Retainers will be your first foot in the door when it comes to making Gil. They're your storage, they can get loot or gather materials for you and they're how you sell stuff on the marketboard.

Get 1 Combat and 1 Gatherer, typically a Miner is best. Any combat class will do. These will be your first 2 free retainers.

You can get a 3rd retainer by upping your subscription and it should be a Botanist if you have a Miner and vice-versa. Fisher is useless. If you get a 4th one, its better to get another Combat retainer unless you really really need a fisher for some reason. Anything above that is your preference.

Get a high enough rank in your Grand Company so you can do Expert Delivery Missions.

Have your retainers do the 1 hour Quick Exploration for two venture tokens each. Do this for every hour youre playing if you can help it. Turn in the items they bring back via Expert Delivery Missions to your Grand Company for GC seals.

This will make your retainers self-sufficient. They will be gathering the GC seals needed to pay them with venture tokens.

Next, use the excess GC seals to buy sellable items exclusive to the GC shop and resell it on the marketboard for Gil. At the lower ranks, Coke and Prisms are good investments. Later on Scheelite and Petrified Log are better. Any expansion after Dawntrail could change what sells best so doublecheck the items.

In the endgame, you'll be switching gears. You'll want retainers to farm mats that are used for the current endgame gear or shards and crystals used for crafting. Make sure you unlock all the new resource nodes by gathering them yourself. You'll still want your combat retainer to farm quick exploration gear for GC seals so you can keep hiring them with venture tokens.

When the next expansion drops, the prices for these endgame materials will probably crash as everyone will be moving on to the new content. You can go back to GC seal farming or shards and crystals while you figure out what the next hot items are.

Optimally you'd want to hire the full 9-10 retainers and have a mix of gatherers to do this for you, but that costs real money. For this guide Im assuming you have the 2 free ones only. it'll be slow going with just your 1 botanist/miner so it might be time to consider getting your 3rd retainer but its not necessary, theres a better way to make Gil.

Get to level 50 botanist and miner asap and finish Heavensward.

FInd out where and when Darksteel ore and Spruce log spawn. They spawn in Coerthas somewhere, at 1am and 9am in-game time respectively.

These two items sell a lot and sell often because of submarines and airships. That content is tied to Free companies and houses, which I wont be touching on because i know nothing about them.

Other items in this category are scarlet sap, dark matter clusters, grade 3 thanalan topsoil, and grade 3 shroud topsoil. tbh, darksteel ore and spruce log beat out dark matter clusters and scarlet sap, and theres a better method for topsoil farming. These items sell on the marketplace at 99 stacks and sell often.

Topsoil is used for gardening, which is tied to free companies and houses, which again I know nothing about. Something to do with selling chocobo food? chocobo onions and fruits sell for a lot.

The best method to farm topsoil is with poetic tomestones. Do your daily duties, khloe aliapoh's weekly adventure book (which has a chance to give you items worth millions of gil), etc. when you have near 2000 of them, go to idyylshire, a Heavensward expansion zone, and buy Unidentifiable shells or unidentifiable ore from Hismena and trade them in to Bertana for grade 3 shroud or thanalan topsoil respectively. Then sell those items on the market.

The real money though is grinding for endgame cosmetics like mounts and hairstyles. Selling 1-3 of those new, rare cosmetics is probably enough to never need Gil ever again.

Lastly, you can do Treasure Maps. Treasure Maps are a rabbit hole all unto themselves, I'll let you figure that out on your own. :P

At some point you'll have enough money to "flip" items on the marketboard comfortably. As in, buy low, then resell at a high price.

You can start buying up things like the scarlet sap or topsoil you've been farming instead of gathering them yourself.

Depending on your server, you can buy them when the prices go down during the week then mark them up and wait for the weekend when everyone logs in. When those dips and spikes happen is up to you to figure out and time.

Another method of flipping is reselling NPC furniture. You'll have to go to the housing merchants in your housing district and search up each item on their list. Some furniture items even though theyre cheaper to get from the NPCs, resell for a lot more on the marketboard. Why? who knows. Maybe players are lazy, maybe players dont know. Either way, each server will have different demands so you WILL have to painstakingly check each item if you want to go this method.

Typically you want to sell 1-3 copies of a single furniture depending on how fast it sells. and sell them as singles. nobody buys the same furniture in bulk. i typically have 1 retainer's entire shop inventory for furniture and the other for mats but you can go all mats or all furniture for both if thats what works for you.

Another popular NPC flipping target are the beast tribes. if you have all their shop items unlocked, congrats you could be rich and not know it yet! Since those items are locked behind a rep grind, you might have access to items most people cant get that you can flip for profit!

Crafting Endgame and "cosmetic" gear tends to sell well. What those items are in your server changes per expansion and it'll be up to you to figure it out.

This requires the most research and I honestly dont bother. The safe bet is to craft HQ endgame gear for the current expansion and pay attention to what everyone around you likes to wear.

Some people craft Anima weapon components, others craft furniture, but again, that requires research and is based on whats popular on your server. If thats what you like doing, go for it. But I honestly cannot provide any meaningful advice on this topic, outside of maybe selling these items as singles.

The safe crafting items are endgame HQ potions and endgame HQ foods. These sell consistently since theyre needed for endgame raids, so long as your server isnt empty that is.

This is usually the part where people cave and buy more retainers. It helps with how tedious it is gathering materials for yourself.

If crafting is your passion, the more time you sink into this, the more it pays out so don't be discouraged. This method requires the most work but has the best payout in the long-run. Even moreso if youre an omnicrafter character.

A good chunk of this guide is based around the current meta of what sells and why. These materials sell because everyone is into gardening and airship/submersibles. These items from this NPC sell on the marketboard because theyre popular and hard/tedious to get. But that could change in a future expansion.

Be on the lookout for what the next "gardening" or "airship/submersible" or "GC mats" are. These mechanics could be replaced and the marketboard meta could shift to propping up that new mechanic thats come to replace them. (There might even be new mechanics that add to this formula and provide another avenue to make gil!)

Each expansion brings in new cosmetics, furniture, etc that could upset the current demand for crafters. They could easily stick around as they are to go away in the next one.

Some people might be flipping endgame items because other players are flipping the same endgame items and you end up with an item thats not really in demand but is bloated from people speculating that its worth a lot. Until its not.

New NPCs and new currencies might pop up that make the current GC seal or poetic tomestone mats worthless.

Always be on the lookout for "the replacement." Pay attention to what the new expansion brings to the game and if it makes what youre doing obsolete. Then find out how they can fit in the different methods.

I know absolutely nothing about Gardening or Airship/Submersibles. These are methods tied to owning a home, which I don't care for. That being said, I thought it was important to at least mention why theyre a thing.

When you get a home, you can buy gardening plots. Those plots can grow fruits and vegetables. The most lucrative being Chocobo food that change their colour or increase their level like Thavnarian onions. Grade 3 topsoil is tied to all this somehow, which is why I assume it sells. The same with darksteel ore or spruce logs are tied to Airship/Submersibles, which you specifically need an FC Hall to have.

The ins and outs to these two mechanics I have no idea, but at the very least, I want you to know that they exist should you gain a House or FC Hall.

Personally I think the prospect of owning a home in the first place is such a crapshoot. You need to wait for a player who owns a home to get evicted so their plot becomes vacant, then you need to pay millions of gil into a lottery for a chance to get the plot. And if you stop playing for an extended period of time, you get evicted next!

Theres a set pool of 9000 houses per WORLD. Everyone in your server will be fighting over the same 9000 houses. Considering how in-demand, limited, expensive and inconsistent it is getting a house, I don't bother.

If youre lucky enough to get one though, Id look into this more.

And then theres the island sanctuary, and i REALLY dont know anything about that.

If you find any of this information inaccurate, feel free to discuss below in the comments. I am by no means an expert. This is simply a compilation of what I've learned since I started playing and I'm open to learn more.