After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).
Continue readingCrafting
A Whole Weekend Of Avoiding My Life Via Final Fantasy 14 Has Left Me With A Lot To Show For It
Sometimes you wake up, start getting ready for work, and then get a text message that sends you back to bed. That’s what happened to me today (the day I’m writing this). Took a day off and everything. Slept for another couple hours, lay miserably in bed while trying to doze for a couple more, and then finally forced myself out of it around noon so I could actually shower and get dressed, make my coffee, and eat some kind of food. You know, the things you do to have some kind of day. Then, instead of think about anything since my next therapy appointment isn’t until tomorrow and I’m putting off everything I can until then, I lost myself in more Final Fantasy 14 crafting hell for the entire afternoon. Or, in this case, gathering hell. Over the weekend, I spent most of my free time working through this crafting project of mine, to make my own high-level gear that is going to quickly become irrelevant, I’m sure. The instant the next patch hits, it will all be largely irrelevant, but for now it’s the baseline required to participate in high-level content that has already been released. Well, for the combat job gear. The crafting and gathering gear is probably the best stuff we’ll see for a while, so getting that stuff set up properly is going to matter a whole lot more permanently since, according to my research, I’ll be using it until the patch content of the next expansion (and I have no idea when that might even happen). Unfortunately, to make any of that, I had to acquire some mid-level patch-content crafting and gathering gear, get all that set up with stat-boosting materia, and only then could I start gathering the special materials required for the actual high-end gear. Which needs to come together soon because I have a set date for doing current “raid” content with other members of my Free Company who have finished everything the game has to offer so far.
Continue readingSetting Up A Serious Grind In Final Fantasy 14 To Distract Myself From My Life
I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.
Continue readingDedication To The Craft In Final Fantasy 14
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.
Continue readingEmett’s Villainous Plans
Daisy plopped onto Emett’s bed. “Now that I’ve explained the entire saga, what’ve you been doing lately?”
Continue readingSaturday Morning Musing
I enjoy arts and crafts. Always have. As a child, I enjoyed gluing stuff to other stuff and cutting up things (many of which I was not supposed to). While I didn’t make much of note prior to college, I really found myself enjoying theater carpentry. It was so much fun to build sets or props! I may not have loved every single second of my job working at the theater, but it is the only job I miss having so far. I learned a lot of great skills there and went from someone who couldn’t cut a straight line even with a straight line to follow to someone who could take a picture a set designer gave me and turn it, plus a few hundred dollars, into a set for a musical. I really wish my college laptop hadn’t died, because then I’d have some pictures to share along with today’s post.
After college, my opportunity to build things has been somewhat lessened. I don’t have easy access to all of the tools, work space, and scrap lumber that I used to, so assembling a pantry and bookshelf out of scrap wood and set pieces that were destined for the trash is no longer possible. Neither is easily building a coffee table you can dance on. Over the past almost 5 years, I’ve been collecting power tools and presents and finances allow, so I’m finally ready to start making stuff again! Or, rather, I will be once I’ve got an air-compressor and air-powered nail/staple guns. Well, actually, I suppose I could just screw everything together. Staples and glue makes for easy destruction, which is probably a bit more important for theater than if I’m making a nifty gaming table.
Outside of theater carpentry, I haven’t done much crafting. Pottery would be fun to learn, as would anything to do with metal. Metal is a bit expensive, though, and the resources it requires are a bit more than an extension cord and a garage. I’d need a real workshop and proper protective gear if I wanted to learn to weld anything. Interestingly, though, there’s apparently a workshop around where I live that I can use if I’m willing to pay $100 a month to become a member. It’d include training on all of the equipment they have, access to a work space (or “maker space” as they called it), and a ton of like-minded peers who’d be happy to give me pointers if I was attempting something beyond my skill. I’d love to sign up, but $100 a month is most-certainly not in my budget.
Honestly, after budgeting and doing taxes last week, I feel like I’ve got less money than before. That doesn’t really make sense because now I actually have a full understanding of my financial situation. It is actually better than I thought it was, though not by much, and that joy was mitigated by the fact that I, for the first time in my life, owed taxes. I’m not sure how, since I haven’t compared this year’s filing to last year’s yet, but I’ll hopefully figure it out soon and be able to prevent it in the future. In the mean time, I just need to tighten my financial belt a little more and see what room I can make between my expenses and my income for extra loan payments on my car.
Which, you know, is going to make it hard to buy things I don’t actually need like a bunch of lumber or an air compressor and nail/staple gun. It is hard to justify building a fancy and extravagant gaming table when my “fun stuff just for me” budget is $30 a month. At least there’s other stuff I can do, like create a sand mold with my girlfriend as a date last weekend and then, this week, go watch a bunch of molten iron get poured into it. Having never seen anything like this before, I’m super interested to see it happen. The biggest question on my mind is how viscous the liquid metal is. The thing I made has a lot of small details and I’m concerned they won’t come out. And that I did a shit job of making sure it was all level and neat once I was done. I’m probably going to need to get an angle grinder or a dremel to clean it up. That’ll be tons of fun, though!