HD mods, without touching a game file

If you have ever wanted FFXI's twenty-year-old textures to look a little less twenty years old, this update is for you. Launcher 0.20.0 ships XIPivot, the community's standard DAT overlay loader, ready to enable on the Addons tab.

What it does:

• Overlays, not overwrites. XIPivot layers mod files — HD textures, remade maps, reworked UI art — over the stock game in memory. Your actual game files are never modified, and turning the toggle off returns everything to stock. There is nothing to back up and nothing to repair.
• Only your screen changes. An overlay changes what your client draws, nothing the server records. Two people standing in the same spot can be looking at two different Vana'dieles.
• Off by default. Nothing changes unless you flip it on.

How to use it:

• Open the launcher's Addons tab and toggle XIPivot on.
• Drop each mod's folder into polplugins\DATs inside your Ashita install — one folder per mod, exactly as the mod author packaged it.
• In game, type /pivot to open its window: enable your overlays, set their order, done. Order matters — when two mods replace the same file, the one higher in the list wins.

Popular overlays the community runs — XiView, XiVision, Ammelila's HD remake, remade zone maps — work as-is. Sound and music overlays are supported too, but the plugin's own author calls them experimental; if your game crashes with one, that is the first thing to remove.

One honest caution: an out-of-date overlay can draw stale text or icons over current data — menu icons and map art from another era of the game. If something on screen looks wrong, turn your overlays off before reporting a bug; if it looks right again, the overlay was the bug.

The plugin is the current official XIPivot build, reviewed and shipped inside the launcher itself, so every install — new or existing — gets a version that actually loads. Its license rides along on the Credits page, where it belongs.