Final Fantasy XIV crafting and gathering is getting an overhaul with Endwalker. We’ve known that for a while, of course, but the development team finally detailed the changes a good bit more in the latest Live Letter from the Producer stream, which revealed a ton of new and upcoming content for the game.
Specifically, the concept of high-quality (HQ) gathering materials is going away. You can still craft HQ items, but won’t be able to harvest them in the wild. This was done to reduce inventory bloat. “Recipe progress and quality values will be adjusted,” which makes sense, since you can no longer use high-quality gathering materials to make difficult crafts… less of a pain.
If you’re wondering about quests that require you to gather HQ materials, well, don’t. Those are getting adjusted to accept normal materials — as are bonus rewards from any activity that awards them for gathering HQ items.
“New actions will be added and existing actions will be adjusted” for gatherers (i.e. Fishers, Botanists, and Miners). That makes sense since about half of the existing skills in the game are designed to help you gather HQ materials. No more HQ materials means no more skills to get them! The “Perception” stat doesn’t seem to be going away, however, since the team specified that the stat will have its name changed in some languages. English is unaffected, but it indicates that the stat (which has mostly been used to increase your HQ yields) is sticking around.
Perception now provides a higher chance of triggering the “Gatherer’s Boon” status. This increases your overall yields by one instead of the old effect. Across the board, in fact, it seems like any action that previously increased HQ item gathering now just boosts your Gatherer’s Boon chance. How exciting that will be for hardcore gatherers remains to be seen, of course…
Fishing is receiving a slightly different change. HQ fish will be replaced with “large-sized” fish instead. Spearfishing, in the meantime, is getting a total overhaul. This previously worked more-or-less the same as Mining and Botany. You clicked on a bunch of bubbles and waited for them to… froth. Then, you clicked a button.
Now, Spearfishing has its own, entirely new mini-game. It looks a bit like something out of an NES game — with fish floating across the screen and the player needing to time trident pokes to catch them. There’s a combo meter and everything! Spearfishing skills will then lower your prey’s “defenses” in various ways, but the team didn’t dive too deeply into the specifics. There will be bonuses for successive catches, though.
The FFXIV devs then came for me, specifically, by announcing that crafting and fishing levequests will now receive much lower rewards in terms of gil and experience points in comparison to “certain other leves,” which will see their rewards increased. On a completely unrelated note, I just spent about a week walking back and forth in the Crystarium crafting the same two items over and over to progress every crafting class to Level 80 and actually made money just doing these randomized missions.
Keep an eye out for more FFXIV and Endwalker news as we continue to dissect the latest Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter!
