After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).

It was a monumental undertaking, but now all that remains is to eat the special food I’ve collected (almost all of which was given to me by friends), drink the special drink I’ve bought, hit a set of macros (a sequence of buttons/abilities automatically pressed for you by the game based on the written-out scrip you put in) until all of my resources are turned into crafting materials, and then hit one final set of macros to turn those materials into actual gear items. Well, there’s also some gathering that needs to be done for the high-tier crafting and gathering gear, but that’s not as urgent as the combat job gear is and I’m slow-rolling that a bit so I can focus on getting geared up first and getting through the remaining current content so I can actually participate in the raid group. I’ve still got to unlock the trials and raids we will be working through every other week, so I can’t spend too much time running around the final areas of the game to hunt for resources that show up on a slow but constant schedule that leaves me little room to interrupt my gathering focus without skipping some materials. I could still buy all that stuff, but it feels silly to spend even more gil when I’m not in a hurry and have another couple months before I REALLY need that better gathering and crafting gear. I can already craft and gather everything I need, after all, and while the process would be much faster with that better gear equipped, it isn’t so much faster that I’m going to prioritize it over preparing for this raid.

Honestly, when I finally settled down to do the crafting of the materials and then the gear, it felt a little… underwhelming? I looked up a bunch of stuff on guides which changed the way I crafted and while the end result was cutting things SIGNIFICANTLY closer than I’d like to, I have a set of macros that will ALWAYS deliver a high-quality product at the end, no matter what happens during the process. I still feel a decent amount of anxiety every time I sit down to do some macro crafting because “what if this time it isn’t enough because I forgot some incredibly important step in the process or my gear numbers changed when I wasn’t looking,” but I came prepared for a few failures and the anxiety is starting to fade as I’ve proven over almost one hundred crafts that the macros work. I wish it would fade faster, but I think there’s a certain of spillover from the rest of my life that’s preventing it from clearing up as quickly as it usually might. Especially because I’ve spent a week investing myself completely and totally in this effort in an attempt to avoid thinking about the letters I sent to my aunts and uncles. There’s a whole lot of emotion mixed up in all of that and it’s difficult to disentangle it all now. Easier to just conclude the project and put it all away with what I’ve resolved to do with my family situation. And all the related ones.

Now all that remains, aside from clicking buttons and more slowly accumulating resources, is to put systems in place to continue to accumulate these resources so I can have the stuff on-hand I need to make more of this gear for my friends and so I can be as ready as possible for what’s coming in the next expansion. I doubt I’ll be able to day-one craft that stuff unless the expansion drops the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day when I’ll be off work, but it would probably go a long way to making new gear if I’ve already got a bunch of the high-value materials on-hand so I don’t need to dip into the market to buy anything when the prices will surely be skyrocketing (and maybe even capitalize on that and make a bunch of money selling stuff at the temporarily elevated prices caused by what will probably be a decent amount of scarcity). I haven’t actually been through one of these moments before, but I’m definitely interested to play around in the space as it happens this time around. It’s a lot of fun, to be current. I don’t plan to make a huge amount of gil or dominate the market or whatever, but it is just fun to be in that advanced space. To know I’m right up there with the best of them. Though perhaps trailing a little bit since I’m clearly not the one writing the guides or the tools I used to make my project happen. I’m not often “a top contender” in any kind of video game, by any kind of metric, so it’s a thing I try to enjoy when I can. Which I haven’t been able to enjoy since Overwatch got reworked to force a changeup in the meta of the now-defunct professional leagues. I miss those days, when I was really good at a game… Maybe I’ll be able to fully experience that feeling here again, when the new update drops and I can make a ton of gear for my FC mates and friends (and myself, of course).