that synth's level.

I realize that this was a semi-rant, and I wish you luck in this Economy of Idiocy (if your server is like Asura). Maybe SE will give us some new recipes (that don't deserve to be tossed into the fireplace and forgotten... *cough* Copper Bullet *cough*), but I won't hold my breath...

[Jei]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

That, combine to the mass RMT banning, I can't help myself to connect them together.... new RMT crafting armies on the rise.

[Wise Donkey]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Everyone has pretty much said what can be said on the topic, but I will add my 2 gil also. I was 60 in 4 crafts on my retired character, and I saw many a recipe just collapse in my time. Prime example was DS Bolts - a stack of quivers sold for around 100-150k profit with regularity, but someone came along and undercut to cost. Dropped the price from 500k to 375k from one sale to the next. I saw that happen with quite a few profitable recipes. It is discouraging, but keep at it, find that next synth on it's way up and good luck.

[Vyuru]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Thanks for all the replies =^.^=

I do tend to favor the consumable route, they normally sell fast, and at least with clothcrafting you don't have to worry so much about the HQ synths, there are alot of synthable ingredients for all of the synths.

squid sushi hit 9k

Same thing happened to Sole Sushi awhile ago, it went from something like 70k/stack to 17k/stack over 3 days. I felt bad for the cooks, but on the other hand I got to use my first stack of Sole Sushi :D

For example, in order to get me from 85 to 86 Alchemy, I made 8 Stun Kukri, 4 Stun Jamadhars, 6 Espadons, 18 Composite Fishing Rods, an Icarus Wing, a Bloody Lance, and 2 Super Ethers

I know what you mean. I skilled up on alchemy before Holy Waters were in big demand, so I bought light crystal stacks for 2k and sold Holy Waters to npcs for 3.6k per stack (AH price was about 2k and moved slow) Some things I don't even bother selling on the AH and I toss them if they are cheap enough and if I am mass synthing them, and have no use for them, Insect/Bird fletchings and Orange/Apple juice come to mind.

For example, in order to get me from 85 to 86 Alchemy, I made 8 Stun Kukri, 4 Stun Jamadhars, 6 Espadons, 18 Composite Fishing Rods, an Icarus Wing, a Bloody Lance, and 2 Super Ethers

See, this is what worries me about raising a craft high, you probably spent a ton of gil on crafting items. Or at the very least you could have sold all of those cermet chunks for a very nice profit. All that for just one level of alchemy.

That, combine to the mass RMT banning, I can't help myself to connect them together.... new RMT crafting armies on the rise.

Not just that, but sometimes I see someone skilling up on a HIGHLY unprofitable synth. I've seen people skillup cooking on making Honey, I've seen 'em skillup on Brais, Linen Robes, Wool Slopes, and just other expensive synths. What is odd to me about this is that there are REALLY cheap and easy synths that they could be doing instead. Heck, I've seen people skillup on Scarlet Ribbons(AH price 3kish, velvet cloth to make them 45k/stack) when they could be doing Insect Fletchings(AH price 8k/stack, 1,000 or less for a stack of Insect Wings) It really doesn't make sense to me.

I highly suspect 90% of my competition comes from lazy crafters. If either the cloth npc merchant in Al Zhabi gets taken, or his friend, the store will close. Whenever that happens the supply of all Wool, Linen, Velvet and Silk thread/cloth drops dramatically and I can still buy them for their cheapest, or close to it, price in Selbina and Windurst. Which tells me that few people are going out to these places to buy them. That's not always the case, there is normally an early morning rush to put up items on the AH before the NA population starts playing. But for the rest of the day the NPC stocks are left more or less untouched.

So even if I didn't want to go the HQ route, I could still make a nice profit by making say, Rainbow Cloth, Twinthread items, and AF ingredients for the new jobs.

I think though that I need to raise some of my other crafts some more first, I need to have diverse ways to make money, and lots of money, if I am going to take Weaving high. Plus for some crafts it gets pretty cool, like for Leatherworking I can desynth cheap leather armor into Sheep Leather that sells for 20k/stack, and that's pretty good.

[Jei]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

The thing about insect fletchings are that the insect wings are not always available. They are so cheap most people just toss them away. When I was skilling my cloth, I started collecting insect wings since I was still skill 0 >.> Buy them once they pop on AH and store them on mule. If you don't plan earlier for this synth, you will really have a hard time finding wings.

First hand experience, when levelling second or third crafting skill, I usually prefer to use materials that are easy to find and always available. I bought tons of silk thread making fishing poles at some point and just NPC the prodects just because it was fast. But that's only possible because I have other skill to fund me to begin with.

[Vyuru]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Buy them once they pop on AH and store them on mule. If you don't plan earlier for this synth, you will really have a hard time finding wings.

While I found that to be true with the Bird Fletching stage, I found that there were almost always 20 stacks of wings for under 1,000 gil on the Jeuno AH, plus the other towns were normally well supplied with them. Maybe I just got lucky though ^^

First hand experience, when levelling second or third crafting skill, I usually prefer to use materials that are easy to find and always available.

I am sooo glad that I had Alchemy up to about 58 before I started weaving, having a steady source of income really let me shoot through the weaving levels by being able to buy the ingredients from npcs. I'd really hate to be a new player just starting a craft now, it seems that there is either a choke point that's hard to get through, like obtaining Cobalt Jellyfish for skilling up on Mercury. Or else the craft doesn't have a really good money maker for awhile like Cooking, or it's so expensive like Smithing, Goldsmithing, and Leather.

I expect that I'll have an easier time of making money during spring break and summer of next year, it seemed like alot of my steady customers stopped playing once the fall quarter/semester for the schools and colleges started.

When they come back, I'll corner the market again and make even more money than I did last summer! :D

Actually, now that I think of it, I don't think I want to know how much gil I spent during that summer. I got both my weaving glasses and the Spinning key item, tossed a bit over a million gil into mog house furniture, spent another 1.5mil on gear, spent lord knows how much in gifts to friends and helping them buy stuff.... And while I did get repaid for some of it, I normally do my best to insist that they not repay me. Hearing their squeals of joy as they finally buy their Haubergeon is more than enough repayment for me ^^

Allrighty, I'm all stoked to get a ton of crafting done before next summer, I am as yet undecided upon whether it's to raise my support crafts for weaving or to take weaving further, but it's gonna happen!

Bwahahaha, next summer is gonna be great :D

[Sabaron]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Don't forget Christmas Break... It's not as long as Summer, but there will be significantly more activity in the markets regardless of gilseller/gilbuyer activities.

[Arkitan1]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Ever since SE banned the RMTs, the FFXI market base has gone to crap!

Its near impossible to make any real good money with a dead market.

You are honestly better off just crafting for yourself or custom craft for other users which I do.

Thats the only real reason why AH market died, no RMTs = no real profits.

Banning RMTs was one of the biggest SE msitakes that could ever had been done.

And they wonder why WoW and EQ are better games.

Is it me or does noone but me know how to reset the AH?

I had to put a 1 after my nick as someone else already took my characters name!

[Sabaron]

Re: Question for the high level crafters

Ever since SE banned the RMTs, the FFXI market base has gone to crap!

Are you high?

RMT have been chiefly responsible for damaging the economy in several ways:

1. They will frequently reduce markets to paper-thin profit margins because they craft 24/7. The paper thin margin allows them to maintain a steady income (esp multiplied by multiple crafters) but it makes the market sour for non-RMT.

2. They have large gil banks and on items that are rare enough to monopolize, they can buy/resell and mark priced up through the roof (remember what they used to do to things like Sushi).

I think that you are either (a) delusional or (b) interested in reducing the price of the gil that your buying by helping RMT crafters...