The Drift Board: contracts in your pocket

There is a version of this feature everybody has already played. A custom NPC stands in Lower Jeuno, you walk to it, you click through four pages of menu text, you accept "slay 10 Goblins", and then you walk back later to hand it in.

The Drift Board is that idea with the walking taken out. Type /quests anywhere in Vana'diel — mid-dungeon, on a chocobo, in the middle of a fight — and the board is on screen. There is no quest giver, because the window is the quest giver.

What is on the board

Six contracts, always:

• Three dailies, rolled fresh every Vana'diel day — 57.6 real minutes. Slay 5 of a family, slay 10 of anything in a given zone, and a wildcard that changes shape with the day: finish 5 with a weapon skill, take 5 between dusk and dawn, or take 3 while the weather is up. Fewer kills, more pay — a mutator does not make a fight harder, it makes most of your kills not count.
• Three weeklies, rolled every Vana'diel week — 7.68 real hours. The same family and zone shapes at five times the size, plus an ecosystem contract: 25 Beasts, 25 Undead, 25 Vermin.

They are pitched at your level band, so a level 9 and a level 99 both get a board they can actually finish, and everybody in your band sees the same six. That is on purpose. A contract is worth more when the person standing next to you is on it too.

And one contract for the whole server

Below your board there is a bar nobody accepts and everybody can push: the community contract, one ecosystem, one target in the thousands, one week. Every credited kill counts, from every character on every account, and the target is always something a level 12 and a level 99 can both hunt — so it is never a bar most of the server watches other people fill.

Push it past a small threshold and you are on the payout. When the server finishes it, everyone who helped is paid at once, wherever they are and whether or not they are logged in, and the whole server hears it fall.

The part that is not like an NPC

• You accept from where you are standing. One click, no travel, no menu.
• The counter moves while you fight. Not on hand-in — as the mob falls. The bar fills, and it keeps filling whichever character on your account is holding the sword: contracts belong to the account, so your mule's kills count toward the same contract your main signed.
• The payout lands on the last kill. No walking back. The window toasts, chat says so, and the coins are in the ledger before the mob finishes falling over.
• A kill counts by the rule you already know — the same one Fields of Valor uses. If it was worth Fields of Valor credit, it is worth contract credit. Nothing you kill at level 99 in the Dunes will move a bar. That one rule covers everything: the mutators and the community bar are filters laid over it, never a second set of rules to learn.
• Nothing expires under you. A contract signed two minutes before the rotation still gets a full period to finish, so a daily taken at the wrong moment is not a daily you had four minutes for.

Drift Coins

Contracts pay Drift Coins, a currency that touches nothing else on this server: not gil, not conquest points, not sparks. Nothing you already own gets cheaper or dearer because DC exists.

What they buy is the reason to keep the window open: instant augments, applied to gear already in your bags — including the bags of the characters you are not logged into — from a curated storefront that rotates every Vana'diel day. That storefront is the Drift Exchange, and it is open: !drift augments shows today's four. Augmented gear becomes account-exclusive in exchange, so read that post before you spend.

How to open it

Type /quests. Type it again to close it. /dwquest does the same, and so does typing !drift on its own.

The launcher installs and updates dwquest automatically and it joins the Default addon set, so for most of you it is already there. If nothing opens, switch it on in the launcher's Addons tab, or load it where you stand with /addon load dwquest.

No addon, no problem

Like every DriftwoodXI addon, dwquest is a window over a typed command, never a gate. !drift prints the same board in chat, !drift accept d1 signs a contract, !drift abandon a1 tears one up, and !drift balance reads your coins and the last few ledger lines. The window cannot do a single thing the typed commands cannot, and every number it shows is a number the server said — there is no arithmetic in it at all.

Something looks wrong? /report reaches us from in game with your real state attached, and discord.gg/DriftwoodGaming is the second-shortest path.