Weather, Geography, and the Calamity

[Anonymoose]

I wanted to know about Nophica's Wells. <...> may have been an NPC saying that it used to be an oasis pre-Calamity, and then it got drained by the landscape changes? But then the lorebook comes in and says something about a cave-in of underground caverns, which may or may not have been caused by the Calamity.

Most of Thanalan's surface was the same copy-pasta sand, but what was under it varied by location. There were mines, antling tunnels, natural tunnels, small caves, connected cave systems, etc. It was one of the places that the lower variance in textures and limited number of area shapes became less obvious (but the lack of content in them moreso).

Western Thanalan had a lot of mesa in the northwest - most of the zone you traversed regularly was actually at the same elevation as Cape Westwind. If you go up there and look out today, you can kind of see that a lot of the zone used to be that high up. However, below was a massive series of tunnels that had been eroded away. You could try to sneak through all of the antlings and drakes there, but there wasn't much to see (that could be accessed, anyway). The Calamity caused a lot of these caverns to fall in on themselves, as if the mesa was held up by pillars that were knocked down. This is especially obvious if you look at the dig sites you run through between Horizon's aetheryte and Vesper Bay. These NPCs are exploring what was hidden under them for years.

Nophica's Wells was in the southeast of western Thanalan, always at a lower elevation than the rest. It was a natural drainage basin full of cenotes. There was a ramp you'd run down into the valley and three of those hollowed-out-cliff things like what make up Little Ala Mhigo (they had those copied-pased all over the landscape and rotated a bit to hide that they only came in a few shapes, some were connected, others not).

You used to have to go north through central Thanalan, then west, then south, to reach Nophica's Wells and the Silver Bazaar. The Calamity collapsed the middle and you can just go west straight through what's left of it.

Also, how did weather patterns in Thanalan change between 1.0 and 2.0? It rains quite a bit in-game now, but was it the same in 1.0? Why is Drybone still "dry" when I distinctly recall questing in the middle of a torrential downpour in-game?

From Patch 1.18 onwards, the weather patterns in Eorzea got progressively more erratic. Whereas rain in Thanalan was rare (if ever seen), sudden downpours there became common to show just how off things were getting. At one point it fell for several earth days straight. The team also adjusted where water appeared, removing it from some places (such as Nophica's Wells, and placing it in places where it hadn't been previously. These relatively easy but obvious changes were mostly a way of showing that something was very wrong, especially because many still associated flooding and Calamity via the previous Umbral Era.

How do dust storms affect Central Thanalan, but never affect Ul'dah when they're right next to each other?

Cities are usually immune to things that make it harder to find your way around, there are new players there after all. So ... walls ... I guess ><

Getting into theorycrafting here, but where does Ul'dah get its freshwater from?

This area of Thanalan has a bit more in the way of drainage basins, springs, aquifers, etc. Access to these sections of the water table was a primary factor in the war between Ul'dah and Sil'dih, as the latter had better access and cut off the former's in some places.