Hi, I’m Kate Sánchez. I’m the EIC of butwhytho.net, a film, anime, and game critic. But more importantly, I’m a paladin main on Leviathan who has spent the last year diving deeper into the award-winning and critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV than I ever have before. I’ve played FF14 on and off again for the last seven years, and it's the only MMO I have repeatedly returned to after long stints away. Half of that is because the community makes it extremely easy to come back in and relearn the mechanics, and the other half is because there are systems beyond just endgame raiding to keep me engaged. Glams is one, and housing is the other.
So. I’m here to write a monthly column about it. Everything I’ve learned when it comes to reselling furniture, buying items, and making furniture that doesn’t exist by using different items came from talking to others. When I started getting deeper into housing and the kind of furniture and rooms I could build, my first priority was making a toilet. And as weird as it may sound, the excited squeal I let out during our FC Disord call when I completed my bathroom was so high that it didn’t register on the mic. Then I made everyone visit my home, and they got it. Toilets are kind of a big deal.
That said, I do want to set some expectations. While I love losing hours of my life scrolling through the XIV Housing Archives Discord or watching new videos on HGXIV, I rarely attempt to do builds that condense my house into one room. That means you’ll get more cottage-core exploration using the new Tural items than a Scandinavian kitchen. That said, building new furniture items like ovens and refrigerators and floating a Nomazu or two is definitely on the table.
A few months ago, I got even deeper into the housing systems when I worked with friends to build a Late Night talk show stage for a charity stream held by Axe of the Blood God. We blew up my house and transformed the upstairs into a photo op and bar and the basement into a stage with a live studio audience. It was a process that excited me to build more and invite people into my cozy plot on Leviathan (). But it also made me want to try new and bigger things that I haven’t done before.
But the path to falling in love with housing in FF14 is infamously difficult. Honestly, I bought a house in real life before I bought one in FF14. Then I hit a bout of depression and forgot to log in, and then I lost it. With a limited number of plots that shrink in availability as they go up in size (from small to medium to large) and a lottery system as the only way to buy a plot, it can take years to secure the goods. My first small plot took me around three years because getting Gil is one thing, and winning the lottery is another beast. When I returned to the game to prep for Dawntrail and finally be able to play a new expansion on day one, we got a new small plot.
This time, I’m not going to let it go. While I have invested a lot in glamour plates for my classes and even minion collecting, housing has now become one of my favorite end-game things to do. My husband is an omnicrafter, so I routinely make lists of what I’d like from the preview menu in the housing HUD to add new things to the home. Plus, it’s now become a running joke that I blow the house up once a quarter (if not once a month).
Now that I have a home again, albeit a small one in a terrible location, I have gone all in on housing. It’s not like I wasn’t before, but now I have an apartment in my Free Company’s ward to hold all my extra things and a room in our FC house to make the witchy library of my dreams. With limited housing item slots, getting deeply invested in building the home of your dreams (or current aesthetic obsession) uses a lot of resources.
In a serendipitous turn of events, Square Enix announced in the latest Live Letter some major updates that are kind of a big deal. While I’ll probably cover the “bigger in the inside” changes coming in regard to being able to upsize your interior size from small to medium, and medium to large, the other development is what has me the most excited: smooth walls.
While some players may like the cozy pillars on the walls of your house, I despise them. They jut out and disrupt the symmetrical placement of things like fireplaces and all sorts of wall decorations. The pillars (and the windows) attached to the exterior aesthetic of your house have been a constant annoyance. In order to do away with them, players use partitions to create a smooth wall effect. A relatively easy hack, you can move partitions of all kinds against the existing wall and connect them to create a smooth surface.
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Nearly every person I know with an FF14 does the smooth wall fix, and it’s one of the simplest personalization things you can do. That said, by using partitions, you forgo using one of the wallpaper options windows (since faux windows can only be placed on partitions using a glitch), and of course, you sacrifice some space depending on whether you are attempting to cover the intrusive corner pillars.
But to do all of this for each room, you’re sacrificing (depending on the house size) anywhere from 12-24 slots per room, depending on the size and complexity of the build. Allowing players to remove pillars frees up slots for more full furniture options if they’re okay with the wallpapers available. Which considering how much I paid for that Eulmore red, I would be.
That said, the need for partitions isn’t entirely gone. By glitching faux windows or using arched ones, you can customize where the light comes from during the daytime cycle, cover up existing windows that don’t work with your aesthetic, and ultimately use dye colors that aren’t available to us for customizing interior walls. I guess you could say the pros and cons. But as someone who has steered away from more complicated builds for my interior because of lack of item space, toggling on smooth walls helps remedy that.
All of this is to say, if you’re focused on becoming a housing sicko who worries about how many slots your partitions take up because you can’t be without smooth walls, well, hi. Welcome. I’ll talk to you again in a month.