Everkeep Population

Walking around Solution Nine and the other parts of Everkeep has left me wondering how many people actually live there. It is absolutely gigantic and none of the other city-states seem to even come close to it in size.
While doing MSQ I don't remember them truly ever talking about it and while searching online I couldn't find anything either. Is there any information I might have missed? Are there any rough estimates? Is there a secret "Welcome to Solution Nine; Popution: X000" that I might have missed?

I had this exact thought going through Solution 9 and couldn’t figure it out myself lol.

Looking at the ‘apartment buildings’ in the distance would make you think there’s like, millions of people in Solution 9, definitely more than any city state as you say.

But then from what we know most of the people in solution 9 are either the remnants of what was once Alexandria or people from Tuliyollal who got sucked in by the bubble. Which doesn’t account for anything close to the amount of space we’re shown lol.

Only headcanon theory I can think of is that they planned at some point to start projecting the Endless into Solution 9, which would essentially give them an infinitely growing population. So maybe all the ‘dead space’ is for all the people who were meant to come back and live again

It reminds me of Amaurot in terms of having numerous high rise buildings which (presumably) served as apartments - although we never saw Amaurot in it's prime so who can tell.

Remember the size of that one flat we visit? Just for a single mother and a kid?
Solution Nine is a housing paradise, everyone gets like 100+ squaremeter apartments for free.

My largely baseless suspicion is that some of Solution Nine isn't actually 'real'. The space we walk is, but I feel fairly certain that at some distance out it's just a holographic image to suggest a larger city. I don't think you could fit one of those skyscrapers into the Everkeep itself.

I would point out that basically every city we go to is abstracted to some degree, though, usually by shrinking the 'expected' space, but a few do take the angle of 'you only get to be in part of this city'. I wouldn't be too surprised if the physical footprint of Solution Nine is comparable to all of Kugane.

The game as a whole seems to try to avoid mentioning population numbers at all costs.

The only two times I can remember in the whole game when populations were counted were both done by Matsuno:
- A field record reference to the Bozjan port city of Martrvje containing 200,000 people.
- A quick mention that 70,000 Dalmascan soldiers died defending Nalbina Fortress from the Garleans.

To put that into perspective, London didn't hit 200,000 people until ~1600.


With Dalmasca's capital city destroyed, Valnain still smoking last time we saw it, Garlemald a heap, and Corvos fresh off a successful armed rebellion followed by the Final Days, I'd say Alexandria from what we can see is now the most populated nation in the world.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

The game as a whole seems to try to avoid mentioning population numbers at all costs.

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Which, honestly, is good, spec fiction is notorious for having terrible sense of scale that breaks immersion if you think about it for too long when given actual numbers.

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Originally Posted by Zero-ELEC

Which, honestly, is good, spec fiction is notorious for having terrible sense of scale that breaks immersion if you think about it for too long when given actual numbers.

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Yeah, on the opposite end of that I get headaches whenever I bump into people who claim that the cities we visit are all there is to them and that they're all "actually tiny" and only contain 2 small outside hamlets each. Despite Thancred having grown up in the "alleys of Limsa Lominsa" and the artwork making it seem much larger. We'd have an insane population crash if Eorzea was just <1000 people.

Found this thread while looking for something else, and hey, we actually have something resembling an answer to this one! Not a population number per se, but 7.1's MSQ gave us something.

Fake Sphene tells us that there's going to be neo-regulators allocated to five thousand people--and crucially, that the reaction to that (by the millala specifically; Wuk Lamat's more responding to 'that's not the entire population and Sphene wouldn't call close enough good enough') makes that sound like a pretty small proportion of the population. So I'd say we're probably in mid-to-high five digits, the low 100ks at most.

We also do have to remember that while Solution 9 is the main residential area, it's 1 of many different levels. A lot of people would be working in the others at least part of the time. Not to mention anyone whose work takes them outside the city like hunters or the military.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

With Dalmasca's capital city destroyed, Valnain still smoking last time we saw it, Garlemald a heap, and Corvos fresh off a successful armed rebellion followed by the Final Days, I'd say Alexandria from what we can see is now the most populated nation in the world.

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Or was at least. With Zoraal Ja's massacre, we know Solution 9 was one of the least effected areas and it was pretty bloody in it's own right. We know other levels were far worse off.

Totally a shitpost number, but 914,000. Bigger than the population of San Francisco, but much smaller than Los Angeles. Also has 9, and 14 in the number.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

My largely baseless suspicion is that some of Solution Nine isn't actually 'real'. The space we walk is, but I feel fairly certain that at some distance out it's just a holographic image to suggest a larger city. I don't think you could fit one of those skyscrapers into the Everkeep itself.

I would point out that basically every city we go to is abstracted to some degree, though, usually by shrinking the 'expected' space, but a few do take the angle of 'you only get to be in part of this city'. I wouldn't be too surprised if the physical footprint of Solution Nine is comparable to all of Kugane.

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In the trial Kugane Ohashi you actually get quite a bit of the scale of how large Kugane is supposed to be from the view in the distance so I don't think you're too far off. A lot of what we see in game is definitely shrunken down, especially older areas.

Maybe Everkeep is like the TARDIS. At this point with electrope, you may as well suggest anything.