FFXIV Quick Tip: Don’t Throw Away Fine Sand

Have you ever checked the value of something and then facepalmed because you’ve been throwing it in the trash ever since…oh I dunno, forever?

If you’re like me when I was a new player exploring Eorzea, you probably wrote Fine Sand off immediately, thinking it was worthless due to its sheer abundance and low autosell value (1 gil).

How Do You Get Fine Sand?

As a fledgling Fisher in FFXIV, one of the first things you come to realize is that there isn’t much use for most of the fish you catch.

Aside from levequest or grand company turn-ins, the vast majority of fish are simply fodder to desynthesize.

Sometimes that desynthesis will yield a tiny bit of coin, but most of the time you get a pinch of Fine Sand.

What is Fine Sand Used For?

Well, despite the supply being high from how much Fine Sand you get from fishing, crafters use enough of it in crafting that it actually has some demand on the marketboard.

It’s a component in a handful of furnishing recipes like aquariums, but the big recipe is Mortar, which itself is used in even more furnishing recipes. Important furnishings, like walls, flooring, counters, and roofs. And you need a lot of Mortar for many of them.

In case you didn’t know, people like decorating their houses! What they don’t like is teleporting all around the place gathering materials to craft those decorations. They’re going to buy the materials or they’re going to buy the furnishing itself from someone else who bought the materials.

Should I Sell Fine Sand or Craft Mortar?

That’s really up to you and how much effort you want to put into making gil.

The decision also largely depends on your server’s marketboard and the relative prices of Fine Sand, Mortar, and Limestone (another component of Mortar which has its own value in furnishing recipies).

On my server at this moment for example, Mortar is worth far, far more than Fine Sand, but unfortunately the price of Limestone is high enough that even if I were to make my own Mortar, it would have been a better idea to just sell the Limestone I used making it.

The main point is that you shouldn’t view Fine Sand as a worthless item, because it is in demand. If you don’t like playing the marketboard, simply list your stack of Fine Sand and it will sell for much more than you’d get autoselling it.

Now you know!