Now that is has been six days since I finished the base portion of the Endwalker expansion of Final Fantasy 14, I’ve finally hit the point where I can really start to think about what I’m going to doing next (as opposed to just sorta thinking about it). I’ve had a lot of this stuff on my mental to-do lists for a while, but I’ve been putting a lot of it off in favor of progressing the main story or doing the work required to continue progressing the main story. Now that I’m hitting a slow-down point and won’t be racing to get as much done as I possibly can, it’s time to turn my attention back to that stuff. Most of it is stuff I’ve been working on slowly, as a part of daily and weekly activities, but it hasn’t really gotten any focused attention from me in a couple months and now it’s time to shift my attention and reasses priorities. All of which is to say that my equipment inventory has way too much stuff in it and I need to get that thing cleared out by leveling up a bunch of classes. Also, I really need to put a bit more focus and effort into my gathering and carfting skills since I’ve hit the point where I can’t repair my own gear anymore and that’s no good. Gotta be mostly self-sufficient so I don’t need to rely on barely-fixed gear or finding a random person whose crafting skills are high enough to fix my stuff (it was a whole thing in my latest raid night with the FC). Lots of stuff that I meant to maintain as I played has fallen by the wayside as the demands of my life and the main story of FF14 have fluctuated and it is time to get everything humming along again.

For the most part, crafting and gathering jobs will go hand-in-hand. If I want to do a bunch of crafting to level up my jobs, I need to gather a whole bunch of stuff to do so. Mixing in some XP boosts to both activities and I can get a couple levels per crafting project and a gathering level every few projects. Eventually, when my crafting skills catch up to my gathering skills, it’ll all go a little bit faster. There’s also some weekly activities for huge amounts of XP that can help, but I’m looking to move a bit faster than a week-by-week basis. I’ll absolutely still do that stuff, of course, since it is entirely possible that it will take several weeks for me to get all this stuff to the place I want it to be, but I’m not going to rely on it. Mixed in with all that is leveling up my war and magic classes. Most of that is done by queuing for dungeons or doing daily roulettes, so I can start waiting for a queue to pop and do my gathering and crafting while I wait. It’s all very synergistic. I just need to be careful since some of my classes will need new gear and my inventory just doesn’t have the space for all of it, so I need to be strategic about what I level and when. Since some of the combat jobs are very silo’d off (as far as gear goes), I can train the jobs mostly at the same time and only get new gear when I’m ready to get rid of the old stuff. I also know I can’t hop between jobs too much since it’s difficult for me to remember all of everything that each job can do and how to make it happen. There’s a bit of a re-learning curve every time I go back to a job I haven’t played in a while. All of this would probably be easier if I picked one class and leveled it up a bunch rather than keeping spread out like this, but I prefer the balanced, incremental method so that I’ve got stuff that can participate in the various activities my FC engages in. I mean, any job of sufficient level can participate, but it feels better to use one that is level appropriate and I want that feeling to last as long as possible.

Beyond that, I’ve got one job I’m saving to do all of the side quests with, to see how well I can level a character based on questing. I mean, I’ll fight stuff too, but only as part of those side quests or when I’m out of quests I can do but still need to level-up. I might spend some time looking for resources for finding all those quests or to help me actually do them. I dunno. That feels like very “laid back” kind of play, so maybe I could get some people together to just hangout in a voice chat or something while I run silly little side quests. This is more of a “grand undertaking” kind of thing, not one I expect to get done any time soon, but I figure I might as well start it soon if I feel up for that kind of laid-back experience. I’ll see where the weekend takes me [it did not take me here, yet, but I did think about it a couple times]. Beyond that, there’s a lot of different types of gear I want to get for my glamours, raids and dungeons I want to do, and special recipes to unlock. All of that is much more concrete and individually achieveable, so it’s a good way to feel like I’m making a lot of progress if I wind up wanting that. All the other stuff higher up the list is a time-consuming undertaking that will probably take a few weeks to do while all of this stuff is a smaller goal I can just set out to do and accomplish in a couple hours at most. Not, like as a whole. It just won’t take long to pick a dungeon to do and do it. The raids would take the better part of a day’s play, but that’s still a single-day event if I can get the people together for it rather than a weeks-long undertaking.

After that is all the new stuff. Islands to explore, a space thingy to experience (I know basically nothing about it other than that it’s in space and will make use of crafting and gathering), new raids to unlock, and patch content to dive into. I’ll probably do some small pieces of all that in the coming weeks, depending on how tired I get of crafting, gathering, questing, dungeoning, and waiting for queues to pop, but I’m not making any concrete plans for it, like I’m planning to figure out what crafting projects to do to level my crafting skills. Well, aside from the island. I’m planning to start that this weekend because that’s also somewhat time-gated and it would be nice to get it underway so I can have it running in the background while I work on everything else. And, should I ever need to shut my brain down for a bit, there’s always timed gathering work for my FC and a personal money-making project to keep working on. I bought most of the supplies for that before I started Endwalker and have been largley ignoring it ever since then. Or not playing Final Fantasy 14 at all! I’ve got anime to watch and Mario Kart to play! I dunno. I’ve got the plans I’ve laid out, but there’s no real schedule or time crunch on them. There’s no need. I’m content to just go forward at whatever pace I move at for the time being. Just because I played 1100 hours in less than six months doesn’t mean I have to hit 2200 hours by the time my 1-year anniversary comes around…