A couple weekends back, thanks to a day with little else going on, I managed to make a million gil (the currency in Final Fantasy XIV) in a single day’s collection. It was quite a prosperous undertaking and still left me with decent chunks of the day to do other stuff. A lot of collecting is done on a timer, with the various collection nodes (minerals for rocks and ore and trees or bushes for wood and vegetation) for high-level materials showing up at specific times every day. So, for the day, I set some alarms that our guild’s leader wrote out for us and teleported around the map to hit up every single possible node. There was one more that I lack the ability to visit, since it is locked behind progressing the Main Scenario, but I still made out like a bandit thanks to my guild leader setting me up with a solid set of gear. A lot of the higher-tier gathering is based on your gear rather than your levels or abilities, so going from a scattered set of decent gear meant for level fifty to a stellar set of gear meant for level sixty was a HUGE boon and going from a mishmash of what I had laying around to actually good level fifty gear for my other gathering class was a game changer. That change alone made me so much money, and my guild leader did it all for free (on top of buying all the stuff to use for his own projects or pass on to the buyer who has hired the guild to collect these resources).

The best part of all this was that, after picking up my payment for this delivery, I was at almost exactly 3,333,333 gil. I was just over 150 away and a guild member was able to give me the remaining gil so I could have the satisfaction of having exactly that amount of money for the ten minutes I was hanging around before I had to teleport anywhere. It was a fun little coincidence, to almost land on a repeating number like that, and while I still have absolutely no idea what I’m going to spend that money on, it feels nice to have it. Now, if I’m working on a project, I have money to spend on things from the Market Board (the place players post things for sale that other players can buy) if I want to just buy things instead of hunting them down myself. Which, you know, I probably won’t do since it usually only takes a few minutes to gather what I want since I’m not at the point of working at a massive scale yet and don’t need ninety-nine of anything. And, usually, if I do wind up needing ninety-nine of something, I can just buy it in bulk from an NPC shopkeeper. So far. I’m sure that’ll change as I continue to level up and need different types of stuff to continue crafting, but right now I’m still working my way up to what I’d call my first benchmark so I can dive into the activity everyone recommends for leveling up your crafting and gathering skills. By the time you’re reading this, I expect I’ll be there and might have even tried it out, but I’ve also still got some Main Scenario Questing to do yet, so who knows.

I did set aside my original project of making a list of everything needed to craft all of the items you can make from level one to level fifty of each crafting class. I wanted to make it so that players like me, who wanted to know EXACTLY how many of each thing they’d need to make it all, would have a source of that kind of information, but I’ve learned that most people don’t actually level up that way. Most people will just quickly remake the same stuff over and over again so they can generate experience points without needing to get terribly engaged in what is going on. Sure, you get extra experience points for making new things for the first time and for making them high-quality, but the amount of time that consumes is often not worth it. Especially if you’re taking two-to-three times as much time because you need to document the ingredient list for every object in a slowly growing list of different items. Now, looking back at the idea, I think there might still be some value in a list like that existing, but not as the tool for new players I originally thought of. It might have some use for people who want to go through and complete their crafting journals (by making every item), but it would need to be formatted incredibly differently to be useful for that kind of endeavor. Which means it’ll be a project for the future, if I ever actually do it.

Now that I’ve seen the kind of earning potential I’ve got right now, the urgency behind all of my gathering has kind of died down. I plan to still keep some of it going, but I’m also not sure I want to spend my limited evening game time making sure that I’m not caught up in anything when it comes time to go collect a node. It’s very limiting to have to keep an eye on the clock like that and a lot of the story scenario stuff has lengthy cutscenes. I’ve already missed multiple mining instances some days because a cutscene kept me from being able to arrive in time to collect things. Plus, it’s difficult to do the full rotation if I start late since everything I’m doing relies on spacing out the work enough that my gathering points (it’s like MP, Magic Points, but for gathering skills instead of magic skills) can recharge enough to really maximize each node I hit. Better to just take some days (or nights, in my case) off so I can focus without feeling the pressure to monitor the time and limit my interaction with elements of the game that might take up a lot of my time. I want to have fun, after all, and while earning a million gil in a single day is incredibly rewarding, I’m not sure that I would call it particularly fun. It’s not not-fun, but I definitely wouldn’t want to just do it constantly, every single day, when I’ve got other stuff that might be MORE fun to do instead, you know? It would become too much of a day job if I did that…