Morning Folks! I went down a brand new rabbit hole in Final Fantasy XIV… or at least one that was new to me. After being prompted by friends for the hundredth time… I unlocked the Island Sanctuary. This seems like it could be an all-consuming addition to an already all-consuming game. I would liken it to something akin to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley in that Tataru gifted us an Island… only to do the hard work of getting it up and running and making it profitable for her wide-stretching enterprises. Essentially the early functionality has focused on gathering resources and building out a base of operations, fields to grow crops, pastures to keep animals, and a workshop to churn out tchotchkes to sell to tourists.
There seems to be a pretty hard limit on how much you can reasonably progress in a single day, but right now I have my second version of the lodge up and running, my crops and pasture upgraded to rank 2, and a workshop that I am starting to sort out how to schedule items to be produced. A lot of this involves retreading the same areas of the island and collecting resources to then funnel into further production similar to any game of this sort. Yesterday’s mission was to farm up enough resources to make enough nets and then run around the island capturing all of the Small-Net-Capturable animals that I could. While I failed miserably at the only Rare I was able to find… aka the Ornery Karakul I did eventually pick up all five of the baseline small animals.
The biggest project from yesterday was completing my first “landmark” for which I chose a big Tree House because I figured it would be cool to be able to climb up inside it and look out at everything. The other option was a Lighthouse which I am hoping eventually I can have both. I am very much in a phase of the island where I am not getting much in the way of directions. The quest objective is something generic like “develop the island”, but I seem to have built everything that I can reasonably build and the little mammet that has a quest is red with no clear indication of how to make it not be red. My guess is that this is probably a time-gating thing, so I will likely spend a bit of time gathering resources and making sure my crops and animals are doing well, but essentially wait for the next phase of the island to kick in.
On the job leveling front, I got my Samurai to level 90 over lunch when I was doing some quests and shifted gears to working on the Monk for anything that might gain experience. I also capped out my Wolf marks so I spent that down on some trophies for the house. I am not really focused on leveling so much as doing a little bit of a few things each day. Mostly I am doing my Hippo Rider quests to level that faction up and then queuing for a Frontline and between those two activities I am flying through levels pretty quickly. At some point, I will probably start queuing for dungeons and such but I am also not super worried about doing things quickly.
I am of course still tracking progress… because I like spreadsheets and data points… but I am trying to approach all of this in a fairly chill manner. I don’t really care if I get everything to 90 before the release of Dawntrail. I think setting that as a hard goal that I was working towards for Endwalker led me to push myself a bit harder than I really should have. To some extent there were a few other people that I felt like I was “racing” at least unofficially… and I don’t really want to get myself in that situation again. That said I do really like having all of the jobs at level cap, and gearing them all up… because it satisfies something in my soul.
At some point, I will return to the MSQ which I have largely stalled out on this week because I have been doing the thing where I listen to an Audiobook while I play. I am way more into the book than I have been in the games I am playing. I know this weekend I will be focused on the next Path of Exile event and trying out a Righteous Fire Chieftain to see how I like that as a prospect for “Bel League”. It still feels egotistical to call the private league idea I had that… but all the rest of the AggroChat folks are so I have also adopted that nomenclature.