As someone who hasn't touched crafting and is a poor fag what would be the best crafters to start with?
1) Do your gatherers first, because otherwise you're going to run out of gil very quickly (even with prices depressed across the board pre-EW). Get all of them to 50 and then do each 10 levels at a time. For levels 1-20, just fill out your gathering log. After level 20, do Diadem in Ishgard Restoration. When you get tired of Diadem, use your leve allowances. Do your class quests up to level 50 and then wait until your gatherers are 60+ with some stormblood gear to do the HW ones because they suck. At level 70ish, Ishgard resto will stop being super efficient so do the Crystalline Mean turn-ins and fieldcraft leves in the Crystarium.
2) Progress crafters the same way you did gatherers - all of them to 50 and then each of them 10 levels at a time. Starting at level 20 you can do Ishgard restoration. If you have saved mats from leveling your gatherers in Diadem, use those to make the ishgard restoration recipes and turn them in. Burn leves when you want to. Do your class quests up to level 50 and then wait until you're 60+ in stormblood gear to touch the HW quests because they suck. Ishgard resto is still decent for crafters even after 70, but there's also pretty easy turn-ins you can do for the Crystalline Mean and Crystarium leves.
3) Don't neglect gearing. Ishgard resto is more forgiving with bad gear than other leveling routes, but you should still grab some NQ gear from vendors at levels 51, 61, and 71. Focus on left side and tools mostly, and just get whatever accessories you can for some extra CP/GP.
4) "Do everything" sounds like annoying crafttranny advice but you're honestly going to need to do it to be efficient. Every crafter uses mats crafted by other crafters (with the exception of CUL), and leveling is fast enough these days that you can just do it.
5) Unlock the beast tribes for DoH/DoL - Ixal in ARR kinda suck, but HW's Moogles, SB's Namazu, and ShB's Dwaves+Qitari are GOAT. Not only are they good for leveling, but their regular-ass vendors often have a better selection of NQ leveling gear than the main city vendors.
6) Unlock custom deliveries (Zhloe in HW, M'naago+Kurenai in SB, and there's like five of them in ShB) and do them weekly. You'll get XP and yellow scrips. I'd recommend doing them on gatherers and spending your scrips on tomes of regional folklore to get the hidden gathering nodes because some of the ishgard restoration crafts actually require these hidden mats.
7) Use materia. You'll get some from quests and can spend skybuilders scrips to get more. This is mainly applicable for crafters. As long as you keep them within 10 levels of each other, you'll be able to meld your own gear for free The main materia you want to use are Craftsman's Cunning Materia for extra CP (especially if you're not keeping up your accessories) and Craftsman's Command Materia for extra control (nice for hitting HQ). Once you're done with a piece of gear, take the materia out so it can be reused before discarding the gear because even low-level command and cunning materia are better than nothing when you have unusued materia slots.
8.) Use level 80 food while leveling. For crafters, this is going to be Blood Bouillabaisse or Chili Crab (the former is weaker but still used enough to be cheap and made in large volumes). For gatherers, grab Coffee Biscuits because they're dirt cheap due to the insane amounts produced for the levequest grift everyone is doing.
9) Use
Teamcraft. Not only will it make nice checklists with mat locations, spawn times, and potential shortcuts, but it also has a crafting simulator that'll let you input your stats and try rotations before actually crafting an item.
