FFXIV: Inventory Woes (House Moving Edition)
I noticed a number of folks writing about inventory management and woes with inventory systems this week for Blaugust, so I decided to chime in with an experience I recently had when moving my character to a new server in FFXIV. This character owned a FC room and a small house, which both were full of seasonal items and furniture.
In order to leave the server, all such rooms and housing have to be relinquished. Before you can do that, you have to take every single piece of furniture out of both the house and the housing storage. There is no intermediate storage to use for this.
This put my main character in a state of total disarray. While I’ve cleared out a bunch of inventory slots thanks to the Glamour Commode, my retainers and bags were not ready to take on over a hundred new items all in one blow.
Here’s a bit what my housing inventory looks like now that I’ve moved into a new place. Keep in mind, I also have an apartment where I offloaded a bunch of stuff (forgot to add that to these pictures), and I went through and sold any furniture that would be easy to get or make before I moved… AND I passed some furniture off to an alt for his apartment. So, I had a LOT more than this to juggle when I first started to organize this move.
In contrast, here’s the open inventory on my retainers and myself.
I have a little wiggle room there, though I was carrying a lot more materials in my inventory that I stashed in the new FC chest. But still, shoving all those housing items into my inventory meant that I had no inventory to do anything else… until I bought a new place.
Working Around It
So how did I manage this without purchasing a third retainer (because I’m not going to do that, sorry S/E)? I had a couple work arounds…
Namely, Binding in FFXIV doesn’t quite work the same as it does in other games. I’m almost afraid to talk too much about it, because it might get fixed (if it’s considered broken)! XD
When an item is bound to you, you can’t sell it, trade it or send it in the mail. But I noticed you can do other things — put it in the FC chest (where other people can take it out) and allow other people with housing rights to pick it up straight out of your house.
Now, I admit that I used the friending glitch that was passed around a while back to friend some of my alts… since without it, you can’t send mail to alts nor allow them to access your house. This is silly. I’ve never liked this. So I didn’t feel bad about working around these things so that my own inventory management was more convenient to me.
Thankfully, it sounds like S/E is looking into allowing alts to share your house in the future. But until then, the FC chest and friend glitch were my only lifesavers in this move.
I took an alt I’d friended and who had a good amount of inventory open, gave him housing access, and he was able to stash a boatload of my furniture, even if it was marked as Binding. He couldn’t pick up the Untradeable stuff, but that was okay. I could manage that number of items.
Once I bought the new house, I just gave him rights to it, and he plunked the stuff back inside. I shoved it all in storage and there you go. Move successful!
It’s still crazy that you’d have to go to that length just to move servers (on top of losing the house with no refund at all (not even partial) and having to hunt a new one on the new server). I can’t imagine what it’s like for folks with bigger houses and larger storage than mine… and those who don’t have alts who can stash things away.
Really, this needs to be looked into. Housing has come a long way in FFXIV, but it remains a major frustration point for a lot of players. The more I work with the system, the more I understand the pain.