After poking about on my baby Ninja on Cactuar I had decided to pick up some Crafting classes so that I wouldn’t be falling behind on them as much as I have on my main on Moogle.
After some careful consideration on how I was going to do this I went ahead and started levelling the three crafter classes you can pick up in Limsa Lominsa (my homebase): Culinarian, Armorsmith and Blacksmith.

I don’t mean to write a guide on crafting, since there is more than enough of them out there already, but I would like to share some of the things that made it “easier” to level crafting on a brand new character.

Tip #1:
Pick up all the crafting classes in your starting town. From level five onwards you can pick between three rewards from quests. Because all starting towns conveniently have three crafts you can pick up you can level them up together and pick all the rewards from the quests simultaneously, making it much easier to “gear up” in general. You can get almost a full set this way for the first 10-15 levels.
From level 10 you can start looking into picking up accessories from the local Jeweler on the markets to fill up your right side. Since you won’t be provided any jewelry from the crafting quests.

Gear I got from doing only the level 5 and 10 quests for the 3 crafting classes in Limsa!

Tip #2:
Make all the recipes in your crafting log. Especially for the first 10-15 levels it will give you almost all the experience you need to level up. Added bonus: Up untill about level 15 you can get all the materials you need from the vendors. After that things will change but I will explain that in a later post.

Tip #3:
Levequests. Do them. Some professions don’t have that many recipes in their crafting log. When you plan to level from level 5 to level 10 just check the local levemete, see what items you need for the levequests and hold on to them, this goes for the entire levelling process by the way. They might give you that bit of experience you need to get to your next crafting quest! The rest of the items you can often sell, or hang onto, whatever you prefer. Especially when you are crafting tools for other jobs it’s nice to hang onto those since they can fill in the gaps that the crafting quests leave.
A special note here for levelling culinarian. Just keep the food. It helps you level other classes and you make it anyway, might aswell use it!

Tip #4:
Aim for filling up the quality bar as much as you can. From the moment you get the Master’s Mend skill (which is level 7 I believe) you can start fiddling around with HQing items. Make sure you always have two tries left to finish off the item (even if you would only need one) just incase the first one fails. Trying to HQ an item is always worth it seeing as with every step off quality you add succesfully you get increased experience from crafting the item. Play around with it and see how you like it. Sometimes you might get lucky and craft an HQ item for a levequest or for use!

Tip #5:
Branch out. Once you hit about level 15 you will notice that you are going to need items that you cannot buy from the vendors anymore. This is the point that you can start looking into picking up the gathering classes and the other crafting classes if you prefer. I know that levelling one crafter is a timesink, let alone multiple at a time. However it’s much easier to focus on a few at a time since all the crafting classes unlock usefull cross class skills that make your life much easier.

Tip #6:
Play your own way. For myself I figured that it was just the easiest to combine all the crafters in one city and attempt to level them up together because I have nothing on this particular server. However if you want to focus on just one at a time: go ahead! Nothing is stopping you from playing the game the way you want to. I prefer gathering everything myself so for me it’s an incredible timesink. You can however opt to buy everything of the market boards or just buy the completed items off the market boards and level solely on levequests… It’s all up to you! I just hope that some of the tips in my little post might be usefull when starting out.

I might be doing some more of these posts as I advance my crafts to higher levels. I hope you liked reading my tips. I know that they worked for me!
Levelling the gatherers and crafters is a nice way to break away from the mainstory or level a battle class for a bit. In the long run, if you’re serious about it, having high level crafters and gatherers can earn you lots of gil, make you fun glamour sets and even some pets, mounts and housing items!