As much fun as it is to build multi-level designs in Final Fantasy XIV’s housing, one thing that can be a little challenging for designers is creating stairs. They’re just one of those things that unless you put in a lot of work, they’re not going to fit well into your designs—too often, they seem to stand out.
So today, let’s go over what to consider when you’re building stairs for your home—and how to step up your stair styles.
What to consider when building stairs in FFXIV
Functionality
Although FFXIV does have some standard options for stairs, many players will end up building custom stairs using the tops of shelves or partitions. These techniques, though they often look much nicer, can end up being choppy in practice.
That’s because technically how they work is your character clips from the top of one shelf to the top of the next.
So when you’re building this way, be mindful of how those stairs will need to function, and make sure you don’t make the height differences too great—or your character will get stuck and you’ll need to jump up your stairs!
Available space
Building custom stairs is a surprisingly space-hungry endeavour. In my own experience, the biggest issues seem to happen either when you don’t have the width (or depth) of space you need to place your steps, or when you don’t have the space to float steps up through the floor.
In these cases, you’ll sometimes need to adapt your design to allow more room for your stairs. And in other cases, you may need to consider another technique altogether.
Slot limitations
Especially when you’re building in smaller areas, your slot limitations will need to be top of mind for you. Each individual step will cost you at least one slot, and typically, you’ll need 10 or so steps to get from the ground floor to the second floor, so that’s a minimum of 10 slots gone.
In situations where you don’t have quite so many slots left, it’s worth thinking of ways to create simpler stairs. For example, using shelves or the tops of partitions for steps will ultimately cost you less than using wooden steps and covering them!
Techniques for building stairs in FFXIV
The wooden step technique
This is a relatively simple technique, and how fancy it gets depends entirely on what you want to accomplish with it! You could just place wooden steps and call it a day, of course—but if you want your stairs to look intentional, you can always cover them too.
My personal favourites for this are white rectangular partitions and the backs of bathroom tiles, the latter of which is especially useful for apartment designs.
The floating step technique
This is probably the oldest technique for building custom stairs, and is entirely responsible for the massive backlog of riviera wall shelves that I’ve had forever. For this technique, all you do is set up a series of wall shelves as floating steps in whatever format you’d like using this wall floating glitch.
Then, you can dress them up however you like! I personally really like this suspension style, though it can get pretty expensive in terms of slots.
It is worth noting that the last time I used riviera wall shelves as stairs, you couldn’t actually stand on them and needed a zabuton cushion to be able to use them. I have no idea if that’s been fixed or not, but can vouch for the antique wall shelf working perfectly!
The top-of technique
This style involves using the tops of a set of furnishings to create a set of stairs. Most often, you’ll see this done with shelves—I personally love the Hingan bookshelf—but it can be done with partitions as well.
In fact, though I haven’t tested it out yet, I was thinking it could be a particularly cute use for the new trick bookshelf partition!
