One of the things that has taken up a large amount of my time alongside running through the plot of Final Fantasy 14 has been not just leveling the combat classes I need to complete the plot-based missions, but also leveling the crafting and gathering classes required to repair the gear for those combat classes. I mean, I can also make gear for the lower-leveled classes I’m working on getting up to snuff now, but most of the purpose for all that leveling is so I can keep my highest tier of combat gear in tip-top shape without needing to rely on other players I might not have easy access to when I need the work done and so I can stop paying an NPC vendor to repair my gear. Getting it fixed by a player character is a much better investment since you can repair gear beyond what you’d normally expect to it’s “full” state. It’s a bit silly since all this does is set a new point for what counts as “full” integrity on your gear, but it is satisfying to see all of those blue lines (to signify full integrity bars) next to all of my gear whenever I open my character window. Still, having all this extra space before you need to worry about your gear breaking is one of the main benefits of crafting to the person playing the game’s content and, for a while there, I couldn’t actually fix my top-tier gear. In order to hurry through the last two expansions, I set aside my usual schedule of 2-3 weeks on content and then 2 weeks on other stuff (mostly leveling crafting jobs), so while the leveling I’d done previously was enough to keep my gear going in the 2nd to last expansion (Endwalker), it was not enough to fix the gear I got following that expansion. And some of the gear I got toward the end of the expansion, too.

So, in the past few weeks as I’ve slowly chipped through the mountains of extra content and side-missions that I ignored, I’ve also started doing the work of getting the stuff I need to level up those crafting jobs. I made a lot of bread. I created a lot of whetstones. I picked up a lot of crafting work for my Free Company (FF14’s equivalent to guilds). And now, finally, I’m going to put in the work over a couple days to get the last of my crafting clases up to level eighty. It will be no small amount of work, mind you [work that is now done as of editing this post]. I’ve got a lot of resources to gather (which should get my gathering classes up to ninety) and then a lot of active crafting to do since the only ones I can automate (using the game’s macro system) are the ones that use High-Quality materials (all of which I also made and was able to automate). The items without HQ components are going to take careful calculations and ad-hoc adjustments since the crafting process could screw me over if I’m not careful. For example, when making an item, you have a chance for the item’s status to be “Good” or “Excellent,” which gives you a boost to the quality of the item you’re making if you use a quality-improving ability while that status is active. Unfortuantely, the status drops to “Poor” after each “Excellent” status and while you get more than you lose from doing a quality-improving action on both of them, I’m often in the position of needing at least one of these status boost to achieve the highest quality tier on my crafting items. I need to be able to adjust on the fly and not waste one of my limited ability activations on a Poor status. Sure, I could probably automate things and just deal with the few instances of failure by having more components than I need, but it’s not like I’ve got anything else going on while this is happening. I’ll still be sitting at my desk, listening to a podcast, and nervously watching my crafting process whether I’m actively clicking buttons or watching a macro attempt do its thing.

I’ll probably need to do more of this heavy crafting sometime soon, to get my jobs up another twenty levels so I can actually start making end-game gear. Sure, I’ve got a whole lot of patch content across to two expansions and then a whole expansion still to do before I’ll really need any of that stuff, but it never hurts to work ahead or have a plan in place for when I finally get to that point. Plus, then I might actually pick a “title” for my character. Titles are a feature of the game I’ve avoided entirely up to this point since I don’t feel particularly interested in most of the titles I’ve unlocked. A lot of them were things I got just for doing the game’s plot or for just doing an activity enough times, so I don’t feel particularly proud of unlocking them. I’m not even that fond of the ones I’ve done a lot of work to get. If there was a “did everything in one year” title, I’d probably use that one when I’d inevitably unlock it, but the rest I’ve unlocked you can just kind of get if you play long enough without any particular focus or effort. You don’t have to be good at anything or particularly dedicated. Which isn’t to say that those titles mean nothing. A lot of people use them to say something about their character or themselves, but I just don’t feel like any of the ones I’ve unlocked speak to (or for) me in that kind of way and none of the accomplishments I’ve done feel like something I should be proud of. I’m not ashamed of them either, I just don’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly worth shouting out into the world, at pretty much every person I meet. Once I get all my crafting classes to level one hundred, though… Maybe that will feel worth attaching to my character’s name.

Regardless, I’ll finally be in a position to make just about everything and anything I could ever want. That’s reason enough to push my way to level one hundred. That kind of freedom of choice is a little blinding, but it will mean that I’m in a position to not only get my own stuff made whenever I want but to quickly put together gear for lower-leveled players. I had a few people do that for me when I was starting out and it was a game changer for people to just show up with everything I need instantly rather than needing to save up various currencies or muddle through the difficult process of crafting level-appropriate gear with gear that’s ten levels old. I mean, I expect that the general idea of making your own gear while you level was to create stuff multiple times throughout the process of leveling up, crafting new gear every few levels, but that’s exhausting and largely unnecessary. At least so far. Who knows what those last ten levels will be like. Challenging, I hope. I wouldn’t mind it taking geneuinely difficult work to get equipment at that tier since that would make whatever titles I unlock and gear I make feel like an accomplishment to actually feel proud of. Which, honestly, is a feeling I’m kind of missing. Sure, the emotional journey I’ve had in the main plot of the game so far has been rich and rewarding beyond my wildest expectations, but I also don’t particularly feel proud of having gotten through it all in so short a time. Mostly, I just feel emotionally wrung out (still! In a good way!) and tired. A little pride in my accomplishments would go a long way…