Newbie Leveling Guide

This is a guide for those of you who are new to Final Fantasy XI. It will cover the basics of leveling up and making Gil (money).

This guide is for the area of Windurst.

Quick EXP:

Levels 1 through 3:
I suggest that all you fight are tiny mandragoras and bumble bees. They are fairly easy to defeat, just be sure that mages cast stone before you engage. Warriors, monks, thieves should have no problem. Save up a rarab tail if you find one.

Level 4 and 5:
You should start attacking river crabs, savana rarabs, and carrion crows. Make sure you press Ctrl+C to check their level. For warriors and monks even match is okay, but for mages and thieves try to stay at the decent challenge level.

Level 6 and 7:
Now you’re pretty strong, you can take on quite a lot of things. Savana Rarabs, carrion crows, and river crabs should be no problem. So start going after crawlers and goblins. Note that goblins are aggressive so if you’re near one it will start attacking you, so make sure you’re not near two goblins at once. The goblins have an attack called Goblin Bomb, it does quite a lot of damage so try to kill it before it uses that attack.

There are different types of goblins, the mage ones (I think they’re called Weavers), the thugs, and the fishers. The mage goblin will cast poison and dia which will continue to drain your life after the fight is finished. The poison and dia can take anywhere from 5hp-20hp. So be careful when engaging the mage goblins.

Level 8 through 10
Around level 8 you can begin taking on Yagundo stuff (scribe, acolyte, initiate). They’re mages that have high hp and high attack so be careful. Start attacking giant bees, mandragoras, and high level crawlers. Also, if you get a small group of three of four, you can start exploring the Horutoto ruins.

Level 10+
At this point, you should have a pretty good understanding of the game, so continue exploring the Horutoto ruins and other areas of FFXI. Have fun and good luck!

Quick Gil:

Getting money isn’t as easy as it seems in FFXI. For one thing, please don’t go around asking other people for money. It annoys those people, and you should learn to acquire gil yourself. In this guide I will show you how to make a couple thousand gil so you can get that WP for your friend.
Crystals are your best friend. To start gathering crystals you must first have a signet on you. The only location of a signet I know of is in the outpost. In order to find the location of the outpost, type /map when you get to West Sarutabaruta. This will bring up the map where a little red box appears, showing the location of the outpost. Get there and talk to one of the guards, they will give you the signet (it looks like he’s casting a spell on you). Now when you kill a monster it has a chance of dropping a crystal. Crystals are used for synthesizing items, and when you have 12 crystals you can go to the auction house and sell it for roughly 600 gil. Not bad since crystals even drop on bumble bees and tiny mandragoras.

Another way of making money is killing goblins and hoping that they drop goblin helms or goblin mails. Take those to the auction house and you can make around 250 gil on a goblin helm and around 500 gil on a goblin mail.

Next you have river crabs, which drop an item called “land crab meat.” These things are worth about 250 gil each. Also, if you kill the Crawlers sometimes they’ll drop “a spool of silk” and those are worth about 200 gil.

And if you keep attacking the goblin fishers, they’ll drop fishing rods. The yew rod is worth about 75 gil and the bamboo rod is worth about 200 gil.

So you can earn a few thousand gil in a few hours. So please don’t go around begging other people for money to buy a worldpass. Go out there and earn it!