While running battle content, crafting, or gathering in Final Fantasy XIV, you wear down your gear over time. When examining your equipment, you’ll find your gear’s condition getting worse and worse. When your gear’s condition reaches 0%, it’s “broken.” The stats provided by any broken equipment are gone until you repair your items. So how do you fix your broken stuff?
Paying mender NPCs with gil
You can pay mender NPCs to fix your equipment. You’ll usually find these NPCs standing around in towns or at aetheryte camps. You can repair your items at any time once their condition falls below 100%, just to keep your gear’s condition from getting too low in the first place. Depending on how low your gear’s condition is, you’ll need to pay a certain handful of gil to repair everything you’re wearing. Clicking around the mender’s menu will allow you to repair other items you might have in your inventory or armory chest as well.
Repairing your own gear with dark matter
Leveling your crafters allows you to fix your own equipment. When examining a piece of equipment, you’ll see its Repair Level information just underneath the gear’s condition and spiritbond percentages. If you’ve met the listed conditions for the Repair Level (leveling a certain crafting job to a certain level), then you can use dark matter to repair the piece of gear.
Right-click the item and select Repair. You’ll see a similar list and menu from the mender NPCs, this time with dark matter listed instead of gil. You’ll need a certain grade of dark matter depending on what level your equipment is. You can find dark matter for sale on the market board, or you can get your own with Grand Company seals.
Repairing your equipment with dark matter is the most convenient option. You can manually repair your own gear even in instanced content, unlike with mender NPCs you’ll only find out in the open world. You’ll have to work at leveling your crafting jobs to reap the full benefits, but it’s definitely worth it in the long-run.
