Is there anyway to do this with fft patcher? basically what I want to do is make more items of a certain type weapons/swords, etc...
To my knowledge, you can change a weapon's type, but there might be glitches in the animation/damage formula. However, armor is pretty much set, I think. I'm pretty sure someone around here was working on a way to shift around weapon types, but I can't for the life of me remember who. What exactly were you thinking about doing?
for a number of reasons in my mod, I want to make certain weapon types available earlier, as well as adding more types of equipment
You aren't able to -add- types of equipment, per se, but you can attempt to replace them. You can make (most) weapons available at a different time in the Patcher. Some weapons seem to be resistant of changes you make to their availability so I make no guarantees to that, but it's worth a shot.
would you have a recommendation on which weapons would be good to replace?
That depends. You can probably cut a few Swords, all of Bags, and maybe Cloths. What weapons are you trying to add?