FFXIV Retainer and Venture Guide: Set Up Passive Gil Income

Retainers are the hired helpers standing next to the market board in every big city. They hold your stuff, sell it for you, and best of all they run little errands called ventures that bring back items and gil while you do something else. Set them up right and they'll basically print money in the background.

The catch is that most players grab their two free retainers, never bother leveling them, and leave them sitting idle. That's easy gil left on the table. Here's how to get the most out of your crew, from grabbing more slots to picking classes to turning those trips into real market board profit.

Unlocking Additional Retainer Slots

You can't hire anyone until you've cleared the level 17 main story quest "The Scions of the Seventh Dawn." After that, a short quest called "An Ill-conceived Venture" opens up. Grab it from the Troubled Adventurer in any of the three starter cities: Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks (around X:9, Y:11), New Gridania (X:11.8, Y:12.2), or Ul'dah's Steps of Nald (X:9.3, Y:8.7). Finish that quest and the whole retainer system flips on.

To actually hire, talk to a Retainer Vocate. These NPCs stand right by the market board in each major city. Pick "employ a retainer," then design your helper's race, look, and name. The name matters a little, since it shows up on your market board listings, so don't pick something you'll regret later.

How many you get for free

Every account starts with two retainers at no extra cost. That's your baseline, and honestly two is plenty for a brand-new player who just wants storage and a small trickle of income.

Paying for more

Want more? Each extra slot is a real-money monthly subscription through the Mog Station. You can stack up to seven on top of the free pair, and each one runs about $2 USD a month. There's also a Companion App premium sub that tacks on one more. Max everything out and a single service account can hold up to ten retainers total. Bonus perk: extra slots carry across every character on the account, which is nice if you play alts.

When more slots actually help

Each retainer adds 175 inventory slots and 20 more market board listings. So is paying worth it? That depends on how you play. If you craft a lot, hoard gear, or want several ventures running in parallel for steady gil, the extra slots pay for themselves in convenience pretty fast. If you barely touch the market board, the two free ones will do you fine.

Three or four retainers is the sweet spot for most players chasing real passive income. More listings means more stuff selling at once, and more trips running side by side means more items coming back per hour. Past that the payoff drops off unless you're a serious crafter or market flipper.

Choosing Retainer Classes for Ventures

Before a retainer can go on a venture, it needs a class and a main-hand weapon. You pick from two broad groups.

Combat classes (Disciples of War and Magic) cover the fighters and mages, things like gladiator, pugilist, marauder, lancer, rogue, archer, conjurer, thaumaturge, and arcanist. Gathering classes (Disciples of the Land) are miner, botanist, and fisher. The class you choose decides what the retainer can bring back, so it's not just a cosmetic choice.

One hard rule: a retainer can never outlevel you in that class. If your own miner is level 40, the retainer tops out at 40 until you push higher. So it pays to match each helper to a class you actually play and level.

Combat vs gatherer: what each brings

Combat retainers hunt monsters, so they come back with the drops you'd otherwise grind yourself or buy with Bicolor Gemstones. That means meats, hides, skins, and other monster parts that crafters burn through constantly. A gatherer retainer (miner or botanist) brings back crafting materials plus elemental shards and crystals, which are steady, stackable sellers.

Fishers are the odd one out. They bring back fish, which crafters don't use much, and they can't gather crystals at all. That makes a fisher weaker for raw profit. The one real draw is that high-level fishers can pull exclusive minions from the 18-hour trips. Fishers do share the Quick Exploration loot pool with everyone else, though, so they're not useless.

The smart default setup

For your first two free retainers, the common move is one combat class plus one miner or botanist. Make the combat one whatever job you play most, so you can hand down your old gear and keep it leveled with almost no effort. Use the gatherer for shards, crystals, and market board mats.

Once you're paying for a third slot, that's when a fisher starts to make sense, mostly if you're chasing those rare minions. Adding a second miner or botanist is the safer play for pure gil, since crystals and common mats sell all day long.

Upgrading to a job and swapping classes

At level 30, a combat retainer can upgrade from a basic class to a full job, which unlocks job-specific gear. You'll need a Modern Vocation item, bought from the Retainer Vocate for 40 Ventures. You also have to be level 50 in that job yourself for the base jobs, and higher for the expansion jobs.

Be careful here. Changing a retainer's class resets it back to level 1 and wipes the old experience permanently. There's no refund, no undo. Think it through before you swap, especially on a retainer you've spent weeks leveling.

Quick Exploration vs Item Ventures

There are three flavors of venture, and each one fits a different situation.

Targeted (item) ventures

These send the retainer after one specific thing, like a particular hide, ore, or log that matches its class. A targeted trip runs between 40 minutes and an hour, and each one costs 1 Venture. The time shrinks as your retainer outlevels the task: a full hour at base, about 50 minutes if the retainer is 10 levels above, and 40 minutes at 20 above.

Use targeted runs when you need a known material in bulk. Check the market board first, find what's actually selling, then point your gatherer straight at it.

Exploration ventures (the long ones)

Field Exploration and High-level Exploration are the overnight trips. They take 18 hours each and cost 1 Venture, but they hand over a big chunk of experience. These are what you queue up before bed or before a long day at work. They level a retainer steadily without you babysitting anything, which is exactly what you want from "passive."

Quick Exploration

Quick Exploration unlocks at level 10, and it's the fun one. Each run costs 2 Ventures, takes exactly one hour, and brings back a single item pulled from a giant pool that spans the whole game, from the base release all the way up to the current expansion.

Since patch 5.4, the experience reward is fixed based on the retainer's level, so it no longer matters what item comes back. What does matter is gear. Better-geared retainers pull larger stacks and have a higher chance of High Quality results. The real appeal is the gamble: most pulls are vendor trash, but every so often you hit something rare and pricey.

Which one to use

If you can check in every hour, run Quick Exploration nonstop. It levels fast and occasionally strikes gold. If you're going to be away all day, stack the 18-hour explorations so nothing sits idle. And whenever you need a specific material for crafting or selling, drop in a targeted venture to grab exactly that.

Keeping your Venture tokens stocked

Every trip costs 1 or 2 Ventures, the little token currency, so you'll burn through them fast. The main source is your Grand Company. Buy Ventures from the Quartermaster for 200 Company Seals each, and you only need the starting rank (Private Third Class) to do it.

Beast tribe (Allied Society) dailies hand them out too, and normal levequests sometimes drop them as a bonus. You can hold up to 65,000 at once, which is a lot of room.

The best loop feeds itself. Run roulettes, greed on dungeon gear, turn that gear into your Grand Company through Expert Delivery for seals, buy Ventures, and send retainers out. Those retainers come back with more gear you don't need, so you turn that in for seals too. A couple of retainers doing Quick Exploration can more or less fund their own Venture supply once the cycle gets rolling.

Using Retainers to Undercut the Market Board

More retainers means more market board listings, since each one can sell 20 items at a time. With the two free ones that's 40 slots. Pay for a few more and you're looking at 80 or 100. More listings means more things selling in parallel, which is the whole point of passive income.

What to actually sell

Quick Exploration is your gil engine, even when most pulls look like junk. The routine is simple: open what comes back, vendor the cheap stuff on the spot, and list anything with real value. Gear you don't need goes to your Grand Company for seals, which buys more Ventures. It's a closed loop that keeps turning.

For gatherers, check the board before you send them out. Look at what shards, crystals, and common mats are moving at a decent price, then point the retainer at the most profitable target. Targeted ventures for specific materials tend to beat random Quick pulls once you know your server's market.

The undercut game

The market board is first-come-first-served on price. Buyers grab the cheapest listing, so the standard move is to undercut the current lowest price by a single gil. One gil is enough to jump to the front of the line; undercutting by hundreds just shrinks your profit for no good reason.

Re-list often. Prices drift, competitors log in, and somebody will always undercut you right back. Treat it as a quick check a couple times a day rather than a one-time setup and walk away.

Watch the tax

The board takes a cut on every sale. In the three starting cities (Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, and Ul'dah) the seller tax sits at a flat 5%, and the buyer pays another 5% on top. The expansion hubs like Ishgard, Kugane, Crystarium, and Old Sharlayan float between 3% and 5% week to week.

There's a real trick here. Your seller tax can drop to around 3% when your retainer is parked in the city that matches your Grand Company. You can move a retainer's location by talking to a Retainer Vocate in the destination city. If you sell in volume, that extra 2% adds up fast across thousands of listings.

Check prices before you list

Before pricing anything, glance at the sale history, not just the current listings. Current price shows what people are asking; the history shows what actually sells and how often. Community tools like Universalis crowdsource live market data across servers, which saves you a lot of guessing. Price to what moves, not to what some optimistic seller is hoping for.

Spread your bets

Don't park every retainer on the same item. If that one mat crashes in price, all your income stalls at once. Spread your gatherers across different materials, mix in some Quick Exploration gambling, and keep a combat retainer or two pulling drops that crafters always need. A spread setup weathers market swings a lot better than betting everything on a single moneymaker.

Common Retainer Management Mistakes

Even players who've had retainers for years leave easy gil on the table. Here are the slip-ups that cost the most.

Leaving retainers idle

A retainer sitting in the corner does nothing. Ventures and slots are only worth what you actually use, so the single biggest mistake is just forgetting to send them out. Build the habit: every time you pass a summoning bell, re-queue everyone before you leave. Two minutes of clicking turns dead weight into a steady drip of items.

Skipping the gear

Retainer rewards use a slightly odd set of checks. Combat ones are checked against item level, and gatherers against their Gathering stat, so an under-geared retainer gets worse results and can't even attempt the higher-level trips. Hand down your old gear constantly. The level-90 set you just replaced is perfect for your retainer, and it directly raises how much they bring back.

Capping out below your level

A retainer can't pass your level in its class. If you stopped leveling miner at 50 and left it there, every miner retainer you own is stuck at 50 too, locked out of the good modern materials. Keep at least one combat job and one gathering class current with the level cap, and your retainers can follow you up into the profitable stuff.

Swapping classes on a whim

Remember the permanent reset. Flipping a level 70 retainer to a new class drops it to level 1, and that experience is gone for good. Double-check what you actually want before you touch the class option, because there's no undo button.

Stockpiling trash

Quick Exploration brings back a ton of random loot, and it's easy to let it pile up "just in case." Most of it is vendor food. Sort the returns the same day: vendor the junk, hand gear to your Grand Company, and list the rest. Letting junk sit fills your 175 slots and buries the items actually worth selling.

Running too many fishers

Fishers are the weakest moneymaker, so stacking your roster with them is a common misstep. One fisher is plenty if you want the exclusive minions. For steady gil, extra slots are better spent on miners and botanists that pull crystals and mats crafters always buy.

Buying slots before building the habit

Paying for five extra retainers feels productive, but if you aren't already logging in to re-queue and manage listings, those slots just sit empty. Nail the routine with your two free retainers first. Once re-queuing and relisting are automatic, then extra slots actually start paying for themselves.

Letting Venture tokens run dry

It sounds small, but running out of Ventures stops everything cold. Keep the Grand Company seal loop going so you always have a buffer. A healthy stack of tokens means your retainers never have to sit idle just because you forgot to restock.

Get two retainers to the level cap, keep them geared and re-queued through the day, and park them in the city that matches your Grand Company for the lower tax rate. That combo alone covers your teleport and repair bills without you thinking about it.