HomeFeaturesFinal Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Final Fantasy XIV’s interior designers will build you Hogwarts, for a priceMMO DIY SOS
MMO DIY SOS
As in real life, there is nothing more desirable inFinal Fantasy XIVthan owning your own home. The plots for houses in the long-running MMO are limited and it can be a struggle to nab a space before other players, and housing is therefore an FFXIV player’s measure of in-game status.
There’s another step beyond owning a house if you really want to show off, however: how you decorate that house. From bars, to modern living rooms, and even someone who managed to create a night sky in their basement, FFXIV’s relatively basic housing tools can be bent or broken to create seemingly anything if you’re patient and skilled. Or, if you’ve got the in-game currency to pay someone else to do it for you.
When I first spoke to Luthien, a teacher from the Netherlands during the day and an interior designer for hire in game, she was in the middle of making Hogwarts castle inside someone’s house.
Luthien is one of a small handful of players who sells her design skills to other players for millions of gil, the in-game currency. Her work takes days to complete. I asked her what the most important element was when creating a good house design, and she emphasised the need for patience.
Glitching is a huge part of an interior designer’s skillset in FFXIV and one that Square Enix quietly turns a blind eye to. The results can be miraculous. It involves using partitions and other items to float things into positions they normally couldn’t rest at, or getting them to clip into each other to look like something else entirely. It’s a fiddly process, but it’s the only way to get items like beds onto lofts and plants onto surfaces that don’t normally register as shelves. Or to make gargoyles that block staircases.
“This is where patience comes in,” says Luthien. “From the top of my head, I think my statue consists of 12 other items glitched together as one, which can really take some time to get right.”
If you want to see the kinds of results glitching can produce, spend some time browsingHousing Snap. The Japanese website hosts photo sets of player’s homes and some of them are stunning for their lavishness and complexity. They put some real world Instagrammers to shame.
Moogie, aprominent FFXIV fan artist and decorator, agrees. When I ask her for interior design tips, she highlights fundamentals of design over technical wizardry.
I picked out a dark green for the floor tiles rather than leaving it the default colour I had before, added a few lamps, and repurposed a blank picture frame as a mirror. To complete my suite I needed a toilet, but with none available in game I would have to craft my own from a cabinet and a stool.
It took me 30 minutes of sourcing and tweaking the position of each item just to make a simple toilet. I had hoped to do my whole cottage like this in an afternoon, but Luthien’s advice about needing patience rang in my head. I think I’ll start saving up my gil to hire her instead.
