FFXIV Island Sanctuary beginner’s tips and tricks (2024)

Final Fantasy 14 has simple farm life in the form of Island Sanctuary, a lush island you can visit to grow crops, raise animals, and live a peaceful life after saving the world multiple times.

The farming, gathering, and merching system can be hard to understand, so we’ve provided some tips to help you get the basis of Island Sanctuary in our FFXIV guide.

In order to unlock Island Sanctuary, you’ll need to talk to an NPC in Old Sharlayan after beating the main story in the Endwalker expansion.

Yes, gather resources constantly

As you run around your island, you will want to pick up everything you can. You don’t need to pick up everything you see or else you’ll be running in a loop, as items respawn as you gather more things.

There are lots of things to keep stock of, like copper ore, salt rocks, and laver, but it ultimately depends on what you’re crafting in your workshops. After a certain point, you should just gather what you need to complete this week’s workshop requirements.

Keep nets on hand to avoid missing rare animals

Make sure you have a handful of nets in a variety of sizes (once you unlock the additional sizes) on you, so you can have ample attempts at catching rare monsters. While you don’t need to collect every rare monster — in fact, your ranch isn’t even big enough to hold them all at once — you won’t want to miss out on one if you see one just because you had no nets.

Simultaneously, don’t get too upset about missing rare animals

All of that said, don’t stress if you miss out on a black sheep or toucan-like Apkallu. The rare beasts spawn in set locations at set times of day, so they’re much more common than, say, a Shiny Pokémon.

Watch the market or risk losing out on sweet Seafarer’s Cowries

When you talk to the Tactful Taskmaster at your base camp, you’ll be able to give your gathered items to workers to make crafts to flip on the market. While it might be tempting to just fill up the schedule with easy-to-make Isleworks Potions, you should pay attention to popularity and demand shift to make sure you’re selling an item that’s valued high.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

If you’re struggling to figure out what to set in your workshops, the Overseas Casuals Discord has a bot that posts the best things to set every day (and you can get these messages posted in your own personal Discord, if you want). The bot will even customize your recommendations if you’re a lower level or you don’t have certain items unlocked.

Balance out your island with workshops and granaries

The more workshops you have, the more items your workers can make simultaneously. However, adding granaries will allow you to send your workers out to gather items for you, so you don’t have to worry about running too low on Copper Ore (you still will, though).

Ideally, you want three workshops and two granaries.

Building more facilities is what nets the most EXP

As you rank up, keep your eyes out for Pathological Pathfinder workers, who will help you expand the buildable land around your island. Building new workshops, granaries, and landmarks nets you thousands of EXP, so it should be the priority.

Don’t forget to talk to the mammets after they finish building your structure to actually get the EXP, though.

Remember to actually upgrade your workshops and granaries

It’s pretty easy to forget you can do this, but you should make sure to check on all the signs in front of your buildings to see if you can upgrade them. While doing this will eat a bunch of your resources, it’ll ultimately increase your gains, so you need to do this. You will also have to do this in order to progress in the Island Sanctuary quest line.

Use an in-game macro to help ease the pain of gathering

You can use Final Fantasy 14’s in-game macros to help you out. We personally used a macro that would target the closest gatherable object and make our character sprint up to it for easy movement and laidback gathering. The macro is as follows:

/targetnpc

/ac “Duty Action I” <me>

/lockon

/automove

/micon “Peloton”

When pasting it into the game, make sure there are no spaces before each line break. We also made the icon for the macro look like the Peloton skill, because it’s a running person and that just made sense to us.

Note that this macro does not automatically harvest the item, just moves you to the closest one. It also does not work if there are no visible harvestable nodes on your screen.

Take it easy, Island Sanctuary supposed to be a break

Our final tidbit of advice is: Don’t burn yourself out. Island Sanctuary is supposed to be a relaxing experience for Warriors of Light who want to get away from all the fighting, so make sure to take breaks. Rather than grinding that last 5,000 EXP by gathering nodes for 10 EXP each, maybe just wait for your buildings to finish construction. We know you want those new Mandragora mounts, but take it a step at a time.

If you’re just starting out in the massive world of Final Fantasy 14, we have tons of guides to help you. We have a beginner’s guide to get you started, along with guides detailing when you’ll get your mount and which Grand Company you should join.

If you’re starting but are feeling overwhelmed, we have guides to help with picking a job and a guide that explains how long it may take to catch up to current content in FFXIV.

We also have guides on side content, like ocean fishing and relic weapons, for those who want to take a break from it all.