Whether you’re gunning for certain Final Fantasy XIV achievements or just trying to grind out Tomestones and Sacks of Nuts, S-Rank Hunts are a fantastic way of accumulating these currencies. The main problem for most players, however, is they have both an incredibly long spawn timer and will only spawn under very specific conditions.
Even one as easy as the Kaiser Behemoth in the Coerthas Western Highlands has an 80-140 hour spawn timer and when available, will only show up if you summon a Behemoth Heir minion and fly close to the ground over one randomly chosen spawn point out of of the 18 available throughout the map. The chances you accidentally discover S-Rank Hunts in FFXIV is essentially zero.
There are tools to help you with this, of course, but unless you’re an expert they can be very daunting. Some like Faloop, track whether the window for the creature to spawn is currently open. I consider myself to be more invested into Final Fantasy XIV’s various systems and mechanics, but this is one that has long been beyond me. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to know when they’re available no matter which shard you’re on. In this guide, we’ll tell you exactly how to set yourself up to passively (or actively) finish your S-Rank Hunts and go over the completion rewards.
Why Do S-Rank Hunts?
Aside from achievements, S-Rank Hunts have the potential to earn you all of the following in a single hunt, should you achieve the maximum possible score.
Endwalker S-Rank Hunt Rewards
- 100 Sacks of Nuts
- 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics
- 80 Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism
- 30 Allagan Tomestones of Astronomy
- 1 Cracked Dendrocluster
- 1 Cracked Anthocluster
Shadowbringers S-Rank Hunt Rewards
- 100 Sacks of Nuts
- 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics
- 30 Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism
Stormblood S-Rank Hunt Rewards
- 100 Centurio Seals
- 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics
- 30 Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism
Heavensward S-Rank Hunt Rewards
- 100 Centurio Seals
- 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics
- 30 Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism
A Realm Reborn S-Rank Hunt Rewards
- 100 Allied Seals
- 50 Centurio Seals
- 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics
- 30 Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism
That’s a whole lot for what usually boils down to five minutes of work and some travel costs.
How to Get S-Rank Hunt Notifications
This is the part of the guide where I tell you to join a Discord server. It’s not ideal, but that’s where a lot of communities communicate and coordinate for things like this. If you’re on Primal, like I am, I highly recommend The Coeurl Discord server.
Once you join, scroll down to the bottom of the channels list and select S-Rank Notifications. Inside you’ll see a few different options where you can customize your notification settings. Only want S-Rank Hunts from Endwalker? You can do that. Don’t want to have to visit other worlds? You can react with the appropriate emoji to only get notifications for those that are already on your server. As you can see, I reacted with the octopus so I only get pinged when an Ultros S-Rank Hunt is live. You can find these notifications in the S-Rank Announcements channel.
Sadly, the Coeurl only serves players on the Primal shard. If you’re on anything else, you can get the same service from the Centurio Hunts Discord server.
When you first join, follow the instructions and type “?iam [Server Name] [Character Name].” After processing that, you’ll get a DM with a link to confirm you’re not a bot. Now navigate over to the Data Center Selection channel and choose yours. If you want to further refine your notification settings, switch to the [Server] Hunt Roles channel where you can select specific types of hunts. Notifications of live hunts are automatically posted by a bot in the Primal S-Rank Relay channel.
I recommend The Coeurl server over Centurio because the former will update the notification once the boss has been killed, keeping you from wasting your time. Centurio leaves the notifications live and the only way to know if the boss has been killed yet is to go check the location yourself.
Why You Should Do S-Rank Hunts
With such long spawn timers it’s important that you do these whenever you can. Most of these hunts will take you, at most, ten minutes and are usually only alive for a very small window of time before they’re killed and put on a three to five day death timer.
You have to be there within a few minutes of spawning or you’ll miss out entirely, so don’t dilly dally. As soon as you get the notification, it’s time to stop whatever you’re doing (assuming you can), and head to the location.
As we mentioned before, they’re also a very efficient way of passively farming Allagan Tomestones of Aphorism and Astronomy alongside Sacks of Nuts.
And if you’re dedicated enough, there’s also the exclusive Triceratops, Centurio Tiger, and Victor mounts which require a total of 11,000 S-Rank and A-Rank hunt completions throughout Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and elsewhere.
