Best Sources of Gil in FFXIV

I always see new players asking about how to farm gil, and to be honest it’s not something I ever really thought about myself. The game sort of throws gil in your face for almost every little thing you do, so you hardly ever find yourself in need. In my early days of the game I wasn’t drawn to the activities that require a lot of funds, so I was fine without paying gil much attention.

Of course, other players are going to have different interests and experiences, so I’m going to review what I’ve seen and learned when it comes to earning in game currency. I’ll walk you through why you might want to accumulate a lot of gil, and some of the various ways you can go about doing it.

Why do you Need Gil?

Presumably you already have some need for gil that has led you to find this page, but I’ll address this here because I think it’s interesting information for new players. There are actually only a few reasons in this game to worry about farming up a lot of gil. Of course, those few things might be very good reasons for you personally, depending on what you enjoy in FFXIV and how you want to play.

Housing / Decorating (plot, furnishings)

To enter the housing scene you’ll have to find a plot for sale first, which is the real challenge. Aside from that though, you’ll need a lot of gil up front as a plot of land will cost millions. The price for a small plot is 3-3.75 million gil, while a medium will cost 16-20 million and a large will be 40-50 million.

Realistically though, you’re not going to outright purchase a medium or a large unless the ward is brand new. Instead, players typically relocate from a small plot to a bigger one, which bypasses the purchase timer. Your first plot will most likely be a small one, and not necessarily in your ideal location either. Relocation still requires you to purchase the new plot, but the price will be lower. Specifically, the price is reduced by an amount equal to 30% of your old plot’s value.

On top of the plot, you’ll need to build a house, which will cost 450k, 1 million, or 3 million depending on the plot size. It’s necessary to build a house so that you can enter it, which resets the auto-demolition timer. If you go 45 days without entering the house, your plot is relinquished and you receive 80% of your gil back.

Apartments are always available, never get demolished due to inactivity, and they’re a cheaper option at 500,000 gil if you just can’t wait to have a place of your own. They’re a single interior room, and you don’t have an exterior space of your own, but I strongly recommend getting one if you have an itch to decorate. Some players absolutely love this part of the game, and this is a good way to get started.

If you have a Free Company, you can purchase a Personal Room / Private Chamber. These are the same size as an apartment, but for the lower price of 300,000 gil. Of course, your room is tied to the FC house, so it’s dependent on your membership and the FC staying active.

Once you’ve secured housing of some sort, you’ll want to furnish it too, and this will also cost gil, maybe a lot depending on how extravagant your tastes are. There are tons of furnishings in the game, and you can browse them using a site like FFXIV Housing. Some furnishings are sold by a few NPCs in the housing districts, but most are bought from other players on the marketboard.

Raiding (food, pots, crafted gear)

While the Best-in-Slot (BiS) equipment for your combat jobs will be a mix of Tomestone pieces and Savage raid loot, these are time-gated and require a decent amount of effort to build up. You may be looking to catch up after being away from the game, or gear up an alternate role than what you normally play.

In these cases, you might consider buying some of the highest ilvl crafted gear. It should be comparable to the current normal raid gear, which is just below the unaugmented Tomestone gear. While you would prefer the higher gear, it’s limited to your weekly capped Tomestones. Crafted gear on the other hand can be bought immediately to get you up to a working average item level.

This is especially true on the very first week of a new raid tier, which launch with even numbered patches. For Shadowbringers, that would be 5.0, 5.2, and 5.4. In this first week, the crafted gear is pretty much the best you can wear, and many dedicated raiders will be crafting or buying the equipment to give them the best chance at clearing the new Savage fights right off the bat.

While your equipment is a hefty one-time purchase, you might be regularly spending gil on high level food and stat potions for your raid nights. If you’re still learning mechanics and trying to get those clears, your raid nights could require heavier consumption of your supplies. Prices fluctuate based on how long the tier has been out, and even how late in the week it is.

For progression in learning new Savage fights, it’s important to have the extra stats from these consumables, especially food, so I don’t recommend skipping them just to save gil. One tip to soften the blow to your in-game wallet is to hold off on stat potions until your group is familiar with all the mechanics, and just needs the damage to beat the enrage timer. If you insist on keeping the potion in your opening rotation while you learn, you could use a cheaper healing potion to simulate that oGCD slot.

Cosmetics (glamour, mounts, etc.)

If you’ve got the gil, you can afford to be an impulse shopper. See something you like? Buy it, store it, wear it. Remember that you don’t need to buy HQ equipment if you’re only using it for the appearance. Just grab the cheapest one, even if it’s NQ. When new glamour outfits are released the crafting materials are often found as Treasure Hunt drops, and the prices can be very high.

There’s a lot of level 1 gear whose only purpose is glamour, so you can skip to the end of the marketboard results to find those. Alternatively, you can set your search results to only look at level 1 gear of the equipment slot of interest, such as in the above screenshot.

Sometimes an item won’t even have any sellers listed on your marketboard. This happens most often with endgame progression gear from previous expansions. Check other worlds on your Data Center using the World Visit System and see if their marketboards have any listed. If not, you could buy the materials and craft it yourself, hire a crafter friend to make it for you, or search garlandtools for other pieces that share the same model.

There are a few mounts and minions that can be sold on the marketboard, including some rare ones from loot boxes that are sure to be expensive. It’s a rather limited selection to be honest, since most of the cooler mounts in the game are untradeable, instead being earned from your character’s achievements.

Weekly Gil Rewards

Doman Enclave Reconstruction

Every week you can make a ‘donation’ to the Doman Enclave Reconstruction effort, which basically means you give them items you don’t want, and you receive more gil than you would have from autoselling the item. At the Doman Enclave, interact with the Donation Basket to drop items with an autosell value. You’ll be compensated at an increased rate up to a weekly budget.

The rate and total budget increase as you progress through the reconstruction storyline, with the maximum being a 200% autosell gratuity up to a weekly budget of 40,000 gil. I recommend saving allagan pieces from your retainer’s open exploration ventures, and donating 40 of those every week for super simple earnings.

Challenge Log

Almost all the tasks in the Challenge Log come with a gil reward attached. The biggest rewards are in the ‘Complete’ category, which means you’ll benefit a lot more by crossing off many different tasks in the Challenge Log. It’s steady, easy gil every week, and it will probably add a bit of variety to your FFXIV gameplay in case you’re getting tired of the same activities all the time.

Items That Save Gil

There are a few types of items that don’t give you gil directly, but do reduce the amount of gil you would normally spend. Many of these items are obtained through your Grand Company, so be sure to increase your rank and gain access to everything you need there.

Dark Matter

Being able to repair your own gear with Dark Matter saves you a ton in repair fees from the NPC menders. In case you didn’t know, when an NPC mender does the job for you, they top up your equipment to 100% durability, and charge you based on how low the durability was.

When you have your crafting jobs levelled up, you can repair your own gear. It costs one chunk of Dark Matter per piece of equipment, and the durability gets 100% added to it, up to a maximum of 199%. For example, if your helmet was at 75%, it will be at 175%. There’s no Gil fee, and it will last longer before it needs to be repaired again.

Remember that there are different grades of Dark Matter, and higher grades are required to repair higher level gear. I only ever buy the grade 7 Dark Matter, since I really just care about repairing endgame gear, and I don’t want to clutter my inventory. You could use the higher grades to repair lower level gear, but it’s a waste of resources at that point.

Aetheryte Ticket

These tickets are bought from NPC vendors through The Hunt currencies. Specifically, you can use Allied Seals from ARR hunts, or Centurio Seals from Heavensward and Stormblood hunts. The tickets are 5 seals each, which is pretty cheap. If you’ve already bought all the cosmetic items you want from these vendors, I would recommend the Aetheryte Tickets to essentially convert them to gil.

One of these tickets is good for a single teleportation, so you should ideally use it on a max price journey. That would be pretty much any trip between two zones from different expansions (except favoured destinations), and would normally cost 999 gil. You’re probably going to make a lot of these trips at one point or another, so save tickets for them to get the most value out of each use. Be aware that there is the slight annoyance of an extra dialogue box every time you teleport somewhere, so that may or may not be a hassle you want to put up with to save on gil.

[Grand Company] Aetheryte Ticket

These are a little more specific than the regular Aetheryte Tickets, since they cannot be used to travel anywhere, but they can still cover the cost of a 999 gil trip if you’re travelling from one of the expansion zones. These are good for one teleport directly to your current Grand Company, which means they’ll place you right at the entrance to the headquarters.

I think that’s kind of neat, and if you’re part of the Maelstrom this saves you a trip through the Aethernet in Limsa Lominsa. If you already considered travel time when you were choosing your Grand Company, then you may have gone with The Twin Adder or the Immortal Flames. In those cities you’ll still take advantage of the free teleport, and save yourself the trouble of running to headquarters from the plaza.

Temporary Discount Items

There are a few different consumable items I like to use that will save you gil you otherwise would have spent. They come from your Grand Company Squadron, specifically from the Priority Missions, of which you can complete one per week.

The Priority Aetheryte Pass cuts your teleport costs by 40% for two hours. If you just logged in and are going to be playing for a while, pop one of these and get some dailies done in various locations around the game.

The Squadron Gear Maintenance Manual reduces gear wear by 30% for two hours. If you don’t have crafters levelled, or you’re all out of Dark Matter, use this before jumping into endgame content for cheaper repairs of your expensive level 80 gear.

The Squadron Rationing Manual increases meal effect duration by 15 minutes, and is active for two hours. This is a little more niche, and would save the most if you were buying expensive raid food and sitting down to raid for a couple hours, saving you from consuming one or two of those meals.

Earning Gil With Combat Jobs

Much of the gil you earn as a combat job will be from quests, so going through the MSQ should keep you afloat for your basic needs like teleport and repair fees. It’s assumed you’re doing or have already done the MSQ, since it’s usually a higher priority than farming gil. This section looks a little more closely at other activities where you can spend your time on engaged in combat with good gil-earning potential.

Clan Mark Bills

Clan Mark Bills are part of ‘The Hunt’ and there’s a clan in each expansion with bounties that reset daily and weekly. While it’s pretty time consuming to try to do all of them, you can get steady gil quickly and easily just by doing the most efficient ones every day, and you’ll earn Hunt currency and combat experience as well.

For Shadowbringers for example, what I do is accept all of the bills for the day, but I only go hunt down the three-nut marks. At 1500 gil for each mark, that’s a total of 7500 gil each day, as well as 75 Nuts and a bit of combat experience if you have a level 70-79 Job. Since the two-star and one-star bills are still accepted in my inventory, I still see those enemies on the field with the mark above their head. If I happen to see a two-star or one-star on the map while I’m out then I’ll kill it, but otherwise I keep it simple and finish up the rounds in 10 minutes or so.

I also like to do the weekly Elite Mark Bill from as many of the Clans as I can, since each one is 5000 gil. The Allied Seals you get from the ARR ones can be exchanged for the Aetheryte Tickets mentioned earlier, saving you tons of gil in teleportation fees. These are so much easier to find now that you can fly in ARR areas too. The Nuts from Shadowbringers’ Clan Nutsy will also be useful for buying upgrade items as a catch-up mechanic for extra Jobs later.

Treasure Hunts

One of the few combat activities that directly translates to lots of gil, and is also fun and luck-based, are Treasure Maps. Along with earning pure gil, you’ll pick up a lot of crafting materials to sell on the marketboard, so go into it with some free inventory space. Some of the drops are direct to your inventory, while others (particularly the rarer stuff like glamour materials) require you to roll for loot against your party members. These are very lucrative items, especially right after they’re released.

If you don’t have your own friends to do maps with, you can recruit or join people in the Party Finder, under the Treasure Hunt section. Depending on which type of group you join, you’ll handle loot differently. ‘Free For All’ (FFA) groups allow everyone to roll on everything. ‘Owner Needs’ groups usually allow everyone to roll on loot OUTSIDE of the dungeon, but once a portal spawns the owner of that map gets first dibs on any loot in the dungeon that requires a roll.

Typically I prefer to join FFA parties, especially if it’s a larger group or if I’m free to run maps for a while. For smaller groups, or if you only plan to join for a short while, ‘Owner Needs’ isn’t too bad. It’s unspoken etiquette, but to be considerate, I would make sure you contribute at least one of your own maps, and run at least one of somebody else’s.

Deep Dungeons

Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High are the two deep dungeons in FFXIV, and are somewhat of a different challenge than your typical duties. They’re also the source of some exclusive items that can be sold to other players for high value due to their rarity.

To be clear, you aren’t going to earn a heap of gil just by levelling your DPS jobs through the same set of 10 floors over and over. The PotD ‘levelling’ set is floors 51-60, and you get 2,000 gil for completing that set. For the big bucks you’ll have to run the higher floors, which require a consistent group of players to progress through each set. These higher floors  are where you’ll get the rarer loot boxes from the hidden accursed hoard coffers. These rare sacks can yield things like mounts or bardings which can be sold on the marketboard for large amounts of gil.

You have two save slots in each deep dungeon, and if you want to continue on through the hardest levels, you’ll need party members who will commit to one of those save slots and climb with you. While the Party Finder does have a section for deep dungeons, I haven’t personally seen too much activity there. You may have better luck asking people in your FC, or posting in a discord server dedicated to your character’s data center.

Expert Dungeons

This suggestion might just feel like you’re going about your daily tasks, but you may not know that max level dungeons can actually put some decent change in your pocket if you run the Duty Roulette: Expert every day. If you’re up for the responsibility, it’s recommended you run as a Tank or Healer so you’ll get fast queues, you’ll never have to compete for rolls on your equipment set drops, and you’ll probably snag the adventurer in need bonus as well for even more bonus gil.

There are a couple of ways these dungeons contribute to your gil. The first is by the high level combat materia drops that go directly into your inventory. This gives you grade 7 and 8 materia which already have high autosell values, but can also sometimes be sold for much more on the marketboard. It may even be worth it to save them up and transmute materia for the high chance at a noncombat materia coming out, since these are usually more valuable to other players.

The other type of high value items you’ll get are the dungeons equipment drops. While these can be desynthesized for high level crafting materials to sell, they can also be turned in through your Grand Company’s Expert Delivery system for a very large amount of Seals. You can easily translate those company seals into gil by buying things like teleportation tickets and Dark Matter which save gil you would otherwise spend.

Alternatively, you could use company seals to buy sellable items like glamour prisms, which typically sell well on the marketboard. Coke, cordials, and xelphatol water are a few other items that may be worth looking into for converting your company seals to gil.

Earning Gil With Noncombat Jobs

As you probably know, if you’re not spending time on a job fighting enemies, the other types of jobs are all about acquiring and producing items. Aside from weekly rewards, the profits you’ll get from these jobs mostly come from looking at what items people are willing to buy, and going and getting them yourself.

Custom Deliveries

If you’ve got crafters or gatherers levelled, you should be doing Custom Deliveries each week. You’ll walk away having made a small instant profit in gil since the turn ins give a reward greater than the cost of crafting materials from the NPC vendors.

More importantly you’ll get a significant amount of scrips, which can be traded for materia to sell on the marketboard for especially high prices when new sets of crafting gear come out.

Levequests

Levequests are a popular choice for powerlevelling your crafters and gatherers, but even if you don’t need the experience you can still grab the gil rewards. There’s even an achievement for earning a high cumulative total of gil from levequests. If you’re chasing this ‘Honest Gillionaire…’ title, you’ll want to put your leve allowances to good use so you don’t overcap them. I recommend the crafting ones since they take less time to finish which makes them easier to grind.

One of the most efficient levequests for your allowances is ‘A Cookie for Your Troubles’, a level 78 Culinarian levequest. It’s a Charity levequest, meaning you can turn it in 3 times on a single allowance. Coffee Biscuits are pretty easy to make too, requiring just 3 ingredients easily gathered in bulk in Shadowbringers zones.

Carpenter and Blacksmith have decent Charity options at level 78 as well, but the rest of the crafters’ levequests involve a wider variety of ingredients which are just too annoying and inefficient.

Playing the Marketboard

This is how the mega-rich players do it. We’re talking hundreds of millions of gil rich. Unlike most of the other gil-earning tactics, this one is not quite as easy or simple. The Marketboard is all about supply and demand, which change constantly, and more importantly, competitively. You can see what price other players are selling an item at by checking the ‘Compare Prices‘ button while listing an item with your retainer. You’re unlikely to be told exactly which items sell well at any given time to make optimal profits, because those that are in the know are probably enjoying those profits themselves.

It’s especially important to make use of the sale history button when you’re examining an item. It will give you an idea of how often people are buying something and for how much, at least on your server. You can also check each of your retainers’ sale histories to see how frequently your own items are selling, and at what times.

There are a few general categories of items that may help you narrow your field on the market. However, you’ll still have to examine your own Marketboard (or the ones on other Worlds on your Data Center) to determine what looks most profitable for you to sell.

Consumables like glamour prisms, raid food, and raid potions, tend to have a steady demand, so someone will buy them eventually. These items are still affected dramatically by timing; food and potions may spike with the release of new difficult content, while glamour prisms could be more in demand when new equipment pieces are released.

Furnishings for player housing can be lucrative, but they sell infrequently, and are a matter of personal taste. I suppose if you were a housing guru and knew what the best-looking stuff was, you could make a killing at this section.

Equipment can be a hard sell, since you can get much of the marketboard’s offerings from NPCs if all you want is glamour. However, crafting the expert recipe pieces, especially from older expansions, could still get you some infrequent earnings. Again, having a good sense of style will help as you can probably target the nicer looking stuff people will be searching for. Keep an eye out for items with very little competition on your marketboard, and make sure the item doesn’t have many shared models that players can easily get without buying them.

Some items are required for turn-ins, which also leads to somewhat steady demand, especially as new players level up. Crafting jobs have quest turn-ins which may sell easily, particularly the HQ items from ARR levels. Levequest turn-ins might be bought and sold in bulk, though somewhat less now that Ishgard Restoration offers another path to levelling. Speaking of, though, you could also try selling Ishgard Restoration materials.

Finally, Grand Companies have Supply and Provisioning turn-ins every day for each crafter and gatherer, so if you have extra time and materials to use up, there are many possible turn-in items that people will buy in specific sets (usually 3 or 10) and/or the HQ versions.

Summary

Ask yourself if you need a large amount of Gil for something. Do you want a house? Do you have expensive glamour habits? Do you just enjoy seeing fat stacks of cash sitting in the corner of your screen, unused? Then maybe it’s worth building up your funds with the activities that sound most engaging to you.

If you love the pace and flashiness of combat, try out different jobs while exploring Deep Dungeons and Treasure Dungeons, and sell the loot you find on your adventures. If you love tinkering, researching, and min-maxing, you might get an immense amount of satisfaction playing the marketboard, finding the most profit per time items for you to gather and craft.

Personally I probably spend the most Gil on glamour items I want to try out, and I tend to make my Gil through combat related activities and weekly rewards. What about you? What are your biggest in game hobbies, and how do you prefer to fund them?