Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
Climate implies that Thanalan is at roughly 30 degrees north latitude. [Checks view from space to see if anything is absurdly askew of this so far, it's not.]
It took me a while, but this sentence, along with my own comments on the constant winter in Ishgard and the Twelveswood seemingly being too far north, made me wonder if it's possible to gauge how far north a particular location is, going by what is possible to grow there. (Wanted to ask if Eorzea even actually experiences seasonal weather patterns, and the only in-lore reference to changing weather is in a levequest [I think it was a level 30-40 crafting levequest?] that mentions that "winter is coming" in Ishgard. And that could've just been a sarcastic quip, really. "Winter is coming? Of course winter is coming, it's always winter here!")

La Noscea, for instance, is on a higher latitude than Thanalan, but has an ecosystem that can support a huge variety of plants. We can harvest grapes, oranges, lemons, and kukuru (cacao) beans in Lower La Noscea alone, plums and strawberries rolanberries in different parts of Upper La Noscea, tomatoes, lettuce, and wheat in Middle La Noscea, artichoke and zucchini in Eastern La Noscea, and that's not even counting all the different herbs and spices we get from that region, some of which, if I'm not mistaken, would be growing in completely separate climates and seasons on Earth.

But then I recall certain trees in the North Shroud which can provide you with both latex and maple sap at the exact same time, and I suppose in-game gathering isn't all that reliable a measure, after all. Fine. So going by what I see in-game, the farmers of La Noscea definitely grow wheat (Red Rooster Stead), grapes (Wineport), some kind of fruit trees, which I'm going to go out on a limb and say are oranges (RRStead and Summerford), and... a field of lavender? Does anyone know which latitude that kind of crop implies?