With your main character, send 1000 or so gil to your Windurst character. In Windhurst buy up as many paralyze scrolls as you can. It costs nearly 100 gil per scroll. You will then deliver these scrolls to your character in San d’Oria, the merchatns do not sell this scroll there. You will get a nice profit here for these scrolls but don’t overflood the AH with them.

Gardening items are usually on demand as well. You can easily harvest the crystals and resell them or feed them to your own plants. Brass pots are needed for yielding 19 fire crystals, they’re sold by an NPC in Bastok Mines named Boytz located in the building right next to the AH on the first floor in the back room. Costs about 1,100 gil per pot. Buy as many as you wish to sell then deliver to San d’Oria or Windurst. I believe you should be able to sell them easily for 3-5k gil per pot.

Here is a quick little reference chart labeling where to buy from and where to sell.

This trick works very well. Go check air elementals pets under scrolls-summoning. You can buy the Air elemental in Jueno for 800gil and I sell them in Bastok for 3000gil. This works for a ton of other items. Any quest item for a city is always considerably cheaper in the next town over. There is way more than 100gil difference in prices in an astounding number of items. I play on two computers and have one at the Jueno AH and one at the Bastok AH. I then rummage around usually spells since that seems to be the highest profit at the moment. I’ve done this trick a ton of times making a minimum of 500gil on a bad trade and 10k gil on some rather rare equipment.

While I will agree that things like crystals and other common items ie. low level gear this would hold true if you check many items you will find ways to make gross amounts of gil.

Tip 7: Diversify! Please, for the love of all things good and pure, do NOT put all your eggs in one basket. Find MANY ways of making money. The market is extremely fluid and sometimes volatile. What might have made insane gil last week might be a big waste of time this week. The more methods you have of earning gil, the more likely you’ll survive (or even flourish) in an unstable market. If you were farming cockatrice meat and suddenly everyone else is doing it too (and subsequently, the price drops), start making mithkabobs. If everyone’s eating mithkabobs faster than the cooks can make them, start farming cockatrice meat. Money doesn’t disappear, it changes hands. Your job is to follow the money. Ask yourself “Who’s making all the money right now, and what do they want that I can offer them?”

Tip 8: Start a production chain. Many miners already understand this one. So, I’ll use mining as an example. Mining can be a wonderful way to make money. HOWEVER, if you sell the ores, you’re just lining the smiths’ or goldsmiths’ pockets with gil. They’re charging a markup on your ores. So, start smithing or goldsmithing yourself! Turn those ores into ingots, then turn the ingots into products (or just sell the ingots directly). Generally, with each stage of a product’s life you make a profit. You profit from mining the ores… you turn the ores into ingots and they’re worth more. You turn the ingots into products and they’re worth even more. You’re forcing your item to appreciate in value. So, instead of selling an ore for 500 gil, you’re selling a piece of armour for 3000 gil.

Tip 9: If you need start-up capital to build your gil-making empire, go do some quests. SO MANY quests in this game will reward you handsomely. Allakhazam has an entire database devoted to quests, their requirements, and their rewards. If you do the teleport scroll quests, the drain/warp/aspir scroll quests, Utsusemi, Selbina Clay, etc, you’ll have a huge bankroll to start investing. You’ll also have a whole lot more fame (which helps too, since it raises the prices NPCs will buy items from you for and lowers their sell prices) and a map of the Crawlers’ Nest (always handy!) Unless you need that quest reward for your job(s) that you’re levelling, you can sell it for a big boost to your bank account. But don’t go crazy and spend it…take the time to consider HOW you’re going to spend it. You want to take that money and turn it into more money. Find a way to do that.

Tip 10: Spend wisely! If you can save 100 gil by walking across town, do it. If you can walk (and farm on the way) instead of riding a chocobo, do it. If you have a lot of worthless junk that you just want to get rid of, instead of throwing it away, take it to the city you have the highest fame in and sell it to an NPC. Every single gil will add up over the course of the game. If you save 10 gil on every transaction you ever make, you could have half a million gil extra (or more!) by the time you reach higher levels. That’s that much more you have to invest. The more money you have, the more money you can GET. Don’t waste a single gil. And don’t just hold onto your gil, either. If it’s not out in the world, it’s not earning its keep. Find somewhere to invest it. Don’t walk around with 400k… Walk around with 20k and have the other 380k earmarked to spend to further your money-making goals.

Tip 2: Check the price information, everywhere! If you have an item to sell, you need to know how much it sells for in every location you can sell it. Meaning, you need to know how much your item sells for at the Windurst/Bastok/San d’Oria/Jeuno auction houses. You need to know how much it sells to NPCs for in the town you have the most fame. You need to know how much the relevant guild (if there is one) will buy it for. You should even have an idea how much it goes for in bazaars in town. This way, you know where you should be selling your item to get the most profit. I cannot tell you how many items I’ve found on auction that sold for less on auction than they do to an NPC shop right next door. If those sellers took the time to check the NPC first, they would’ve made even more money and (more importantly) not wasted an AH slot. However, just because you know where it sells for the most gil at, that doesn’t mean you know where to sell it. Because….

Tip 3: Find out what the demand is for your item. Your item may sell for 10k in Windurst and 8k in Jeuno. But that doesn’t mean you should necessarily sell it in Windurst. Check the dates on the last 10 sales in the AH history, and find out how quickly the item sells there. If it sells three times a month in Windurst and six times a day in Jeuno, even if you won’t get as much money for it you’ll probably want to sell it in Jeuno. Every day that it’s sitting on auction, you’re losing money. Because that auction slot could be selling something else and it’s tied up selling this one item. Fast sales are usually better than big sales. Also, if you’re selling a crafting ingredient, you can bet the demand is going to be higher in the town with the relevant craft. If you have cockatrice meat, you’d be hard pressed to find a better place to sell it than Windurst since the cooking guild is there. So, knowing how much demand there is for your item is critical.

Tip 4: Find out what the supply situation is for your item. Just because you know how many are selling, that doesn’t mean you’re ready to sell off your item yet! You need to consider how many are on sale. If there are just a handful of your item on auction and it sells quickly, you’ve found a golden ticket. That means the demand is there but the supply is low. You’ve found a market niche to fill. If there are 208 of your item on sale, REGARDLESS how quickly it moves you’ll probably want to consider selling it somewhere else. Again, you don’t want to waste AH slots that could be selling more merchandise.

Tip 5: Find out where your item can be obtained. You need to know EVERY SOURCE of that item in the entire game. You need to know where and what mobs drop it, or what tradeskill it belongs to, or what NM has it, what items can be desynthed for it, or what NPC merchants sell it. You need this info for two reasons: First, you need to know where your potential competition is getting their supply from. Second, if you have several options on where to get that item from, you can find the one that’s the most cost effective. Sure, farming Paralyze scrolls off beastmen is a free way to get the scroll, but there are a number of NPC merchants who sell the scroll for cheap. You could mine darksteel, or you could desynth quadav backplates for much, much cheaper. Rather than waste time (your #1 asset) farming them, you can pay the minimal price to buy them and mark them up at the auction house. This leads to…