One of the goals I have for this year is to deep-dive into FFXIV’s housing and decoration features. Between Tumblr and sites like Housing SNAP, I know that this is much more involved than it seems at first. And a number of neat things can be accomplished if you know the glitches to use.
Glitches? Housing glitches aren’t new to FFXIV by far. I’m thinking back to games like EQ2, where glitches are used to break out of the normal housing area into bigger zones.
Well, in FFXIV, glitches are primarily used to do things like float objects to make lofts, stairs, and place things in locations they normally wouldn’t be. While these glitches aren’t required to make a nicely decorated home, knowing about them and understanding what they do has provided me options for decoration I didn’t realize existed.
Many of these glitches require something very specific, such as placing an item from the housing storage or from your inventory. The infamous floating object glitch is really just toggling off the counter placement setting and breaking an item’s link to a table or shelf you placed it on.
So lets talk about these glitches, shall we?
Floating Loft
The first thing I set out to do was create a floating loft from a stage in the FC’s main room. You can see this WIP here:
Basically, this is a squirmy glitch that requires several things to work — the item must be in the housing storage, and you must bring it out at an angle to the wall. You must then go into first-person view, smush yourself against the wall and try to place the stage above a window with the middle-most part sticking through. Oh, and you have to use the mini-command menu to place it.
Here’s all that in a video:
The one thing to be aware of is that if you use a mouse/keyboard setup, the mini-command menu is (by default) set to the * (star) key on your number pad. This brings up the menu, but then you have to press the 0 (zero) key on the number pad to actually select “Place.”
Floating Stairs
Once you have a loft, you must then make stairs! Typically this is done by placing cushions on top of shelves.
There are two flavors:
I chose to use spiral stairs in our house because that fit better.
Floating Objects
Making floating stairs actually uses this same glitch. But in case you just wanted to place a picture or tabletop item somewhere it shouldn’t be (even floating in mid-air), here’s how it’s done!
Putting Windows on Partitions
It’s funky that those windows you pick up from the Enclave can’t be placed directly on partitions. Frankly, that makes no sense at all… so hopefully this will be a QOL somewhere down the line. Until then, here’s a glitch to make those windows do what you want!
I’m not quite finished with decorating our FC house yet, but I’m making good progress on it. I’ll update when I have something more solid to show.
But in the meantime, if you’re looking to refresh your room or house in FFXIV, check out that Housing SNAP website for inspiration and hopefully you’ll find a good use for some of these glitches I listed here! There’s a LOT more you can do with FFXIV housing than you might think at first glance – let your creativity go!