Quick answer: You can turn gear you already wear into sellable materia through spiritbonding — the gear fills up as you use it, then converts to materia for free. Both combat and crafter/gatherer materia sell, with current-tier and top grades paying most. It's essentially passive gil layered on top of whatever you were already doing.
Updated August 11, 2026
Every time you craft, gather, or kill something, the gear on your back is quietly earning you money — you just have to collect it. Spiritbonding converts that passive progress into materia, and materia is one of the most reliable things you can sell on the board. It won't make you a millionaire overnight, but it's about as close to free gil as the game offers.
Every piece of equipment has a hidden spiritbond percentage that climbs as you use it — crafting, gathering, or defeating enemies while it's equipped. When a piece hits 100%, you can pull a materia out of it, and the gear's spiritbond resets to start over. That's the whole loop: wear gear, play the game, harvest materia, repeat.
The rate depends on what you're doing relative to your gear's item level, but the important part for gil is simply that it happens while you do everything else. You were going to run those dungeons and craft those items anyway.
You need to do a short quest once: "Forging the Spirit," from Swynbroes at the Bonfire in Central Thanalan. You'll need any class at level 19 to pick it up. After that, extraction is available forever on every character progression you have.
Once a piece is at 100% spiritbond, right-click it (or open its sub-menu on controller) and choose Extract Materia. You get one materia and the gear drops back to fresh. The grade of that materia is set by the gear's item level — higher-ilvl gear gives higher grades. That's the key gil insight: the current top-grade materia only comes from current-tier gear, and those top grades are exactly what raiders are buying.
Not all materia is equal on the market. Broadly:
Which specific grade is hot depends on your server and the patch cycle, so price before you list. Drop the materia into item search or check what sells best — and mind sales velocity: a grade that "sells for a lot" but moves twice a week is worse than a cheaper one that clears daily.
If you want to farm materia deliberately rather than passively:
Materia gets consumed by melding — attaching it to gear for extra stats. Basic melding fills a gear piece's guaranteed slots; advanced melding (overmelding) gambles extra materia into non-guaranteed slots at a success rate below 100%, which means players burn a lot of materia chasing perfect melds. That failure rate is your steady customer base. (Unlock melding via "Waking the Spirit" and, for overmelding, "Melding Materia Muchly.")
So the cycle that makes this profitable: raiders need best-in-slot melds → they overmeld → they burn stacks of current-tier materia → you, who've been quietly spiritbonding, sell it to them.
For the effort (near zero — it's a byproduct of playing), yes. It won't rival focused crafting, but it's reliable, and current-tier combat materia around a new raid tier can be genuinely lucrative.
Meld what your own gear actually needs, sell the surplus. Most players over-accumulate low grades and never touch them — those should be on the board, not in your inventory.
Check live prices and velocity for your world — the top grade shifts each tier. The live tools show both price and sales-per-day so you're not guessing.
Put this into practice with live market-board prices for your world:
Check materia prices on your world → Every gil method, ranked →
More: how to make gil (all methods) · passive & AFK gil · what sells best
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