Sometimes you wake up, start getting ready for work, and then get a text message that sends you back to bed. That’s what happened to me today (the day I’m writing this). Took a day off and everything. Slept for another couple hours, lay miserably in bed while trying to doze for a couple more, and then finally forced myself out of it around noon so I could actually shower and get dressed, make my coffee, and eat some kind of food. You know, the things you do to have some kind of day. Then, instead of think about anything since my next therapy appointment isn’t until tomorrow and I’m putting off everything I can until then, I lost myself in more Final Fantasy 14 crafting hell for the entire afternoon. Or, in this case, gathering hell. Over the weekend, I spent most of my free time working through this crafting project of mine, to make my own high-level gear that is going to quickly become irrelevant, I’m sure. The instant the next patch hits, it will all be largely irrelevant, but for now it’s the baseline required to participate in high-level content that has already been released. Well, for the combat job gear. The crafting and gathering gear is probably the best stuff we’ll see for a while, so getting that stuff set up properly is going to matter a whole lot more permanently since, according to my research, I’ll be using it until the patch content of the next expansion (and I have no idea when that might even happen). Unfortunately, to make any of that, I had to acquire some mid-level patch-content crafting and gathering gear, get all that set up with stat-boosting materia, and only then could I start gathering the special materials required for the actual high-end gear. Which needs to come together soon because I have a set date for doing current “raid” content with other members of my Free Company who have finished everything the game has to offer so far.

I didn’t ONLY work on crafting and gathering stuff this weekend. I did about twelve hours worth of Deep Dungeon exploration in Pilgrim’s Traverse and managed to clear it, even, right at the end of our second day of it. I went on a group outing for some Halloween-themed photos. I even played a different game, Outward, with a friend of mine! I also made one hundred sixty collectible tacos (this is not what they are called, but it’s an accurate enough description and I find it funny enough to continue using it) to turn in for orange crafter’s scrip, a currency I needed to exchange for tools and a special material I’ll need for my top-tier gear. I also collected more than two hundred Gathering Collectibles of various types to turn in for a bunch of purple gatherer’s scrip (to unlock the ability to gather certain special materials) and orange gatherer’s scrip (for more materials). I spent a few million gil (the in-game money) on materials so I didn’t need to gather or craft thousands more collectibles, I dipped my toes into the Materia market so I can eventually burn a few million gil on “pentamelding” my gathering and crafting gear (the name for putting up to three additional pieces of materia in an item, pushing its stats to the absolute highest they can go in a process that has an increasingly high failure rate), and eventually just bought out a bunch more material that I was too tired to gather myself (but only because it was incredibly cheap at that moment). I spent more in-game money in a single weekend than I have since I bought my in-game house and paid a friend to decorate it.

It has kept me very busy, most of the time, but I finally hit the tipping point last night were I had everything I needed to start working on the combat job gear. I still need to fix my crafting gear a bit since I didn’t know what I was doing when I put materia in there the first time, but that shouldn’t take very long and then I’ll be off to the races! I’ve got my workflows mostly mapped out (thanks to some helpful guides my FC pointed me towards), I’ve got my materials stocked up (with extra just in case), and all I need to do now is settle in to click buttons and let my inventory fill with high quality ingredients ready to be turned into high quality combat gear [this turned out to be an incredibly slow process and took most of the week to finish]. Thanks to my efforts outside of gathering and crafting, though, I was able to get my hands on some higher-powered gear for my main combat job, my White Mage, which is what I’ll be bringing to my raid group next weekend (or last weekend, as this gets posted), so I was able to cut down on what I need to craft for myself by two items. I’ll maybe be able to get another one before then, if I take the time to grind out the specific type of tomestones I need, but that’s a few hours of time right there and I could probably process ALL of my materials in that amount of time [I was incredibly wrong about this]. It’s probably better to stay focused on the crafting and only go for that stuff if time allows in the end. I already know I’m going to be replacing all this gear eventually, so replacing it right after crafting it is something I’ve already made my peace with. Better to have it just in case rather than count on having the time and energy to do that grind two days in a row.

Hopefully, with the few evenings and two full days remaining to me (I’ve decided to also take Friday off because this week sucks and I need to not be at work as much as possible without breaking the vacation bank), I’ll be able to get enough done. And will be able to keep myself distracted until such a time as I am ready to not be filling my brain to overflowing with what I’ve called “Crafting Brainrot” via the browser folder I keep all my bookmarks in. There’s a lot of information I need to keep track of! And my current mild-to-moderate dissociation means that I need the little bell dings to remind me that I shouldn’t be zoning out, I should be running off to gather some more of this specific type of wood or sap or stone or ore that will eventually be made into a kick-ass set of crafting clothes when combined with like fifty other incredibly expensive things. Thank goodness I learned how to world-hop for lower prices… I would have spent so much more if I couldn’t do that. Difficult to think of anything else when I’m trying to balance tracking the price of five things, waiting for it to dip or for updated prices to show up within my buy range while jumping from place to place to gather materials, and doing the math required to calculate what I can start working on now without interrupting the numerical tracking of the materials I’m still collecting. Can’t be sad or anxious or upset if I’m too busy to feel anything but Maximal Efficiency!