Unexpected Adventures

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.