cashew | Saturday, July 9th, 2022

So, crafting on the free trial is a PITA. Mostly because you have to gather all the items yourself and level all the craft jobs simultaneously, since crafting higher level stuff requires items from other jobs. On a paid account, you can just buy the materials off other players, but for a free account with no way to trade, you're stuck crafting everything yourself.

I'm far from completing the thing, but here are some quick tips:

You can unlock Ixali tribe quests once you hit MSQ level 41. Ixali tribe quests is a crafting quest and gives a ton of XP. Use the daily reset to level up your jobs really fast.
There are 8 crafts (disciples of the hand aka DoH) and 3 gather (disciples of the land aka DoL) jobs. Of the DoH jobs, cooking is the only one that doesn't seem to be integrated with the other jobs, i.e. cooked things aren't used to craft other materials in the other seven jobs. Of the DoL jobs, fishing doesn't seem to be involved with anything. So I recommend leaving out fishing and cooking for later.
Definitely level crafts and gathering simultaneously. Make/collect a little extra when turning in stuff for job quests, because often the item required to turn in on one job is an ingredient needed for another job's request, too. Keeping all the jobs at about the same level means not having to wait to play catch up when trying to collect/craft the quest items.
On a free account, it's best to take things sloooooow and keep the inventory manageable. Save most of your inventory space for materia, not craft material that you can farm later.
At around level 20-ish (I think it's more like 17), you'll start unlocking materia melding. You need so many pieces of materia for the level 20 job quests. Again, as a free player, the only way to get materia is to extract it yourself from equipment, so keep all your materia on hand.
At craft level 30, you can unlock desynth. Here's a desynthesis guide. Point is, this is where a lot of gil will get used up. Since you can't spend gil on trade, time to buy up stuff from NPCs and desynth away. (I haven't actually gotten into this yet. I'm still working on getting my crafts up to snuff.)
White Mage's Holy is a really quick way to farm large groups of low level monsters. Set chocobo to attack, cast holy in a group of monsters, watch inventory fill up. This is because Holy has a huge range and uses the player as the center of the AoE. I haven't tested it yet, but I think it's actually faster than DPS classes, which has higher single target damage, but slightly smaller range. When the monster is more spread out, however, Bard is much faster because it can just sit in one place and tab-target forever.

Anyway, personally, I don't think it's nearly as fun to follow a guide and speed through the crafting stuff. I mean, yeah, I'm leveling up crafting because I want to be able to craft some glamour items, but at the same time, crafting itself is a fun little puzzle and a nice distraction from all the combat.