Introductory post to the Shapes of Final Fantasy XIV

Shapes!

Preface

Now I get to actually write about my hyperfixation! Shapes! And what they mean to Final Fantasy XIV, the game that you’ve all heard the copypasta about, and has recently hired someone who identifies as something that a lot of weird people online are getting irrationally mad about. (I love Wuk Lamat. She is the perfect idiot. I’m glad she’s the protagonist when we’re out of the spotlight.)

As of writing, my ability to get new shapes is crippled by the interfaces for getting them (Dalamud plus Cammy, and also Splatoon for in-game diagrams) being currently broken following Patch 7.1. There will be plenty of backlog to go through from when the Shapes Museum was a private Discord-only repository. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about them. Then again, I don’t care. I have to listen to my brain rail off about inane shit, and now you do as well.

Naturally, there will be spoilers. These documents assume you have seen just about all the game has to offer. If you haven’t, then I hope the title of each post will provide enough context for you to make the call.

Shapes? A background.

Right. Shapes. I’m not joking about them. They’re mostly cubes, and sometimes pointy. You never see them because they are far removed from the game environment. They are always empty, and are far out-of-bounds. You need strong shenanigans to reach a cube - if there is no valid ground somewhere beneath the player, then they are not allowed to move there. It looks like an invisible wall that you’ll run on the spot at. If you teleport into this zone, you’ll essentially be cast in stasis. You will either need to hack your way out (using the same method you got in), or use the Data Center Travel/Recall in the Character Menu to return to a homestate Aetheryte.

You can experiment with this yourself. In an area that you have decoration rights to (an Apartment, Private Chamber, Estate Hall, Free Company House, or your Endwalker-mandated Private Island (to a lesser extent).), if you place a bed through the wall and /doze near, you will snap through the wall to lay on it. Jump off. Welcome to the void. It’s safe - you won’t fall forever, but you may be trapped.

I will probably write up a technology glossary on how to do these things yourself.

Anyway, in the big outside, the developers often hide a shape. I don’t know what the shape is for, but experience tells me that it’s an instantiation pool (a place where things live until needed; teleported into the map) or a dev-cube (a place that holds the logic and mechanism of the map).

The shape normally exists along one axis, usually below the center of the map, and normally 512 or 1024 units away in whatever the dominant direction is. They have a very small render radius - they won’t appear unless the camera is very close. There are probably more I haven’t discovered, but included are the ones that I have. Obviously.

Author’s note

Yes. This is insanely against the TOS. and I’m sure Squeenix would be mad at me if they found this. But I am ascribing to the trapdoor excuse that Yoshi-P provides: If you are going to contravene the rules, do not damage the experience for other players. No grief, no unfair advantages. No need to give Square Special Task Force a reason to get mad. I hope they won’t be mad. This is a project of weird, arcane passion and genuine respect for the game. I am a Mentor and I wear the crown honestly. If you want to reach me in game:

Name: Nox’edwin Tepes
Server: Jenova (Aether)

Afterword

It’s nice to upload something through my new form that isn’t me bitching about how uncooperative Jekyll was. Gues they should’a called it ‘Hyde’, amirite? *canned laughter* (Also, my boyfriend clocked off early, so I’m left to hyperfixate, and I might as well RP ‘being productive’.)