FFXIV: Odder Otter FC House
A lot of different small and exciting (to me) things happened over this weekend. But each of them really deserve their own little post, so that’s what I’m going to be doing this week. I’m starting with the larger one — we finally built the Odder Otter Walls for our Shirogane FC house!
Back in May, patch 4.3 brought the Odder Otter walls to FFXIV. When I saw this, I knew I had to have it. This was the first themed house that I felt was a good balance between cute and tastefully designed. One that would be right at home in Shirogane.
These walls require a recipe made of items only the FC airship can bring back — you can’t buy these items on the market board. You also must craft the walls within a FC workshop, and the material list required can get quite extensive, especially for bigger houses.
At the time this first came out, I was still back on Midgardsormr and had a personal house in Shirogane. Our FC house had the large castle walls, which the crafters had worked so hard to make, so I knew we wouldn’t be changing from that. Instead, I unlocked the recipe for the FC, and focused on gathering what I needed to make the walls for my own personal house.
Only… for some reason, I never got around to finishing it before I transferred to Mateus. I had almost all of the materials required, with the help of Amoon, and could have easily knocked it out months ago. But I hesitated for some reason and just didn’t do it.
What did that mean?
Well, when I transferred servers, I brought all those materials with me. But it didn’t occur to me that we’d need:
- A FC house
- A workshop in the FC
- At least one airship in the workshop
- The materials from the airship to unlock the recipe
When that dawned on me, I realized we had a long, long road ahead of us. Amoon and I got to developing our first FC airship as soon as we unlocked the workshop. But this ship needed to be upgraded and leveled. We also had to discover the sectors in which you can gather the materials needed to unlock the recipe.
Then, we had to endure the RNG for weeks, hoping a single ship would bring back the materials. We were down to needing two last synthetic resin this week, and the ship just refused to bring them back day after day after day.
This required drastic measures…
Well, last night was the night. The ship brought back not two, but five resin. And much to my excitement, Amoon was on board to help craft the combines we needed to get the job done. It was easily something a single max-level crafter could do, but it made it much better with two max-level crafters.
We knocked the crafting out in about an hour or so. The actual building part took a good chunk of time as well. But when it was done, we finally had our otter house (only after six months of wanting one).
Now we can focus on upgrading the airship further and sending it out farther. We also started gathering what was needed for our first sub. I think Amoon has some interest in the Shirogane walls for his personal house, so there might be some more airship missions to unlock that.
Now that the walls are up, I can think about outdoors decorations and yard layout — something I’ve been putting off until I saw the finished house. I’m really pleased with how it looks — our location is fantastic, nestled between staircases on either side, a market board, bell, and aetheryte in our street. Nearby neighbors who are all tastefully decorated as well.
It may be a small house, but on this server, even that’s lucky to get! We remain a small Free Company with no real ambitions to grow or develop beyond what we decide to do as a small group of friends.
And while I sometimes miss the support of having a larger group to do content with for things like clearing trials and raids, we’ve gotten by as a smaller FC. Syn and I have been doing a lot of writing and story role play. She’s made real progress with her own RP character, whom she just rolled only a few months ago… and is now at end game already!
While I won’t be going to Fan Fest this year, I did get next Friday approved for a day off, and will be watching the stream. I’m eager to hear what the next FFXIV expansion will bring, and I knew that I’d be no use to anyone trying to work with the Fan Fest happening next week. So there’s that to look forward to.
In fact, I’ve really had a lot of positivity toward this game the last few months, which I attribute to making a shift in the way I play and integrating creative endeavors into the game. Not everything is perfect, but for my style of gaming, I think I made the right choice.
