Goldsmithing Guide by Sarchar

==Introduction==
This guide is going to be designed using a rather different approach to leveling a craft. 
Now, because every server's economy is different, there are going to be better and worse items to use for skilling up. Choosing an item to skillup on isn't very clear cut and can generally take a long time to decide what to do.
Hence this guide pops forward. I've spent the past month leveling up goldsmithing to 60 and doing a lot of research just so you can take my suggestions and use them yourself to level up goldsmithing.
===Before Starting Goldsmithing===
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There is some stuff you need to know about goldsmithing before you begin. First of all, it is considered by most to be the most expensive craft in the game. And, well, you're right. At level 50 some recipes will require about 300,000 G for just 12 synths. At level 60, expect around 800,000 G for 12 synths.
Goldsmithing is about pretty stuff, like rings, earrings, gems and jewels. Famous items from goldsmithing include the Beads that are used to make Elemental staffs, brass armor, silver
items, mythril weapons, gold armor, etc. A lot of rangers in the higher levels (55+) try to get their goldsmithing to at least 20 so they can make their own silver bullets. The list really goes on.
The insane amount of gil required to level goldsmithing is only a slight indication of how difficult a craft it can be. What makes a craft difficult is not really the gil investment, but the choice of recipes that is offered to you for skilling up and the availability of ingredients of your chosen skillup recipe. And,
I guarantee you that this craft is hard.
So should you decide to take on the challange, I hope this guide will give you enough information to push forward through the tough times.
===What you will need===
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Gil. And lots of it. Actually, there are plenty of times throughout your goldsmithing (herein after referred to as GS) career that you will profit. I will try my best to indicate this when possible.
So how much gil? Well, that all depends roughly on how serious and how patient you are. If you want to work with little gil, you will NEED a lot of a mules, preferably one in each city. You will need to walk a mule to Jeuno. Since GS prices are so different, you will find very quickly that the mules are so important.
You will need a list of goldsmithing recipes. You can find this on Allakhazam or MysteryTour. Even though I tell you which recipes to do, I do not generally tell you the specific ingredients. So you will need to look these up as I suggest
them.
It's also a good time to consider gardening for crystals and other materials. Search the Allakhazam.com forums for a good gardening guide.
The crystals you will be using are (in order of most-used): Fire, Wind, and Earth. Once you get high enough in GS you will eventually use Earth more to make the rings and earrings,
but during skillups, wind crystals will be used more often. Save these at every oportunity you get.
You will need a way to make money. Some people on my server camp the valkurm emporer for a week straight, then does GS for a few days. While I don't really condone camping NMs for
your main source of income, it is definitely an option. In either case, you will need a way to make 40-50k per day, usually by selling stuff overnight at the Auction House. At some point in the future, goldsmithing will become self-sustaining meaning selling some items will allow you to reinvest that money to skill up some more. But you will have to do the research into which items are profitable outside of the guide I have written.
As with any craft, if this is your 2nd or 3rd craft then it will be easier than the 1st. This is so true, in fact, that if you have not gotten your cooking to 60 on any character, then I strongly suggest you do so before starting Goldsmithing. The reason for this is experience! The more experience you have with crafting and understandin what to expect, the better off you will be!
Life will also be easier if you have Rank 5. Having the airship pass allows you entrance to the vendors that reside by the Airships. And, trust me, this will save you a lot of time and money. In fact, I find it so necessary, that I just assume you are going to be rank 5.
===How my GS guide works===
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At the beginning of every section I will put a level range. The level range should be understood as loosely stated. For example, if I said "5-10" as the level range, then it is perfectly ok to be at level 4 and use some of the synthesis in the said section.
But the upper level range "10" will almost always be the hard cap. You will not skill up past that level in the section.
I will then list several recipes that you can choose to skillup on, and I will make a decision about which recipe is the one I chose and why I believe it is the best of the available options. That recipe will be marked with two stars. This will be followed
with a general cost analysis (gernally numbers will not be used) as well as what you should do with the synthesized items. If you need synthesis support for the recipe, I will mark that next to the stars with "SUPP" meaning that "support is suggested."
The way I use support is as follows. I try to pick an item that is no more than 7 or 8 levels above my current skill. If it is more than 4 I will definitely get advanced support. Around 3 or 4 levels ahead I will likely get regular support just none at all. At less than 3 levels I just don't recommend getting support. I've noticed that skillups tend to decrease when I use support at that level range.
==Skilling Up==
So let's begin...
===BEGINNING===
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Level 0-3
Options:
# Copper Ingot (yagudo bead necklace recipe)
# Stone Arrowheads
# Copper Ingot (copper ore recipe) **
I suggest you consider stone arrowheads only if you have some woodworking skill. Otherwise, if you do this recipe you will need to sell the arrowheads to NPCs, since the sell rate on these is rather low (on my server). You will lose money if you choose to do arrowheads.
Alternatively, you should make copper ingots and I do not suggest doing the yagudo bead necklace recipe. Save the yagudo bead necklaces and turn them in for norg fame, get your utsusemi scroll and use the money to invest in goldsmithing!
However, since you're Rank 5, you can ride the airship. Look at the regional map and find out who is in first place. Buy yourself about 4 stacks of fire crystals and take the airship to that country from Jeuno. Do not leave the airship area! Stop by the vendor and look at his goods. He's selling copper ore! Buy about 8 copper ore, do two synths, sort your invetory and repeat. You will fail some, but that's ok. With maximum fame, the ores sell for 10 gil.
By the time you are done, you should have about 3 or 4 stacks of copper ingots. This will have cost you about 1400-2300 gil. If you bought your fire crystals, add in another 6000-8000 gil. Generally the ingots sell for more than they cost to make, so if you stick them up on the Auction House you will make some money. In fact, you can continue to use this method to make money for a few levels.
However, I suggest you save a few stacks of copper ingots for the next stage.
This recipe will cap at 3 and I suggest you take it all the way to 3. You may or may not need to do more synths to reach the cap, it depends mostly on luck.
===BEGINNING part 2===
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Level 3-7
Options:
# Copper Ring
# Copper Hairpin **
You are welcome to choose the 3-7 range as stated here, or skip this section and do the BRASS part 1 section next at level 2 or 3.
Unfortunately there just isn't much of a choice here, just two items. I don't recommend doing the copper rings since they're worthless on the auction house (like 50-100 gil) and require two copper ingots. So do the copper hairpins. These again are pretty much worthless on the auction house, but at least they sell. They sell fast in San D'Oria and Windurst because the mage classes want them.
Alternatively, buy a few stacks of lightning crystals and desynth these badboys. It will give you a good taste of how successful (or not) desynthesis can be. You will also get some of your copper ingots back and can finally sell them at the AH.
You will probably lose a little bit of gil in this stage, but it shouldn't be very much since you grew your own fire crystals and are using the ingredients from the 0-3 stage, right?
===BRASS (learning goldsmithing)===
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Level 2-9
Options:
# Brass Ingot **
If you choose to do this recipe before level 5, be sure to get advanced support.
There is almost literally no choice in what to do now. Like the BEGINNING stage, you will need to get several stacks of fire crystals and go to an airport shop and synth there for a while. But this time, you need to go to bastok and browse the bazaars or buy from the auction house (or even go mining) for zinc ore. It should cost some where around 300 gil, but thats just a rough estimate. Get about 12 of these and go to the airport shops, buy 6 copper ore at a time and make two brass ingots.
Now these things are good profit. In fact, better profit than copper ingots were. If you're making money from the copper ingots, start doing these instead. But again, I suggest saving the brass ingots for the next stage.
===BRASS part 2===
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Level 9-11
Options:
# Brass Sheet **
# Brass Cap
I don't recommend the brass cap recipe, simply because they sell rather slow and you will need to make 20-30 of them to gain 2 levels.
So take the ingots from the first BRASS stage and use them on a fire crystal to make sheets. Sheets sell on the auction house, albeit very slowly. You may have to relist them several times, but on my server they sell for a bit more than the ingots sell for.
This is a relatively simple stage, and you only lose money on the crystals if you bought them since you used the brass ingots from the first BRASS stage. Again, however, save the sheets for the next stage.
===BRASS part 3===
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Level 11-13
Options:
# Brass Scales **
Take the sheets to a wind crystal and watch them turn into scales. The skill ups on these seem to be better (but that's just theory). You will need to do about 2 stacks of sheets, and dumping them to an NPC can be painful but you will have a very hard time selling these on the auction house.
From the sum of the 3 BRASS stages you will probably lose about 10-20K gil. I'm sorry.
Alternatively, it is possible to skip BRASS part 3 and advance directly to the first SILVER stage. Your increased failure rate early on will mean little or no profit, but depending on the market conditions, you likely will lose less gil than if you turn all of your pretty brass sheets into worthless scales.
===SILVER (mmmm money!)===
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Level 13-18
Options:
# Brass Flowerpot (16 cap)
# Brass Hairpin (17 cap)
# Silver Ingot (18 cap) ** SUPP
This is actually a pretty fun stage since you will be making money! I chose to do the silver ingots simply because I needed to get used to the market and the making money part didn't sound so bad either.
Don't do the brass hairpin synthesis, it's a pretty big loss of money. They sell for about half the cost of ingredients, but do have a pretty good sellrate.
If you don't have flowerpots, now is a good time to make a few for yourself. Go buy the ingredients and make yourself some flowerpots :-D
Really, though, go to any auction house. I recommend the San D'orian AH because the silver beastcoins tend to be cheapest there. One stack of silver beastcoins makes 3 silver ingots.
Find out the price of silver ingots and try to buy silver beastcoin stacks at about the cost of 2 silver ingots. I suggest getting about 8 stacks of silver beastcons, and two stacks
of fire crystals and heading to the GS guild in Bastok. Pay for advanced support and crank out two stacks of silver ingots. Sell them on the Auction House for a pretty penny. They should sell overnight too!
Normally, I would recommend keeping the ingots for later, but like before there is good profit in selling the ingots.
===SILVER part 2===
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Level 18-20
Options:
# Silver Ingot (20 cap) **
# Colored Rocks
I don't recommend doing the colored rocks since 90% of the time the resulting items are useless. Instead, grab a few stacks of fire crystals and head down to the guild and do like you did at the airship vendors. Buy ~8 silver ores and make silver ingots.
If the guild runs out, run up to the Auction House, the price should be very similar.
You should reach level 20 goldsmithing in no time at all. Sell the ingots or keep them for the following stages.
===BREAK===
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Now is a good time to take a break from goldsmithing and learn the market some more. Take a look at the items ahead of you and the items behind you and be proud of reaching level 20.
If you thought it was expensive so far, think again. Getting to level 30 is no easy task. The previous steps have only been minor road bumps, but up ahead are some very large mountains.
Be warned that the next few stages will cost a lot of money. Also, this is where having some other craft could become very handy.
===SILVER part 3===
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Level 20-27
Options:
# Silver Bullets (52 alchemy required. Caps at 24 GS)
# Silver Arrowheads SUPP
# Silver Hairpin ** SUPP
# Onyx Earring SUPP (Caps at 25 GS)
I actually did the first 3 of these recipes. My first craft was alchemy, so I had it pretty high and was able to do silver bullets. I quickly found that I got very little skill from them.
However, they were a lot of profit. In fact, I could almost double my money. And the bullets sold pretty quickly too! So if you have 52 alchemy or about that, I would actually suggest this recipe until you hit about 22 or 23 goldsmithing.
Silver Arrowheads are very nice, but only if you can make your own arrows. If you can make your own arrows, then you will profit in this stage. Buy carnations and have them quivered and sell them in jeuno for a nice 5k profit per stack (or so). However, you will be making a LOT of arrows, and silver arrowheads have a very slow selling rate, especially quivers.
So, despite the profit avaialble from both (1) and (2), silver hairpin is by far the quickest and most painful way of reaching level 27 goldsmithin. The cheapest way here is to buy a ton of silver beastcoins, and make your own silver ingots. You will need about 5 stacks of silver ingots. Run them all through wind crystals making silver hairpins. Once you've made them all into hairpins (you will need a lot of storage space, send as many
as you can to mules), start desynthing them. Take a lightning crystal plus the silver hairpin and try to get those ingots back. Once you've got some desynthed, make the hairpins again. Repeat this process until you have capped 27.
You can optionally synthesize a variety of earrings that all cap at level 25 GS. These are made by combining a Silver Earring with the gem of your choice. Onyx earrings tend to be popular, and on some servers they may even be profitable. The other earrings usually sell for a loss.
Depending on the exact route you take, you will more than likely lose close to 50,000 G during the desynthesis. But congratulations, you are over the first hill in goldsmithing.
===MISC 1===
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Level 27-31
Options:
# Silver Ring
# Hiraishin **
# Thief's Tools (smithing and woodworking required)
This section is a little weird. You're currently inbetween silver and mythril stages and you've got to somehow bridge the gap. Silver Rings are possible, but they're a good way to waste your money. Thief's tools actually are a good synthesis, but the last time I looked, they sold very slowly.
In fact, hiraishin sold very slowly too, but for a very decent profit. Hiraishin is a cheap recipe, and you can either make your own copper and silver (recommended for the silver) or just buy it at the auction house. If you make your own, you will sell these in jeuno for a very nice profit.
This section can be somewhat tedious and slow and boring, but the money you will make should offset that feeling.
===SILVER part 4===
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Level 31-33
Options:
# Silver Chain **
# Mythril Ingot SUPP
Ok, so you're more than welcome to skip this part if you feel like you can handle a 7 level difference for the mythril ingots. However, to be safe I recommend making silver chains to 33. These are a nasty gil loss because they just will not sell at the auction house, so I had to sell them to NPC to get any form of gil back. I believe it was about 50% loss selling to NPC, but I got over it quickly.
===MYTHRIL part 1===
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Level 33-38
Options:
# Mythril Ingot ** SUPP
# Rings
Don't do the rings, because again, unless you can high quality these you're going to take a big gil hit. Moreover, you can actually make money synthing Mythril Ingots with the mythril beastcoin recipe.
You should use support on this until about level 35, where you won't need it anymore.
This is by far the most expensive stage in goldsmithing you've seen yet. A stack of mythril beastcoins is near 15000 Gil on my server and you need 4 of them for just one stack of ingots.
Expect it to take about 6 stacks to get you to 38. That's a whole lot of gil. But the best part is that these mythril ingots sell very nicely at the auction house (usually overnight),
but you may need to undercut. Sell these at the auction house like you did for the SILVER part 1 stage, but you will need to make more mythril ingots for use as ingredients later.
===MYTHRIL part 2===
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Level 38-40
Options:
# Mythril Ingot **
This stage is very simple. Just get a few stacks of fire crystals and make yourself a ton of mythril ingots from the ore selling in bastok. There is generally about 50-100 ores for sale at any given time on my server, so you should do this stage very quickly. This time, you may want to save a stack of ingots for the next stage.
===MYTHRIL part 3===
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Level 40-41
Options:
# Mythril Sheet **
Very simple, just turn one or two stacks of those ingots into sheets and sell them at the auction house. The sheets will take longer to sell than the ingots, but they will sell.
===MYTHRIL part 4===
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Level 40-43
Options:
# Mythril Chain **
Again, a very simple recipe. Two stacks should be enough. These probably will never sell on the Auction House like the silver chains, so dump them to NPC for a horrible loss. Try to get over it, but you may want to go to bed and cry for a while. You'll feel better, trust me.
===BREAK 2===
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Okay, so you've come this far in goldsmithing. Wow, level 43. Definitely some hot sh*t, eh?
Well, you've got your work cut out for you, because the next section is by far one of the most painful sections of goldsmithing there is. It is both tedious, stressful and the only
thing you can possibly do is lose money, no matter which synthesis you choose.
Getting through the next section will require you to spend upwards of a million gil. The good part of that is that you will make most of it back, but nowhere near all of it.
I had about 430,000 gil to start this section. I ended up with around 260,000 gil left.
You will need lots and lots of patience or lots and lots of gil. Most of us don't have the gil so you will need to learn to have patience in this section. It will take at least a week if not more if you want to do this right.
Again, I cannot stress this any more, this section is very hard! Many, many, many goldsmiths have given up upon reaching these levels and you will soon see why.
===MYTHRIL part 5===
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Level 43-47
Options:
# Mythril Ring ** SUPP
# Silver Bangles
# Earrings
Ok, just don't do (3) for the same reason as not doing rings in MYTHRIL part 1. You will lose money if you can't HQ them.
As for (1) and (2) there are huge debates on which you should do, and it entirely depends on the state of the economy on your server.
I chose to do mythril rings for the follow reasons. Firstly, the money you spend on making silver bangles and then desynthing them is almost entirely lost. You will spend around 500k and desynth and synth and eventually everything will be gone by desynthesis (somewhat an overexaggeration, but you will lose a good deal of money). Secondly, bangles just do not sell on the auction house. Thirdly, while you still lose money on mythril rings, you will
be able to sell them to the auction house to get at least 75% of your investment back.
It took about 50 mythril rings for me to get these 4 levels. That equates to about 100 mythril ingots, or 400 beastcoins. At 1200-1300 gil each, that's about 520,000 Gil. You will make about 75% back selling them at the AH and these puppies sell quick!
This is the best way to go in my opinion. Feel free to take silver bangles instead, if they look more appealing to you.
But damn, this is one very hard section. I suggest you do about 12 mythril rings, then sell them. Repeat this procedure for about a week and you should be at or near 47.
===GOLD part 1===
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Level 47-51
Options:
# Silver Bangles (cap at 49)
# Gold Ingot (cap at 51) ** SUPP
Ok, so which would you rather do? Lose all your money, or make money? Exactly.
The problem with this part is that you will need about 300,000 gil for one stack of synths. "Oh my god!" You say. Yeah, I'm sorry. Fortunately for us, though, the gold ingots sell
at an insane profit. In fact, on my server I can make around 40-50k per stack. That means about a 20% profit. I go buy 48 gold beastcoins and make ingots and sell a stack. That's good money.
This section is very slow because the gold ingots take a few days to sell. But it's very nice seeing 300,000 G in your delivery box.
- Note - On Diabolos you can still make a profit with this, but slowly. In case buying a stack of beastcoins looks like a money-losing proposition, check all four Auction Houses for single Gold Beastcoins. Thieves usually only collect one or two at a time and they want a quick sale on them.
===GOLD part 2===
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Level 51-53
Options:
# Gold Ingot **
Same as before in the mythril and silver stages. Go sit in front the auction house buying gold ore for about 6000-7000 gil (try for less than 1/4th of a gold ingot price) and make ingots for 2 levels. This is a very simple stage, but will require a lot of investment. You should end up making money, though.
===GOLD part 3===
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Level 53-55
Options:
# Rings
# Heater Shield
# Gold Ingot (54 cap) **
If your server has gold nuggest for sale (probably in jeuno) then you are in luck, and will likely not lose much money. However, since the nuggest generally require high level alchemy they will be slightly more expensive than ores. But these cap at 54, so if you can get these to 54 and skip to the next section that would be the way to go.
If you can't manage to find gold nuggets, then this section sucks so bad. It's almost the suckiest section in this entire guide. Unfortunately there is not much you can do but lose money. You will need a bunch of mythril
rings like before, and then you will need gems. But, thankfully a lot of these gems stack, and you can get them for very cheap!
Do not buy the ingots to make mythril rings! Buy the mythril rings on the Auction House since it will be cheaper that way. You only need to do this for two levels, so the pain should
subside quickly. You could also desynthesize mythril earrings for Ingots then turn them into rings.
===GOLD part 4===
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Level 55-58
Options:
# Gold Earring (cap at 57)
# Gold Hairpin (cap at 58)
# Hydro Claws (cap at 59)
If you choose to make gold hairpins, do so because you have a lot of gil to spare. You will lose approximately 10000 Gil per synthesis on these things if you sell them back at the auction house. Otherwise, you could desynth them back to gold ingots. My choice, however, was to do several stacks of Hydro Claws. Shout in Jeuno and find someone who can make claws for you. You'll need a mid-level bonecrafter. Occasionally throw in the stack of gold hairpins if you don't mind the loss. Hydro Claws you can dump to NPC, but still manage to lose less money than on gold hairpins. The hairpins don't sell that fast (slower than the mythril rings did). You'll need twice as much gil to invest, and critical failures will be a bit more painful (losing two gold ingots), but hopefully you will get past this stage by taking your time.
===PLATINUM part 1===
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Level 58-63
Options:
# Platinum Ingot ** SUPP
Finally, more money. This is actually where you will want to do some gardening. Platinum ore is very expensive, and each synthesis will probably be about 80,000 gil depending on
your server. So, if you can grow your own platinum nuggets you could do the platinum nugget recipe for the ingot.
This stage will take a few weeks. It's the best you can do, I've looked. In fact, I would challenge everyone out there to find a better recipe.
You will make money with this, though. If you grow your own platinum, you will make a LOT of money. For example, I have three mules that I use to garden. I harvest, on average, 12.5 stacks of platinum nuggets which is equivelent to 25 synths of ingots. 25 ingots sell currently for about 1.875 million gil. Minus the cost of ores (24,000 each x 25 = 600,000) and the cost of tree cuttings (100,000 each stack x 3 = 300,000), I harvest roughly 900,000 G every week and a half. And I get some Goldsmithing skill while I'm at it ;).
Stay tuned for more updates as I progress past 60.
==Conclusion==
As you can see, a good number of the sections above only list one or two items to choose from to skill up on. This is because of the difficulty of goldsmithing. However, if you perservere, you will make it.
I hope everyone has found this guide as fun to read as I have found it to write. Please leave me comments and suggestions. I will try to maintain the guide and eventually post some more information. As I get higher in goldsmithing, I would like to extend this guide to level 100.
Notes:
As this guide was not created by me, I thought i would not change the actual guide, but leave a comment in the notes section. I believe the author meant Hydro Claws in GOLD part 4, as Hydro Patas cap at Level 67.