The Raimdelle Codex Alces

[WyrahFhurrst]

Why not add them, though? Are the animal and plant minions not flora and fauna of Eorzea as well? Do they not deserve to be included in a complete bestiary?

[Anonymoose]

Are the animal and plant minions not flora and fauna of Eorzea as well? Do they not deserve to be included in a complete bestiary?

Yes and no. When you focus on the things SE has made clear borders for, it's much more concrete. If you start trying to accommodate every danner sage and hunting hawk that comes along, though, it all starts to slip through your fingers as you scramble to collect scant mentions and compare them by language. Some are crazy inspecific, some have nothing but a name and the icons are shared, and some aren't even the same objects in different languages. It's better to just assume that The Raimdelle Codex in Eorzea might have all of these things, but the out-of-world bestiary based on it isn't as good on the arguably irrelevant stuff because the out-of-world people working on it can't reasonably dedicate the resources to make it that good.

The minions (what you're actually asking about specifically) haunt a frustrating middle ground. They have models, they have background, but they also don't appear in the world or add much beyond flavor (and even that is fluid). Take the Owlet, for example. It was originally planned to drop in Gubal, so it was an owl that hadn't been made into Skatane yet. It was changed to drop in Fractal, so now it's part of the source DNA of the Mirrorknight. Either way, all you get out of it is that owls exist in Eorzea, and it didn't seem to be of much value to muck up the cloudkin list with things like [Cloudkin / Owl / Owlet] [Cloudkin / Hawk / Hunting Hawk] just yet.

Though, now that a huge amount of the work is out of the way (and updating for 3.2 has been relatively easy)... maybe there could be a list of "other" simple mobs and plants? But it'd always be incomplete and not be guaranteed to match by language...