Good Morning Friends! This weekend started innocent enough with a few goals. The first being to level my Paladin as far as I could take it and the second being to knock out a bunch of beast tribe dailies along the way. On Friday I managed to finish up things with the Goblins and now have the spiffy floating chair thing held aloft by Final Fantasy style “bombs” aka the mount you can see me riding above. This meant that I could focus my efforts on the Amalja which is the last of the normal beast tribes that I have not maxed reputation for in A Realm Reborn.

This also meant that I had spare daily allowances and should probably return to working on the Ixal Dailies. The thing with the Ixal is that they are not battle quests, but instead involve collecting crafting components and turning them in. One of these quests involves crafting a number of items and then “donating” them to the Ixal and gaining a number of point per item turned in. Since I had been working on Carpenter I decided to keep going down that path. The easiest item I could craft on the list of items available for turn in was the Ash Composite Bow. Ash Lumber is no big deal because I have high level gathering professions and could just pop over North Shroud and harvest all I could ever want of that. Animal Sinew is dirt cheap on the vendor in the Free Company house, so that was easy as well.

Antelope Horn however was a bit tricker. I could not find it available on a vendor and the Market prices were way too rich for my blood. So instead I resorted to doing something I have never actually done in Final Fantasy XIV… and looked up the mob type that it drops from and then proceeded to lay waste of South Shroud until I had enough to craft the handful of items I wanted to. The thing is… I enjoyed this process. I liked the little adventure of trying to find the components needed to craft the items needed for a quest. It got me out into the world and exploring areas that I had not explored in years, and something felt better about turning this quest in without spending exorbitant amounts of gil on the market for my components. This friends planted a seed that ultimately dominated my weekend.

Yesterday it seemed like the optimal item that I could craft was the Garnet Grinding Wheel. It required Mithril Ingots, which could be obtained from collecting a bunch of Mithril Ore from Southern Thanalan. Mahogany Lumber was easy enough from collecting logs in Raincatcher Gully in Eastern La Noscea. Raw Garnet however is where things began to go off the rails. It comes from along the Bloodshore in Eastern La Noscea, but for some reason in my head I got it stuck that I needed Cut Garnets and not Raw Garnets.

This set me down a path I absolutely did not need to go down… which was leveling Goldsmith to a sufficient level to be able to actually cut all of those garnet I had gathered. This path required me to collect a significant amount of silver, because basically anything I could craft to skill up on required silver ignots. This took me back to the Upper Paths section of South Shroud to harvest up a big stack of silver ore. Using the Silver Ingots required me to have some whetstones, so this lead me to pop over to Western La Noscea to farm up a large amount of Mudstone, and then converting that into whetstones. The silver managed to take me just high enough to be able to cut the Garnets… which I did and then almost immediately realized that I didn’t need to have done this step in the journey but managed to get Goldsmith up over 30 in the process.

This left me with Blacksmith to level because I was nowhere close to being able to smelt Mithril Ingots from the ore that I had gathered. Any progress made was going to require Steel, which is made up of two components… Iron Ore and Bomb Ash. Bomb Ash can be gathered from Bomb type mobs… and I first made an attempt at farming this up through killing Bombs in the Copperbell Mines area but it was not dropping fast enough for my tastes. So instead I went back out into South Thanalan to harvest large amounts of Bomb Ash required to move forward. The Iron Ore is also harvested through the Copperbell Area in Western Thanalan so I farmed some of that up when I was over there attempting to kill bombs.

Everything that I could craft required a large amount of Oak Logs… which in turn required me to go harvest a bunch of that up in the swampy area below Camp Tranquil. This essentially meant running back and forth between three nodes and gathering this up until my eyes bled. It required several rounds of gathering, because I kept going up prematurely to Camp Tranquil to craft up items thinking that maybe just maybe it would be enough to finally unlock the Mithril Ingot pattern. Which it was not… and required more lumber to continue the journey.

I had started this specific leg of the journey pretty early in the day. In fact if I am remembering correctly I started sometime around 10 am when the server reset happens, and did not wrap things up until after 5 pm last night. Tedious though it may have been at times there was something interesting about the journey of leveling two tradeskills in order to feed items to a third tradeskill. The journey took me to places that I had not really spent much time in since I was initially leveling in Eorzea the first time. It does make me wonder if I have robbed myself of this experience in the past, because having this focused craft based mission definitely kept me engaged throughout the day as I ticked off little portions of it.

All told I made a lot of progress in a lot of different jobs. On the Carpenter side of things I managed to get it up to level 44, which was what I started out trying to level through the Ixal quests. The side adventures managed to get my Goldsmith up to 31 and the harder grind which was Blacksmith to 35 in order to craft the needed Mithril Ingots. Somewhere along the way I got a level in weaver because I needed to craft some bits and bobs there was well. On the battle side of things, I managed to push my Paladin up to level 70 and I am enjoying it greatly.

More importantly I am actually queuing for dungeons again… completely random and as a tank. I am not sure what happened… maybe it is just the fact that I knew I had a social safety net in the form of the Super Dungeon Friends discord… which side note is quite hopping these days. You should absolutely check out the original post on Super Dungeon Friends if you are playing Final Fantasy XIV and looking for a cool low pressure environment to hang out in. Whatever the case I seem to be getting over my mental block against queuing for random dungeons. In spite of playing on the server that was a nexus of chaos this weekend due to a prominent streamer setting up residence… I had nothing but enjoyable grouping opportunities with strangers.

Another big highlight of the weekend is that my good friend @JazSquirrel set up shop on the server as well and is leveling I believe a bard… or technically an archer leading up to becoming a bard. Having her around along with Bells and Zuu and a bunch of folks like Thalen and Waren showing back up as well, are making it feel like “old home” week in Greysky Armada. I’ve also been enjoying random interactions with members of the community, which ultimately was a lot of what glued me in place in Cactuar for years. That is the difference between a good game you finish and move on from and a game you inhabit is the people that you inhabit it with. It seems like I am well and truly back in Final Fantasy XIV and it seems like a great time to be there.

Morning Friends! One of the problems with me as a human being is that I often have these ideas… and then either don’t act upon them or take for freaking ever to do so. This mornings post is firmly planted in that second column, because over a year ago I started paying for access to YAGPDB.xyz a very noob friendly discord bot that can do a whole slew of things. This thing was done precisely for the project that I am announcing today and I have effectively been paying $5 a month for nothing. In the “better late than never” camp I bring to you this madness I “thunked”

The Pitch

Hi I’m Belghast, a 45 year old gamer that has had to deal with his stable group of friends becoming far less stable as we have all aged and moved further along in our careers. The thing is… I still really like MMORPGs but these are far less enjoyable to play without a group of friends to experience them with. I still have a great group of friends, but timezones are a thing and have pushed start times out to where I as a working adult cannot cope with PST based start times.

Another particular challenge that I have is that I suffer from a not-insignificant amount of social anxiety, which I know is probably a shock given the community initiatives I end up leading. As an introvert I go through these periods of time that I lovingly refer to as “turtle mode” where I pull my head up into my shell and forget the world exists. When I return from one of these I find it harder and harder each year to get over the hump that is “grouping with strangers”. I am also a tank which makes this exceptionally worse because not only am I grouping with strangers… I am expected to be the defacto leader of whatever party I happen to be in.

The idea is pretty simple… what if I didn’t have to group with strangers? What if I had a community of players that went into groups understanding that it would be a very low pressure and non-judgmental environment where we help bolster each other and make it through the content come hell or high water? I thought to myself that I can’t be the ONLY person to have these feelings and I can’t be the only person to feel like it would be nice to have a safe circle for group activities. So legitimately over a year ago I had all of these thoughts, and even went so far as to come up with a name and a logo and everything… and then just sat on it because the pandemic sapped all of my energy.

Super Dungeon Friends

Today I present you with Super Dungeon Friends, a discord designed to help you find low pressure groups in Final Fantasy XIV. I am specifically launching it with FFXIV because firstly it is the game I am engaged with right now, and two the community already tends to be way more chill than some other MMORPGs. The thing is Final Fantasy XIV already has a pretty group community and grouping environment, but still I have anxiety about pushing that queue button. Super Dungeon Friends or SDF (yes a very purposeful robotech reference) is there to bridge that gap and is a fully public community asking Final Fantasy XIV players that maybe have some of the same hang-ups as I do to come along for this journey.

When you first join the server you are going to be presented with a single channel called #Server-Rules and a big long statement. Below it are two reactions for Yes and No. If you hit Yes, you get assigned to the Friend role and can fully participate in the server. If you hit No, however you will effectively be stuck in the void for all eternity. You can change your mind, but the idea is that everyone that is on the server will have agreed to the following terms:

The rules are pretty straight forward I hope, and they set forth the basics of how the community is expected to interact. I bounced them off a handful of friends who helped me tweak them and make them a little more clear as to the intent. The server is completely open to anyone who would agree to these terms and if it ends up getting big enough I could see it spreading to other games. However for the time being we are focused on Final Fantasy XIV specifically. That is not to say that the friends you make here might not carry over into other places.

Role Assignment

Once you are on the server and have accepted the terms you will be given access to a number of channels, one of which is #Role-Assignment. In this channel I will be setting up various bot reaction commands that allow you to assign yourself specific designations. For the moment I only have a few role menus, but the most important one is Data Center, which will toggle on specific Data Center based grouping channels. This becomes significantly less important when 6.0 releases and we get grouping between multiple data centers. The other option is to flag yourself for specific roles that you feel comfortable filling in a group setting.

So using myself as an example, I’ve changed my server specific name to be my actual FFXIV character name and the specific server that I play on. I have the role of Friend, which grants me access to all of the channels. I have flagged myself as feeling comfortable playing the role of a Tank or Melee DPS in a group setting, and indicated that I play on the Aether North American data center. The rename thing is completely optional of course, but it does make things a little easier when it actually comes to forming a group. Yesterday I talked a bit about the process of how you group across servers in a data center, which might come in handy.

Other Roles of Note

• Guide – these are going to be the server administrators that you can turn to if you need help with something not working as intended or if an issue arises.
• Mentor – these are players with a wealth of experience in Final Fantasy XIV and can be turned to for help and advice about not only gameplay mechanics but also specific issues you might be having. If you feel comfortable filling this specific role, reach out to me and we will have a discussion about it.

There are a lot of channels on the server and some of them may not be entirely intuitive so here is a run down of each of them and some of my general thoughts about them.

Channel Structure

• Administrative – These are channels that don’t allow messages and are designed as serving some administrative role.
  • Server-Rules – This displays the server rules and can be looked at at any point. Any future rules changes will be announced publicly over the server and this channel will be updated to reflect them.
  • Role-Assignment – This is the channel that will house all of the various role assigning widgets. Currently this only contains Data Center and Group Role, but might expand over time.
• Social – Non-Game Specific “Off Topic” style channels.
  • The-Waking-Sands – You have to go there constantly during your journey in Final Fantasy XIV, so I thought I would name the general game specific chat channel that as well. The intent is for any general game specific discussion to happen in this channel.
  • Seeking-Help – Are you struggling with something? This channel is here to help players work through problems be it with specific game mechanics, a quest that is giving you trouble, or just gaining some knowledge.
  • Crafters-Corner – This is a specific channel about the deep crafting systems in the game. Crafting discussions can get highly technical and I felt it was probably best to give them a space of their own.
  • <DataCenter>-Grouping – Choosing a Data Center in the Role-Assignment channel is going to grant you access to its corresponding “Grouping” channel. This gives you a space to talk specifically to the members of your data center for building groups for dungeons, trials, raids or just doing fun things like maps.
• General Voicechat – This is the equivalent of the Social text channels but for voice.
  • The-Alehouse – Named after the bar in Buscaron’s Druthers in South Shroud, this channel is designed to be a place where folks hang out while playing games and is not activity specific.
• Grouping Voicechat – This is a number of non-specific channels named after the gods of Eorzea aka The Twelve. The idea is that as you find a group, you can hop down to one of the channels and use that for whatever activity you are undertaking. There are currently twelve unique channels, but if those end up being filled regularly more will be added.

That’s it friends! That is the plan for the Super Dungeon Friends community. I hope this post reaches a number of people who might be interested in following me on this adventure. Please feel free to spread the word if you have friends who also might be interested in this undertaking. The server is up and ready along with all of the bot rules configured for the time being. I am certain there will be needs along the way that might change a few things, but I think it is a fairly solid approach. If you are interested here is the Discord Server link:

• Super Dungeon Friends – FFXIV Discord Grouping Community