Cheapest Craft To Level To 100

So one of my aims in FF11 has been to get a craft to 100. I have 2 million gil and I think I'd like to start. But I don't know which to choose.

Making a profit would be nice, but I'm more concerned with levelling quickly and cheaply (although making a profit would help with cheapness).

I've heard alchemy is cheap to level and can make some okay profits, but that possibly it is difficult to level after a certain point. Wanting to get to 100 is key for me so this is important,

I've also considered woodwork, got it to 25ish.

So what do you think? Which is the cheapest and easiest to level? Also how much would it rouly cost to get a craft to 60 and then to 100 these days? Prices seem through the roof.

I thiiiiiink cooking is pretty cheap and very easy to skill up, but I'm not sure it's the cheapest craft to 100. When you get to Red Curry Buns though you'll be able to make good gil.

Given how common logs are made by VW, woodworking might be economical too.

From my experience, Alchemy has alot of cheap vendor synths you can abuse to get up quickly, as well as just vendoring back the results if you're just going full power level route. 2M is overkill to get it 60+ I'd say, though getting higher takes a certain degree of planning to work right, or else you'll be pumping money out for sure.

To give you a general idea of what I mean about planning, one of the guides states to do a low level craft to skill up on, then save the potions created for a synth about... 20-30 levels later on. I got a mule with over 40 stacks of Venom Potions waiting for me to get bored someday and skill up past my current point. Though to get that many venom potions made up when I was skilling, I was paying about 1k-2k a stinger off the AH or just going into Altepa and farming them myself on THF, which kinda knocks the cheapness out depending on how you look at it.

Not sure with how Campaign/WoE/Abyssea/VW started flooding the markets with once extra rare synth materials for higher level crafting as to which one ultimately comes out cheapest to take to 100 nowadays. I've seen waaaaaay more gold/smithing/logs compared to alchemy or cooking materials. Even less cloth materials most of the time in my experiences.

Cooking/alch/ww all pretty cheap nowadays. Can usually break even or very little loss if you just npc what you make. Cooking took me a day to get to 80 with actually profiting, but that's actually selling stuff like yag drinks i saved and what not. Cooking used to be pretty gay in the 90s, but you can just ride red curry super early now with such an abundance of dragon meat nowadays, even usually profiting still at early level/breaks. If you got the time, you can realistically get cooking from 1-100 in 3-4 days. Downside about cooking, you have to work alot more to profit in comparison to other crafts, and the gp is complete trash. starting new, i think on average it'd take about 2-3 years to complete all your gp being active every day.

fishing is technically a craft, its the only craft you will actually make money from skilling up,( hence is why skill ups or sooo slow), other then that

Woodworking, Alchemy, and Cooking (I think) are definitely top 3 , which order they go in im not sure

I started Alchemy with 25K Gil and took it to level 60 just on selling what I made and using synths like was said for new recipes at a higher level.

Use/learn the regional vendors for cheap supplies and remember the 3 listed make CONSUMABLES so there is always a good demand.

I would really consider getting the "other 2" up to level 60 also as they are good subs for many other crafts and now synergy.

My 2 gil here, whatever you decide on, dont forget your guild point stuff. Even if your 100 in whatever craft, its going to be gimpy if you dont have your guild items.

I like the advice here. Cooking, Woodwork and Alchemy all produce consumables that are always in demand so your basically guaranteed to make a steady income from these.

alch has been pretty cheap for me. Most mats are farmable and ones that arnt are either really cheap from venders or are made from prev synths. But I'd say check out the recipes on here to figure out a craft and path you'd think you be suited for

I'd say that if you're going to want to profit from the leveling - or even just save as much gil as you can, make sure you've got a ton of space. For example in cooking, I tried to save as much Selbina Butter (lvl 20) as I could to make Pie Dough (42) which I think made into Apple, Melon, or Rolanberry Pies. If you're going fast or slow, that's a ton of synths and you've got a lot of mats to move around.

But on the other hand, to hang on to something like that if you can sell it for even close to breaking even. It's very very easy to fill up inventory with crap like that - and I would imagine the problem is similar for all crafts. (I have a meat/egg mule, a crystals mule, a RCB mule, and Dawn Mulsum mule, a cooked food mule, and a misc ingredient mule. But maybe I'm just a hoarder, too!)

Good luck!

Cooking.

/closethread

I've done cooking, woodworking, cloth, smithing, bone to 100 -- WW was a lot cheaper via the level ASAP and sell stuff to make room method. Both cooking and WW however have huge potential to make gil while leveling and end up at 100 with a profit, if you have patience.

Cloth was a waste of money to 100, smithing was a close second (at the time years ago). Bone was a loss but not a whole lot.

Cooking requires a lot of running around to various vendors and luck if that vendor sells something currently due to conquest winnings. If you happen to time it right, it's very easy to get 100. If you time it wrong, you may have to wait a few weeks or go HELM your ingredients.

Cooking is one of the more expensive and time consuming guild point setups too. I've seen the gil per guildpoint ratio well over 10X's higher than any other craft in cooking a lot. You can't always go buy what guild pattern database says for costs per GP either since a lot of GP items don't sell much on the AH but the mats do.

Well I levelled Cooking to 63. Pretty cheap so far tbh. Well less than 1 million.

I'm taking a break now due to july update crystal price increase.

But I will start again soon, does anyne know how much it will cost rougly to get cooking to 100 from 60 so I can start saving?

Thanks for advice all!

I don't recall how much it cost taking Cooking to 101 on my mule, it wasn't horribly expensive, but here's the path I took:

66 Colored Egg (Lizard) - Vendored
68 Colored Egg (Bird) - Vendored
72 Pear Au Lait - Vendored
75 Rarab Meat Ball - Vendored
78 Cloudy Wheat Broth - AH for profit
81 Pamama Au Lait - Vendored
85 Cocoanut Rusk - Still have a few stacks on mules, requires 8k gp item. AH for slow profit.
90 Rolanberry Pie - Vendored
95 Rice Dumpling - Stockpiled on mule until it was GP item, sold for ~ break even.
97 Dawn Mulsum - AH for profit
101 Red Curry - 97-101 will go as fast as you make it go. Camp the AH for dragon meat. Pay the market price, skill up on the curry, convert it to red curry buns, turn a profit, reinvest profit into more meat.

Not smithing, goldsmithing or Clothcraft lol

Alchemy and cooking is good for small steady profit :)

Silent oils and other perishables are in high demand lately.

As an addendum, the thing that made this a relatively cheap process, THF99 - I farmed as much of the AH only materials as I could. Fire Cluster in sky, Lizard eggs, etc.

Of course, there are arguments to be made about time investment vs drops vs gil. Will it make more sense to farm the items directly, or for example, farm high AH cost aby triggers and flip them for gil to reinvest in crafting? You'll have to gauge that on your own.

Good luck!

IF you're not lazy Clothcraft IS the easiest and cheapest craft to get to 100

and 90% of the levels you will get from fetchlings, you can start with a huge gap of about 11-12 levels and it wont really matter because the fetchling are so easy and cheap to make break synthing them is the way to go and you can farm most of the feathers/insects etc in some of the easy zones with tons of mobs XD

thats my 2 pennies

i just did gold to 100 on like 35m in a week, so not that. Alch i did to 94 on less then 3m years ago during inflation. Cooking and alch are very cheap cooking would defiantly be more profitable.. everyone eats foods and foods disappear once you eat them so its an endless market unlike someone buying armor once and being done with it.

I did woodworking and seemed to make more profit than losses. I skilled on arrows and bolts up until the 70-80's or so, I believe, and then synthed logs into lumber until 100. (I have not yet bothered with going to 110 because I really dislike synthing.) The arrows and bolts sold well, keeping the losses from buying mats down. However, that being said, I'm not sure that woodworking would be the best choice anymore. The best ammo now is obtained through synergy, which probably means that the selling price of the old ammo has gone down, which means your profits would also take a plunge.

Coeurl Sautees were a good synth to go to as well, then turning them into Yellow Curry (and Curry Buns) was a good way to get to 85/88. Did the same for Coeurl Subs, which capped at 93. I did Dawn Mulsums from about 91, so thats a fairly nice easy synth. But yeah, plan on spending time getting Dragon Meats and what not. Thankfully Abyssea has helped that out too. There's also Kitron Juice now as an alternate to get to 100, and each synth costs less than 1 single Dragon Meat, so theres that option too. Cooking Alts 101 as we speak

If you go slowly, selling many products at the AH, you can make a profit leveling Alchemy to 100.

Woodworking is fairly cheap to get to 100, and the ability to quiver arrows and bolts, thereby putting the products of 36 synths up in one AH slot, is a great help.

Cooking levels fastest and most profitably with fish. But leveling fishing to level cooking slows the process down.

Don't forget subcrafts.....

Fishing is the cheapest technicly. As for real crafts, cooking would be the next best thing.

WW prices have dropped signifantly compared to pre aby time. However so have their main profit synths. Since things like arrows and bolts dont really sell much anymore.

Alch can start costing a bit around 50-60+

The path Leviathan suggested looks good. How far would 2 million get me from 63?

Any great guides for COOKING and FISHING, let me know since I would want to take cooking first to 100 and then fishing.

Thanks in advance.

You probably should fish while you cook actually. The two crafts go well together.

Well I would if there is two guides.

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/84574-Fishing-Guide-1-100

You will find several guides to leveling cooking referenced here:

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Cooking

A fishing guide I often use:

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=24;mid=1111740020415258220;num=218;page=1

Why not if there is only one guide? Why not if there are no guides? Or why not just buy a character with the ***leveled already, if you're just going to do exactly what someone else wants you to do?

DEFITELY NOT TRUE...

Once you get past Black Cho fletchings at 93... it starts getting expensive and ridiculous at that. Relative to smithing/gold it's cheap but compared to WW, Alch, and Cooking it's absurd. The worst thing is from 93-100 none of the skillup synths are worth a damn.