FFXIV: How to Manage Your Inventory

Your inventory is full. Your armoury chest is full. Your saddlebag. Your retainers. Your glamour chest. You’ve hit rock bottom. How did you get here? You never knew you were a hoarder until you found yourself staring at your inventory, trying to decide what to throw away while everyone else is waiting for you to roll on the loot that just dropped. Well, throw out those hi-potions and imp wings so you can get out of there, and then get ready to purge.

Inventory Best Practices

If you really don’t have any inventory space to maneuver, skip down below where I go over how to deal with different categories of items. But right here I’m going to talk about some good practices to save yourself from getting to that point.

Adjust Your Inventory Settings

First, I strongly recommend going to Character Configuration -> Item Settings, and unticking the box that says “Store all newly obtained items in the Armoury Chest”. This gives you so much more control over your Armoury Chest, and it won’t passively fill up with garbage which you have to painstakingly deal with later.

This does mean you’ll have to get used to keeping an eye on what new gear you’ve acquired, and deciding whether it belongs in the armoury chest or not. One thing I’ll mention is to get into the habit of removing gear from your armoury chest when you get an upgrade. Once you update your gearset just move the old item into your inventory right away and you’ll be much less likely to forget about it.

You should also have a quick look at the Inventory Interface options in the same menu. ‘Normal’ shows a quarter of your inventory at a time (35 spaces), ‘Expanded’ shows half (70) in each tab, and ‘Open All’ as you might expect shows all tabs of your inventory at once (but key items and shards are always separate). Try them out and see which one you prefer.

Give Retainers and Saddlebag a Purpose

Next, designate categories for your saddlebag and any retainers you have. If you can’t remember where something goes you can always use the /isearch command and right click ‘Search for Item’ to locate something (or more of that something).

It’s efficient and easiest to remember if you have everything related to, say, gardening, all in one place. Or all your dyes. Or all your materia, or your upgrade items. That way if you’re doing something you don’t have to go interact with multiple retainers and your saddlebag to get all the necessary items.

The point is, keep similar things together so you’re less likely to forget and accidentally end up with stacks of the same item in two different places (treasure maps being an exception)! Much like your hotbars and keybinds, this is going to be a personal system, customized to how you enjoy playing the game, but I’ll give some tips that may help you out.

Some stuff just has to be in your main inventory to use at the drop of a hat. Food, potions, dark matter, gysahl greens, maybe glamour prisms, fireworks, etc. Basically items you might want to use while in and out of combat, or inside a duty.

The Chocobo Saddlebag cannot be accessed in duties or while actively in combat, but other than that it’s easy to access, available at just the touch of a button. This is a very versatile inventory space for when you need something but don’t want to teleport back to a Summoning Bell. For example I use mine for deep dungeon items, relic weapon materials, pigments and dyes, and tokens and other currencies.

Retainers have a ton of spaces – as many as your own inventory – and you can throw so much crap onto them that it’s pretty easy to forget to actually organize them. You might want to think of some categories that have a lot of items in them (crafting), or are typically used in close proximity to summoning bells (glamour, gardening, housing furnishings).

Clear Your Inventory Regularly

Finally, it sounds counter-intuitive, but in some cases you should resist the urge to use the right click ‘sort’ function on your inventory! If you’ve been in a dungeon, or you’ve been gathering, or your retainers have brought things back from ventures, all of that will be easily visible at the back of your inventory. Make it a habit to glance at your inventory and put new items where they belong when you get a chance.

Part of that habit building might include a routine of regularly passing by specific places, like your Grand Company to unload unwanted equipment, or somewhere with a summoning bell to sell or store materials.

If I absentmindedly hit ‘sort’ and disperse those things throughout my inventory I often forget about them and they sit there for far too long. If you’ve just done a low level dungeon, throw out the garbage like wolf fangs and acidic secretions before you hit the sort button!

Of course, after you drop things off with your retainer, turn in a bunch of gear for seals, or use up a bunch of crafting materials, it’s a good idea to sort your inventory so you fill in those empty spaces.

My Inventory is Full! What do I do?

Ok, I’ll assume you’re in dire straits, and want to get rid of stuff but don’t know which items are garbage and which ones have value in keeping. Sort your inventory with the right click ‘Sort’ menu option, and work section by section. In each category of items, I’ll detail what you can safely toss, what few items you should keep in your inventory, and what can be moved to other means of storage.

Gear

This should put all gear at the front, ordered by job and item level. Going through equipment there are a number of things to check for. This checklist can also be used to sort your armoury chest. I use the following acronym to remember the list: BAG MESS (Best, Armoire, Glamour, Materia, Expert delivery, Synthesis, Sell). Go in this order, and do the whole section at once. This will prevent you from running back and forth to the inn or your GC for example, or accidentally selling something you could have converted into materia or gotten seals for. Note that for Materia, Expert delivery, and Synthesis, this is just my priority order, but you may want to check synthesis before expert delivery for example, depending on your own priorities (do you want materia, seals, or crafting materials/desynthesis exp).

Best – Is this item the best staff/sword/chestpiece/whatever that you own for its job? If so, put it in your armoury chest and remove any others (except perhaps in-progress relic items). There are a couple of ways to compare items, but note that this doesn’t work for your retainers’ gear, so you’ll just have to check those manually:

1. Open your armoury chest and right click ‘Sort’ the corresponding section, then look for your best piece of gear of the relevant type and visually compare the ilvl or stats.

2. Change to the appropriate job and either hover over the item (you’ll see green numbers in brackets if it’s better than what you’re wearing, this is a quick ilvl check) or right click and select ‘Item Comparison’ which will show them side by side (more in depth for checking stats).

Armoire – Check if you can put the gear in your armoire, and if so, throw it in there. The third icon at the top right of the item tooltip will be lit up if it can be placed there. The armoire doesn’t count against any storage limits.

Glamour – Next check if you like the glamour. Simply right click ‘Try On’ and examine your character model. Put all desired gear in your glamour chest at an inn or your grand company squadron chambers (after removing any materia and repairing it to a condition of 100%).

Materia – Next check if it is fully spiritbonded. If the bar is white (or it says spiritbond 100%), you can right click ‘Convert’ (after removing materia) to convert the item into a piece of materia. Not all gear can be converted, and the item will say if it’s convertible near the bottom of the tooltip.

Expert delivery – Next check if you can get GC seals for it. If the item icon is pink, green or blue, it may be eligible for an expert delivery turn in. Take it to your GC and get some seals.

Synthesis – Next check if you are able to desynthesize it. Check the listed crafter and desynth skill required towards the bottom of the tooltip, or just right click ‘Desynthesis’ and see if you can do it.

Sell – Finally, check if you can sell the gear. Check for ‘Shop Selling Price’, ‘Sells for’/’Unsellable’, and ‘Market Prohibited’, which all appear at the bottom of the tooltip. If it has a shop selling price, you can rebuy it, so it’s not a big deal if you decide later you want it, you can always obtain it again, and gil is very easy to come by. If it is market prohibited you can’t sell it to players, so just autosell it. If it has no autosell price, just right click ‘discard’ the gear.

Medicine

There are several useful medicines in this game for raiders, crafters, and gatherers. There are also a lot of useless medicines that are probably wasting a space in your inventory. For raiders, look for consumables that increase your main stat. At our current tier in Shadowbringers (the first raids are not out yet) the consumables you’ll be using aren’t out yet, but they’ll following a similar naming convention to last tier’s, e.g. ‘Grade 3 Infusion of Strength‘. Get whichever medicine gives you your job’s main stat (though you may want strength instead of vitality for tanks, depending on your preference).

If you play a healer, some more optional items would be a high level ‘Super-Ether‘ for when you run into MP emergencies, or ‘Eye Drops‘ if you get silenced. Crafters benefit from items such as ‘Cunning Craftsman’s Tea‘ for the bonus stats, while gatherers should always carry some type of ‘Cordial‘ to restore their GP while gathering.

Some other general medicine that you should check, keep, or use include ‘Durability Draught‘, ‘Fantasia‘, ‘Spiritbond Potion‘, ‘Potion of Harmony‘, and ‘Tinker’s Calm‘.

Meal

Meals give you a 3% exp buff for 30 minutes (base duration) and most meals also give you bonuses to your stats. Since you sometimes get meals as rewards from quests, it’s possible you have more than you need in your inventory. I suggest at maximum six, and most players do not need six. These meals would include: experience only (literally any food, preferably cheap like raisins, boiled egg, etc.), crafting, gathering, and then a very generous three more slots in case you raid with three very different classes.

If you don’t do endgame raiding, crafting, or gathering, you’ll be fine with just raisins (or nothing if you are no longer levelling jobs), but you still may consider purchasing the combat food for your preferred job for any high level content.

Crafting Materials (Ingredient, Stone, Metal, Lumber, Cloth, Leather, Bone, Reagent)

This is the largest and most complicated category, so there are a few general rules to go by. If it has a shop selling price, get rid of it (you can always buy it from an NPC if you need it). If it’s an item gathered by miner, botanist or fisher, or dropped by a mob, and it’s low level – say, level 60 or below – get rid of it (it will be most likely be easy to obtain again, either from the marketboard or by gathering it yourself). If it’s a higher level gathered item or mob drop and you craft, then either craft the intermediate material it’s used for (carpenter’s lumber, alchemist’s glue, leatherworker’s leather, etc.), or sell it on the marketboard.

Some items like Effervescent Water, Silver Ore, or Stiperstone are used in many higher level crafts but must be gathered or bought from the marketboard. If you craft, you’ll get a sense of which items are like this, and can hold onto those on a retainer if that’s more convenient than gathering it whenever you need it.

If it’s an intermediate material (e.g. ingots or leather) and you do NOT craft, sell it immediately. If you do craft, then you may want to hold onto it, but in your retainer’s inventory, not yours. Also, don’t keep both NQ and HQ versions of these. If you have high level crafters, you should be able to consolidate them into NQ (right click ‘Lower Quality’ on the HQ and then stack them) as long as they are not endgame materials.

If you have low level crafters, it’s a bit trickier. If you have to put much effort into crafting HQ items, consider only keeping HQ materials, and selling NQ. If you need to make a lot of an item (such as for levequests) then you should only have NQ and HQ versions of a couple items at a time, and burn through them all in a designated crafting session. The biggest pitfall with crafting items cluttering your inventory, is when they live there permanently.

Materials in your inventory should ideally only be temporary, until you get to a retainer, or sit down to craft. I’m currently levelling my crafters through Shadowbringers, so my inventory contains many Shadowbringers crafting materials, and anything from lower level content is on my retainers.

What tend to be the absolute hardest materials to decide what to do with are the materials you get as loot. Drops from things like Primals and Treasure Maps, and all those annoying Garlean Fibers. These are the types of items where if you really don’t want to miss out, you’re going to have to check what these are for, using a site like Gamer Escape. I recommend just listing them on the marketboard anyway, since if you can do that, you can buy it later. For the most part, crafts using these items don’t even count for your crafting log, so don’t worry about ‘checking it off the list’.

Dye

In my opinion this is a great category of items to keep in your saddlebag. Make sure you check if it has a shop selling price, and dump it if so (unless you’re the type of player who has to re-glam their gear the very second they update it in the field). You can re-buy many dyes at the main cities and from beast tribe vendors, and of course from the marketboard.

Consider also keeping pigments in your saddlebag, since you can craft many dyes from those as needed. The dyes with a green background are more rare. You may have some that were brought back by your retainers on their ventures, and these can sell for quite a bit on the marketboard.

Materia

Personally I keep my useful materia in my saddlebag, since other materia gets dropped in my inventory and I don’t want to have to sort through them all the time, but I also don’t want to run to a summoning bell whenever I want to update my gear. Grade VIII is the current highest materia, while Grade VII is useful for overmelding, and Grade VI has a 100% retrieval chance, which is useful while levelling. If you do not overmeld your gear, sell the VIIs. Obviously, sell any stats which are not useful for the jobs you play. For example, If you’re a Red Mage who also levels gatherers but not crafters, just sell or transmute any yellows (tenacity/piety for tanks/healers) and dark blues (for crafters).

Catalyst (Dark Matter, Glamour Dispellers/Prisms)

These items are useful to most players. Dark matter is used for repairing your own gear (lasts longer and you can do it anywhere), while Glamour dispellers and prisms are used for changing the appearance of your gear. For ease of use I recommend keeping all these in your inventory.

Miscellany (Coffers, Tokens, Gil, Delineations, Maps, Chocobo items, Buff items)

Here are my tips for this category. Use your coffers as soon as you can, then decide what to do with the gear according to the gear section above. The only time you may want to hold onto them is if you will be levelling a job in the future and you want the HQ gear when you get to that level.

For Tokens, get rid of them unless you are actively trying to get a piece of gear or mount or something. Mount tokens need 99, so hold onto those ones until you get it. I keep one stack of allagan pieces to quickly trade in at the Doman Enclave every week, but other than that you can sell them.

Delineations are fine to keep in your inventory, or your saddlebag if you can remember to take them out before you start crafting. Maps don’t take up too much space since you can only hold one of each at a time, and there are only a few useful ones to bother with. You can hold one in your key items by using it, and then you can pick up another of the same type, and your saddlebag also lets you hold duplicates.

Chocobo items are fine to keep in your inventory so you can summon it and feed it certain items. Buff items are those that do things like reduce teleport fees, or increase MGP earned for a duration. Make sure you actually use these or else they’re a waste of space! Put them on a shared hotbar if you need to so you’ll see them and use them up.

Seasonal Miscellany (Firecrackers)

There are a LOT of fireworks type items, so ask yourself when the last time is you used one. If you really like how they look, use them! They look way better in front of your character than in that inventory slot. Unless this is something you absolutely love and use frequently, it’s probably best just to pick a small number of favourites and get rid of the rest. I realized I was holding six but only use two (and rarely).

Other (Upgrade items, Buff items, Eureka Crystals, Tokens)

Engineering, Survival, and Squadron Manuals can be very useful, but again, make sure you actually use them! Same with GC Aetheryte Tickets. These are all untradeable so they only have value for you.

Upgrade items (carboncoat, gobdip, scaevan twine, etc.) are cheap to rebuy with poetics so you can either discard them or spend them as soon as you can to grab some (50/60/70) gear for a job you’ll level in the future, or browse the tomestone vendors and see if there’s any gear you like so you can get the dyeable versions.

Eureka Crystals can be tucked away in your saddlebag or given to a retainer.

Gardening (Soil, Seeds)

Do not hold onto any of this stuff unless you are serious about gardening. It takes an immense amount of planning and commitment. Better to just sell it on the marketboard. If you do garden, you probably want this in your saddlebag or retainer instead. It will lower the chance of you accidentally using the wrong soil or seed while planting.

Demimateria

Clear demimateria is autosell fodder, the rest are all crafting materials, so they may sell well on the marketboard. If you’re a crafter but not at a high level yet, consider holding onto Mastercraft, Kingcraft, and Fieldcraft (III) Demimateria for later.

Triple Triad Cards

Very simple category here. Use (or attempt to use) each card, then turn in any left at the Gold Saucer for MGP. No other reason to keep them in your inventory.

Orchestrion Rolls

If you don’t care about these, treat it the same as Triple Triad Cards. Attempt to use them, if you already have it, then sell it. Faded copies you’ll most likely autosell. If you DO care about these, you should still probably get rid of most faded copies, and rebuy them when you have the relevant materials to craft the full versions and make a dent in your Orchestrion Log all at once.

Fishing Tackle

Baits and tackles can really eat up inventory space, which is especially annoying since when you fish you might need a little extra temporary space for the fish you reel in. If you are one of the few people that loves fishing, you could try keeping important tackles (the re-usable ones) in your saddlebag, and quickly picking up an appropriate amount of bait before you head out to the fishing hole, then dumping it after.

Summary

I hope this little guide has helped quell any fears you had about throwing items away, and nudged you a little further away from the downward spiral of hoarder life in FFXIV.  The big focus here has been on separating the items you need and use from the items that you’re ‘saving for later’ but actually do not need in the foreseeable future. Honestly, much like real life, the key is to be diligent about cleaning it out every once in a while. That way you won’t have such a bag mess!