FFXIV gathering leveling guide

You have a lot of levers, and the good ones stack.

• Fieldcraft Leves give you 3 allowances every 12 hours. Crank the difficulty and over-gather for the evaluation bonus.
• Gathering Log discovery hands you a chunk of XP the first time you gather each new item.
• Collectable turn-ins are the backbone from the 60s on, and your main source of scrips.
• Custom Deliveries are a weekly stack of XP and scrips (Wachumeqimeqi in Dawntrail).
• Grand Company provisioning is a daily turn-in for XP and seals.
• The Diadem (Ishgard Restoration) is very fast for Miner and Botanist from 10 to 60, and your level-10 gear carries the whole way.
• Ocean Fishing can carry a Fisher most of the way to 100.

Pop a Survival Manual (+150% XP) before a session. It stacks with everything above.

• 1 to 60 (MIN/BTN): lean on the Diadem, topped up with leves.
• 60 to 90: collectables and Custom Deliveries, with leves to fill gaps.
• 90 to 100: Wachumeqimeqi Deliveries and level-appropriate collectables.
• Fisher: Ocean Fishing on the 2-hour cadence, leves in between.

Each gatherer carries a main hand (pickaxe, hatchet, or rod) and a secondary (sledgehammer, scythe, or gig). Your armor and accessories hold most of your stats. At the cap you have two options:

• Orange Scrip gear is the budget baseline. It's solid, but it's job-specific and can't be fully melded.
• Crafted gear is the best you can get. It takes every materia slot and works on all three gathering jobs, if you can afford the Market Board price.

Gathering drives success and yield, Perception drives your Boon and collectability, and GP fuels abilities. The catch is that stats only matter at breakpoints. Cross a threshold and you unlock a bonus like extra yield, extra Integrity, or a bigger Boon. The points between thresholds do nothing, so you meld to hit an exact target. Those breakpoints move every patch, so check a current gearing guide for the nodes you're chasing instead of trusting a fixed number.