The trick to making gil in Final Fantasy XIV should be focused on sustainable profit with a potential slice for more. Compared to the slew of various methods for becoming a gillionaire in the MMO, desynthesis is one such avenue.
The art of breaking down items into their base components is a relatively easy path to master once you’ve unlocked the ability to desynth. To maximize your gil, you should have all crafters unlocked on your character. If you want better chances at receiving materials make sure to have your desynth level close to (or above) what you’re destroying. Items that can be desynthed are separated by crafting job, meaning the higher the desynth level for that item, the better materials you’ll receive.
How to make gil with Desynthesis in FFXIV
To maximize gil with desynthing, players need to consider when it’s worth it to break down an item. In FFXIV, players should quickly realize that there are a couple types of gil making: sustainable and unsustainable.
What is a sustainable and unsustainable source when it comes to desynthing in FFXIV?
A sustainable source means the player can acquire the item by farming it themselves. The caveat to this is that it’s a slower way to make gil with desynthing. An unsustainable source is when items are obtained from players via the market board, or from Retainers. This is a quick way of making profit, but it has the tendency to run out fast due to the availability of items. Lastly, players should also consider the amount of time they put into desynthesis. After all, time is money. Some avenues, while readily available, may not be fully worth the time unless you’re just starting out or wanting to mindlessly grind.
Players have a few options to choose from when making gil from desynth, but the main ones are desynthing from vendors and desynthing from the market board. Whichever path you choose will depend on what you personally want out of desynthing, whether that be raw gil from vendoring, realized gil through sold materials, or re-crafted goods on the market board.
How to make gil with desynthesis from vendors - raw gil farming
There are hundreds of vendors with several desynthesizable items at the player’s disposal. There are too many to list in this guide, but whatever you can purchase from vendors is sustainable - be it with gil, scrips, tomestones, or other currency. Items purchased from vendors may not earn a profit but there are a few that will. This sustainable grind will relatively not be time friendly but will be gil friendly and you won’t have to rely on the market board.
Desynthing fish to receive Allagan Gil Pieces
Allagan Gil Pieces are a type of vendorable currency you can get through level skips, job boosts, MSQ, and even desynthesis. There are quite a few items that can be desynthed to get the whole range of these quasi currencies - you just need to know where to look. For example, consider the Eurhinosaur, an economical fish that is currently purchasable by any scrip trader for five white gatherer’s scrips.
I stumbled over this fish while I was leveling up my gathering professions when I was still new to the game. I discovered that by desynthing Eurhinosaur that I'd have about a 10 percent chance to receive one Allagan Gold Piece. One Allagan Gold Piece is worth 2,500 gil. That meant if I put in about 50 white gatherer’s scrips I could get back 2,500 raw gil without having to go through selling materials on the market board. For a newer player at the time, this was phenomenal when I had no gil to my name. The only downside? It took quite a few hours to put into gathering scrips enough to earn a sizable profit and on top of that it took even more time to desynth it.
So let’s break down this fish with some stats:
- For every 5,000 White Gatherer Scrips = 1,000 Eurhinosaur.
- 10 Eurhinosaur with a 10% desynth rate = 1 Allagan Gold Piece (2500g).
- 1000 Eurhinosaur = approximately 100 Allagan Gold Pieces, or 250k raw gil. (You will also get water clusters, linen canvas, and fine sand as extra byproducts.)
Mothsworn’s Desynth Stats:
Items received from 711 Eurhinosaur:
- 561 Sand
- 78 Linen Canvas
- 72 Allagan Gold Pieces
Time to desynth: 32 minutes and 32 seconds.
When using FFXIV’s Quick Desynthesis panel to break down a stack of 999 Eurhinosaur, players are looking at a completion time of roughly 45 minutes. This is due to Desynth’s ability being locked on an internal GCD of 2.5 seconds with added delay.
That means for every 1,000 fish (250k) you receive, you will gain over 5,480 gil per minute. The extra caveat is that to truly track profit over time in raw gil farming, you have to include the time it took to gather those 5,000 scrips. This can be a good method if you’ve got some left over White Gatherer’s Scrips and nothing to do with them.
How to make gil with Desynthesis from the market board
Desynthing materials with the intention to put them up for sale on the market board is a different beast in itself. This type of unsustainable desynth is something that should be done a few times per week so you don’t exhaust all of your resources or flood the markets and lower your profits. That still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try - in the NA region alone there are over 28 market boards to buy from to flip desynthable items at a competitive price.
Primal Weapons
An effective way to use desynthesis to make gil is to break down any Extreme Trial weapons you get into their base components to craft the altered glowy version of the trial weapons. For example, The Dancing Plague (Extreme) will give you a shot at a Dancing Wing when dismantling their weapons. Each run takes about two minutes to complete unsynced with a full level 90 party, which will reward individuals with a King Totem.
If you don’t get a weapon, Weapon Coffer, or Dancing Wing on your loot rolls, you can turn in seven of those King Tomems for The King’s Sword in Eulmore. If you’re in the desynth’s target range, you have a good chance to break the sword down into a Dancing Wing. You do not want to choose shields when desynthing despite it being a lower totem cost due to the changes in 6.0 that removed primal materials from shields.
If you’re lucky or persistent enough to get a Dancing Wing from desynthesis, you can place it on the market board for a decent profit, or craft the glowy weapons yourself to sell for even more. This information can be applied to any desynthable extreme weapons and there are numerous out there to choose from.
Housing Items
This category holds a large chunk of items that are undercut daily but hold some flippable value when broken down. When you buy housing items to desynth you’re effectively “cleaning up the markets” and resetting price values to a certain gil threshold on each World. This advanced method of desynth-to-gil farming does require an investment, steady risk analysis, and time, but ultimately can lead to an average increase of profits if done correctly.
Head down to the market board and filter by housing items. Experiment by picking cheap high volume listed housing items; check what base materials they give and if the base materials can be flipped for profit. Set those items as favorites so you can easily check them on every World and Data Center you hop to. It’s considered good practice to track these items every week to see if you can snipe lower prices. However if you see the items you’re focusing on run out of stock in the market board or become too expensive you should alternate what you desynth.
Players can experiment to see what items work well for them, picking up bargain items like the Dead Man’s Chest to desynth them. This item can break down into numerous materials like the Clear Demimateria III, Darksteel Ingot, Splintered Chests, and more. Just one 300 gil purchase could net you well over 5,000 gil if luck favors you. However, don’t rely on just one item. The market board is volatile, and prices change constantly.
It’s easy to get lost in the process of desynthesis. Remember to take into consideration how much of your own time and gil you put into the process and realize that this shouldn’t be a rigid guide, but more so a way to think critically and apply skills to make more bang for your buck. As they say - if you give a person a fish, well, at least teach them to desynth it.
