Usually, when I’m doing a writing challenge (or am just feeling particularly uninspired and out of ideas), I like to go back through my lists of possible topics to see if there’s a good one I’ve forgotten about. It’s a bit of a toss-up—sometimes I’m left feeling just as uninspired as I started.
But other times, I find one that I can’t figure out how on earth I haven’t written it already.
That’s what happened the other night when I was digging through my photo archives. I wasn’t exactly looking for anything in particular, more just seeing what I had lying around for posts, when I stumbled across an entire Final Fantasy XIV build that I never shared.
Welcome to the reimagined Chocobucks Cafe, home of our little FC.
Building on a previous design
Back in February 2022, I first shared photos of a little coffee shop build I’d done for our FC. I’m actually still pretty proud of how the build itself turned out, and I kept a lot of those features in this new version, including the windows, general aesthetic, and the tables and chairs—but there were a few things in execution I thought I could do better.
For example, I somehow managed to build the elevator glitch into the raised floor outside of the FC workshop door, so if you weren’t careful, you could leave the door and rocket up through the roof of the second-floor office.
I had also managed to create a haven for the members of our FC who took joy in finding ways to jump through walls, and though I wouldn’t say I wanted to prevent that entirely, I did think I could find ways to make it more of a challenge, you know?
And lastly, this was back when the luminous wooden lofts had just come out, and I had some new ideas for a bar area that I wanted to try out.
And so the new version was born.
Reworking the second floor
Like the first Chocobucks build, I wanted to try and use the second floor of the house as organically as I could. But unlike that build, I wanted it to be a little more functional for the members of our FC as a whole.
So rather than a mostly aesthetic office made to catch the people who accidentally rocketed up through the floor with the elevator glitch (which ended up not mattering anyway because they clipped through the top), I created a fun little D&D room.
Why? Well, the name of our FC is actually Heroes’ Inn, a reference to the structure used often in D&D (Heroes’ Feast, anyone?). We also have quite a few people who expressed interest in playing D&D together, so I made the room as a place where if we wanted to, we could host games through a virtual tabletop and gather within FFXIV too.
I know, I’m a nerd.
Adding the little flourishes
One of the things I wanted to accomplish with this build was to create Easter eggs of a sort for the FC members. It wasn’t anything too drastic, just the sorts of things where if you knew, you knew.
With some things, like the FC chest and crystal bell, it was functional things that members already kind of knew to expect from me. For reference, the chest is behind the window next to the front door, and the crystal bell is tucked into the bookshelf next to the mug display!
But I also added a few subtler things, like the coffee machine that uses hand-poured coffees for the spouts—so if you click on it, you actually drink a serving of coffee.
