In attempt to count the bad weather we’re having in the days leading up to the start of Spring (which has already begun by the time you’re reading this), I decided to stop putting off a significant task I’ve been ignoring for months and clear out my digital inventories in Final Fantasy 14. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve accumulated a lot of junk that I thought would eventually be useful. Some of that wound up being true, and some of it wound up being incredibly false. It has been a real grab-bag, having all of that junk around, and while it was certainly helpful sometimes to just have the stuff I needed for whatever weird little thing I wanted to do or make, I’ve recently reached the point where I need to instute actual inventory management as I start having more and more stuff I need to sort into discrete collections that the game doesn’t recognize. So, rather than have to pick through a bunch of different inventories, I’ve reworked how much is kept where, what stuff is kept for future projects, what is kept from workshops, and what is kept around for my various “money makers.” It’s not a terribly complex system, but it’s one that works without needing a lot of management. Unforunately, that comes at the cost of actually needing to follow through on all of my “I’ll save this for crafting at a future date” promises so I can actually use some of these incredibly rare resources for their intended purposes rather than just throw them out so they stop cluttering up my virtual pockets.

What I’ve learned doing this process (all of which is finished save for the spending of special currencies, the final settling of one collection of items that’ll go where all those special currencies are currently being kept, and then the actual creation of the massive pile of random junk I’ve set aside) is that I am either very good at predicting what needs to be saved or VERY bad at it. As it turns out, everything I’d put on one retainer (an NPC you can hire to go on missions for you and hold a bunch of your stuff) was either something that wound up being integral for crafting all the junk I decided to make OR it was something I collected in my first fifty levels, before I knew how things really worked in this game. It was either nearly priceless and just what I would need to complete other crafts (or to do some crafts themselves), or it was garbage I might as well just toss on the ground (which is what we call dumping things out of our inventories and thereby deleting them from existence). So I’ve got a good eye for stuff to keep that might one day be useful for special collectible items OR I just hoard anything that is rare or not easily bought and just so happened to wind up with a lot of rare items from boss fights. I’d like to think it is the former, and all the junk is just the unexamined collection of junk from before I knew how pointless it was to keep most crafting resources in the long term, but I think it is at least mostly luck that I wound having a pile of very useful things.

A pile of very useful things that I now understand the use for. Most of them have been kept in greater quanities than will be useful for my purposes, so I stand to make a decent chunk of change from selling all that stuff to other people who don’t compulsively keep things for an unspecified later, or from making extras of those things and selling them. Regardless of which I wind up doing, I’m hoping it’ll all amount to enough to make up for all the rare, limited items I’m going to need to buy to finish all of this collected crafting. A lot of them won’t be cheap, but at least they’re mostly all from past expansions that aren’t so far back that the items become expensive again. None of them should be priced at over a couple hundred thousand, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to find them for less than that when I actually go hunting for them. Time will tell for certain, but I doubt that, between this and my various other projects, I’ll lose money. At least in the long-term. Some of my primary sellers are currently in a lull, which is making me believe I’m probably going to need to actually drop my prices rather than riding out the valleys so I can take advtange of those who need what I’m selling when prices are at their peak, but I won’t figure that out until after I’ve done all this crafting. After all, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to make a ton of money. I can be patient.

Once I log back in and finish up this process (I stopped on a Monday evening and am now taking Tuesdays off of computer time for my own well-being) in the next couple days, I am excited to figure out what to do with all that extra inventory space. I mean, there’ll be more opening in a bit over a month once Final Fantasy 14’s dye system changes as part of the next major update. It’ll be ince to get those eighty or so inventory slots back. Well, some amount of them. I expect that I’ve got some rare dyes that’ll probably still be individual items, but that’ll still make for quite a bit of extra space regardless of how it plays out. The only thing that could get me more inventory space is if they got ride of materia or found a way to collapse the various versions of it into smaller objects. That would free up an entire retainer, given how much of that junk I’ve got and how important having it around can be for specific activities I might never do but might someday decide I want to do. At which point I’d be kicking myself for tossing out all of this stuff. I’d have to just buy it all again, and that’s not a cheap endeavor given how many poeple do just that. Sure, each one isn’t super expensive, but you need a ton and the costs rack up quickly. So, for now, until I eventually go do that stuff, I’ll keep holding on to it all. For now.