FFXIV: Patch 7.31 Relic Gathering and Crafting Rush
Posted on September 3, 2025 by Aywren
Final Fantasy XIV just dropped patch 7.31, which brought new steps to Dawntrail relic weapon development. Much to my surprise (and somewhat delight), this harkened back to the older relics which required the help of well-geared and maxed-leveled omni crafters and gatherers.
This was the kick in the pants I needed to finally invest in my crafting and gathering jobs on my main. I’ve long had all crafting and gathering jobs at 100, but I’ve shied away from picking up the newest high quality gear that released back in the original patch 7.3.
Now, I absolutely adore the gear glamour for both crafting and gathering, so this was always on my list to pick up somewhere down the line. I was hoping to see the cost of the gear come down before I made this investment, but then the relic steps came along requiring one-time assistance from crafters/gatherers.
Not only did I want to be self sufficient in creating for my own relic, but this is also a good time to earn a little gil from these crafts and recoup the cost of picking up gear and setting up some melds for it. So, yesterday was a flurry of spending way more gil than I’ll probably actually make back from this, and researching the lowest-cost crafting melds for the current patch. Thankfully, my gatherers didn’t need any melds to gather what was needed, as long as they have the current HQ gear and tools.
I’m not quite done with all the melds since most of my crafting alts haven’t reached Solution Nine in Dawntrail, which is a requirement in order to be able to spend orange scrips this expansion. However, I was able to funnel material bought with purple scrips earned from custom deliveries to my main yesterday, which was enough to get most of the melding done.
I decided to tweak this a bit, and did not go with all the second and third slot Craftsman's Cunning Materia XII – instead, I used Craftsman's Cunning Materia XI, which had one less CP per materia. The amount of orange scrip materia needed for the higher materia that only had a 17% chance at success was just not going to happen anytime soon, and I can still usually successfully create the Dark Matter on my specialist jobs without that one extra point of CP, using this macro.
Last night, I set about FATE farming in Yak T’el for the 600 bicolor gemstones since there were a couple FATE parties out there. That didn’t take all that long, and I was able to put a pin in the first step of the relic quest, and move on to the Aetherwell Array step.
I’m not so thrilled about this step because it requires running roulettes that I don’t usually run – for a reason. Alliance Roulette is fine. However, High Level Dungeons, Normal Raids, and Trials are roulettes I avoid like the plague because I simply don’t have the memory capacity to remember all the battles in FFXIV anymore. There are just SO many fights, SO many mechanics, some which I have only run once for a clear, and that may have been many years ago.
I’m going to TRY to do this, however, though I’m not looking forward to it at all. I hope that Syn won’t mind me asking her to help get me through, and that she’ll look the other way as I play most of this like a noob due to having zero recollection of the content I’m going to have to run at random.
I wonder if this relic step will bring an influx of other players like me – since relic is supposably tagged as “casual content” – folks who haven’t played these runs in years, and will be stumbling through them just for the sake of relic. I do have to say, though, the glowy red mage relic looks really nice this time so…
We’ll have to see how long I can persevere. Light farm stages tend to lose me in the long run, but since this is a one-time thing, I think I can make it through.