When I first started playing Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns, I quickly learned that giving your animals treats to boost their productivity was not as easy as it sounds.
Each animal requires a specific number of each of four types of treats, and nothing is consistent between types of animals.
The easiest way to keep an eye on everything, at least for me, turned out to be a very precise notepad with each animal’s name and a tally of how many treats each had been given to reach each new level of productivity. Sure, I goofed on it a couple times, but for the most part, it worked.
At the time, I thought that was a complicated and at times messy task.
It turned out to be nothing compared to keeping track of things in Final Fantasy XIV.
See, the thing I’ve been learning about MMOs the last few months is that there is no end to the things you can do. In itself, that isn’t a problem; the issue is when it becomes tricky to remember what I wanted to do next!
Unfortunately, in this sort of situation, a little notepad with a tally system just doesn’t work.
So, I thought I’d take some time to share some of my favourite resources for the massive game, and how they make my life easier!
This chocobo colour calculator
This is actually the first of these resources that I discovered.
Much like the treats of Harvest Moon, if you want to change your chocobo’s colour, you will need to feed it a specific diet and let it grow new feathers for six real-time hours.
It’s not exactly intuitive in the game, though, so this calculator comes in very handy!
It’ll tell you which fruits, how many, and in what order to feed them to your chocobo to get the colour you want. Most of these fruits are tricky to get—your best bets will be to either get them from your FC if you have one, or from the market board (although this will be expensive).
The default starting colour on the calculator is desert yellow, but if you’ve already coloured your chocobo and want to change it, you can change the starting colour in the calculator to adjust the directions!
The market board
This is actually the only resource on this list that is in the game, and there’s a good reason for it.
Although the market board can be a pain when it comes to buying things, especially gear, it’s pretty useful. See, you can get a lot of gil through story quests and dungeons, but I’ve learned that with the right classes and a bit of savvy, it’s pretty easy to make half a million gil per week using the market board.
I usually use it to keep an eye on in-demand items I can sell, like furniture and crafting materials.
TIP
The market board also has a super-handy filter feature at the top-right corner of the interface that lets you sort the most in-demand items in a category.
XIVCurrents
When you get to the expansions of FFXIV, you will get the magical opportunity to let your company chocobo spread its little wings and fly.
But first, to do that, you will need to track down 15 aether currents in each map to fly in that map, and there are 12 different maps with those currents.
A quick Google search will show you all kinds of Wiki pages that tell you where each current is, but the reason I like XIVCurrents much better is that it is an interactive checklist.
I use it to check off which aether currents I’ve already found, so I don’t find myself in the painfully familiar situation where I’m missing one but have no idea which one and run around the map like a chicken with my head cut off.
Mining node and botany node lists
Gathering is one of my favourite things to do in this game, both because it supports my dream of becoming an omnicrafter and because the materials can pull a lot of gil on the market board.
However, there’s a plethora of things you can gather, and if you don’t know where to look, trying to find the right thing can be frustrating.
These mining and botany node lists are pretty much always open on my laptop beside me when I’m gathering, and a quick Ctrl+F search tells me exactly where I need to be to find what I want. They’re also a handy way to help fill in your gathering log!
Unspoiled gathering node lists
Once you get to about level 48 with one of your gatherers, you will get an ability (either Truth of Forests or Truth of Mountains) that lets you locate unspoiled gathering nodes.
These nodes only pop once or twice an Eorzean day, but they’re the only way to get some rare and highly valuable items.
Rather than leaving it to chance that I’ll be in the right place when one happens to show up, I like to use these unspoiled mining and botany node lists to see when and where the nodes show up, and plan a schedule around it.
Bonus: If you know you’ll need some materials on the regular, you can set the closest aetheryte as a favoured destination so it’s cheaper to teleport there!
These are just a few of the fun things I’ve discovered to help me with Final Fantasy XIV, and I fully expect to find more out there. I’ll keep you posted!
3 thoughts on “5 of my favourite resources for FFXIV”
Wow! I’m officially impressed at your organisation 🙂 I tend to just go with the flow in FFXIV. Occasionally I’ll get stuck and ask Google for help, but otherwise it never occurred to me to look for any resources like these. Great tips! 🙂
“I usually use it to keep an eye on in-demand items I can sell, like furniture and crafting materials.”
I have a question! Does this board can be used to buy FFXIV Gil?
I don’t look into how people do that because I don’t support the practice. Buying gil is against the game’s ToS and can get your account permanently banned.