Let me start by saying that while I own FFXV for the PC, I’ve not played it yet. The extent of my exposure to this entry in the FF series is a few episodes of the anime, which were actually quite charming in terms of character building.
I wasn’t completely thrilled to learn we’d be getting a FFXIV/FFXV crossover event which includes the Regalia as a car mount. Mostly because… well… a car can be squeezed into the world of Eorzea, but really doesn’t fit. (Neither does the Whisper or Cactuar mount… but yeah…).
However, it’s a free mount. And it’s the game’s first FOUR PERSON mount. So, even though I don’t care for the idea of having a huge car mount in game, I’m not passing up on it for any of my characters.
Turns out the event is actually pretty charming. As someone who knows very little about FFXV, I’m never quite sure what to make of the main character, Noctis. His appearance makes him out to be an angsty young adult type… and he’s a prince, so I expect him to be arrogant or stuck up. However, it seems he’s more of a bro-buddy with a lot of responsibilities on his back.
I don’t know. Can anyone tell me what he’s supposed to be?
Can you believe this month is already halfway over? There’s not a whole lot of interesting things to discuss from this weekend, but I did want to touch on the progress I’ve made with my goals at the month’s halfway point.
I’ve reached all the baseline goals for my Alt’s crafting progress, so now it’s just a matter of continuing the shorter daily Beast Tribe quests to finish leveling the final two jobs. That’s just measured, steady progress.
Just as I’d hoped, less time spent with Ixali quests has led to more time focusing on making progress on my main’s goals. While I do need a bit more motivation leveling my Astro (she’s lingering at halfway through 56… just not much of a fan of Somh Al with squads), I’ve started to pick up the pace in leveling my Ninja.
One of the other goals I have in the back of my mind is to finish up the Hildibrand quests. I noted before that Syn and I had stopped on the last story arc for these quests back in Heavensward and just never finished up. This was a real shame because I knew that the reward was a Vivi minion – and I’m a big Vivi fan!
Anyhow, yesterday, we picked back up where we left off and completed that line of quests. I got my Vivi minion… and… the end of the storyline was a step up from the previous quests in my mind. I really did enjoy it.
We also dove into the Stormblood series, and are about halfway through it from what I can gauge. The team seems to have gotten back into the stride of things, and I’ve been enjoying this story more than the Heavensward one.
As long as we keep moving forward with these quests, I don’t see why we can have it all complete by the end of this month. I’d love to have that crazy new dance, that’s for sure!
I meant to write about this earlier, but it just kept slipping my mind. I talked about how shop owners were testing the Animesh version of the Water Horses in a previous post, and how the sim was going to get a remake.
Well, the Animesh horses released live last weekend, and the Sim remake has also happened. The whole place looks great – major kudos to the Water Horse team for really refreshing the shopping experience! This means I have a new shop location there!
The move happened on a Friday/Saturday a few weeks back, and I was ready for it. I managed to get into the sim pretty quickly when it re-opened for shop owners to choose a spot, and I got a location that I’m quite happy with. It’s far better than the spot I used to have, which was on the backside in an area that folks didn’t travel as much.
Sales have been pretty steady since the Animesh version was released, but the truth is, I really need to sit down and work up some new coats. I have a whole line of Heavenly Bodies that I haven’t fully completed, for example! I have been touching up some of my existing coats – though they say the body textures for the bento should work for the Animesh exactly, I’ve found some issues around the base of the ears I’ve had to fix.
It seems word is getting out about the Water Horse Animesh release, because folks at Second Life put out an official blog post in the featured news about them, including an aesthetics video. I learned about this earlier this week from fellow SL equine artist, Claire at Lunistice, who alerted me to the fact that my shop was included in the official video that went along with the blog post (thank you!).
I went to watch, and sure enough, starting at about 0:21, a guy is standing in my shop, looking out the window. I think they were more attracted to the “Unicorn Xing” sign in my shop, because the video focuses on it for a moment… then pans away to a gal riding a unicorn. So having the sign there helped to mesh the concepts together.
Ironically, when I made the move to the new shop, I almost didn’t put this sign back in. I guess it was a good thing I did!
Anyhow, you can view the full video below:
Unexpected things like this are always neat!
I’d like to spend some more time in Second Life with all the events coming up in that world – Easter is a time for great egg hunts, the Fantasy Faire is in the works, and a Second Life birthday celebration will hit the grid this summer.
Due to some issues with my web host, I ended up shuttering the blog I was using primarily for Second Life stuff earlier this year, and moved the relevant content to this blog instead. So, if I write about the grid, it’ll end up on this blog from now on out.
Last night, one of my largest goals for this month was met. The major objective I wanted to achieve was to get Amon’s lowest level craft over the level 50 hurdle. This was the last crafter I need to level for him, and most importantly, it means that I get to put away the Ixali quests for good.
Not only did I finish that, but I also leveled his second highest job to 60. This means that this job can move into doing Namazu quests and the level 50 job can start Moogle quests. And that’s all I need to keep doing to finish up all my crafters on that character from here on out!
Almost there!
Again, the biggest part of this is the fact that I don’t have to do Ixali quests anymore. Now, I’m the type of person who can’t sit there and grind crafting leves for faster leveling. So I appreciate that Ixali quests exist.
However, I’ve been doing these quests almost every day for about half a year now as I leveled various crafting jobs from 15 to 50. Unlike Namazu quests, which you can usually complete in an easy 10 mins, Ixali quests are the old skool beast tribes. They can be quick, if you get the kill or fetch quests. But some of them send you to gather nodes.
Or worse… they send you to fish.
The RNG on the Ixali fishing quests is abysmal. There are days I could get the quest done in 5 casts… but that was very rare. There were days I had 20+ casts to get the fish I needed. And the worst one was being sent to fish in the Dragonhead Latrines… not just because you were fishing in latrines, but because this needs 3 fish in total and took more time. I literally groaned every day I got West for Fishing.
In fact, I was so glad to be done with these fishing quests that I deleted the Moth Pupa (the bait you use specifically for these Ixali quests) from my inventory when I hit 50 on my final job. Good riddance!
So, while I’m still not completely done with all the crafters, and there’s still some job quests I need to clean up, the most troublesome part is done. This is the second character I’ve worked to level an omnicrafter to 70 on. I’ve already bought all the yellow scrip gear for all of his jobs, and so end-game gear is waiting for the leveling to catch up.
Certainly won’t have any trouble getting this all done before the expansion comes out. Just in time to add another 10 levels to all the jobs! XD But that’s okay.
This also frees up a bunch of time for me to finally put towards my leveling goals for my main. I just need to stay motivated to keep working on that. Still plenty to do in this game, that’s for sure!
I haven’t been writing a whole lot about the holiday events in FFXIV this year, mostly because they’ve been a bit on the underwhelming side. Either they’re a bit of a rehash of previous events (I’m looking at you Valentione’s Day), or their rewards weren’t very exciting (again, looking at you Valentione’s Day).
The community has chalked this up to the team putting most of their efforts into the upcoming expansion. If this is the case, I’m alright with this.
Little Ladies’ Day did give a cute flower crown that seemed to be a hit on the RP server. But most of the rewards we’ve gotten (aside from the wonky hidden ones on Valentione’s Day) have been housing decorations. On top of that, 95% of those are food housing decorations (which can get used up if you’re not careful).
Considering housing is at a premium right now, I’m not sure this is the wisest move. Though, the food decorations are cute and I did pick them up and use them in our house and rooms.
Thankfully, Pa-Pa-Ya brought us a whole cosmetic outfit reward in the form of Spriggan attire. It’s a bit on the cute side, but seeing this is Hatching Tide, I won’t complain. It’s fully dyeable, and is different from other stuff we currently have.
Spriggan outfit dyed – along with the housing items for this year
There’s also a variation in the legs for the male and female versions.
Our RP alts being silly
Aside from the outfit, we get two food housing items and a huge pile of colored eggs as a tabletop item. Just in case you ever wanted to fill your whole room with a pile of eggs (which I have seen pictures of people doing, of course).
The quest itself is fairly short – takes about 10-15 mins once you know what to do. It’s not random in any way, so getting the outfit for alts is just a matter of going through the paces.
Getting it the first time requires an egg hunt and a bit of a word puzzle to figure out the egg’s location. The answer to the hunt takes a little thought to work out, but was already posted up on Reddit before I got home from work yesterday. So it’s do-able, though a bit evil with its obscure reference on the final puzzle.
I’ll be picking this outfit up on the rest of my alts over the week, and do appreciate the work that went into it. We’ll be seeing another cross-over event shortly, and on top of an advertised welcome back week for the game, we’ve seen a lot of activity around the town!
I know, I know. Potty humor picture. I’ll explain more about how that came to be in a bit.
So, the Posse has gotten together for at least one night each weekend to continue our current map of 7D2D. I’m not sure what it is about this particular game, but we’ve stuck with this fort longer than any other in quite a while. I think when we hung it up on Sunday, we were on Day 25.
While the game isn’t super hard by any means, we’ve seen a lot of unusual encounters and locations we’ve never experienced before. Especially for so early in the game cycle… since the concept is that the game gradually gets harder and harder as more blood moons pass.
One evening, right at sunset, I caught sight of a random horde spawn just down the street from our base. Now, hordes do spawn, and we’ve seen many different kinds – dogs, buzzards, wolves, zombies… But this one spawned a zombie bear and a handful of wolves.
Now, normal bears are no pushover in this game. But zombie bears are something to take great care with. Everyone scrambled back in the base, and with guns loaded and a careful pull, we took out the wolves, and then the bear.
Zombie Bears still get caught on barbedwire
That was pretty interesting!
We also discovered that the pig farm, which I talked about in a previous post, and the boss mob Grace, both respawn regularly. This has been a huge boon to us because it’s basically a place we can go to stock up on tons of meat, rather than trying to hunt the almost non-existent game.
The funnel system I built into our base seems to work overall. And after experimenting with the iron upgraded spikes, I have to say they are a good substitute for the old wood log spikes that the devs removed. Overall, our base has withstood up to the day 21 horde, with irradiated zombies and all slews of stuff coming for us.
Night 21 Horde – Bright green zombies
Oh, and before I forget to mention, we now have upgraded to motorcycles rather than pedal bikes. These are super nice, and even have spikes on the front that do the dirty work if you run up against any wayward zombies on your travel.
We’ve yet to upgrade to any of the larger vehicles, and we completely skipped the mini-bike phase since the crafters among us said it just wasn’t worth the materials to make those anymore. You may as well put a bit more into a full motorcycle.
These bikes have our scavengers happy.
Fort Moon
So, I promised you the story behind the sign in at the top of this piece, and I’m going to deliver. Sunday, our zombie team was down to three people at the time – Xaa, Amoon and myself.
Xaa and I needed to go AFK for a short bit, and I joked that Amoon would have to hold down the fort. Then I added that by the time we returned, he would have rebranded it.
A little while later, after we’d returned to the game, I hear Xaa remark about the sign I made at the front door that said “Fort Moon.”
I was like, “Wait a minute. That wasn’t me!”
Amoon started laughing, and I knew exactly what happened. He had run with my joke and actually rebranded the fort!
Well, then the suggestion popped up that we needed to put some graffiti on there and make it an official moon. After trying (and failing) at finding a good text representation of said moon (the font wasn’t working with things like CC ) I Googled a text butt and added to the sign what you see above.
Glorious? Not really. But it only happens in a sandbox building game like this, huh? 🙂
After completing my Alchemy goal on my RP alt this weekend, I was pretty motivated to work on other goals for my main. I’ve been running Alliance and starting back up on beast tribes for her Ninja, and finishing up level 50 beast tribes and squad runs for her Astro. Both gained a level this weekend, which is nice.
But my main focus was getting some job quests done. I caught up on job quests for her Astro — which is important because at level 56, there are several skills she needs to unlock. I also randomly picked one of my level 70 jobs to finish job quests for — this time, it was Paladin.
Part of me must have been traumatized by the Black Mage job quests, which I was always terrible at. Because I keep going into these quests with the fear that they’re going to be a lot harder than they turn out to be.
There were a few fights for the Paladin, but nothing at all super challenging. In fact, I found them pretty enjoyable from a story standpoint. I keep running up against this — putting off these quests and then finding they’re not bad at all in the end.
And I also got the Paladin shiny wing skill, too!
While I’m not completely finished with all of my crafting beast tribes on my RP alt, I’m getting pretty close. Once that’s done, I’ll have a whole lot more time to throw at my leveling and questing efforts on my main, and hopefully get her into the place I want before the new expansion drops.
I still have plenty of time, and it will be nice to finally square away most of her jobs at level cap…. just in time to add two more new jobs. Ah, well!
