The Squad — bring your own characters as trusts

You have sixteen character slots. On any other server the rest of them sit in a mog house doing nothing while you play one.

Not here. Your squad is up to five of your own characters, registered to slots. Type !squad call and they walk out as party members — wearing the best gear they own, on the jobs they actually have levelled, casting the spells they actually know. They fight on their own from a per-job profile, they take orders from a macro bar, and the experience you earn is written back to their real character rows.

One client. Six characters' worth of party.

You can also reach every one of their bags from the character you are playing: search all of them at once, move items between them without logging anybody in, and change what a member wears. That has its own post — One inventory across your whole account — and its commands are summarised at the bottom of this one.

Getting a squad

Register a slot with a character name. They must be your own characters, on your own account — that is checked on every single operation, so there is no way to point a slot at somebody else.

`` !squad set 1 Yakapo !squad set 2 Caderousse !squad set 3 Tea !squad list ``

!squad list is the one to remember. It shows who is registered, who is currently out, their jobs and levels, and — most importantly — the tag each member answers to. You need the tag to give orders, and it is not visible anywhere else.

Then, anywhere out in the world:

`` !squad call ``

They follow you, they fight, and !squad dismiss sends them home.

The whole command list

The squad as a group

Their bags and their gear

/dwbags is the same thing as a window, with icons and a search box. It ships enabled in the launcher's Default addon set and is a renderer over exactly these commands — turn it off and nothing is lost.

One member at a time

Every member answers to a job tag — !whm, !blm, !war. When two members share a job they are numbered by slot, so !blm and !blm2. !blm1 is the same member as !blm, which means a macro written for two black mages still reads correctly when only one of them is out.

Spells, abilities and weapon skills go through the real recast timers and MP costs. Press !blm stone twice and the second press tells you how many seconds are left. These are characters, not scripted effects.

If a command is refused, the message says why in terms you can act on — not learned yet, not enough MP, on recast, out of range, wrong job, or not enough weapon skill. For example:

`` Caderousse needs BLM17 for Stone II -- currently BLM1 Provoke is a WAR ability; Zatara is THF1 ``

Behaviour profiles

!squad behavior <profile>, or !<tag> behavior <profile> for one member.

On aggressive and defensive the squad skillchains off itself and magic bursts its own chains, without being told to. You do not need a special mode for it and there is no setting to turn on — when two members' TP bars line up, the second one picks whichever weapon skill closes the bigger chain, and any mage holding a matching spell bursts it.

The squad-wide profile is remembered across zone lines. Per-member overrides last until you zone.

A macro book that works

Squad commands are chat commands, so a macro line is /say followed by the command. The server intercepts it before anyone hears it — but a typo is not a command, so a mistyped line does get said out loud. Six lines, one page:

A second page, once you know your lineup:

Most fights need nothing from page one except engage. The profiles do the rest.

Experience — read this bit

The squad levels for real. While a member is out, everything you earn is mirrored onto that character's own experience and level, at 100%. Nothing is taken from you — it is additional experience, not a share of yours. Play one character for an evening and six characters gained a level.

Two things about it will look wrong and are not:

The chat message is not the number that lands. When you see "Driftwood gains 14000 experience points", your squad will be credited less than that — because you were credited less than that. A single award can only raise you one level, and the game discards whatever is left over above that. The squad mirrors what you kept, not what the message announced. With chains at these rates you will see the difference on most kills.

Experience only moves while the squad is out. Play solo for an hour, then !squad call, and none of that hour arrives. The clock starts when they do.

A member that dies stops earning from that moment, and a member sitting at its level cap stops earning entirely. !squad xp shows exactly where each one has got to.

One consequence worth planning around: the relay moves levels, not combat skills. A character you levelled entirely as a squad member will log in with the skills it actually earned by swinging, which is far below its level. That gap closes almost as fast as you can swing: on this server every attack rolls a skill-up — hit or miss — and every roll under the cap lands, so an evening at the front of the party catches them right up.

Their gear keeps up on its own, though. A character levelled 1 to 40 as a squad member never logs in, so it never changes its own clothes — which is why the gear is chosen fresh at summon time out of whatever that character is actually carrying. !squad send them a better weapon and the next !squad call has them holding it.

Doors that want a party's bodies

A few doors in Vana'diel are not locked by a key or a quest — they are locked by a headcount. Four bodies on four stone plates. Three specific jobs standing in three specific spots. Enough combined weight on a plate that one Tarutaru will never manage it.

Your squad gives you a party's power but not a party's bodies — a summoned member follows you and cannot be sent to stand on a plate across the room. So the game also ships an item for each of those doors that lets one player do it alone, and every character starts holding all four:

Nothing else was handed out. Every other key-item door in the game — the Yagudo Torch in Castle Oztroja, the Temple Knight Key in the Sacrarium, the Paintbrush of Souls, the Moongate Pass, the Gates of Halvung themselves — is a lock one player can open by playing the content, so you still earn those.

Loot

Alt-trusts do not roll on drops. Everything that falls is yours. There is no lot window, no passing, and no split — a squad member cannot take an item from you even in principle.

Where the squad can and cannot go

Alt-trusts follow the same rules real trusts do:

• Not in town. Cities, Mog Garden, Adoulin, Whitegate, Al Zahbi and the other safe zones do not allow trusts, and neither do Limbus, Walk of Echoes, Provenance or Mordion Gaol.
• Not while you are in an alliance. A party of two shares the six slots; an alliance would hand each of you a full five, which is not what the squad is for.
• Battlefields have their own rules. Some allow trusts, most do not, and those that do have a participant limit the squad respects.
• Not into a fight already in progress. If you or anyone in your party is engaged or holding hate, !squad call refuses. Call them before you pull.

One thing that is not a retail rule: the squad is not capped at three or four members by Rhapsodies of Vana'diel. All five slots work from the start.

The small print

• A summoned character cannot be logged in. If you try, you get a message and a disconnect. Run !squad dismiss on whoever has them out first.
• They do not survive a zone line. Walk through, call them again. The behaviour profile is remembered so that is one command, not six.
• Displayed names are the character's real name, unchanged. There is no room for a job tag in a 15-character name, which is why !squad list prints them.
• What a member wears is chosen for them, and changes nothing about them. The pick is made fresh at every summon from what that character is carrying, scored for the job they are on. Their own equipped loadout is never written to, so it is exactly as they left it the next time you play them. !squad gear shows the choice and !squad equip overrides it.
• Your account learns things, not just your character. Home points, maps, outpost warps, teleports, travel key items, spells, unlocked jobs and weapon skills all mirror to every character on your account, automatically, at their next login. Mission, quest, fame and rank progress does not — that stays personal to the character that earned it.

What is still rough

Some jobs are better squad members than others today. Bard songs, summoner, beastmaster and puppetmaster pets, geomancer indi-spells, ninja Utsusemi and most of dancer are not specifically tuned yet — those members get sensible movement, weapon skills and self-healing, and nothing job-specific beyond that. They work; they are not clever.

If something reads as broken rather than merely untuned, say so — the whole system is new.