Pharos Sirius

[Wolfman88]

Hello all,

Pharos Sirius is one of my favorite locations in the whole game! It has a certain sadness to it. It's like seeing something that was a great and awe inspiring in the past become something that has very little purpose except to only few people. I had a few questions about this place.

- Does this lighthouse pre-date the settlement of Limsa Lominsa?

- Do we have any information about who built it or where the technology inside comes from? In Pharos Sirius NM you can see some machines and other contraptions as you are making your way to the top. It'd be nice to know how they work too.

- Does anyone have any screen shots of what Pharos Sirius looked like in 1.0?

Any bits of information you all can provide is greatly appreciated.

[Anonymoose]

It comes to my attention only now that my information on Sirius is nowhere near as together as I thought it was, lol.

Does this lighthouse pre-date the settlement of Limsa Lominsa? <...>
Does anyone have any screen shots of what Pharos Sirius looked like in 1.0?

I could have sworn Sirius had been dated at some point, but I can't seem to find it in my notes. All of the references I can find are from after the Calamity, referring to how it was damaged in the Calamity. However, it wasn't in 1.0 at all. And I don't mean like the Ishgardian Vigils, where they were retconned from dinky rock forts into massive strongholds. I mean it was never mentioned at all, and there was no lighthouse out there period. Since I can't find any references to it prior to 2013 (so far?), I suspect that it was a retcon for A Realm Reborn and that any attempt to date it will have to come from after (assuming I wasn't wrong that I had a date and just can't find it at the moment). For what it's worth, though, the architecture seems quite Lominsan, but more precise and solid than the earlier stuff you see in town.

Do we have any information about who built it or where the technology inside comes from?

It's clearly aetherial tech, but it seems a bit ahead of 1.0 Lominsan standards. The one reference for it claims that the smallfolk would have you believe that it's an "arcane bomb" or "thaumaturgy", which is interesting because that's the 2010 background for Pharos Polaris, the blue-tipped lighthouse in Galadion Bay (Limsa Lominsa itself).

Assuming there's no info I've just lost for the time being, it'd probably be safest to assume that Naldiq & Vymelli's, in conjunction with various scholars, did have the technology to create these aetherial-powered lighthouses in 1572, and that we're just supposed to accept that Sirius was the "pride of Limsa Lominsa" and is one of the most recent lighthouses after Polaris and the various towers.

[Wolfman88]

Thank you very much for the information. I never would have guessed Pharos Sirius is only a couple of years old. The kobolds must work very efficiently to dig an underground tunnel from La Noscea to the Isles of Umbra in such a short amount of time and get all their equipment in there to cause the mess they did in the HM version of the dungeon. I don't think the kobolds took boats there right?

[Fenral]

Assuming there's no info I've just lost for the time being, it'd probably be safest to assume that Naldiq & Vymelli's, in conjunction with various scholars, did have the technology to create these aetherial-powered lighthouses in 1572, and that we're just supposed to accept that Sirius was the "pride of Limsa Lominsa" and is one of the most recent lighthouses after Polaris and the various towers.

It's entirely possible. With most of Ul'dah and Ishgard's manufacturing centers kept entirely off-screen, Limsa Lominsa actually has the most advanced engineering on display out of any of the Eorzean city-states, in both their shipbuilding and the rest of their construction (those windmills!).

Schizo-tech and weird medieval fantasy conceits make it hard to pin down, but Eorzea's mean technological level is comparable to Earth in the late 19th century. For reference, the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889 after only two years of construction. Something the size of Pharos Sirius could easily have gone up in a year or two before the Calamity.

[Zohar_Lahar]

I norice Pharos Sirus (and Pharos Polaris) are much larger than other lighthouses like Brewer's Beacon, Osachon's Totch, and that one lighthouse on an island seen from Lower La Noscea. Speaking of which, what is that island supposed to be, and is that the same lighthouse seen from Mist?