Zeny Farming

Becoming All Powerful!

Money, Money, Money!

As I mentioned in the expectations section zeny is the most important thing in this game.  Your rate of growth is solely determined by how much zeny you can farm.  Level increases give you stat points and job levels give you skill points to boost the base damage of your skills, but these become tiny drops in the hat.  It will be a while before you reach base level 160 to increase your daily combat time cap from 300 minutes to 450 so raw power is the only way to fight tougher mobs for better zeny and exp rates.

Drop Rates

In order to maximize zeny gains you'll want to farm monsters within your level range.  There are penalties once your level starts to exceed your target by 31 levels but they are much more relaxed than they were in the past.  As you can see from the table here these penalties maximize at 50% penalty at 71 levels over the monster.

It is worth continuing to one shot lower level monsters if you cannot one-shot stronger ones.  Yes, I'm going to stress this until my hair goes grey, do not get impatient!  Fast exp comes with power and if you're not strong enough to one-shot tougher mobs then you're better off investing in more power.  Tougher mobs might give 10-20% more experience anyway so you're still better off focusing on what you can farm quickly since two-shotting would significantly reduce your gains.

I've included a table that can be found in game in the Travler's Notes that shows the drop rate and experience adjustments based on your level difference.

Experience and drop rate adjustments based on your level difference from the target mob

Which Class is "The Best" for Zeny Farming?

It's asked all the time so I'll just throw it in here.  New players that really want to focus hard on zeny gain will want to roll Stellar Hunter (SH).  The reasons for this are:

You can get by without being a SH no problem, it will just take longer.  Many popular classes such as Light Bringer have 1 second cooldowns on their skills.  Most mobs are spread out by the time you reach base level 100 so you're lucky to land any multikills at this point in the game unless you're using specific classes.  While these classes may land 5-6 kills every 3-4 seconds in a good case, a SH will easily land 10+ kills while covering much more ground in the same amount of time.

If you didn't choose this or don't want to be stuck as a Stellar Hunter forever the game has a multijob feature which will let you switch to other jobs once you unlock them. If you are impatient you can pay BCC (cash shop) to unlock other classes early but if you wait until base level 150 you can unlock every non-collab job for free.  Class change coupons are rewarded for your first clear on each job in one of two level 150 instances so you'll be rewarded with this capability once you reach this point.

However, you should note that archer is not particularly strong until you reach Ranger and the real farm potential isn't unlocked until you hit fourth job so your auto attacks hit multiple targets.  As you get more attack speed and power this will eventually net you a ton of zeny.  You will want to take advantage of elemental weakness and anything else you can exploit to boost your damage to kill faster.  Your mobility will allow you to farm things most jobs can't early on so this can be very advantageous.

Because I know someone will say it, gunner can actually overtake Stellar Hunter but requires a specific rune that rolls the probability roll (8% chance) while also rolling a high proc chance modifier.  This is extremely hard to do and without good rolls Stellar Hunter still overtakes gunner by a large margin.  New players will certainly not have access to even start rolling for this which is why I'm against recommending it for newbies and am recommending Stellar Hunter instead.

So why should I always one shot mobs?

Let's compare the base zeny drops from a few mobs from wind breath (level 120) up through the current content up to a level 171 mob:

The difference between the wind breath mobs and level 171 crab is only 8 zeny.  Thats almost a 10% increase with a 50 level difference between them.  From the looks of it you won't even see raw zeny increases until the 160's when you start moving into Eclage content and even then you may be getting 3-5 more zeny per kill, if that.

It should be clear that there is no point where you should be two shotting mobs.  Halving your income for a 5-10% increase is a waste of you time.  You can usually find a mob in most level range that drops something else of value such as rough Oridecon or Elunium which you'll use lots of when safe refining your gear.  Try to find mobs that drop those things as you look for new targets.  They also sell for quite a bit and though they sell slowly, they are a steady source of income.

TLDR; do not fight tougher monsters that you cannot kill in one hit, it's never worth it unless by some strange, limited event which to date, has never happened

Maximize Combat Time for Zeny

I mentioned Combat Time earlier in the expectations section, the time that you're allowed to farm every day without any penalties.  This time is shared across your account so you can use it all on one character or split your time between your main and your alts.

To be clear, you should probably never use your time on alts unless you have an extremely good reason.  These days your main should be the only character you're investing zeny into.  Multijob is preferable when you're higher level so you can farm zeny on something that's great at it to use up your combat time, then you can switch to your main job to do content with.

Check out the article on Combat Time for more details.  In short, listen to the jukebox each day, get mentors if you can, and use up your combat time each day to maximize your daily income.  Another 60-90 minutes of adjusted combat time also goes a long ways...