HomeFeaturesFinal Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Final Fantasy XIV’s huge fishing community make their own fun with spreadsheets and bootleg aquariumsAnd they’re doing it in incredible style
And they’re doing it in incredible style
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
On paper,Final Fantasy XIVdoesn’t do a very good job of encouraging fishing. FFXIV’s lead director and producer Naoki Yoshida — known as Yoshi P — wanted to create something that was “fun, but relaxing”, and there aren’t a lot of material rewards for the time you put in. You can sell the fish or break them down into other materials, but really the only reason to fish is for the sake of fishing itself.
I’m no master angler though, and that’s how I found myself talking to Sarath Ras, a fisherman who’s completed FFXIV’s entire fishing log, and earned the in-game title Saint Of TheFirmamentthrough a server-wide fishing contest. You were only required to come in the top twelve to get the title. Ras was first.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
The strategies involved do get complex when it comes to Ocean Fishing though. Every two real-world hours, a fifteen minute window opens where players can register to go fishing on an auto-piloted boat. Normally, you have to do this alongside 23 other players and it’s meant to be just a bit of fun. But fishing with a bunch of strangers makes hunting for the rare fish that are exclusive to Ocean Fishing incredibly difficult, because there’s so many variables you need to micromanage to get these rare fish to appear in the first place.
So what’s the solution? “People try to isolate boats and get them to themselves in order to control for those variables,” Ras says. If you queue as soon as the window opens, you’re very likely to get put into a group with 23 other people. But if you wait till the end of the 15 minutes, and rush to get in at the last second, you’ll be put on an empty boat. Of course, there’s usually multiple people all trying to do this at the same time and, more often than not, they end up getting thrown together. Another method involves changing your language in FFXIV’s Duty Finder — the game’s matchmaking system — to, ironically, avoid other players.
Building an aquarium in FFXIV isn’t easy though, particularly because the game doesn’t really let you do it. The aquariums were instead built using the player-owned houses available through the Free Company system (similar to guilds). In FFXIV you can display fish in houses using fish tank furniture units, which, inconveniently for me writing this, the game calls aquariums. But houses have a finite limit of how many of these aquariums can be placed. The largest size house — a mansion — can only fit ten aquarium units.
R: a display in the North American Eorzean Aquarium; L: a page from said aquarium’s guest book |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
Cataloguing fish is one thing but figuring out how to catch them is another. Fish are periodically added to FFXIV in waves, but very little information about how to catch them is given outright. In fact, the details are so obscured that the fishing community calls the process of finding this information “discovery”, and as Fruity says, “discovery is probably one of the best parts of every update”. He put me in touch with Tyo’to Tayuun, the key organiser behind discovery.
Tyo’to makes clear that while he could be considered the “manager” of discovery, his role is mainly in maintaining the spreadsheets used to track the whole effort. At the start of every fishing update, Tyo’to creates a spreadsheet for recording the conditions required to catch the newly added rare fish, including what time the fish were caught, what bait was used, what the weather was like, and so on. It’s a bit like solving a Sudoku puzzle but on a giant scale — you eliminate what doesn’t work till you can logically deduce the answer.
Prior to patch 6.4 released in May of this year, “it was possible to datamine whether or not a fish had a time or weather condition. You couldn’t tell what those were, but there was a flag for if they had them at all,” Tyo’to tells me. “Starting in 6.4, that’s not possible anymore.” So, on the first day of discovery, “people just go fishing”. There aren’t any restrictions placed initially because a fish could have absolutely any condition required to catch it, and, as you can imagine, Tyo’to doesn’t want people “to start narrowing things down immediately when nothing has been tried”. Tyo’to also uses this period to look at what sort of conditions are throwing out interesting results in order to plan for the next day.
An exhibit in the European Eorzean Aquarium |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
Tyo’to then starts sending out specific windows of time for players to test. Because people across the world volunteer their own free time for the discovery process, that free time is different for everyone. Tyo’to notes that this is hugely beneficial as “it’s entirely possible to fish in a viable window and not get a bite,” so having multiple people cover the same conditions helps speed the entire process up. “We can almost never be 100% confident about a fish’s conditions,” Tyo’to admits - but in the months between patches the collected data gets tested further to increase its accuracy.
