CRAFTING in FFXIV is a SCAM! (Kind of...) | Munbalance

hey deliver name of balance and crafting in final fantasy 14 is a scam well not exactly but you'll see what i mean when we get further into the video so as you might or might not know i recently took a loan to buy a house in final fantasy 14. now if i'm intending to pay that loan off i'm gonna have to make some money but there's already like a brazilian guides on youtube on how to make money or gill in final fantasy xiv so don't worry this isn't one of those videos so obviously i need to make money so i went right ahead and started doing things to make money right now i spent five hours making a spreadsheet to show myself what's the best way that i could in theory with my resources make money now whenever you go look at guides on how to get money in ff14 generally the go-to answer is well get crafting and gathering they make a ton of money which is a decent way to make money don't get me wrong but they leave so much out of the picture craft what gather where and then it struck me if i've learned anything from previous game it's that if you want to make money look what the bots are doing this is especially true in final fantasy since this is a paid for game with a subscription how could bot runners possibly justify paying the upfront sixty dollars as well as also fifteen dollars a month unless these bots were extremely profitable so what have i noticed bots doing well gathering of course ff14 has a special legendary timed nodes that only appear at certain times of the in-game day these materials are generally used for high-end gear and consumable crafting and whenever one of these nodes pops up what do you see well you see some sparkles on the wall that's the node but more so you see a bunch of completely basic looking gatherers wearing absolutely no glamour at all all riding with no exception the midgard summer mount they quickly fly in grab the node sometimes extract the material from their gear optionally they'll use a cordial and teleport away now i know i can't tell definitively that they're bots but i mean look at these guys you can't tell me that these aren't bots look how they fly towards that note do you see that you see it there's no way that is a bot come on so i decided to try the strategy for myself to see how much kill i could make it an hour and for brevity's sake i also calculated the hourly earnings in other facets such as crafting which led me to the conclusion that crafting just isn't worth it most of the time but how did i come to this conclusion well i started off by calculating how much value or gill you add to items when you craft them i get a bunch of examples and i used to stopwatch to see how long it took to craft these recipes and by doing so calculate how much gill you technically generate if you were to do literally nothing but craft this one recipe for an hour straight then i followed the bots and grabbed every legendary note in n walker to see for sure if it was worth crafting materials into stuff or if i was just better off dumping the raw materials into the market board and calling it a day this was also a great way to compare recipes and markets to see what was actually the best items to craft and which are better to just be bought now obviously since we're dealing with the market board i've got to put an asterisk down because as you might have guessed this is the in-game market we're talking about and that deals with real people and as a result is very subject to hiccups and fluctuations someone could buy out all of one material in one day and double the price of something or they could also unload hundreds of a material to the market board and tank the price immensely all of my market estimations were done on july 19th on the midgard summer server i checked both the going rate of a current item as well as the market history to make sure that there wasn't a strange outlier situation and in those cases i of course corrected my evaluation of the price to adjust for such things but with that out of the way let me show you some of the recipes i looked at and their value propositions now the first recipe i tried is pumpkin potage this is a raid food that i as a reaper main used to prog through the end game savage content so i figured this would be a very popular and valuable item and thus a good idea to craft right well not exactly a batch of three pumpkin potage went for 4905 gil on my server at the time and if you were to buy all the materials and just craft it this would cost 4 348 kill this means that every time you craft a pumpkin potage you're only getting 557 extra kill of value and while that would make sense if crafting was automatic but this level of recipe is far from it not only is pumpkin potage an end-game craft it's very finicky to ensure a high-quality craft additionally it also requires crafting of another recipe northern sea salt adding to the overall crafting time so given that you'd have to craft both the northern sea salt and the pumpkin potage we need to add their crafting times together 30 seconds to craft the sea salt of which we're only using two of the three that this creates so we'll take 20 seconds of that and for our final craft the food itself which is a much longer 47 second craft you're looking at at very least 53 seconds per craft now you can slightly automate this process with in-game macros but not completely you still need to select the recipe and push the macro button almost every minute or so or you could have your little brother arnold henry king do it for you but do so at your own risk that kid has no idea how to talk to gm's but theoretically if you were to just sit there crafting nothing but pumpkin potage for an hour straight how much money would you make well since the value of the item is so close to the sum of its parts over the course of an hour you'll make it very most 29 521 gil now depending on your social status you might think that's a lot but i assure you for a level 90 fully geared crafter that is really not that great and this will become even more obvious as we continue our research the next craft i tried was calamari rapini which introduced some problems mainly that it requires a fish and no one likes fishing so while most items had a consistent price history there was only a few instances of thevenarian calamari which was required for this recipe now that being said there was another major issue with this craft in the sense that it required ovibos milk which is an insanely important monster drop item and nearly threw the whole value out of whack at the end of the day with this crazy rare fish and the sink of ovibus milk this recipe barely added value to the craft with a profit of a mere 44 gil not even enough to cover the tax of listing such an item on the marketport additionally with not one but two pre-crafts for an overall harder recipe this leaves us with only 39 crafts in an hour or a measly 1716 kill per hour pretty sure you could get more guild just like desynthesizing items this is a really really bad profit margin the next craft i tried is where things start to look a bit brighter a grade six tinker of intelligence these have a market value of about 1800 and you make three per craft so that's 5400 gil per craft pretty nice now the total value of all the materials including the materials to craft the grade 5 alkahist only brought us up to a value of 2138 kill this means that each craft would net us 3 262 kill and given the 65 second crafting time we've got an estimated hourly wage of 212 030 gil which is a breath of fresh air compared to our full rays and cooking now to veer away from consumables i decided to try making a gear and what better example than a beautiful scythe the classical war scythe went historically for about 50 000 gil but compared to our previous crafts this was a huge undertaking that required six and two-thirds pre-crafts and some of the most valuable raw materials that are introduced in unwalker at the end of the day we could purchase everything we needed to make a classical war scythe for 21 919 kill which is a really good value craft at 28k per craft now that being said scythe crafting is a major undertaking with a total of 473 seconds or just under 8 minutes per craft this means that we can only craft about 7.6 scythes in an hour but funnily enough this brings us to an estimated hourly wage of 213 127 gil but we have to deduct a thousand gil for the crafter food we needed to craft this successfully which puts us right on parity with our estimate value of us crafting raid pots instead and with that said i should remind you that all of these crafting estimations are extremely generous since this does not account for inventory funneling or menuing just raw unadulated crafting time now before we show more crafting examples that might completely destroy my argument let's have a look at that gathering now it's much harder to mathematically figure out how much money you'd get by gathering so i decided to undertake an hour of following the bot's shoes i just decided to do a quick rotation of all the legendary nodes in unwalker to see how much value i to make in an hour just by doing those and after an hour and about eight thousand gill in teleport fees i can proudly estimate i made roughly 328 532 kill just by gathering for one hour straight and i should probably mention that this is really unoptimized too i was only getting legendary nodes from endwalker there's legendary nodes for every expansion and even rarer nodes that appear only once a day rather than twice not to mention there was plenty of time during this farming session where i was just literally waiting for a node to pop up obviously adding something within that downtime would be ideal for profit a fully optimized gathering route which accounts for this would only get more value i think it's safe to say that this surpasses any amount of value we could get from crafting even the most end gaming list of items now don't get me wrong when a new patch drops and thus new crafts everyone rushes to be the first one to put it on the market board and at that moment you've probably got a higher value proposition there but as it stands between major patches with a relatively stable market right now crafting just doesn't seem worth the time that is until we get into furniture yeah furniture to put in your house this stuff is ridiculous it sells for many times its weight materials if you were to spend a whole hour crafting furniture you'd probably be stinking rich let me show you now i did calculations on two furniture items raised wooden deck and the rod can rocking chair both relatively high demand items on the market board and my home server now crafting furniture is a lot like crafting other materials with one key exception since this isn't a statistical item it's not important for the item to be of high quality since high quality only boosts statistics and what's a high quality chair gonna do be more chair this makes it insanely quick to craft both the materials and finally the item itself making for some insane value propositions raised wooden deck went for 50 000 kill on my market board and i could buy all of the items i needed to craft it with a mere 23 000 kill this is great since crafting the item only took me 55 seconds meaning i could make 65 of these per hour this equates to a whopping 1.7 million kill an hour but that's not all the ronkin rocking chair was a 60 000 kill item and all the materials are purchasable from the market board at just 17 135 kill and since there's no pre-craft and the item literally takes me one skill to complete this would equate to about 14 million gil an hour if i did nothing but craft ron can rocking chairs but that's where the caveat comes in furniture items while generally having higher values sell much slower than raw materials it is possible to do nothing but craft one piece of furniture but the materials that you buy to craft it will raise in price and also you'll flood the very limited market of that one specific piece of furniture additionally since the market is much slower you need to keep an eye on your crafts and make sure that they haven't been undercut there's plenty of room for slashing with such high margins so expect a bit of a price war going forward overall i think the extra attention that this demands makes this value proposition a little untenable and very risky you're turning a bunch of raw materials that go into many different things and turning them into specific and purely aesthetic items and you have to babysit them to make sure that they sell for whatever reason if your item goes out of style or the 12 forbid this furniture item be given to retainers to hand out could very well see yourself taking a major loss if the market for a certain furniture item goes belly up anyway i found these findings to be interesting enough to waste 14 minutes of your time and 14 hours of my time making this video and with my new money making prospect i should expect to pay my debt back in as little as 47 hours hey uh man yeah what's up diaper what about eureka hey you made it to the end well i hope this video was informative and entertaining like the video if you liked it sub to see more like it and a special thanks to my patreon supporters i'll take sponsorship deals or run middle ads on my videos so if you like what i do and you'd like to support me check out the link to my patreon in the description below you can also check out my twitch channel where i stream every weekend and of course leave a comment if you have any questions at all thank you guys so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Munbalance

Views: 5,549

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Id: 6JjVBzpGCmk

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022