Distances and Travel Times

[Mysterysword]

So with the world map opening up, I'm curious about how much ground we're actually covering and how long it takes us. For example, from Limsa Lominsa to Kugane. I'm guessing that trip took 3 months of sailing, meaning that in Stormblood, we actually spent the better part of a year away from Eorzea.

I also want to know how long an average trip between the Eorzean city-states generally takes. I've seen some NPC dialogue that implies that a single rider can get from Gridania to Ul'dah in one day, but only if they push their chocobo to the absolute limit. What's the distance between those two points?

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

Distance is hard to measure because the map is limited to 40x40 coords so 1x1 pixel is different yalms on different map.
I guess you can use aether compass if you haven't unlock flying for hard measure but won't work for ARR.

Travel time I settle for what chocobo/falcon porter gives (with mount speed),
gridania - camp tranquill - camp drybone - uldah = ~10mins, or 3h 26 mins eorzean

[TinyRedLeaf]

G.R.R. Martin, author of the Song of Fire and Ice chronicles, famously refused to give any specifics on how large Westeros and Easteros are, precisely because he didn't want fans fussing over long it takes for characters, armies and ships to get from one part of the world to another.

I'd suggest that players don't take distances too seriously in Eorzea either. All talk about travel times is effectively moot, given the existence of instantaneous travel via aetheryte crystals and Garlean teleporters.

The lore makes it such that adventurers are "special" (don't ask why; there's never been a satisfactory answer, I feel, as to why adventurers necessarily have more aether reserves, or anima, than common folk), and are able to teleport regularly, almost at will. And, in gameplay terms, that's effectively what it is: instant travel, any time, all the time.

It's one of those things I'd chalk up to gameplay-story segregation. For head-canon/fan-fiction reasons, I ignore the existence of such teleportation devices, or otherwise imagine that their range is severely limited.

But, to answer the OP more directly, I believe it was indeed officially stated somewhere that it takes about two to three months to sail from Limsa Lominsa to Kugane.

So, yes, the journey to-and-from Gyr Abania to Othard should, by right, have taken up to at least half a year in game time. By my own very conservative reckoning, the campaigns to liberate both Ala Mhigo and Doma should have taken at least a year concurrently, if not more, excluding travel time.

And so, contrary to how it feels to most players in actual gameplay, the revolution didn't happen "overnight". It did in fact take a lot of time, logistics and planning to carry out, and would have very likely not been easy.

[Mysterysword]

snip

It's funny you should mention fanfic, since that's one of the reasons why I'm thinking so much about this question. Writing a long fanfic on Comic Book Time is doable, but not my style, really.

I personally estimate Stormblood as having taken place over a year, travel time included - which means all our fighting and talking took place within 6 months. It's things like these that remind me of how the writers really screwed the pooch by making Alphinaud and Alisaie teenagers: all that time passing and they don't age one hair? But well, time bubble.

I actually estimated the travel time between Limsa Lominsa and Kugane by a real-world comparison. A sailing ship in the 18th century apparently took 100 days or so to travel from England to China, going around Africa and all that. Limsa Lominsa to Kugane, in Earth terms, would probably be like sailing from Saint Helena to Japan, which I'm guessing is a similar distance.

[Wyssahtyn]

I forget the source, but someone (might have been Anonymoose?) did the math or something and the trip from Limsa to the Far East is supposed to take at least two months, assuming good weather.

[uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu]

Ah I see now. I don't think we can set age or relative time span in story. How long a quest can be finished usually not related to how long the story went. My character would be 42 years old if I start adventuring at age 16. The game is accurate tho metrics-wise, in the example without mount speed, it would be 14 hours for normal npc which gives 10 hours rest in camp drybone/tranquill. Even chocobo need sleep/eat

There's no chronological order for side stories too, for example dragoon job quest and msq can overlap in sb and still make sense to me. (sorry if spoiler)

[Anonymoose]

I'm guessing that trip took 3 months of sailing

I forget the source, but someone (might have been Anonymoose?) did the math or something and the trip from Limsa to the Far East is supposed to take at least two months, assuming good weather.

Getting the obligatory disclaimer out of the way: Any and all timelines focusing on the opening cutscene of A Realm Reborn onwards are fanmade contrivances to which no player can justly be beholden until such a time that the world lore team concretely and specifically states otherwise. Time is locked in a one-year bubble in Eorzea's open world and NPCs deliberately refer to present time passage in vague increments.

That said, if you were going to try to focus on your own headcanon timeline for your own writing, I highly recommend just checking out historical sailing information. Almost every metric on Hydaelyn mirrors Earth itself with a bit of wiggle room, from the name (Earth → Eorþe → Eorzea) to the basic layout of the continents. Until we have anything better to go on, that's a great place to start.

Landmass distribution implies that Eorzea is roughly Africa broken and shifted northward with Europe shifted eastward to accommodate. 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.] So grab a location between Portugal and Senegal (a fff[kupo]k of a lot farther than 1,000 malms, let me tell you, Gosetsu), pretend mid-Africa is open ocean, and sail to Nagasaki at galleon speed (let's say 8 to 12 knots). Yeah, you're probably looking at a moon to two depending on where the fine-tuning falls in terms of latitude and wind behavior.

This is why I don't even try to gauge realistic travel across even just Eorzea. You are able to explore tiny sections of areas which make up tiny fractions of regions which make up a massive continent, and being an MMO means playing with scale as required. Even taking aetherytes and linkshells and the imaginary time-jump between loading screens into account, by the time you chart out the various speeds at which news and soldiers are able to travel based on the needs of the plot, you're back to arguing about the flight speed of ravens alongside the Ice and Fire crowd.

[Gumbercules]

Also keep in mind that the areas we have explored are sometimes really far apart (love the new map layouts showing this!) So even on the chocobo examples, we still cross those swaths in an instant XD Ironically reason i don't mind the instanced areas is because this means they realistically can keep adding "land" wherever they want lol.

[Wyssahtyn]

I dunno how true the one year bubble statement is now, given that there's a NPC (Yomogi, under "what kind of place is this") in the Doman Enclave after you liberate Doma who specifically states that it's been a year or so since the failed Doman rebellion, which was around... 2.2-ish?

[TinyRedLeaf]

And Gerolt's disciple once said it's been two years since the master crafter received a commission to hammer out, if I remember correctly, a number of kettles, while Lyse/Yda said it's been, what, 15 or so years, since she fled Ala Mhigo? I don't have access to my notes to give the definitive figures offhand.

But this doesn't mean a time bubble isn't in place. A better analogy suggested by one forum contributor a while back is to imagine a "chain of (time) bubbles", with each expansion corresponding to the latest bubble in the chain. By that, we know definitively that events in one expansion happen after events from previous content. But bubble still holds, with regard to each expansion.

As 'moose said, try not to think too hard about it. It's enough to know that there is some kind of continuity. Let your imagination fill in, or paper over, the gaps, whatever the case may be.