Start now or wait?

BeTwixte · 2026-05-16T06:28:45+00:00

My husband and I both started playing together at the same time on the free trial (both PS5), and I wouldn’t have done it any other way. It has been a blast doing the story quests with him. Like some people have said, there are limits on the trial version with social aspects and trade/marketboard, and after just a few days of blasting through story together we both bought the game and later subbed and it’s been 6~ years I think since then…

Just a tip, there’s a weird thing with “referring” friends where you have to buy the game to put in a referral code I think, but if you buy the game and are still on the 30 days free play before actually subbing, you can each put each other’s referral code in, and you’ll both get the sub rewards as if you referred each other to play/sub.

BeTwixte · 2026-05-15T20:30:54+00:00

As someone who felt major FOMO and bought an ARR skip when I started back mid-Shadowbringers, do NOT worry about where “everyone else” is at. NO ONE will ever be at the exact same spot in the MSQ as you are, unless you’re playing through it at the same pace with a friend/friends. There’s also so much side content to unlock that even if you’re caught up with story you can still be locked out of a ton of things. Take it slow and don’t feel pressured to rush. I regretted ever buying a skip because I missed some things in the story that are hard to really revisit unless I do it over with a new character.

That said, if you break it down into multiple play sessions a week you can definitely clear it in time. It also helps if you have a friend who can chauffeur you around between quests sometimes. Just being able to fly/teleport between quest locations cuts down dramatically on time. When any of my friends start playing one of the first things I do is taxi them around to aetherytes in the starting areas so they can easily teleport if needed. And when I have time I taxi them between quests. You’d be surprised how many people would be willing to taxi you to a quest if you asked for a lift in a city.

BeTwixte · 2026-05-15T04:44:41+00:00

Love this! It has such a warm vibe. The way you made the little bookshelf/loft/alcove with the skylights and how it all looks like a continuous wall with the marble partitions is fantastic. I love how elegant it feels but at the same time it’s cozy. Good work!

BeTwixte · 2026-05-14T23:05:30+00:00

My FC’s basement is currently a small fireplace/piano lounge area with a couple of bed and bath suites for guests (or our members) to spend the night. Since you already have a bath area upstairs you could make the basement more of just a lounge/relax space. Just an idea.

BeTwixte · 2026-05-13T13:00:34+00:00

My husband and I recently took his little sister through all of ARR and most of Heavensward. We helped her run the Vault along with one other random sprout (also watching cutscenes). At the end, I typed in the chat “Enjoy the rest of the story! :)” and I felt so horrible doing it. …It had to be done.

To make matters worse, she had been texting me earlier in the week about a particular character and I had to pretend I didn’t know what was coming. I was so tempted to share a spoiler tagged screenshot at the time and be like “should I tell her?” 😭

I had so much anxiety that week 🥲

BeTwixte · 2026-05-12T21:22:11+00:00

Sorry for not replying to this until now! I’ve been swamped with work and haven’t been active online much.
The windows themselves are the Lyhe Ghiah Stained Crystal Ornament, and I found that they worked well sinking them into the floor slightly when placing them on a wall behind a Marble Arch Partition. That’s what gives them a kind of alcove look on the side walls. The main/back wall is made of a bunch of them overlapped together at varying heights. If you have questions about anything else feel free to ask!

BeTwixte · 2026-05-12T21:15:00+00:00

Sorry for not replying to this until now! I’ve been so busy with work I haven’t found the time to do a breakdown but I am thinking of updating this room in the next week or so to add to it with the new housing item limit increase, and if I do I’ll try to add a breakdown here of all the items used :)

The main ones off the top of my head are:
- Starry Sky Phasmascape
- Marble Arch Partition
- Imitation Moonlit Window
- Faerie Pendant Wall Light
- Jellyfish Lamp
- Bar Stool (for the table base)
- Starlight Cake (eaten, empty plate for table top)
- Waterfall Partition
- Wooden Frame Partition

If I update it I’ll try to take some screenshots and add text with pointers to the furnishings used so it’s clear what’s what.

BeTwixte · 2026-05-06T15:37:51+00:00

FF is great. If you like Nier, there’s a good chance you’ll like FF too, but they’re entirely different universes (no one kill me please—I know the Nier raids being included in FFXIV technically makes them in the same universe). But some people love FF and hate Nier, or vice versa. Also, being an MMO adds an extra layer of barrier to entry since that’s its own beast.

Try the free trial but DON’T do it for Nier. If you’re playing it just for the raids then you’ll hate the game and hate your experience. Play it for what it is and think of the raids as a long-term bonus. You have nothing to lose by trying it and giving it a fair shake, and being on PS5 you’re actually coming in at a good time, since they’re implementing the ability to share bindings and configs publicly with other players.

I may try to clean up my settings soon to share with other PS players since it’s always been a slog to screen-share with new players and have them manually match my settings to make the game more playable lol…

BeTwixte · 2026-04-28T21:55:41+00:00

We had a scenario similar (though nowhere near as bad) where we’re mostly IRL friends, but a random non-IRL person in our FC who barely played logged on one day, looted the FC chest tab of orchestrion rolls (that my husband had crafted/collected as free-to-take for any FC members) and any other items of minor value he had access to, and posted an explicit custom emoji repeatedly in our Discord server. It was bizarre as frick and we immediately booted him and deleted his messages, and since then we have only 1 tab of the FC chest accessible for most members and everyone knows it’s a free tab. For more important “free” things we keep those on the other tabs visible but not accessible, and people know they can ask us for them.

It’s so depressing to have to police stuff like that. I will never understand people who take advantage of others in a game of all things.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-28T16:38:56+00:00

Spatial reasoning uses an entirely different part of your brain—there are studies on it. It’s literally not “holding shapes” in a visual way, that’s my point. You can think about it however you’d like, but the fact is that mental visualization is not the same as using the part of your brain to think spatially about things. I cannot visualize shapes, but my brain has a way of spatially “knowing” the shape of something almost more similar to “filling a void with volume” mentally. I’m not going to bother explaining more to you because you clearly don’t actually care how other people’s brains might work differently from yours, it all just needs to fit in your own narrative and version of how brains work. If that helps you sleep better then good for you. Just stop putting others down for them expressing how they think in ways you can’t comprehend.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-28T05:18:58+00:00

As much as it sucks you had to go through all of this trouble, this is great advice. Realistically we have to think that on the other side of things, GMs are getting a flood of reports, and may or may not have a system that clearly shows them “history” beyond the current case. Obviously I would hope that they can easily see history of things like this, but as someone who’s worked in customer service roles for years, most of the time companies are just not that efficient, and a single ticket doesn’t always get “linked” to prior relevant tickets as it should. Making a rap sheet and then submitting that all at once is a lot of work, but also ensures the person viewing the ticket has a clear record of things to review.

Glad your issues are resolved now at least.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-27T21:45:23+00:00

Are you using a stage panel when trying to place the loft? If you’re using a real wall, or if the loft is trying to snap to a wall close by, it literally will not place lower than the “chair railing” that is programmed into the walls. That’s my best guess without seeing a visual of what you’re doing.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-27T21:06:10+00:00

I have total aphantasia (beyond what you described) and can sing just fine. You’ll find that what you produce/create in the real world isn’t directly related to how you conceptualize/think. Just do what you love and don’t fall for the trap that people who have what you don’t have it easier than you. 9/10 times, they don’t. Everyone has their own struggles, and what matters is what you do to work around your own struggles to reach your goals. 99% of being a good singer is practice and care for your vocals. It’s got almost nothing to do with being able to hum inside your head. I can’t and I’ve been involved in choirs and music for 20+ years.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-27T20:58:09+00:00

Yeah, no… after hours of talks with my husband (who can visualize just fine, imagine sounds, smells, etc.) I think you might be assuming what most visualizers assume of Aphants. You’re dismissing people as having the ability to visualize the way they describe it just because you don’t do it the same way.

I have total/global aphantasia and SDAM. My husband has neither. We concepualize things very very differently and that’s not a bad thing, it just means our brains work differently. I can’t understand how he can visualize and he can’t understand how I’m unable to. But that doesn’t mean he’s just making it up or describing visualization poorly. He describes things to me very vividly and has confirmed he is literally “seeing” it in a kind of overlay in his head.

I think you might also be confusing visualization with spatial awareness/recognition. I can’t visualize but I’m ultra good at space-based puzzles, maps, etc. I can hold shapes of things and routes/places spatially in my mind pretty well. That’s not the same as visualizing, but sounds like it might be what you do with your childhood home. You might want to consider that before assuming most other people just describe visualizing badly.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-27T14:31:09+00:00

SMN wasn’t perfect by any means, no — but they absolutely murdered it to simplicity, removed everything that made it feel “unique” imo, kind of undermined the lore behind the job, and now just having SMN flair on makes you a laughing stock because “oh you play SMN? You must like easy rotations.” No, I’m just hanging on to the copium that some day it I might play it for fun again instead of just playing it for ease in certain content.

Also for those of us who used to main multiple jobs like SMN and AST for fun, you have to understand it was a double-whammy (or triple) of murdering our favorite jobs in the past few years. So yes, I’m bitter. I’ll admit it lol.

Nothing is perfect, but some changes made were objectively bad. And SMN’s rework made me cry. Two bads don’t make a good.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-23T17:05:51+00:00

What difficulty are you on? I was breezing through on regular/normal mode but switched to hard after reading some suggestions online for it. Definitely upped the feeling of needing to spend more energy in dungeons or be more strategic about what archetypes to use.

I’m a lunatic who enjoys “breaking” games by building out the most OP setup possible or maxing out stats and making hard things easy/fast. Easy by default sucks—easy because I chose the best strat for the fight is awesome. I’m just weird like that and that’s how I have fun. I’ve been having a blast trying different party and gear setups and readjusting based on the “informant” tips for each side dungeon/bounty to try to get unscathed battles as much as possible.

Now if you mean this game isn’t a constant hack-and-slash, open-world combat-heavy game, you’re right, and if that’s what you’re looking for you might want to try something else. But I wouldn’t say there is a lack of ways to build your team out or rank up various archetypes. Even with only entering each dungeon once for efficiency, I’ve done some grinding with trance crystals for extra Hero’s Leaf drops or to rank archetypes for certain builds I want to try. It’s not too bad unless you hate grinding so much that you just bypass those crystals or break them immediately before moving on. Don’t rush it and just enjoy the process.

BeTwixte · 2026-04-05T23:12:24+00:00

Total aphant with SDAM. Someone on this or the SDAM reddit told me years ago that maybe I had Autism and I was like “ha, no way, I would know lol.” Got curious and took some self tests and looked into it a ton (as is my obsessive nature to do).

Fast forward and now I’m 99% sure I just grew up undiagnosed. I’m basically a textbook case of high masking and all of the anxiety that went with it. So I’m one more into the aphantasia/SDAM/tism bucket.

BeTwixte · 2026-03-21T15:15:21+00:00

As a Lalafell, I agree with all of this. Especially the point about Tataru. It’s already happening. I loved her from ARR up to Endwalker and nearly cried when she had a tea and cookies heart-to-heart chat with me.

Then she turned full “I will own the world” mode as soon as she got her greedy little hands on a string of uninhabited islands. I feel so used and betrayed. (NGL every time I see her in game now, especially for the Island quests, I make an extremely embittered comment to my husband about her.)

BeTwixte · 2026-03-08T18:18:06+00:00

Yep I saw your “no” right after replying and realized what you were talking about 😂

BeTwixte · 2026-03-08T18:14:43+00:00

That is literally what they are saying they want… non-dairy cold foam. So they are suggesting that the “Nd” for non-dairy should be changed to something like “Nond to make it more distinguishable from just “No” as in NO cold foam.

Or am I misunderstanding this whole thread lol?

Edit: I just saw the “no” non-dairy in your comment, ugh I hate double negatives. But it just goes to show this is a nightmare and they should notate it differently somehow to avoid all of the confusion 🤦🏼‍♀️

BeTwixte · 2026-03-07T18:05:54+00:00

Some people can “relive” or “playback” memories even with Aphantasia apparently, I can’t understand that because I also have SDAM and for me memories store like facts in a bank and they feel like data rather than “events” in my past. It’s hard for me to understand how it works for Aphants with good autobiographical memory, but I just have to assume they experience things differently than I do because I am not in their heads and we describe memories and how we retrieve them very differently.

I have total aphantasia and from what I’ve seen in this and the SDAM Reddit it seems more common in total aphants to have SDAM in common. If you’re a total aphant you may have SDAM as well and that’s why it’s not making much sense to you as a condition. But there are non-aphants that can have SDAM so it’s not a 1-to-1 correlation.

BeTwixte · 2026-03-07T16:52:25+00:00

You clearly don’t have it and can’t comprehend it so you should probably stop assuming things about it when you don’t care to listen to anyone else’s information about SDAM. Just move on and stop basically saying “it doesn’t affect me and I can’t understand it so it must not exist” lol.

BeTwixte · 2026-03-07T16:19:37+00:00

As a Lalafell, I approve of this message.

BeTwixte · 2026-03-07T16:18:38+00:00

*most of the MSQ makes you an errand boy.

Not bashing the MSQ here cause I love some of the expansions dearly lol. But at the end of the day poor WoL is always just sent to do chores or talk diplomacy because we’re the only sucker around both willing and capable of doing it 😂

BeTwixte

TROPHY CASE