Author’s note: I originally published this post back in May 2018, but things have changed since then!
So you may have noticed from the quickly growing Design section here on the Girly Geek Blog that I’m mildly obsessed with the housing aspect of Final Fantasy XIV.
Or, as Shane calls it, my better-looking Minecraft.
Though it started out as a neat little hobby, it didn’t take me long to realize exactly how huge home design really is! Once upon a time, I had thought I’d figured it all out because I knew which couches I wanted in front of our hearth—but discovering a plethora of pseudo-professional designers (some of whom actually charge people for their design services) showed me that I’d only scratched the surface of what I could do.
Even now, three years later, I’m still learning—but in all my time spent combing through Reddit, watching tutorials, and researching furnishings on FFXIV Housing, I’ve built a little toolkit of tricks I come back to time and again.
Here’s what I’ve learned!
The subcommand menu is your friend.
This little trick will be your most valuable tool for everything fun when it comes to your house.
I’m not entirely sure how to access it on the PS4, since I only play on PC. On PC, the menu I’m talking about can be accessed by default using the asterisk key on your number pad. It will not work if you use the 8/* key at the top of your keyboard!
The trick with the subcommand menu is that you can use it to glitch housing items into places they wouldn’t normally go. Here’s what you need to do:
- Place the housing item into your house’s storage room
- Click on the housing item in your storage room
- Without placing it beforehand, move it to where you want
- Press the * key, then use the 0 key on the number pad to select Place
This is handy because this way, you can place items where they’d normally show up as purple, meaning they can’t be placed.
You can see it in action in this video:
Note: This will not let you magically float things in midair. Everything needs to be in relation to something else, so you’ll need to place an object on another object and then make that other object go away to float the thing you want to glitch.
Which is a perfect segue into the next handy tool.
The counter surface toggle is magical.
When you’re placing housing items, you’ll notice on the toolbar at the bottom beside the big options that there are two little bubble buttons.
The top one controls whether you can place items like paintings and flower vases on their proper surfaces.
The bottom one controls snaps, which are handy for quick placement and for making sure things line up without a painful little overlap line that you can see from a mile away.
Let’s just look at the top one for now.
When you have that button selected, it will let you place items on top of other items. To magically float things, here’s what you do:
- Toggle counter surface placement on
- Place desired floaty thing on a supported surface, like a partition or a shelf
- Move the supporting surface with desired floaty thing to the location where you want the floaty thing
- Toggle counter surface placement off
- Select and then deselect desired floaty thing (without moving it!)
- Move the supporting surface away
This will leave your desired floaty thing hanging where you wanted it!
Again, you can see exactly how it works in this video. The principles apply for pretty much everything from making fake walls out of Eorzean maps to creating fake staircases with wooden beams and more.
You can make your own staircases—and walk on them, too.
This was a crazy discovery. One of the hallmarks of a favourite designer’s work, Alice Lucis’caelum, is her multi-level approach, which of course needs staircases so it isn’t just as disappointing as all those places you can’t get to until you can fly.
She does a bunch of unique things with her stairs, but her typical approach has been to use the floating glitch to place a series of Riviera wall shelves. You can’t step on those, though, so you’ll need a zabuton cushion for each step to make it traversable.
Alice has a couple of step-by-step tutorials on how to do both regular and curved staircases, and once you get the basics down, it’s easy enough to make your own patterns!
One of my more recent discoveries is that you can also use wooden beams to create a staircase that you can actually walk on—but the downside is that you don’t have as much control over its shape.
And once you have stairs figured out, it’s time for my favourite glitch of all.
The loft glitch takes the cake.
Once upon a time, lofting was an incredibly tricky technique—but since the introduction of the wooden loft, it’s become so much easier. It’s also one of the most popular ways to make any home look massive!
Wooden lofts are also fairly easy to make, and only really need three crafters and two gatherers at level 45. However, if you can’t make them for yourself yet, check with people in your friends list or your FC before you head to the market board—they’re usually overpriced!
The loft glitch can be a finicky one, but you can see how it works in this video. Just be sure to use a stage panel for your wall, or you won’t be able to get the loft close enough to the floor!
Don’t be afraid to get creative with it!
This is very important! Just because a furnishing looks a certain way when it does its default thing does not mean it couldn’t be something else entirely.
For example, I love building kitchen cabinets out of merchant’s shelves that I lift up with the loft glitch, and making built-in ovens out of Hingan sideboards and a series of Riviera chronometers.
I’ve even started figuring out how to make super-modern fireplaces using masonwork stoves and this glitch video to lift partitions up through the floor!
Ready to make your own dream house?
Be sure to check out the rest of the Design section here on the Girly Geek Blog for design inspiration, item reviews, tutorials and more. Have fun with your own creations!
9 thoughts on “Housing hacks for Final Fantasy XIV”
good day thank you for all your tips had a question how do you prevent windows from falling behind when you exit your house in the bay window hack?
This is so late, but your windows need to be a certain distance from the wall otherwise they snap back to the wall. If you mount the windows on a stage panel it should keep them there
This is sooo helpful; thank you!!
Thank you for the lovely compilation! In your loft glitch video you show a working set of stairs that look like the loft stairs, but I can’t get these to actually be usable. You also don’t mention them in your section on working staircases. Is there still a way to use them?
Hey! So the stairs I use in the video are Wooden Steps, just the default loft stairs. They should be usable without doing anything special, all you should need to do is mount them on the wall 😊
Sure enough, the wooden steps and loft DO work in my new cottage! I’m not sure why I couldn’t get them to work in my apartment but I suspect I was trying to run up them while still in furnishing mode. >.< Thank you so much Erin; I’m off to glitch all the things! <3
I usually play on PS5, but am using my PC version to do these housing glitches, might be a stupid question for PC players, but how do I click on something and then “deselect it.” Anytime I click on the item that I want to disable the counter placement, I don’t know what to do after that.
Oh no not at all! To do that it’s just right click 🙂 I hope that helps!
So I have stumbled on your page, and I’m curious if you know how to sink draconian down trees? I know of a house “Plot 58, 23 Ward, The Lavender Beds (Large) Jenova” that has it done in their entrance but I cannot find anything on it.