While I haven’t been making much in the way of progress in FFXI, I have been logging in every day for the Repeat Login Campaign. For a period of time set by the game, you can log in each day to earn points. You then spend those points on things like mounts and cosmetics, and the rewards change when campaigns change.
When I logged into my main, I discovered that I had stashed away a LOT of these points from last time I played in 2016. I remember picking up a few mounts back then – there were only two that had been released at the time – so this time I put my points towards a lot more mounts!
Looking through the other reward possibilities, one caught my eye: Mog Patio Designs. Based on the description, this made me imagine putting a nice hanging patio/balcony in my FFXI Mog House.
For those who haven’t played FFXI, the Mog House is sorta a blend between FFXIV retainers (storage and sales), the inn room and the personal housing apartment. In the early days, you went there to store stuff and check your market sales. But eventually, it expanded into the FFXI form of housing where you could garden and decorate. And yes, you can “Open” your Mog House to allow people to visit it (though I don’t know the details on this).
In order to use the Patio Design, I read that I needed to have unlocked the second story of my Mog House. Already, the FFXI housing has a couple of things over on FFXIV apartments in that:
- It’s freely and automatically granted to every character
- You can expand it to have a second story
Sure, the overall space is smaller feeling and not quite as robust to decorate, but still. For the time it was developed, this wasn’t a terrible housing system.
Anyhow, in order to add a second story to my Mog House I had to do a series of quests. None of these were difficult – they all required you to bring a specific type of flower to NPCs in each starter town.
The flowers you can buy for next to nothing in Jeuno – granted that you have fast travel unlocked there (oh thank you so much for fast travel!). This is what I did.
The hardest part of this quest was remembering how to interact with NPCs in this game. I forgot there was an oldskool Trade option, and from there, you select the item in your inventory.
I also had to unlock areas of Windurst I’d never been to before on this character, but that just allowed me to attune to different warp points that I probably needed to do anyhow. Once that was all done with, I went back to my Mog House and the moogle within let me know that I now had a second story!
You access the second story by clicking on the house door and selecting it as a travel option. Sorta like you would if you were going into a private chamber or workshop in a FC house in FFXIV. Not the most elegant way, but for the age of this game, I understand why.
And there it was.
A completely empty room, like the lower floor. Just sans Moogle.
So now, the next thing I had to do was save up points to buy the Patio upgrade. This took 1,000 points, which meant 10 days of logging in. This morning, I finally saved up enough and made my purchase.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I went into this thinking I was going to write a post about how FFXI could add patios and second floors to housing and FFXIV needed to take a page out of its predecessor’s book. Only, that’s not quite what happened.
So, I bought the plans and I went to my Mog House expecting my moogle to announce the brand new patio add-on. That didn’t happen.
I then noticed that the patio plans (which had no instructions) were an item in my inventory, so I tried to use it. Couldn’t do that in the housing area.
Alright.
Left the Mog House. Used the item. That seemed to have worked. It gave me the Key Item: Mog Patio design document. But no instructions on how to use it again.
After poking around in the menus of the moogle in my house, I noticed a Remodel option. When I selected that, lo and behold, the option for Mog Patio was there! I clicked it and… nothing seemed to happen.
So I went up stairs to check. That’s when I learned…
Mog Patio is not a patio add on. Instead, it’s the equivalent of changing the wallpaper and floors in a FFXIV house. It did give an open sky (and you could see the skybox changing as time passed), which was kinda cool. But overall, not what I was expecting from the description of the item (come on, translation writers – you could have been a lot more specific with this description!).
Still, it’s a neat change from having the exact same walls as below. So, I left it and decided to move my cherry tree – the one lone decoration I own – from the first floor to the patio.
I then faced the question of… how do I change the layout to put items down on my second floor? On the first floor, I was clicking my moogle and selecting the Layout option. Here, there was no moogle to click.
I then did some research on this, and discovered you can type /layout in chat and it pulls up the layout options. Score!
And…. that’s my adventures so far in FFXI housing.