My latest adventure in Final Fantasy 14 involves interior decorating. Part of the recent patch was an expansion of how many housing items could go into your various player spaces. Every single one of them increased by fifty percent for interiors and doubled for exteriors–which have much smaller numbers than interiors, but that kind of makes sense because all the interiors are their own instances and the exteriors are part of a shared map with thirty other houses, many NPCs, and the graphical infrastructure of making someplace a neighborhood. For the spaces I have access to, a “Private Chamber” in my Free Company’s house and my own “Cottage,” there wasn’t a lot of change. Fifty extra items for the private chamber and one hundred for the cottage. That said, I’ve never really been that heavy of a decorator and my cottage still had plenty of space for more stuff that I’ve never really filled in. I don’t really feel the need to clutter up my character’s home yet (for character reasons) and my private chamber was just a place I put all of the free furniture I got from quests or various activities, jokingly arranged so all of the themed furniture (it was “carbuncle” themed, which is an often-blue fox/cat-like creature used by the “aracanist” combat job) appeared to be looking at anyone who came in the door. It was a fun little joke that I enjoyed, but given my work for my Free Company running workshops and stuff, it felt like it was time for a change. I wanted something to reflect what I actually did for the FC and, after some thinking, settled on making a warehouse.

I know there are a lot of tools for planning out homes and figuring out how to perfectly arrange everything for Final Fantasy 14, but I prefer more of a “get in the space and feel it out” approach to my interior decorating. It is incredibly inefficient, I will fully admit, which is why I paid a friend (in-game currency) to do all the work of planning and laying out my character’s home instead of doing it myself. It’s also time-consuming work no matter what and I was deep in the thrall of Doing Content And Crafting when I got the house, so I knew I wouldn’t really get around to doing anything with it for months if I waited until I felt inclined. So I paid my friend, got it done in a weekend, and have been living cozily ever since. It’s such a nice little alchemy shop and home that I’ve felt no inclination toward sizing up or moving anywhere else. It also set a pretty high standard for what I would consider as “an adeqaute job” of decorating spaces in the future, so I was a little hesitant to try my hand at anything. Luckily, settling on “warehouse” meant that any messiness or ugliness could be baked into the design and since it was supposed to be a frightful mess to anyone but my character anyway, I figured it would be safe to try it out.

Then, true to form, I locked in to the project and stayed up super late two nights in a row decorating what would become my magnum opus of a warehouse. It might be my “magnum opus” because it is quite possibly the only such space I’ll ever decorate, but I’m still proud of the work I did. I filled it with shelves, clutter, storage bins, cardboard boxes, crates, papers, a vault, and even bags of gold to simulate me paying people out after some walls sold. It’s arranged to fit the space based on a bit of a “starting here and building out as I need to” approach to reflect the sort of happenstance that led to my character becoming this figure in our FC, followed by the heavier organization imposed on it immediately after that happened when I pushed myself to get organized. It tells a small story, but it tells the story I want the space to voice, given that pretty much everyone already knows it and this is just me reinforcing it/finally using my FC room for something more than a silly little joke (a fun joke, to be sure, but one I was growing a little tired of myself).

I’ve been thinking of this as potentially a trial run for whatever I wind up doing with my FC house for my alts, when I manage to win one in the housing lottery and get everything set up. I might not make the thing a proper warehouse, even if that’s where the idea behind all this originated since I planned to use the FC as storage and resource generation for my main character. I might make it a cafe on top and a warehouse on the bottom/in private rooms, though, since the whole joke behind this alt FC’s name is a Costco reference, which famously is a warehouse. It also had a famous cafeteria/food service area, so it would be in-keeping with the theme if I decorated the first floor (the main floor) as a cafe and kept the warehouse portions of the place to the downstairs and private chambers. I’d be able to theme them, if I did that, thanks to having six total alts on the server in the FC. But for now, I’m content to imagine that and enjoy my newly decorate warehouse. Who knows, maybe I’ll even start parking myself inside there to do crafting work instead of elsewhere. Actually craft a little truth to go with the tiny bit of storytelling. Otherwise I’m just doing it outside on the FC’s lawn or in my cottage’s basement, so it’s not like I’d be losing anything by changing locations.