From the log
1 of 97Runes, bank an augment and put it where you want
Every kill that pays you experience can now hand your account a Rune, one Super Auged augment banked for later. Open the new Runes tab in /spoils, pick a piece of your own gear, and the augment goes on it. Plus a longer road to Esper mastery, a round of trade and storage fixes, and squad characters that were stuck at level 50.
Nemesis Restart this Battle, and DWGambits ready for Wings of the Goddess
Farming the same Nemesis for its +1 no longer costs two loading screens a fight: open the chest, press Restart this Battle, and the monster comes back in the same arena. DWGambits gets a full Dancer and Scholar pass, eleven new conditions, a searchable condition picker, and dozens of fixes.
Nemesis +1 gear, Super Auged spoils, Hover Shot, and a dock for your windows
240 Nemesis monsters now have an item level 119 +1 you can buy with its trophies, a DWSpoils roll can come up Super Auged, Rangers get Hover Shot with no movement needed, and /dw rail docks all your DriftwoodXI windows in one slim column. Plus charm that keeps your squad and spell damage that always lands.
Blue Magic overhaul, 35% gear haste, and a Puppetmaster pass
Every Blue Magic spell in the game now casts, eight more can be learned, and four new ones join the list. Gear haste caps at 35 percent so Ascension's Celerity counts on top of capped gear. Puppetmasters deploy faster, automatons skill up like you do, and Animator Z finally carries its stats. Plus Overkill, Spaekona's Coat, and Unleashed kills that always count.
Espers: Magicite, attunement, and the grind after the grind
Every kill that pays you experience now pays Magicite. Magicite and Esper Cores make Espers, the thirty-one from Final Fantasy VI and a thirty-second called Driftwood. Equip one and it lends its spells, abilities, traits and stats to any job; fight with it long enough and they are yours forever. Plus a puppetmaster fix, a corsair fix, Aspir III, and more.
S ranks, a fully raised Aht Urhgan, and ammunition for crafters
Three new skill ranks above A+ for ten jobs that needed the help, the ToAU +60 now reaches every enemy in every Aht Urhgan area, nine high-level rounds you can craft, Absorb-Attri on sale, and a long list of fixes
A cleaner log, wider rolls, and a Corsair who sang
DWChat folds the chat spam and colours the rest (off until you turn it on), Fancychat is installable from the launcher, every Phantom Roll reaches three times as far, elemental casting time now works on 33 more pieces, melee squad members stop freezing behind a healer, and a gunless Corsair stops singing bullets at the monster
The Artisan, Lu Shang's rod, and a walk-back
A new Artisan tab in /quests sells the crafting guilds' key items and Lu Shang's Fishing Rod for Drift Coins, the carp count for the rod drops to 5,000 with the daily catch limit raised to 500 — and Monk Hand-to-Hand and Dragoon Polearm are back to A+.
Treasures of Aht Urhgan is open
Aht Urhgan is live — Whitegate, Nashmau, forty-eight missions and three new jobs — with every monster out there raised sixty levels, so it is endgame content here rather than level 60 content.
Balance pass: every job
Every job that plays differently here than it does on retail, with the number, in one table — Warcry at a minute, Boost at 25% a press, Hasso and Seigan at fifteen minutes, doubled buff song duration, 1.75x on four schools of magic, and the rest. Jobs not listed play as retail does.
Black Mage reparations, Endark II and Enlight II, the Prophetic Knife, and a macro fix
Elemental magic goes from 1.25x to 1.75x for players and everyone fighting on their side, while enemies stay exactly where they were. Dark Knights and Paladins can finally cast the Endark II and Enlight II their job points paid for. The Prophetic Knife gives its stats. And dwmacro stops leaving you one book and one set away from the page you asked for.
Unleashed: a famous monster breaks loose in the open world, and everyone who shows up gets paid
Every two to three hours a Legend-tier notorious monster stands up in a real zone and the whole server is told where. Ten minutes to get there, then it wakes — no claim, no party, anyone may fight it. Kill it and every account that took part is paid Drift Coins on the spot.
Ascension II, Larceny fixed, Black Mage melee ranks, and stronger squads
A second page of eight Mastery lines on the Ascension tab, with the first page repriced and every rank you already paid for kept. Larceny no longer hands a thief an eight-hour Invincible. Black Mage gets A+ staff and B- scythe and dagger. Squad members hit, dodge and defend like the character they are, learn Unbridled spells, can be told to hold TP for a bigger weapon skill, and a hired mercenary now fights with the whole rule set you wrote.
Mercenary Battles: your mercenary, your rules, a wager, and the Hall of Records
The mercenary board grows an arena. Register a mercenary you listed, fighting by a rule set you wrote, put up a wager, and anyone can answer it; five minutes later the two fight in Ru'Lude Gardens while everyone watches. Also in this patch, seals drop every two minutes instead of five, hired mercenaries keep their weapon skills and run a full sub job, and five lottery camps that could never pop are fixed.
Office pays now: the Mayor of Jeuno, powers with teeth, and a public ledger
DWPolitics grows a sixth seat and a ladder to the Crown, every office gets real powers held in check by design, DWPort's fares are now the office holders' to set, and half of every gil charged above the stock price is theirs while the other half leaves the game. All of it is on a public ledger.
The Circuit, the Grand Circuit, and a raid board that hits back
Chain Trials keep going now. Beat a boss's top rung and the arena stays open while your party names the next one; run every boss in one sitting for a Grand Circuit time on the leaderboard; the variety chain counts a whole trial as one link; and every raid boss has twice the HP and a fifth more of everything.
Chain Trials, three new bosses, and the raid board rebalanced
DWRaid gains Chain Trials -- every difficulty of a boss in one arena, paid at every kill -- plus the Moonlit Carbuncle, the Verglas Shiva and the Keraunos Ramuh, a rebalanced roster, three new leaderboards, blue magic learned three times as fast, four player-report fixes, and a launcher that can bind Target Nearby NPC.
Nemesis eased, jobs for sale, and your squad's bows
Nemesis arenas cap at level 160 with cheaper doors, the Drift Board pays a fifth more and sells every job unlock for 100 coins, DWCon shows every effect on your target from the server itself, squad members shoot like their characters and stop wasting ninja tools, Bard gambits save again, three more addons are allowed, and the fishing and digging days are longer.
Get a working client
If the game will not let you log in since September's retail patch, the website now has one page that walks you all the way from a fresh install to a working launch — and the one trick that makes PlayOnline actually fetch the update.
Relic, mythic and empyrean effects, for you and your squad
A squad member wielding a relic, mythic or empyrean weapon now earns its aftermath; every 99 II and 119 II relic gives the afterglow aftermath it promised; nine relics get their additional effect back above level 75; eight mythics and the two ranged empyreans get the lines they were missing.
Summoners by name, Avatar's Favor, and digging skill-ups doubled
Your squad summoner's keep and release rules take an avatar's name, Avatar's Favor works from a rule and its aura reaches the party, chocobo digging skills up twice as often, a thief's Trick Attack lands on a hugging squad member again, and the Avalanche Tzar's fuse is counted down out loud from the moment you land.
Rename your characters, skip the two stories, and refresh the chat log
The Drift Board grows a Special shelf with three services: a character rename for 500 Drift Coins, the Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia story skip for 1,000, and every waypoint of both expansions in DWPort for 250 once the stories are done. The GM panel's chat log gets a Refresh button.
Any Arena, Any Boss
The raid seats a full boss in the next free arena instead of turning you away, your alts' automatons can be fitted and named from the bags window, and Aht Urhgan gets its price list ahead of the gates opening.
September's Retail Patch
Square Enix patched FINAL FANTASY XI on September 9; update your client through PlayOnline before the next server patch, and update the launcher so item names, augments and titles come back — in the game and in the addons.
The End-Game Balancing Act, Part One
The raid now pays for variety instead of repetition, the reforge stones drop in the world, Nemesis grows to two hundred and forty-seven monsters at half the fee with a stone chance in every chest, and the Pop-Items shelf asks fewer hundred-pieces.
Politics: five seats of power, won by your votes
A new addon. The Crown of Vana'diel, the Mayors of Bastok, San d'Oria and Windurst, and the Royal Treasurer are now real offices, each won by a vote of every account on a four-week season clock. Winners hold real levers, every act is public, and the first season opens on September 14.
Empyrean Weapons at the Arms Dealer, and Oboro's road to 119
The sixteen Empyrean weapons are on the Arms Dealer shelf in /quests for Drift Coins, at level 99. Oboro in Port Jeuno takes them, and the Relic weapons, to item level 119 for 300 stones from the /raid shop. Here is what each road costs.
Nemesis: a hundred famous monsters, a hundred levels stronger, and a chest that is yours alone
A new battleground. Pick any of a hundred famous notorious monsters — Leaping Lizzy to Kirin — pay the fee, and fight it in a private arena at its wild level plus one hundred. Kill it and every real player opens the chest once for their own roll of its real drop table, and every piece of gear comes with one to four random augments.
Playing DriftwoodXI on Linux
A by-hand guide for Linux players is up on the website, and the launcher has taken its first step toward running there too.
Finishing Chains of Promathia
The road from the Dawn fight to The Last Verse, step by step, including the three Jeuno quests that actually close the CoP log and unlock the Promyvion raid tier and the 109 shelf.
The armor ladder, the Jeweler, and blue magic you can read
Every classic armor family now climbs from the Outfitter to item level 109 through the forge, the Drift Board has a Jeweler selling the Promathia-era earrings and rings, and the ToAU kit's Blue Mage tab shows what each spell grants and which job trait it feeds.
Ascension — your limit points are a currency now
Every limit point you earn is banked for life. The bank buys Mastery tiers — permanent HP, MP, attributes, accuracy, attack, damage taken, regen and weapon skill damage that every squad member you call inherits — or merit points at ten thousand each. Merits got bigger too, with a window that tells the truth. Type /merits.
X-Magic, and the endgame loop closes
A ring augment that lets one spell cast a second. Merit Points roughly double across the board. Mounts arrive on the /cpx store. Plus the Relic Reforge tab, the Pop-Items shelf, a three-hour Dynamis clock, and Stash and Trash in your bags.
Weapon Burst — your weapon casts now
Weapon Burst augments give any wielded weapon a chance every attack round to fire off a real spell — nukes, buffs, or enfeebles, and they can magic burst in a skillchain window. Earned in the Gauntlet, bought on the Drift Exchange. Type /quests.
The Conquest Point Exchange
Every gate guard's conquest-point shelf and every merchant's counter in Vana'diel, in one window, from anywhere. Any nation's gear at any rank for your own CP, and 1,400+ merchant items for gil or conquest points. Type /cpx.
The wind pair, a raid rebalance, and seven fixes you reported
Two new bosses open the Cloister of Gales, bringing the raid board to eight trials across four shrines and twelve arenas. Four existing fights are retuned, the Cragmaw's stone armor is fixed, and seven bugs you reported are closed -- Bestial Loyalty on squad members, the worn tag in /dwbags, walking through your own squad, and more.
Launch failing? Windows Defender is the culprit
Windows Defender's automated scanner keeps quarantining our game loader by mistake. Microsoft has reviewed the file and confirmed it is clean. Here is the two-minute fix, and what the launcher now does to help.
Every craft to 110, and four fixes you asked for
One character can now master every crafting skill. /hidetrust finally hides squad pets too, Beastmaster Ready charges actually spend, the mystery DEBUG status icon is gone, and item tooltips show augments and readable elemental resists.
HD texture and map packs, one toggle away
Launcher 0.26.0 adds two switches under Settings → Alternate graphics — NextHD Textures and XICombinedMaps. Flip one on and the launcher downloads the pack and layers it over the game at launch; flip it off and you are back to stock. Your FFXI files are never touched.
Relics at the ArmsDealer
A new ArmsDealer tab in the Drift Board sells every level 75 Dynamis Ultimate weapon — Excalibur, Ragnarok, Spharai, Claustrum and the rest — for 250 Drift Coins apiece. Open it with /quests. And under the hood, roughly a thousand item-level pieces that used to wear their stats only on paper now actually carry them on the server.
The Player Market
Every listing with its real price, buy orders that escrow your gil, selling from anywhere with no listing fee, and an account wallet -- /dwah, from anywhere.
The Outfitter: artifact armor for Drift Coins, a daily stipend, and the end of the one-shot
A new tab on the Drift Board sells every job's artifact set for Drift Coins, logging in at all now pays your account 50 coins a day, and the two ways an even-level mob could delete you from full health — ancient magic and self-destruct moves — are gone.
Stone and tide: six trials, three shrines, nine arenas
The raid board triples: Waughroon Shrine and Balga's Dais open beside Horlais Peak, four new bosses join the roster — including a petrifying pair — every shrine runs three arenas at once, fights are capped at fifteen minutes, and the daily bonuses are retuned.
The Driftmark armory: endgame weapons and armor for every job
The Driftmark shop now sells the full item-level 100 catalog — a weapon for every job, three five-piece armor sets, shields and endgame ammunition — across five browsable pages. The ingots are retired, and everything your raids have been paying is now a gear fund.
Squad weapon skills, unblocked
Decimation, Raging Rush and every weapon skill your characters have earned now work on your alt-trusts — quest weapon skills included, arriving at the same levels a real player gets them. And if you helped finish a server contract while logged off, the server now tells you about your payout on your next login.
Your warehouse grows as you do
The warehouse cap is no longer a fixed thousand. Complete the support job quest for 100 more slots, and earn another 100 for every nation rank your account reaches for the first time, up to 2,000 slots in all -- credited retroactively, so everything you have already done already counts.
The black screen after zoning — found it
If you ever zoned into a pitch-black world — players and chat visible, but no ground and no way to move — that wasn't your PC. Our default graphics settings were pushing the ancient FFXI client past its memory limits. Fixed in today's launcher update, and yes, the weekend's server crash is fixed too.
Windows Defender false alarm on the game loader
A Defender update today wrongly flags our game loader; if your game stopped launching, here is what is happening and what we are doing.
Alliances for your squads
Squads join alliances now — up to three parties, eighteen strong, every alt-trust rendered right in the alliance windows. Four new typed commands carry the invites the game's own menus grey out, and stock trusts ride along under the same rule.
The squad enters the burning circle
Battlefields that refuse trusts now admit your own characters. Enter first, call inside, and the fight's own participant cap and level cap do the balancing.
Your login commands are back
Launcher 0.21.0 adds a Custom commands box to every addon set — /fps 1, binds, camera tweaks, anything you used to keep in default.txt — plus a clear warning when you edit a set nothing launches.
Every command, on one page
You asked for a master list of the player commands, and it is up — every typed command, the job-tag squad orders, and all nineteen add-on windows, on one page you can search with Ctrl+F.
HD mods, without touching a game file
Launcher 0.20.0 ships XIPivot, the DAT overlay loader — HD textures, remade maps and UI mods, layered over the stock game without modifying a single file, off by default and one toggle away.
Your camera settings stick now
If the in-game camera control kept flipping back to Inverted every time you launched, that was the launcher's doing — it was quietly serving one machine's settings to everyone. Fixed. Whatever you set in Config → Mouse/Cam. now survives a relog.
The raid grows: a second fight, four tiers, a fuller shelf
Horlais Peak now holds two trials — the Tidebound Colossus and the new Riptide Behemoth — each at four tiers from Easy to Savage. Every fight at every tier pays its own first-clear-of-the-day bonus, and the Driftmark shop has grown from three shelves to eleven.
Your controller and your UI are yours again
The launcher no longer overwrites your controller buttons at launch — your own FFXI pad settings now apply, or map every button in the launcher itself. UI size, font quality, texture quality and more are now real settings, and the forced 1600×900 UI that made everything blurry is gone. Plus a squad window toggle for when your trusts join the fight.
A thousand slots that follow your account
The Warehouse is open. A thousand storage slots your whole account shares, opened with /warehouse from anywhere, with a Stash All button that empties a full bag in one press and kits that pull a recipe's materials back before you sit down to craft.
Ten sets that fight with both jobs
Support jobs run at full level on DriftwoodXI, and the squad gambit library finally acts like it. Ten new shipped sets built around main/support pairings — a shadow-tanking paladin, a scholar-sealed super healer, a stun mage, a dancing beastmaster — plus deeper kits for the four pet jobs.
They notice you later
Aggro and link radius are cut in half. The honest con from yesterday's update stays -- anything that pays experience still cons Easy Prey, and an aggressive creature in that band will still come for you -- but it has to get much closer first, and it brings far fewer friends. Nothing about holding aggro changed, so pulls and kites work exactly as they did.
If it pays experience, it counts
The /check con now agrees with the experience curve. Anything that pays experience cons Easy Prey or better, so it drops crystals under Signet, feeds seal drops and weapon skill points, and counts for Drift Board contracts. Only creatures that pay nothing con Too Weak -- and the honest con cuts both ways, because Easy Prey aggro is real aggro.
Pick your squad's weapon skills
Tell each rule set which weapon skills to use, in what order, and at how much TP. Four picks, one hold amount, a new "spend at an amount" trigger — in the editor, in chat, and in every share code.
The Drift Exchange: your coins buy augments now
The storefront the Drift Board was banking coins for is open. Four augments a day, rotating on the Vana'diel clock, applied straight onto gear already in your bags -- or into the bags of a character you are not logged into. Augmented gear becomes yours: no auction house, no trade, no bazaar.
The Drift Exchange gets a window
The augment storefront is a tab in /quests now. Today's four offers with their prices and the countdown to the next roll, a picker that shows you exactly the gear an offer can go on -- yours and your logged-out alts' -- the four slots with what is in them, and a price you see before you spend anything.
Your squad's pets come along now
Squad summoners field their real avatars, dragoons their wyverns, beastmasters their jugs, and puppetmasters the automaton they actually built. Pets summon on their own, fight beside their owner, and answer the same typed commands everything else does.
Enemy balance pass: leaner trash, meaner notorious monsters
Ordinary enemies drop from 1.5x to 1.25x HP and the squad's HP scaling eases off at high level, so 60+ stops feeling like a bag of hit points. NMs keep their full 2x HP and pick up a 10% stat bump. Danger stays; sponge goes.
Streamer mode now hides your login name too
Launcher 0.9.2 closes the hole in streamer mode -- the account picker on Home was still spelling out your login username in plain text, and so was the launch log. Every name the launcher draws is now blurred, and the one control Windows draws for itself shows initials instead.
The Drift Board: contracts in your pocket
Every private server puts its custom quest giver in Lower Jeuno and makes you walk to it. DriftwoodXI puts the board in a window you open anywhere. Six slay contracts pitched at your level, a server-wide contract everyone shares, a counter that moves while you fight, and a new currency that pays out the moment the last one falls.
DWFame: all your fame, one window
Fame drives half of what Vana'diel will let you do, and retail makes you walk to a different NPC in every city to hear a riddle about it. The new dwfame addon shows every fame area as a progress bar, tells you exactly how far the next level is, and its Guide tab names the fastest repeatable quest for each one.
The launcher installs Ashita for you now
New in launcher 0.9.0 — press Install Ashita and the launcher downloads a ready-made, checksum-verified Ashita v4 with the whole DriftwoodXI addon roster already in place. No zip files, no folder shuffling, no "Ashita-cli.exe not found".
Verify your game files, and point the launcher at any FFXI install
Launcher 0.9.1 turns on Verify Game Files -- the server now publishes a manifest of every file in a known-good FFXI install, and the launcher can hash yours against it and say exactly what differs. And if your FFXI lives somewhere unusual, you can now point the launcher straight at it, during setup or any time after.
The fight finds you: auto-target that actually works
When your target dies mid-pull, you now swing straight onto the next enemy your party is fighting — even the one behind you. Weapon out, no camera dance, out to about 28 yalms. A new addon, dwengage, does the turning; the launcher installs it for you.
Everywhere you can go, everything you can make: /port and /craft
Both new windows are finished, so here is how to drive them. /port is every teleport you have unlocked in four tabs with the real fee on every button. /craft is your whole crafting career: the ledger, a recipe book that checks your bags, a ladder that plans the climb, a tally of the sitting, and every character on your account craft by craft.
A Rare you already have now goes to your next character
Rare drops stop being destroyed when your main already owns one — they go to the next character on your account instead, and are only lost once all of them have a copy.
Stop teleporting twice: the travel window
The new dwport addon puts every teleport you have unlocked in one window. Type /port, click where you are going. Home points, survival guides, outposts and the teleport spells in tabs, the locked ones greyed so you know what is left to earn, and the fees exactly what the NPC would charge.
Your crafting ledger: the new dwcraft window
The new dwcraft addon shows the crafter's ledger the game hides. Type /craft: every craft's level, rank and next rank test, the specialization budget -- how much you have spent past the free cap, how much is left, and which craft pays when it runs dry -- and the crafting rules this server actually runs, read live from its settings.
The allowed add-ons and plug-ins list is posted
There is now a published list of every add-on and plug-in you may run here, and from today anything not on it is against the terms of use. Everything the launcher installs for you is already on the list, so if you have not installed anything yourself there is nothing for you to do.
The launcher keeps itself current
Open the launcher, press Play. Updates to the launcher and to the DriftwoodXI addons now arrive on their own, the only thing ever asked of you is a restart.
The website is open
xi.driftwoodgaming.com is live, make an account, download the launcher, reset a password you have lost, and read everything posted here without installing anything first.
Start here: our addons, and how to open them
Almost everything DriftwoodXI adds to Final Fantasy XI is reached through the many addons written for this server. Nearly all of them open a window you click through. Here is what each one is, the one word that opens it, and what to do when nothing happens.
One expansion at a time: where DriftwoodXI is going
Thank you for playing here. What's open today, why the rest of Vana'diel opens one expansion at a time, and a promise: DriftwoodXI is free, and there will never be a cash shop.
The mercenary board: your characters keep working after you log off
List one of your characters on the mercenary board with an hourly rate and the gambit sets you wrote for it. Other players hire it as a trust (your gear, your levels, your rules, synced to their level) and the gil lands on your ledger while you sleep.
Close the wiki tab
The quest tracker is in. Open a quest and see its steps, with the one you are on lit up, read from your real progress on this server, never from a wiki.
Every swing counts: combat skills without the grind
Every swing rolls for a skill-up, hit or miss, and every roll under your cap lands. A fresh weapon catches up in a session, and your main is never the weakest member of his own party.
One account, sixteen characters
One account per player is the rule on DriftwoodXI. It is not a limit, your sixteen characters are a full squad, a mercenary roster, and all the storage you will ever need.
Treasure caskets, reworked: rarer chests, augmented gear
Chests are a quarter as common as retail, but three in four are the locked kind, so roughly one kill in fifty-three hides a chest full of randomly augmented gear, rolled fresh for you.
Combat rebalance: magic, weapon skills and items
Magic and weapon skills at 1.5x (Elemental at a temporary 1.75x for players since September 18, enemies at 1.25x), items at a deliberate 3x, retail-accurate character stats, and a full sub job's worth of MP. Your squad is the power fantasy, not your character sheet.
Content unlocked: Dynamis, Garrison, Sky and friends
Dynamis on a short clock (three hours as of August 30), Garrison restarting every ten minutes, the road to Tu'Lia, and the gates lowered so a handful of people can actually run all of it.
Crafting with an identity, gathering that never breaks
Every craft reaches 70, three of them can reach 110, HQ chance is doubled, harvesting tools never break, and the auction house keeps its fees honest.
Custom commands and what happens when you make a character
Every command a player can type on DriftwoodXI in one place: the squad, your account's shared bags, gambit rule sets, per-member job tags and the small quality-of-life ones, plus what a brand-new character is handed on day one, and where merits, job points and trusts come from.
Drops, gil and a rewritten Treasure Hunter curve
Double drop rates, gil from every mob, rebuilt treasure caskets, and Treasure Hunter exactly as retail tuned it, on top of it all.
How DriftwoodXI plays: the numbers at a glance
Progression at 3x, drops and gil at 2x, combat at 1.5x with items a deliberate 3x, movement at 1.5x retail so you never commute, and death that still costs something. The whole server on one page.
Rates and progression: the full table
Triple gil, experience, capacity and tabs; FOV and GOV pages at 1.5x; death costs half of what retail charged; and movement at 1.5x retail, so you never spend an evening commuting.
Rule sets: write how your squad fights
Final Fantasy XII's gambit system, in Vana'diel, on your own characters. Ordered rules of the form "ally under 40% HP → cast the biggest Cure I can afford", written by you, obeyed by your squad, with a library of forty ready-made sets if you would rather not.
One inventory across your whole account
Search every bag on every character you own from the one you are playing, move items between them without logging in and out, and let your squad members dress themselves out of their own bags.
The Squad: bring your own characters as trusts
Register up to five of your own characters and summon them as party members. They wear the best gear they own, fight on their real jobs, and earn real experience back to their own rows.
The DriftwoodXI launcher
Account auto-login, addon loadouts you can toggle without editing scripts, per-account graphics settings, live server status and automatic updates, the whole server in one window.
Welcome to DriftwoodXI
A small, unhurried Vana'diel for friends, launching with the base game and Rise of the Zilart, generous rates, and no cash shop, ever.
News
Announcements, patch notes and the reasoning behind them. These are the same posts the launcher shows you on its Home panel.
Runes, bank an augment and put it where you want
Every kill that pays you experience can now hand your account a Rune, one Super Auged augment banked for later. Open the new Runes tab in /spoils, pick a piece of your own gear, and the augment goes on it. Plus a longer road to Esper mastery, a round of trade and storage fixes, and squad characters that were stuck at level 50.
Nemesis Restart this Battle, and DWGambits ready for Wings of the Goddess
Farming the same Nemesis for its +1 no longer costs two loading screens a fight: open the chest, press Restart this Battle, and the monster comes back in the same arena. DWGambits gets a full Dancer and Scholar pass, eleven new conditions, a searchable condition picker, and dozens of fixes.
Nemesis +1 gear, Super Auged spoils, Hover Shot, and a dock for your windows
240 Nemesis monsters now have an item level 119 +1 you can buy with its trophies, a DWSpoils roll can come up Super Auged, Rangers get Hover Shot with no movement needed, and /dw rail docks all your DriftwoodXI windows in one slim column. Plus charm that keeps your squad and spell damage that always lands.
Blue Magic overhaul, 35% gear haste, and a Puppetmaster pass
Every Blue Magic spell in the game now casts, eight more can be learned, and four new ones join the list. Gear haste caps at 35 percent so Ascension's Celerity counts on top of capped gear. Puppetmasters deploy faster, automatons skill up like you do, and Animator Z finally carries its stats. Plus Overkill, Spaekona's Coat, and Unleashed kills that always count.
Espers: Magicite, attunement, and the grind after the grind
Every kill that pays you experience now pays Magicite. Magicite and Esper Cores make Espers, the thirty-one from Final Fantasy VI and a thirty-second called Driftwood. Equip one and it lends its spells, abilities, traits and stats to any job; fight with it long enough and they are yours forever. Plus a puppetmaster fix, a corsair fix, Aspir III, and more.
Treasures of Aht Urhgan is open
Aht Urhgan is live — Whitegate, Nashmau, forty-eight missions and three new jobs — with every monster out there raised sixty levels, so it is endgame content here rather than level 60 content.
Balance pass: every job
Every job that plays differently here than it does on retail, with the number, in one table — Warcry at a minute, Boost at 25% a press, Hasso and Seigan at fifteen minutes, doubled buff song duration, 1.75x on four schools of magic, and the rest. Jobs not listed play as retail does.
Black Mage reparations, Endark II and Enlight II, the Prophetic Knife, and a macro fix
Elemental magic goes from 1.25x to 1.75x for players and everyone fighting on their side, while enemies stay exactly where they were. Dark Knights and Paladins can finally cast the Endark II and Enlight II their job points paid for. The Prophetic Knife gives its stats. And dwmacro stops leaving you one book and one set away from the page you asked for.
Unleashed: a famous monster breaks loose in the open world, and everyone who shows up gets paid
Every two to three hours a Legend-tier notorious monster stands up in a real zone and the whole server is told where. Ten minutes to get there, then it wakes — no claim, no party, anyone may fight it. Kill it and every account that took part is paid Drift Coins on the spot.
Ascension II, Larceny fixed, Black Mage melee ranks, and stronger squads
A second page of eight Mastery lines on the Ascension tab, with the first page repriced and every rank you already paid for kept. Larceny no longer hands a thief an eight-hour Invincible. Black Mage gets A+ staff and B- scythe and dagger. Squad members hit, dodge and defend like the character they are, learn Unbridled spells, can be told to hold TP for a bigger weapon skill, and a hired mercenary now fights with the whole rule set you wrote.
Chain Trials, three new bosses, and the raid board rebalanced
DWRaid gains Chain Trials -- every difficulty of a boss in one arena, paid at every kill -- plus the Moonlit Carbuncle, the Verglas Shiva and the Keraunos Ramuh, a rebalanced roster, three new leaderboards, blue magic learned three times as fast, four player-report fixes, and a launcher that can bind Target Nearby NPC.
Nemesis eased, jobs for sale, and your squad's bows
Nemesis arenas cap at level 160 with cheaper doors, the Drift Board pays a fifth more and sells every job unlock for 100 coins, DWCon shows every effect on your target from the server itself, squad members shoot like their characters and stop wasting ninja tools, Bard gambits save again, three more addons are allowed, and the fishing and digging days are longer.
Get a working client
If the game will not let you log in since September's retail patch, the website now has one page that walks you all the way from a fresh install to a working launch — and the one trick that makes PlayOnline actually fetch the update.
Any Arena, Any Boss
The raid seats a full boss in the next free arena instead of turning you away, your alts' automatons can be fitted and named from the bags window, and Aht Urhgan gets its price list ahead of the gates opening.
September's Retail Patch
Square Enix patched FINAL FANTASY XI on September 9; update your client through PlayOnline before the next server patch, and update the launcher so item names, augments and titles come back — in the game and in the addons.
The End-Game Balancing Act, Part One
The raid now pays for variety instead of repetition, the reforge stones drop in the world, Nemesis grows to two hundred and forty-seven monsters at half the fee with a stone chance in every chest, and the Pop-Items shelf asks fewer hundred-pieces.
Politics: five seats of power, won by your votes
A new addon. The Crown of Vana'diel, the Mayors of Bastok, San d'Oria and Windurst, and the Royal Treasurer are now real offices, each won by a vote of every account on a four-week season clock. Winners hold real levers, every act is public, and the first season opens on September 14.
Empyrean Weapons at the Arms Dealer, and Oboro's road to 119
The sixteen Empyrean weapons are on the Arms Dealer shelf in /quests for Drift Coins, at level 99. Oboro in Port Jeuno takes them, and the Relic weapons, to item level 119 for 300 stones from the /raid shop. Here is what each road costs.
Nemesis: a hundred famous monsters, a hundred levels stronger, and a chest that is yours alone
A new battleground. Pick any of a hundred famous notorious monsters — Leaping Lizzy to Kirin — pay the fee, and fight it in a private arena at its wild level plus one hundred. Kill it and every real player opens the chest once for their own roll of its real drop table, and every piece of gear comes with one to four random augments.
Ascension — your limit points are a currency now
Every limit point you earn is banked for life. The bank buys Mastery tiers — permanent HP, MP, attributes, accuracy, attack, damage taken, regen and weapon skill damage that every squad member you call inherits — or merit points at ten thousand each. Merits got bigger too, with a window that tells the truth. Type /merits.
X-Magic, and the endgame loop closes
A ring augment that lets one spell cast a second. Merit Points roughly double across the board. Mounts arrive on the /cpx store. Plus the Relic Reforge tab, the Pop-Items shelf, a three-hour Dynamis clock, and Stash and Trash in your bags.
Weapon Burst — your weapon casts now
Weapon Burst augments give any wielded weapon a chance every attack round to fire off a real spell — nukes, buffs, or enfeebles, and they can magic burst in a skillchain window. Earned in the Gauntlet, bought on the Drift Exchange. Type /quests.
The Conquest Point Exchange
Every gate guard's conquest-point shelf and every merchant's counter in Vana'diel, in one window, from anywhere. Any nation's gear at any rank for your own CP, and 1,400+ merchant items for gil or conquest points. Type /cpx.
The Player Market
Every listing with its real price, buy orders that escrow your gil, selling from anywhere with no listing fee, and an account wallet -- /dwah, from anywhere.
The Outfitter: artifact armor for Drift Coins, a daily stipend, and the end of the one-shot
A new tab on the Drift Board sells every job's artifact set for Drift Coins, logging in at all now pays your account 50 coins a day, and the two ways an even-level mob could delete you from full health — ancient magic and self-destruct moves — are gone.
Your warehouse grows as you do
The warehouse cap is no longer a fixed thousand. Complete the support job quest for 100 more slots, and earn another 100 for every nation rank your account reaches for the first time, up to 2,000 slots in all -- credited retroactively, so everything you have already done already counts.
The black screen after zoning — found it
If you ever zoned into a pitch-black world — players and chat visible, but no ground and no way to move — that wasn't your PC. Our default graphics settings were pushing the ancient FFXI client past its memory limits. Fixed in today's launcher update, and yes, the weekend's server crash is fixed too.
Windows Defender false alarm on the game loader
A Defender update today wrongly flags our game loader; if your game stopped launching, here is what is happening and what we are doing.
A thousand slots that follow your account
The Warehouse is open. A thousand storage slots your whole account shares, opened with /warehouse from anywhere, with a Stash All button that empties a full bag in one press and kits that pull a recipe's materials back before you sit down to craft.
The Drift Exchange gets a window
The augment storefront is a tab in /quests now. Today's four offers with their prices and the countdown to the next roll, a picker that shows you exactly the gear an offer can go on -- yours and your logged-out alts' -- the four slots with what is in them, and a price you see before you spend anything.
The Drift Board: contracts in your pocket
Every private server puts its custom quest giver in Lower Jeuno and makes you walk to it. DriftwoodXI puts the board in a window you open anywhere. Six slay contracts pitched at your level, a server-wide contract everyone shares, a counter that moves while you fight, and a new currency that pays out the moment the last one falls.
DWFame: all your fame, one window
Fame drives half of what Vana'diel will let you do, and retail makes you walk to a different NPC in every city to hear a riddle about it. The new dwfame addon shows every fame area as a progress bar, tells you exactly how far the next level is, and its Guide tab names the fastest repeatable quest for each one.
The launcher installs Ashita for you now
New in launcher 0.9.0 — press Install Ashita and the launcher downloads a ready-made, checksum-verified Ashita v4 with the whole DriftwoodXI addon roster already in place. No zip files, no folder shuffling, no "Ashita-cli.exe not found".
Everywhere you can go, everything you can make: /port and /craft
Both new windows are finished, so here is how to drive them. /port is every teleport you have unlocked in four tabs with the real fee on every button. /craft is your whole crafting career: the ledger, a recipe book that checks your bags, a ladder that plans the climb, a tally of the sitting, and every character on your account craft by craft.
The allowed add-ons and plug-ins list is posted
There is now a published list of every add-on and plug-in you may run here, and from today anything not on it is against the terms of use. Everything the launcher installs for you is already on the list, so if you have not installed anything yourself there is nothing for you to do.
The website is open
xi.driftwoodgaming.com is live, make an account, download the launcher, reset a password you have lost, and read everything posted here without installing anything first.
Start here: our addons, and how to open them
Almost everything DriftwoodXI adds to Final Fantasy XI is reached through the many addons written for this server. Nearly all of them open a window you click through. Here is what each one is, the one word that opens it, and what to do when nothing happens.
One expansion at a time: where DriftwoodXI is going
Thank you for playing here. What's open today, why the rest of Vana'diel opens one expansion at a time, and a promise: DriftwoodXI is free, and there will never be a cash shop.
The mercenary board: your characters keep working after you log off
List one of your characters on the mercenary board with an hourly rate and the gambit sets you wrote for it. Other players hire it as a trust (your gear, your levels, your rules, synced to their level) and the gil lands on your ledger while you sleep.
Close the wiki tab
The quest tracker is in. Open a quest and see its steps, with the one you are on lit up, read from your real progress on this server, never from a wiki.
One account, sixteen characters
One account per player is the rule on DriftwoodXI. It is not a limit, your sixteen characters are a full squad, a mercenary roster, and all the storage you will ever need.
Treasure caskets, reworked: rarer chests, augmented gear
Chests are a quarter as common as retail, but three in four are the locked kind, so roughly one kill in fifty-three hides a chest full of randomly augmented gear, rolled fresh for you.
Content unlocked: Dynamis, Garrison, Sky and friends
Dynamis on a short clock (three hours as of August 30), Garrison restarting every ten minutes, the road to Tu'Lia, and the gates lowered so a handful of people can actually run all of it.
How DriftwoodXI plays: the numbers at a glance
Progression at 3x, drops and gil at 2x, combat at 1.5x with items a deliberate 3x, movement at 1.5x retail so you never commute, and death that still costs something. The whole server on one page.
Rule sets: write how your squad fights
Final Fantasy XII's gambit system, in Vana'diel, on your own characters. Ordered rules of the form "ally under 40% HP → cast the biggest Cure I can afford", written by you, obeyed by your squad, with a library of forty ready-made sets if you would rather not.
One inventory across your whole account
Search every bag on every character you own from the one you are playing, move items between them without logging in and out, and let your squad members dress themselves out of their own bags.
The Squad: bring your own characters as trusts
Register up to five of your own characters and summon them as party members. They wear the best gear they own, fight on their real jobs, and earn real experience back to their own rows.
The DriftwoodXI launcher
Account auto-login, addon loadouts you can toggle without editing scripts, per-account graphics settings, live server status and automatic updates, the whole server in one window.
Welcome to DriftwoodXI
A small, unhurried Vana'diel for friends, launching with the base game and Rise of the Zilart, generous rates, and no cash shop, ever.
S ranks, a fully raised Aht Urhgan, and ammunition for crafters
Three new skill ranks above A+ for ten jobs that needed the help, the ToAU +60 now reaches every enemy in every Aht Urhgan area, nine high-level rounds you can craft, Absorb-Attri on sale, and a long list of fixes
A cleaner log, wider rolls, and a Corsair who sang
DWChat folds the chat spam and colours the rest (off until you turn it on), Fancychat is installable from the launcher, every Phantom Roll reaches three times as far, elemental casting time now works on 33 more pieces, melee squad members stop freezing behind a healer, and a gunless Corsair stops singing bullets at the monster
The Artisan, Lu Shang's rod, and a walk-back
A new Artisan tab in /quests sells the crafting guilds' key items and Lu Shang's Fishing Rod for Drift Coins, the carp count for the rod drops to 5,000 with the daily catch limit raised to 500 — and Monk Hand-to-Hand and Dragoon Polearm are back to A+.
Mercenary Battles: your mercenary, your rules, a wager, and the Hall of Records
The mercenary board grows an arena. Register a mercenary you listed, fighting by a rule set you wrote, put up a wager, and anyone can answer it; five minutes later the two fight in Ru'Lude Gardens while everyone watches. Also in this patch, seals drop every two minutes instead of five, hired mercenaries keep their weapon skills and run a full sub job, and five lottery camps that could never pop are fixed.
Office pays now: the Mayor of Jeuno, powers with teeth, and a public ledger
DWPolitics grows a sixth seat and a ladder to the Crown, every office gets real powers held in check by design, DWPort's fares are now the office holders' to set, and half of every gil charged above the stock price is theirs while the other half leaves the game. All of it is on a public ledger.
The Circuit, the Grand Circuit, and a raid board that hits back
Chain Trials keep going now. Beat a boss's top rung and the arena stays open while your party names the next one; run every boss in one sitting for a Grand Circuit time on the leaderboard; the variety chain counts a whole trial as one link; and every raid boss has twice the HP and a fifth more of everything.
Relic, mythic and empyrean effects, for you and your squad
A squad member wielding a relic, mythic or empyrean weapon now earns its aftermath; every 99 II and 119 II relic gives the afterglow aftermath it promised; nine relics get their additional effect back above level 75; eight mythics and the two ranged empyreans get the lines they were missing.
Summoners by name, Avatar's Favor, and digging skill-ups doubled
Your squad summoner's keep and release rules take an avatar's name, Avatar's Favor works from a rule and its aura reaches the party, chocobo digging skills up twice as often, a thief's Trick Attack lands on a hugging squad member again, and the Avalanche Tzar's fuse is counted down out loud from the moment you land.
Rename your characters, skip the two stories, and refresh the chat log
The Drift Board grows a Special shelf with three services: a character rename for 500 Drift Coins, the Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia story skip for 1,000, and every waypoint of both expansions in DWPort for 250 once the stories are done. The GM panel's chat log gets a Refresh button.
Playing DriftwoodXI on Linux
A by-hand guide for Linux players is up on the website, and the launcher has taken its first step toward running there too.
Finishing Chains of Promathia
The road from the Dawn fight to The Last Verse, step by step, including the three Jeuno quests that actually close the CoP log and unlock the Promyvion raid tier and the 109 shelf.
The armor ladder, the Jeweler, and blue magic you can read
Every classic armor family now climbs from the Outfitter to item level 109 through the forge, the Drift Board has a Jeweler selling the Promathia-era earrings and rings, and the ToAU kit's Blue Mage tab shows what each spell grants and which job trait it feeds.
The wind pair, a raid rebalance, and seven fixes you reported
Two new bosses open the Cloister of Gales, bringing the raid board to eight trials across four shrines and twelve arenas. Four existing fights are retuned, the Cragmaw's stone armor is fixed, and seven bugs you reported are closed -- Bestial Loyalty on squad members, the worn tag in /dwbags, walking through your own squad, and more.
Launch failing? Windows Defender is the culprit
Windows Defender's automated scanner keeps quarantining our game loader by mistake. Microsoft has reviewed the file and confirmed it is clean. Here is the two-minute fix, and what the launcher now does to help.
Every craft to 110, and four fixes you asked for
One character can now master every crafting skill. /hidetrust finally hides squad pets too, Beastmaster Ready charges actually spend, the mystery DEBUG status icon is gone, and item tooltips show augments and readable elemental resists.
HD texture and map packs, one toggle away
Launcher 0.26.0 adds two switches under Settings → Alternate graphics — NextHD Textures and XICombinedMaps. Flip one on and the launcher downloads the pack and layers it over the game at launch; flip it off and you are back to stock. Your FFXI files are never touched.
Relics at the ArmsDealer
A new ArmsDealer tab in the Drift Board sells every level 75 Dynamis Ultimate weapon — Excalibur, Ragnarok, Spharai, Claustrum and the rest — for 250 Drift Coins apiece. Open it with /quests. And under the hood, roughly a thousand item-level pieces that used to wear their stats only on paper now actually carry them on the server.
Stone and tide: six trials, three shrines, nine arenas
The raid board triples: Waughroon Shrine and Balga's Dais open beside Horlais Peak, four new bosses join the roster — including a petrifying pair — every shrine runs three arenas at once, fights are capped at fifteen minutes, and the daily bonuses are retuned.
The Driftmark armory: endgame weapons and armor for every job
The Driftmark shop now sells the full item-level 100 catalog — a weapon for every job, three five-piece armor sets, shields and endgame ammunition — across five browsable pages. The ingots are retired, and everything your raids have been paying is now a gear fund.
Squad weapon skills, unblocked
Decimation, Raging Rush and every weapon skill your characters have earned now work on your alt-trusts — quest weapon skills included, arriving at the same levels a real player gets them. And if you helped finish a server contract while logged off, the server now tells you about your payout on your next login.
Alliances for your squads
Squads join alliances now — up to three parties, eighteen strong, every alt-trust rendered right in the alliance windows. Four new typed commands carry the invites the game's own menus grey out, and stock trusts ride along under the same rule.
The squad enters the burning circle
Battlefields that refuse trusts now admit your own characters. Enter first, call inside, and the fight's own participant cap and level cap do the balancing.
Your login commands are back
Launcher 0.21.0 adds a Custom commands box to every addon set — /fps 1, binds, camera tweaks, anything you used to keep in default.txt — plus a clear warning when you edit a set nothing launches.
Every command, on one page
You asked for a master list of the player commands, and it is up — every typed command, the job-tag squad orders, and all nineteen add-on windows, on one page you can search with Ctrl+F.
HD mods, without touching a game file
Launcher 0.20.0 ships XIPivot, the DAT overlay loader — HD textures, remade maps and UI mods, layered over the stock game without modifying a single file, off by default and one toggle away.
Your camera settings stick now
If the in-game camera control kept flipping back to Inverted every time you launched, that was the launcher's doing — it was quietly serving one machine's settings to everyone. Fixed. Whatever you set in Config → Mouse/Cam. now survives a relog.
The raid grows: a second fight, four tiers, a fuller shelf
Horlais Peak now holds two trials — the Tidebound Colossus and the new Riptide Behemoth — each at four tiers from Easy to Savage. Every fight at every tier pays its own first-clear-of-the-day bonus, and the Driftmark shop has grown from three shelves to eleven.
Your controller and your UI are yours again
The launcher no longer overwrites your controller buttons at launch — your own FFXI pad settings now apply, or map every button in the launcher itself. UI size, font quality, texture quality and more are now real settings, and the forced 1600×900 UI that made everything blurry is gone. Plus a squad window toggle for when your trusts join the fight.
Ten sets that fight with both jobs
Support jobs run at full level on DriftwoodXI, and the squad gambit library finally acts like it. Ten new shipped sets built around main/support pairings — a shadow-tanking paladin, a scholar-sealed super healer, a stun mage, a dancing beastmaster — plus deeper kits for the four pet jobs.
They notice you later
Aggro and link radius are cut in half. The honest con from yesterday's update stays -- anything that pays experience still cons Easy Prey, and an aggressive creature in that band will still come for you -- but it has to get much closer first, and it brings far fewer friends. Nothing about holding aggro changed, so pulls and kites work exactly as they did.
If it pays experience, it counts
The /check con now agrees with the experience curve. Anything that pays experience cons Easy Prey or better, so it drops crystals under Signet, feeds seal drops and weapon skill points, and counts for Drift Board contracts. Only creatures that pay nothing con Too Weak -- and the honest con cuts both ways, because Easy Prey aggro is real aggro.
Pick your squad's weapon skills
Tell each rule set which weapon skills to use, in what order, and at how much TP. Four picks, one hold amount, a new "spend at an amount" trigger — in the editor, in chat, and in every share code.
The Drift Exchange: your coins buy augments now
The storefront the Drift Board was banking coins for is open. Four augments a day, rotating on the Vana'diel clock, applied straight onto gear already in your bags -- or into the bags of a character you are not logged into. Augmented gear becomes yours: no auction house, no trade, no bazaar.
Your squad's pets come along now
Squad summoners field their real avatars, dragoons their wyverns, beastmasters their jugs, and puppetmasters the automaton they actually built. Pets summon on their own, fight beside their owner, and answer the same typed commands everything else does.
Enemy balance pass: leaner trash, meaner notorious monsters
Ordinary enemies drop from 1.5x to 1.25x HP and the squad's HP scaling eases off at high level, so 60+ stops feeling like a bag of hit points. NMs keep their full 2x HP and pick up a 10% stat bump. Danger stays; sponge goes.
Streamer mode now hides your login name too
Launcher 0.9.2 closes the hole in streamer mode -- the account picker on Home was still spelling out your login username in plain text, and so was the launch log. Every name the launcher draws is now blurred, and the one control Windows draws for itself shows initials instead.
Verify your game files, and point the launcher at any FFXI install
Launcher 0.9.1 turns on Verify Game Files -- the server now publishes a manifest of every file in a known-good FFXI install, and the launcher can hash yours against it and say exactly what differs. And if your FFXI lives somewhere unusual, you can now point the launcher straight at it, during setup or any time after.
The fight finds you: auto-target that actually works
When your target dies mid-pull, you now swing straight onto the next enemy your party is fighting — even the one behind you. Weapon out, no camera dance, out to about 28 yalms. A new addon, dwengage, does the turning; the launcher installs it for you.
A Rare you already have now goes to your next character
Rare drops stop being destroyed when your main already owns one — they go to the next character on your account instead, and are only lost once all of them have a copy.
Stop teleporting twice: the travel window
The new dwport addon puts every teleport you have unlocked in one window. Type /port, click where you are going. Home points, survival guides, outposts and the teleport spells in tabs, the locked ones greyed so you know what is left to earn, and the fees exactly what the NPC would charge.
Your crafting ledger: the new dwcraft window
The new dwcraft addon shows the crafter's ledger the game hides. Type /craft: every craft's level, rank and next rank test, the specialization budget -- how much you have spent past the free cap, how much is left, and which craft pays when it runs dry -- and the crafting rules this server actually runs, read live from its settings.
The launcher keeps itself current
Open the launcher, press Play. Updates to the launcher and to the DriftwoodXI addons now arrive on their own, the only thing ever asked of you is a restart.
Every swing counts: combat skills without the grind
Every swing rolls for a skill-up, hit or miss, and every roll under your cap lands. A fresh weapon catches up in a session, and your main is never the weakest member of his own party.
Combat rebalance: magic, weapon skills and items
Magic and weapon skills at 1.5x (Elemental at a temporary 1.75x for players since September 18, enemies at 1.25x), items at a deliberate 3x, retail-accurate character stats, and a full sub job's worth of MP. Your squad is the power fantasy, not your character sheet.
Crafting with an identity, gathering that never breaks
Every craft reaches 70, three of them can reach 110, HQ chance is doubled, harvesting tools never break, and the auction house keeps its fees honest.
Custom commands and what happens when you make a character
Every command a player can type on DriftwoodXI in one place: the squad, your account's shared bags, gambit rule sets, per-member job tags and the small quality-of-life ones, plus what a brand-new character is handed on day one, and where merits, job points and trusts come from.
Drops, gil and a rewritten Treasure Hunter curve
Double drop rates, gil from every mob, rebuilt treasure caskets, and Treasure Hunter exactly as retail tuned it, on top of it all.
Rates and progression: the full table
Triple gil, experience, capacity and tabs; FOV and GOV pages at 1.5x; death costs half of what retail charged; and movement at 1.5x retail, so you never spend an evening commuting.