Why Farming Your Own Mats is Bad (and vice versa)Follow

*claps* Well said. All true, unless there's an elephant in the room that I've missed. This is exactly why I'm leveling fishing and have stopped leveling crafts, it's just not worth it farm ingredients for synthing when the ingredients themselves sell just as well... Plus I can do work while I feesh =) Rate up.

This is good advice. The only time it's really good to farm your own materials is when you're broke and you have to.

What I got out of this post:

Stop crafting and farm (if you like money).

And I agree, farming makes me more money, but what if everyone stops crafting?
Then I would make more money crafting, but only until everyone starts crafting.

I think its a cyclic issue that is weighted more in the farmers favor thanks to RMT and just plain impatient behavior from normal players that want to undercut to sell THEIR stack of stuff faster.

BTW I like your post and im sure you will agree its very situational based on the specific item's economy right?

This is true; at least in my experience in cooking synths.

really, it's to the point where I as a cook find it easier to just *buy* the items for consumption rather than bother farming to make it; unless I'm in a particular mood to do so.

I do like crafting, but save for a few.. rare cases, its mostly dead as a gilmaker :(

You assume that the crafter is stupid enough not to look up the market value of their fished/farmed materials before using them to make something of equal or lesser value.

Bream sushi: 12 breams for 10,000g, 12 wasabi for 23,580g, 12 vinegar for 2160g, 12 rice for about 2000g, 12 water for 132g, and 12 earth crystals for 600g for a total of 38,472g. Market value of the sushi: at least 48,000g. Why not buy the rest of the mats and earn another 10,000g for the time you spent fishing up the breams? If you plan well it only takes a few minutes to get the ingredients and another few to craft the sushi.



Edited, Feb 17th 2009 4:15pm by Hamasi

Pretty much been saying for years that crafting is ruled by the farmers. Supply, profit, subsequent saturation of end product and demand. It's all got a source beyond the swirling crystal and there's very little the crafter can do to influence profits ESPECIALLY if competition is present.

I know when I'm discussing the ills of crafting with others, a popular response is, "Well, I see all these profit recipes on FFXIAH..." where those numbers make no account for demand, could be based on prices from years ago in the more obscure synths/sold materials, and don't always properly account for tiered synthing where selling the combined materials may have just gotten you more than shooting for a finished product.

I'd like to think things would be a bit healthier for the crafter if we had some variety in demands and options for specialization to cut down on the glut of competition, but when so much of the best gear is simply an R/E drop away or yet another maxed craft level 1 mule enters the system, there's no real balance to it. Just pray the next patch gives you a new synth you could gouge for a few days and then go back to wrestling with the debate of crafting, farming, camping (H)NMs, or trying to do more BC fights in search of that lottery ticket. At least in the latter cases, you didn't spend (much) money to make money. Not a whole lot different than people saying MMM is awesome for EXP without considering the fact it's a ton of farming beforehand when you could've just EXPed elsewhere beforehand and come out ahead.

Edited, Feb 17th 2009 4:43pm by Seriha

Farming your own materials is a good thing in the sense that it can teach you just how much money there is to be made with farming that particular material.

One person can make 50k/hr at some place, another person could do 500k/hr, whatever, but it's not always easy to pinpoint what YOU can make without going there to try it yourself.

Wow so many assumptions in this I don't know where to begin...

Assumption 1) Crafting takes as much time as farming.

Probably not true. I keep a healthy supply of ingredients on my mule so if I need to craft something, i just dump a few stacks over craft a stack or two and I'm done. Total time like 20 minutes.

Assumption 2) Nothing else drops while farming.

This is a bad assumption because for both the farmer and the crafter it means extra gil to be factored in.

Assumption 3) Prices are the same all over.

Well guess what they vary widely from server to server and it makes your examples kind of meaningless.

My fun experiment... Coeurl Subs!!

Farm 1 hour:

2 stacks Coeurl Meat - 20k
10 Coeurl Hides - 20k
3 stacks Coeurl Whiskers - 30k

Crafting 30 minutes:

Coeurl Meat - 20k
Black Pepper - 4k
Grape Juice - 9k
Selbina Butter - 1.4k
Rock Salt - 300gil
Wild Onion - 12k
Olive Oil - 500gil
Honey - 6k
----
White Bread - 4k
Cabbage - 1k
Mithran Tomato - 1k
Butter - 1.4k
Crying Mustard - 1k

Total Synth Cost: -58k

18 Stacks of Coeurl Subs at AH: 12k x 18 = +216k
10 Coeurl Hides = +20k
3 stacks Coeurl Whiskers = +30k

Grand Total Farming+Crafting: 208k!!!!!!!! (and that's if I don't even HQ anything)

Farming another 30 minutes
1 stack coeurl meat = 10k
5 hides = 10k
1.5 stack whiskers = 15k

plus original farming of 70k

Grand Total just Farming: 105k

UHOH!!!! My farming + crafting skills just made me an extra 103k gil!!! That is not a small amount!!!! XD

Not only that, but I made an additional 50k gil farming over just buying the ingredients from AH/vendors and crafting alone!!!!

So basically I'm laughing all the way to bank!

edit: I guess I should say before some smart @ss asks why I don't just craft for 1½ hours and make 600k ... I frontload my ingredients on my mule while I'm in certain cities during my normal travels. Maybe an extra 15 minutes of time for 8 stacks of synth. But to synth non-stop from AH materials and running around to vendors would cost me way more in time and materials than I'm spending the way I do it since not all ingredients are in all locations and always in stock. I think the main reason I farm is that I can't count on the main (non-vendor) ingredients to be in stock when I want to synth. Sometimes they aren't. So farming is a necessity.
I guess this would be Assumption 4) everything is always in stock when you want it. It isn't. >.<


Edited, Feb 17th 2009 8:10pm by rikkuotaku

I had a friend lvl99 Clothcrafter.
He was making a killing in craft but guess what ? He needed 3M+ gils to buy the materials and selling those HQ stuff was taking a fair share of time.
Not everybody can have that much of a working capital.
So what to do ?
Farm your own materials or wait for the materials prices to drop ?

Edited, Feb 18th 2009 11:18am by SeeYouTaru

There is also a psychological side to this. Some people have trouble getting themselves to sit down and focus on making money. Sometimes using an excuse like "I'm farming my ingredients for skilling up" is the push that person needs to go out and do something that would generate some money for them. While the farming itself doesn't actually make that particular synth more profitable, it does make it so that a person may spend more of their time attempting to make money than they would have otherwise.

I know that's why I fish up my ingredients for skilling up cooking...

Thinking about it more, I think it might be best to farm and craft but not just farm for the craft.

You have 7 slots on the AH and thinking your going to sell all 7 per hour is crazy. (I know there are exceptions)

There for I like the subs argument: Farm meat but get hide and whiskers and my experience was in the mountains was like 6 hides and 3 whisker stacks for every stack of meat. I NPC'd the hides (just for space and time sake even though I was throwing away like 1k per because of it) the whiskers sell between 1-5 stacks a day on my server and meat alot faster. But if I use the meat to synth I make more money per AH slot per hour which is my goal in the end I guess.

Im still working on this idea though, I like the discussion so far ^^

I see exactly what you're saying, but this just doesn't seem practical at all to me. I guess I make more "per hour" crafting than farming if I were to add up the total time I spend doing both, so according to you I should "STOP FARMING! Go Craft + Craft!"

If the auction house were a place where you could dump everything you craft for the current going price, and there were enough materials for you to buy an unlimitted supply of them, then sure, that'd be great advice. But it isn't. It's the foundation of the entire FFXI economy for everything but the most expensive items in the game (which are usually traded/bazaar'd), and there are limits to how much you can make by using it. Buying materials in Jeuno and then crafting them to fill up my auction house would probably take about 10 minutes. But what then? Keep crafting until my inventory is full and wait until my first batch sells to put up more? Keep crafting until I've filled up an account full of Jeuno mules, creating such high demand that I ruin my own market? I don't see any appealing option here. By doing nothing but buying materials and crafting, I'm creating goods so quickly (and for the lowest possible profit per synth, I should add) that I can't sell them fast enough to make a significant amount of gil.

Let's go back to the example in my earlier post where a stack of squid sushi makes you 7k if you fish + craft, or 1k if you just craft. You would need to sell 7 times the amount of sushi just crafting, to equal the gil you make fishing + crafting. Even if this could be done in the same amount of time that you would have spent fishing, what type of effect do you think think this would have on your market?

If you can make more farming than crafting, there are still other things to consider such as managing inventory space, which I mentioned in my post above. In the squid sushi example, it favors the crafter (although it won't always, with black sole it would be more space efficient not to craft while fishing). Auction house space is another but you already acknowledged that. One thing that I didn't mention is the rate at which the product sells, which depending on the synth could favor either the materials or the synthesis result. If it's the synth sells at a quicker rate than the materials, crafting may be the better choice than selling off what you get farming.

I think that there are far too many factors to just do one or the other without considering all factors (inventory space, auction house space, selling rate, your effect on your own market to name only some of them). In some (possibly many) cases, I think farming and crafting compliment each other so well that doing both can make you more money than either of them could individually in the same amount of time.

Edited, Feb 18th 2009 12:53pm by ChocoboDragoon

Other reasons to farm your own mats:

-skilling up in the field
Making scorp arrowheads and rings to skill bonecraft? go to the maze and farm scorps/skeles while crafting. You may also pick up stacks of silk off the crawlers to sell. You can stack your arrowheads for more space, failed rings take up no space but may offer skillups, so you can keep going for a while at a decent rate. You know that the scorp arrowheads are a loss almost anywhere, but this way you are farming up useful/worthwhile stuff and skilling...
-No mats on the AH
I like to farm my own mats most of the time just to be independent of the system. The more I can make for myself without relying on others the less I'll be slowed down when I need certain types of arrows that just arent selling today. Granted, I only really do this when I'm crafting stuff for my own or my LSs use.
-Farming the "max profit" mobs every single time is BORING
For the love of god, its the same set of mobs, in the same places every time. By basing my farm locations around my skill up synths most of the time, makes it interesting, and I can sell farming byproducts.

Note: I craft a fair bit, no 100 yet, but at 60 on everything but fishing, goldsmithing, blacksmithing, and leathercraft (gold/black/leather are all over 31 atm, skilling leather until I hit 60, then I'll start leveling thf(46 atm) for bst coins to help skill ups in the smithings) I don't craft just for gil. EVER. I know I could make money, I know it wouldn't be too hard to find a niche, and I'll sometimes craft extra of something when I know I'll make a profit selling it. I don't farm everything, but I farm well over half my mats. I enjoy it, and I love seeing that my skill increased by X every once in a while, because it means that my character is that much better at something, and is that much more useful. I don't even care if I put it to use, I just like seeing the "dings"

Kinda just saying there's more to just crafting than pure profit, there is flexibility, independence from the market, character advancement and a change of pace.

But few corps operate in every link in the product chain. For example lumber companies don't get into the business of making furniture even though there's profit to be made there. Lumber companies don't really compete with furniture makers. There are companies that do it all, for example oil companies both extract raw materials, process it, and distribute it, in which case the argument works. But not all players necessarily have to play both sides, they can put aside crafting to focus on farming if it's more profitable. Sort of how Sega stopped making consoles and just made games for their former rivals. It got them out of the hole.



If it was a wasted investment, wasting more time into it won't help recoup lost profits.

Edited, Feb 18th 2009 5:42pm by cookiesmonster

Edit: Chocobodragoon made the point about compressing more stuff into less AH slots before I did. Reference one paragraph below ICO fire and ice double XD.

WARNING: WoT AHEAD!

[/em also prepares to be voted below sub-default]

First off, let me say that I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with your premise. The cost of materials should be factored in to your math, and if it comes out that you lose, then you shouldnt (generally) craft it. This being said, I'd like to poke a few holes, mostly from the practical application side as compared to the theoretical, on paper side. Caveat: it's 230am and my wife just dared me to a double fire and ice... so if this degenerates into babble or horrible grammar or atrocious misspells... yeah. Anyway, on with the poking.

#1 Inventory compression

Two examples:
First is tuna sushi. 6 gugru tuna become one stack of tuna sushi. Granted, 100% nq is usually a slight loss (not bothering with specific numbers), however, let's say you fished 42 tuna. Nice, easy number. You can either restock the AH 6 times, presumably on mules, which you may not check fanatically, or, you can spend an extra hour-ish (at absolute maximum) turning those 42 tuna into 7 stacks of sushi, which can all be placed on the AH at once. Yeah yeah, flooding the market, totally different discussion :-p.

Second is good ole beehive chips. If you're not dumb about it, just selling the chips is about 16k for 10k worth of wax (again, assuming 100% hq) However, wax is stupidly easy to get to 51 over on, so this again, should be a break-even to slight profit, even under relatively less than optimal conditions, and you can fit three stacks of chips into one action house slot. In other words, you can sell 21 stacks of wax for the same convenience that you can sell 7, it just takes 3 stacks of fire and distilled water.

The point of this is that the consumables market has always centered more (at least in my opinion and experience) on how fast you can move your wares, not maximizing the profit you can make on each one at the cost of tied up slots for days.

Two other great examples of inventory/auction house compressing foods: Pescatora (which is sheer awesomeness for my pld) and Tav tacos. Reason being the grims in both cases.



Varying your market

For this, I'll use your own examples of squid and sole sushi. First, I'd like to point out that squid sushi is another excellent candidate for an example of inventory compression. That aside, the point of this is that many fisherman sell their wares raw, and many craft them. It may be postulated that these are generally two separate groups of people, as I believe it's a safe assumption that most people dont give it this much thought. Therefore, it naturally follows that by crafting some of your gains, you place yourself in two different markets, thereby making you somewhat more resistant to the people who feel it necessary to attempt to price fix and dump. People chopping sole down to stupid low? Meh. Make it all into sushi, and dump it yourself, just trickle it so the dumping isnt noticed. Someone who buys gil skilling on it? Meh, just sell the raw ingredient and have done with it.



Immunity to price fixers

OK. So. Buffalo drops. Anyone remember when SE screwed us in the ass about a month and a half ago and made milk and meat NPC buyable? On diabolos at least, this resulted in a crash of milk price, and therefore cream puff price. To a somewhat (though still pretty respectable) lesser extent, hedgehog pie and carbonara were affected. This has just started to recover, due to people running out of stockpiles. Personally, I had just restored my character, and therefore didnt have a lot of gil. I stockpiled what I could from the NPC, but, given how long cream puffs sat at 5k/stack, other people stockpiled significantly more than me (pizza's been steadily falling since introduction, and didnt seem to be much affected by this). The point of this segment is that, when someone has otherwise cornered the market and checkmated you, you can farm your materials, and then sit on them, while using other means to make your gil, without losing anything out of pocket. Then, when they get bored with it/have enough money for a PCC or whatever, they move on, and you're primed to be the next guy. To make an analogy to reality, this is roughly the same as selecting a mutual fund for a 401k that your employer will match right now. The analogy isn't perfect (a traditional retirement plan would be much more so, but no one f'in does those anymore) but you get the idea; more of an investment of effort than money, due to money constraints.



Collateral Benefits

Whenever I make hedgehog pie, I always farm the truffles. This, admittedly, is a holdover from when I didnt have enough money in 2006 (I quit for two years, came back two months ago) to buy a stack of truffles, but could buy the meat. However, while there, I can farm a stack of lizard eggs in about ten minutes, and get a boatload of other mushrooms from the truffle droppers that I can then turn into various other mushroom dishes.




Reasons to level cooking

From 48 synths, I can almost guarantee 100k profit, at least. It, at times, requires sitting on my materials or finished product (the 8 stacks of Ule-milk I just bought for 5k/stack, that I'm holding in hope of cream puff price going back to 12k/stack), and, to be perfectly honest, isnt that substantial. However, it provides yet another way for me to make gil. Between gardening, fishing, cooking, alchemy, and some (rather limited) farming, I can, almost always, escape the woes of someone screwing my market, as I just sit on whatever I just did, and change my focus to a new area (carbonara at 18k/stack? lolwut? fine, I'll cut it even lower, then go mine for money to put the people who thought they could undercut me out of business, then come back to it after the people who couldnt piss far enough folded their hands. /endrant).



Closing

While I completely agree with what the OP's subject was, there are many many many variables to the economy, and many constraints placed on us (available auction house slots, number of mules, time spent playing per day, etc etc etc). If you lock yourself into one category only, there's a very good chance you may be shutout by someone who has diversified more, and can therefore still make millions in other areas, while losing hundreds of thousands to shut someone else out of their favorite market.

~Cwellan

PS Rated OP neither up nor down. agree too much to rate down. See too much single-minded tunnel vision to rate up.

Edit #2;
Edit #3; Deleted edit #2. If you dont have anything nice to say, dont say anything at all, right?

Edited, Feb 19th 2009 3:28am by CwellThor

Edited, Feb 19th 2009 3:33am by CwellThor

Edited, Feb 19th 2009 3:46am by CwellThor

This is opportunity cost, which should really be obvious to anyone that wants to make gil. It's not a difficult concept to grasp...

You also have to consider personal preferences. Some people love crafting and absolutly hate farming and they wont do it unless they have to. On the other hand, some people love farming but cant stand crafting.

Telling me I'll make (for exemple) 10k more profit / hour for doing something I absolutly hate is not gonna make me wanna do it more... It would be a better allocation of my time, to do less profit (relatively of course), but with something I enjoy.



Also, Time limit is a complete other issue to consider.

Let;s say I'm currently in town and I got an event in 20 min. To attend said event takes only 5 min to get there.

So basically, I have 15~24 minutes to spare in game. Now granted taking those 15 min to go farm / fish / mine / harvest is not always optimal. some of those would require me to either change job, change gear, make some invent space, travel for 5+ min, or any combinaison of the above. Short story: not worth my time i'd better just head to my event and kill random stuff around or wait and chat.

Or, I could always hit up the ATM machine, aka the AH, check up some mats and crystals, get the rest from various NPC in town, craft 1 stack worth of ingredients, or 2 if I got time, put it up on AH, or mule it and make some profit.
I'm sure that's far from being the best profit you can come up with if you got time ahead and planned ahead. Pretty sure 10 min of farming would grant other people more than my 10 min of crafting I just did.

But still, I just maximised those 20 min I had to spare.

I think this depends alot on the person doing the crafting. Personally I enjoy farming my mats especially if its a higher level synth or there's alot of materials. For example on my clothcraft when I hit Field Tunica's. I would spend a day farming the more pricey mats such as wool cloth/thread and linen cloth and then once I had enough for a dozen synths (plus a little extra for breaks) i would hop a tele-dem and kill rams and sheep for some quick leathers. Almost 100% of these synths were "free" so anything I made was pure profit. At 15-20k per tunica that worked out to be 180-240k for a few hours worth of effort. Plus I was skilling up on em. A more recent example would be getting cloth to 93 on giant bird plumes. I'd like to say now that unless you have a thf or /thf save yourself the headache and buy the plumes. I parked my ass in miseraux coast for about 3 weeks farming diatryma's and took cloth from 88 to 93. The only reason I did it this way was because I had issues with spending 120-140k on a 2 stacks(and a bit) of plumes only to sell the fletchings for 45-50k. Plus as a side bonus I farmed and sold 52 stacks of giant bird feathers which will help with getting mats for dance shoes.
I guess it comes down to how much time you have to farm, how much profit you'd like to see etc. I dont do much endgame stuff cept for dynamis and some nyzul so I enjoy this approach to crafting/farming.
I'd also like to add that this was all done AFTER SE nerfed the beast blood prices (npc) Otherwise I would've farmed them and just bought the mats for my clothcrafting.

This is a very good debate and one I have had with several friends.

A couple things to really take into consideration is can you make more Gil farming something else then your materials are worth ? And if so, are the desired materials available in the quantity needed?

I am a Smither and this sparks a inward look for me. If an unlimited supply of quadav backplates, helms and Antican Pauldrans were available at 500-2k gil respectively Then farming them myself is a complete waste of time. I would craft for 45 min and list results and go work on merits or farm NPCable goods. On the flipside quadav backplates drop like rain don't stack and really need to be desynthed on the fly to prevent burning time running back and forth. However Antican Pauldrons have a horrible drop rate so much so that farming them yourself and desynthing can often lead to several hours of work for 10k worth of Darksteel. And yes I have done it enough to know it aint worth it.

So I would say it really depends are there 200 quadav backplates on the AH right now selling for 500 gil? Ok go farm and make 30kish an hour if your smithing is high enough. On rare ocasions I have seen large quantities on AH for 300-500 gil and I promptly buy them up taking advantage but almost never enough to create a stack of material for selling so this usually means I run out and farm for a while. Now I send to Jeuno mule and sell when whole stacks are completed.

It really comes down to a few things on whether is is better to farm your own materials or not.

1. Is there a ready supply of the material I need on the AH?
a) Yes, buy material and synth.
b) No, guess I am farming the mat or looking to synth something else.

2. If 1 is true, can I make more gil by farming something else and buying the mats?
a) Yes, go farm something for gil, buy mats off of AH.
b) No, really no easy answer here, you can farm said material then if you want, based on whether you have gil to spend or not.

3. If 1 is true, can I make more gil by farming mats for synth and crafting said item?
a) Yes, farm away.
b) No, just buy the mats then.

4. If 1 is false, what do I do?
a) Farm mats for said synth.
b) Find alternate synth that will produce income/skillups then start over from 1
c) Farm something lucrative and sell, don't worry about crafting.



Lol, I now understand why the Car Companies are in so much trouble financially. Their Union employees are doing too much motion. They should hire 2x more Union Employees to get out of their financial trouble by reducing the current employees workload, thus increasing efficiency.

You really had a lot of good points up until this little blurb.

Edited, Feb 25th 2009 12:02pm by Meldi

The reason why Car Companies are in so much trouble financially?

Answer: They keep pumping cars off the assembly line like no tomorrow, but yet the Market for cars is dropping. No amount of Government Bailouts are going to save them; they are producing something that is not needed.

It is just like RMT Sushi Cooks; they flooded the AH with Sushi faster than people were needing it. Thus, value of Sushi goes way down. Only, with Cars, the value doesn't go down, it actually goes up.... but nobody is buying. The cars, therefore, just sit on the car dealerships' lots.

With an economy in recession, fewer people have the moolah to go out and buy a new car. No, they look for OLD Cars that are much, much cheaper. Which would the average money-starved consumer do? Buy a brand-spanking new car for $20k (with absurd interest rates), or go out and buy a, say, 1995 model for $5k with no interest rates, that will probably work just as well if they found a decent one?

But, the car companies keep pumping out more and more and more and more cars off the assembly lines, but nobody's buyin'. And advertising. My God, I swear, the last 2-3 months, every other TV commercial is a Car Commercial. Cars, and Pharmaceuticals. Either/or, takes up 80% of the commercial time during a TV show. Those commercial slots aren't cheap, surely. More and more car ads, more and more cars being made, but people are buying fewer cars.

No wonder they are in trouble. And the Government wants to just fork taxpayer money over to them, to bail them out? WHY!?

Jeez. Anyone with half a brain could add this up in their head... no amount of money is going to fix the problem, hell, Obama would have done more good by mailing some low-to-mid income families a $10k voucher to go buy a new car. That would have had the same effect as paying the car companies directly, to be honest, with an added twist: People now have newer cars, and they are spending less money on repairs/junkyard parts on older cars.

It boils down to a concept called "Opportunity Cost"

If you go on holidays, you have to factor in the cost of the vacation AS WELL AS the cost of the money you could have made during the time you're gone.

Same thing goes for crafting. When you synth something where you farmed the material, you have to consider what you COULD HAVE gotten if you had simply sold the materials on the AH.

Beeswax:

3x beehive chips: 1500 gil
1x Distilled Water: 12 gil
1x Water Crystal: 100 gil

=

1x Beeswax: 2000 gil (prices are arbitrary)

This is a profit synth, whether you farmed the mats or bought them. Farming the mats doesn't make it any more profitable, you just don't need to invest your actual gil to earn the profit.

You farmed the chips, therefore the opportunity cost of not selling them as is is 1500 gil. You need to factor this value in to your equations.

In the case of someone earlier that said that they farmed all of their mats for skillup synths, so they were pure profit, unfortunately that's not entirely true. A loss synth is always a loss synth, because you could have just sold those farmed mats for more. The loss is well worth it in order to increase your skill, however let's call a spade a spade.

Your post was well written and entertaining, though you took a lot of text to say something pretty simple.

You must always analyze each activity independently. Whichever activity yeilds the highest gil/hr is the activity that you should repeat for gil.

To make this point obvious just look at an extreme example. Even the hard core advocates of "farming your own material" do not farm their own crystals. Why not?? You are basically proving yourself wrong by not doing this. You don't farm crystals because the time it takes to farm them is too high compared to the cost, so you make much more money buy simply buying them off the AH.