As many of you know, I’ve recently become hyper-obsessed with Crafting and Gathering. Truthfully, it also came as a shock to me since for years the thing that kept my focus in FFXIV was the combat and I even skipped all the story and cutscenes until I was heavily encouraged by members of my Twitch community to go back and read everything I had missed.
It’s honestly come to the point where I do more Crafting and Gathering than Combat in the game, not only because I’m trying to get the Mount that requires over 4,000 crafts in the Diadem, but because I’ve become overwhelmed with work and with the help of Retainers I’m at least able to passively craft most resources I need in hopes of making heaps of Gil to make up for the gameplay hours I have to miss out on.
Although I don’t truly remember how annoying Crafting used to be in previous expansions, since I focussed most of my efforts on completing Tribal Quests, I’m glad to see that Crafting has been streamlined to the degree it has been. You see, in the past, each Crafter had some abilities that were unique to it and while you were able to use some of these abilities on other Craters players would regularly need to toggle which they wanted to use instead of every Crafter having the exact same Abilities.
While this didn’t impede skilled Crafters who crafted resources by hand, it did make it more difficult to set up concise Macros that could be used across all Crafters. Nonetheless, this change made it more of a priority to unify all Crafter Hotbars in hopes of reducing the number of mistakes a player were to make if they had built a Muscle Memory to the placement of key Abilities.
As a player who has spent the majority of my Crafting journey on the Carpenter, simply because I recognize the icons for the Abilities much better when I started only completing Expert Crafts it became the utmost priority to unify my Hotbars. As I’m sure those of you who complete Expert Crafts know, they are tremendously difficult to Macro if you don’t have Pentamelded Gear, Food and sometimes even Potions, making relying on Muscle Memory much more important.
Today I’m going to take you through the two absolute easiest ways to ensure your Crafting Hotbars are unified so you don’t make silly mistakes because your Hotbars don’t match.
Note: If you have any questions about FFXIV that you want me to cover feel free to leave them in a comment below, you can also ask me while I am streaming on Twitch, YouTube or in our community discord.
BEFORE YOU START COPYING A CRAFTER’S HOTBAR
I’m sure that the majority of players who craft in FFXIV use Macros and many of these live on different Crafters’ Hotbars depending on how much variance there is between the level and difficulty of resources you are Crafting on each Crafter.
I would strongly advise that you remove these if they are placed on the Crafer you are going to be using for the base Hotbar and take this opportunity to rename the Macro or give it an icon if you haven’t previously. Though I am typically pretty organized when it comes to my Macros, ensuring that I label them, there is the odd occasion where I plan to use a Macro once and don’t name it or give it an Icon… my bad, my bad…
I would recommend you always build your base Hotbar on the Crafter you use most frequently as this should simplify the task because your Hotbar should already be already close to perfect and if not, you will at least recognize all of the Abilities by their Icons.
When you are ready you’re going to want to choose one of the two methods to copy your Hotbar.
HOW TO MAKE A MACRO
If this is your first time making a Macro, it’s actually a quite simple task. First, you are going to want to head to the System Menu, which is the XIV Icon in the bottom right of your screen, if you have not altered the default HUD Layout. If for whatever reason you have removed this element from your screen you can simply hit “P” on your Keyboard and find the System Menu in the XIV above the word Extras.
You are looking for the User Macros menu, which is depicted by a writing quill.
As I’m someone who regularly utilizes Macros, whether it be to set up custom menus or to more easily craft, I have placed the User Macros button onto my custom Crafter Menu. If you forsee yourself also utilizing Macros regularly I would recommend the same.
SINGLE-TIME COPY MACRO
My preferred copy Macro is a single-use one. Though you can ultimately the Macro anytime you make significant changes to your Hotbar, it will give players the freedom to place any unique Macros for each Crafter on their Hotbar without the risk of it disappearing. I will cover what I mean by that in the next section.
I would recommend that players use this method if they are not regularly making changes to their Crafting Hotbars, however, if you are newer to Crafting or are regularly making changes to your Crafters’ Hotbars you may want to begin with the Macro in the next section.
For a single-time Copy Macro players will simply need to create a Macro that goes as follows:
/hotbar copy crp 1 wvr 1
/hotbar copy crp 2 wvr 2
/hotbar copy crp 3 wvr 3
As you can see, the Macro utilizes abbreviations of the Jobs and the first will be the base Hotbar you are copying from and the second will be the Job Hotbar you are copying to. Of course, if you are using different Hotbars than I use or using more, you can simply change the numbers.
That being said, all of these text commands can be placed in a single menu and you can execute them directly from the User Macros instead of having to place it on your Hotbar.
I keep this template in my User Macros in case I ever make big changes to my crafting Hotbar, though I don’t see this happening again anytime soon.
As a heads up, I’ve had some odd occurrences where Abilities have not transferred between Hotbars. I can’t explain why, since I’ve never had issues with Custom Menus before, so I have to chalk it down to a “blip.” I chose to manually place the Abilities that weren’t placed, but you can also simply execute the Macro as one line to see where the problem is.
MACRO THAT COPIES EACH TIME YOU SWITCH CRAFTERS
The following Macro follows the same principle as a Custom Menu and will make it so your Hotbar copies from your “main Crafter” each time you switch onto any of your Crafters.
Realistically I feel this is overkill, but I cannot look past the usefulness it may have when you are levelling up your Crafters or are making regular changes to your Crafter Hotbar.
Now, the one issue with utilizing a persistent Copy Macro is if you have unique Macros for each Crafter. For example, the majority of the resources I craft on my Weaver are below level 80, for my Culinarian they’re between levels 80-90 and for other Jobs they’re all 90*** and above. So, each of my Crafters has at least one unique Macro I’ve placed on my Hotbar to easily execute.
There is a simple solution to this, which is the use of a fourth Hotbar that never gets copied over, however, since I use buttons on my Mouse to execute Crafting Macros I’d prefer not to do this.
My advice is to only use this method if you are regularly changing your Hotbar and if you already plan to make a Job switching custom Menu as it will be required to make this function. I’m personally in the stages of making my Job switching Macros instead of being a simple Gearset change for the sole purpose of being tired of switching what HUD Layout I’m in manually, so I would be a good candidate for this method. I say this since I will already have base Macros built for all of my Crafters and can easily add and remove elements of the Macros that execute.
Again, if you do not plan on creating Custom Menus I would not advise going down this route.
For this method to work, you’re going to build a Macro that changes your Gearset and has a copy function. You will already need to have built a Custom Menu unless you are simply planning on Executing the Macro from the User Macro menu, which I can’t see saving time.
Say you are switching to the Weaver which uses Gearset 22 and the Carpenter is the Crafter you predominantly use, your Macro would look something like this:
/gs change 22
/hotbar copy crp 1 wvr 1
/hotbar copy crp 2 wvr 2
/hotbar copy crp 3 wvr 3
Take note, if you ever change the Gearset your Job is bound to you will need to update this Macro. This is of course true for any Job switch Macro you create going forward.
If this idea piques your interest I strongly recommend going through my Custom Menu guide because setting one up will significantly improve your quality of life in FFXIV with no questions asked.
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