Where to get and how to meld materia in FFXIV

After you level up to max and get a set of good gear in Final Fantasy 14, you’ll want to meld materia on to it. Whether it’s for your combat job or your crafters and gatherers, materia can make a pretty stark difference at times.

You can obviously buy materia from the marketboard, but this is an expensive route to go down, and you typically don’t want to do this unless you’re hunting down older materia for overmelding (more on that below).

Getting regular combat materia is pretty easy, but getting materia for crafters and gatherers is a bit harder. Below we explain where to get FFXIV materia and how to meld it to your gear.

Where to get combat materia

The easiest way to get materia is through trading in cracked clusters, with different types of clusters correlating to different levels of material. As of the Endwalker expansion, the clusters you want are Cracked Dendroclusters and Cracked Anthoclusters. You can get these from doing the following activities:

Once you have the clusters, you can trade in Dendroclusters and Anthoclusters to the materia vendor in Radz-at-Han or Old Sharlayan for level nine and 10 materia. These NPCs are marked on the in-game map as “Materia Masters” with an icon of materia.

Image: Square Enix via playtecharena

You can also trade them to the Rowena’s Representative NPCs in Ishgard, Kugane, Limsa Lominsa, Gridania, and Ul’dah.

If you still have clusters from old expansions, you can trade them in at the respective hub cities for those expansions. Stormblood clusters can be traded in Rhalgr’s Reach and Shadowbringers clusters can be traded in Eulmore.

You can also opt to extract materia from your gear, in exchange for resetting your spiritbond, once you complete the quest “Forging the Spirit.” We don’t really recommend doing this, though, as combat materia is pretty easy to find.

There are a few other currencies you can trade in for materia, like Sacks of Nuts from hunts, as well as the currency from Variant Dungeons like Aloalo Island or the Sil’dihn Subterrane. You can also trade PvP Wolf Marks and Arkasodara tribe currency for high-level materia.

Where to get crafting and gathering materia

Just like combat materia, there’s a cracked crystal you can get to trade in for whichever materia you want. Cracked Dendrocrystals and Cracked Anthocrystals only come from high rewards for completing Khloe’s Wondrous Tails, though.

Luckily, there are quite a few other ways to get the materia without having to trade crystals in:

• Collect purple crafting or gathering scrips and trade them in for crafting or gathering materia, respectively. You can gets scrips from doing collectable turn-ins or from doing custom deliveries, for characters like Margrat or Ameliance at level 90.
• Trade Island’s Cowries or Seafarer’s Cowries for the materia you want on your Island Sanctuary.

As mentioned above in regards to combat materia, you can also select to extract crafting and gathering materia from your gear, in exchange for resetting your spiritbond. Unlike combat materia, this is actually pretty useful, since crafting and gathering materia can get expensive. Even the low-level materia you extract has use for overmelding.

How to meld materia in FFXIV

There are three ways to meld materia: you can ask an NPC to do it, you can do it yourself, or you can ask a friend to do it.

NPCs who can meld materia are in most towns, and they’re all labeled as “Materia Melder.” They’re typically next to a materia vendor NPC. Simply click on them and select the gear and materia you want to meld and they’ll do it for you, easy as pie.

You can meld the materia yourself once you unlock the Materia Melding skill from the “Waking the Spirit” side quest. You can meld all materia as long as you have at least one crafter (it doesn’t matter which) at the same level or higher than the gear you are trying to meld. Once you’re all set, just select the gear you want to meld and then choose the meld option from the menu that pops up.

You can also ask a buddy to meld your materia for you, as long as they meet the above requirements, by selecting them and choosing the “request meld” option.

When melding, keep an eye on the stats in the menu, as added stats will not overflow beyond their limits. The number will show up red if you’re adding too much:

Image: Square Enix via playtecharena

How to overmeld using Advanced Materia Melding

You can add even more materia to some gear, via Advanced Materia Melding. To unlock Advanced Materia Melding, you’ll need to complete the quest “Melding Materia Muchly.”

You cannot overmeld unique gear (the equipment with the blue and green backgrounds), as noted by the in-game tooltips that say “Advanced Melding Forbidden.” That said, the best stuff to overmeld is high quality crafted gear, making it an expensive endeavor to even start.

Once you have your crafted gear, you’ll ideally want to squeeze five materia on to it, known as “pentamelding.” You’ll start with your highest level materia and then move downwards, attaching lower level materia until all the stats are filled as you want them to be:

Image: Square Enix via playtecharena

The more materia you meld, the lower chance the next one has to attach, so it does become a bit of an RNG situation. Unfortunately, materia that fails to meld explodes and is lost to the wind. Which, yes, means that overmelding your gear will take a ton of materia and thus rack up the costs.

But once you make expert-level crafting gear, you’ll make all that gil back, right? R-right?