Do we have some kind of FFXIV lore wiki?

[Amekaze]

Hi guys,
newer player here. Been playing it hardcore over past 2 months and I have huge interest in the lore of the game and have an idea of maybe making some youtube videos about it BUT I have maaaaany questions and tons of stuff are really confusing to me still. I often search the forum here to find my answers but it is really hard to find some of them even after a super long searches so I was wondering do we have some kind of wiki or archive or anything alike where all we know is written down or I will have to keep wandering around to find it?

Thank you!

[Vidu]

Well, we have the two lorebooks, where a lot (but not all) stuff is written down by the dev/lore-team themselves -> https://store.na.square-enix-games.c...ntasy-xiv-book (there might be pdfs of the books out there, but I would still recommend buying the books - they're beautiful, well written, loaded with pictures and all in all just great!)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2055243359 -> there is also this, written by our lore-master Anonymoose.

Thats the only two things I can really think about - besides browsing the forum, seeing if something you want to know about has been discussed before or, if not, make a thread asking about it.

[Amekaze]

Well, we have the two lorebooks, where a lot (but not all) stuff is written down by the dev/lore-team themselves -> https://store.na.square-enix-games.c...ntasy-xiv-book (there might be pdfs of the books out there, but I would still recommend buying the books - they're beautiful, well written, loaded with pictures and all in all just great!)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2055243359 -> there is also this, written by our lore-master Anonymoose.

Thats the only two things I can really think about - besides browsing the forum, seeing if something you want to know about has been discussed before or, if not, make a thread asking about it.

Oh wow,this book looks amazing,I will keep my eye on it to grab it in the near future for sure!
Thanks!

Okay let me drop directly the question that has been bothering me for days already,
Do Calamities happen only on the Source? I would answer yes,since to Rejoin shard needs to come back to the Source,but if it is not true I will be even more confused of how the world works.

[Gula]

Player made from a lore monger:

http://mirkemenagerie.tumblr.com/pos...nagerie-update

[LineageRazor]

Okay let me drop directly the question that has been bothering me for days already,
Do Calamities happen only on the Source? I would answer yes,since to Rejoin shard needs to come back to the Source,but if it is not true I will be even more confused of how the world works.

At this time, it is unknown just what happens on a Shard prior to a Rejoining. Really, we don't know much of anything about what life is like on other Shards. The most we know is that Ascians go to other Shards to meddle, and that that meddling sometimes causes a Flood. Since Ascians don't actually want Floods to happen, they must be meddling for other reasons. While what those reasons might be are unknown, we DO know that Ascian meddling on the Source usually has the purpose of introducing more chaos into the world, in the hopes of eventually causing a Calamity to occur.

Calamities are said to thin the barriers that lie between the Source and a Shard, which is what allows the Shard to be reabsorbed into the Source. It's not out of the question to speculate that having a Calamity occur on BOTH sides of the barrier would be more effective at destabilizing it than would doing it on just one side or the other. By that logic, it would make sense to assume that the Ascians on the Shards are trying to trigger Calamities to coincide with the Calamities on the Source.

However, that seems like it would require an awful lot of coordination, and Ascians are also known for being rather independent from one another. They're not great team players, each having their own schemes and ambitions (even if their overall goal of resurrecting Zodiark seems to be pretty universal among them). That would be a point against the idea that the Ascians on the Shards are trying to trigger Calamities. Every Rejoining has coincided with a Calamity on the Source. If one happened on a Shard, but not on the source, it did not cause a Rejoining.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but the bottom line is that we do not know the answer to your question, and no current source of lore provides an answer. We can only speculate at this point - but since we're going to a Shard next expansion, it's at least possible taht some of those questions will be answered. It'll be interesting to see how much of the history of the First Shard we're able to learn, so we can compare it to what we know of the history of the Source.

[YianKutku]

Every time the idea of a lore wiki for FFXIV comes up, it gets a lot of approval and "someone should do it", but honestly I don't think anyone really has the time and spare effort to make a good one.

Especially since it needs to be actively curated and updated, which means setting up a wiki is just the easiest step. Moderating it would be the real test.

[Anonymoose]

It seems logical to assume that the shard worlds only experience the Calamity that destroys them, but logic only gets you so far. There's no confirmation. It's on the "if it's not answered in Shadowbringers, we should probably ask the devs" list, lol. I suspect that the Ascians are weakening both sides of a single shard/Source barrier at the same time, meddling in both dimensions to create enough instability to finally blow out the membrane and rejoin the shard world.

As far as a lore wiki goes, curation and moderation is indeed the challenge. It takes so much time to do data entry, one loses time for actually acquiring and archiving data. For what it's worth, Gamer Escape welcomes any efforts to flesh out the lore and (through their Discord server) will do their best to accommodate any changes needed to the infrastructure to make lore work easier.

[Amekaze]

However, that seems like it would require an awful lot of coordination, and Ascians are also known for being rather independent from one another. They're not great team players, each having their own schemes and ambitions (even if their overall goal of resurrecting Zodiark seems to be pretty universal among them). That would be a point against the idea that the Ascians on the Shards are trying to trigger Calamities. Every Rejoining has coincided with a Calamity on the Source. If one happened on a Shard, but not on the source, it did not cause a Rejoining.

Yep,that is EXACTLY what I was wondering,but my hopes are now in vain. I thought we had answers to that. I had some crazy idea that maybe Calamities that happen on other Shards somehow reflect themselves on the Source too,so they actually happend there and not on the Source but Source got hit just as much as the Shard. I dont really know,just my stupid thought on it :P.

[Amekaze]

It seems logical to assume that the shard worlds only experience the Calamity that destroys them, but logic only gets you so far. There's no confirmation. It's on the "if it's not answered in Shadowbringers, we should probably ask the devs" list, lol. I suspect that the Ascians are weakening both sides of a single shard/Source barrier at the same time, meddling in both dimensions to create enough instability to finally blow out the membrane and rejoin the shard world.

As far as a lore wiki goes, curation and moderation is indeed the challenge. It takes so much time to do data entry, one loses time for actually acquiring and archiving data. For what it's worth, Gamer Escape welcomes any efforts to flesh out the lore and (through their Discord server) will do their best to accommodate any changes needed to the infrastructure to make lore work easier.

As I said I am new player,freshly finished MSQ and still finding tons of different stuff to do,but I am really interested in the lore itself so I did some searches and learned many things about this awesome world,but I guess the questions I seek now noone actually knows, which is kinda sad because I had an idea of making youtube videos about the lore but kinda wanted to start it from the beggining. Like the creation of the world or atleast explanantion what/who Hydaelyn and Zodiark are. Were they one before? If no what were they before separation? If yes, they seem just like some sort of huge aetherflow that got wrong ways and formed characters that represent their weird goals, which would also mean they could seperate again in smaller parts or "personas" or whatever. Then,where is this Zodiark,it is said Hydaelyn banished him and he is imprisoned in some "moon",is that "moon" something like Dalamud but million times bigger and stronger than the one we know? How will Rejoining even reborn the Zodiark,he is still "banished" and imprisoned,no? Are 7 shards (knowing we had 7 calamities) already Rejoined? Ascians say they are but somehow,I dont believe them. I think (this is 100% my made up idea) that when Shard is Rejoined all life from it returns to Source and with it I think we (people who live on the Source) would have some kind of flashbacks from the life on those destroyed Shards.
Urghh,I am thinking too much about it! But I kinda had this cool idea for a video and now I am sitting here and not sure should I go with it or just do the gameplay content (this is first game that triggered me to actually try to do something like videos and stuff,YES IT IS THAT GOOD. )

Thanks to everyone who actually reads all this!

[Anonymoose]

I did some searches and learned many things about this awesome world

This is good! But always take what you read with a grain of salt. Reddit, YouTube, and FFWiki have a...hit and miss..relationship with FFXIV and lore accuracy, lol.

Were they one before?

It's been vaguely hinted at but we're not sure of the specifics. We know they were "One" and yet we know they "shared the Sea." Can you share something if you are one thing? So it seems that the Will of Light (Hydaelyn) and the Will of Darkness (Zodiark) (if they ever were fully enmeshed as one entity), spent some time is a single body with two wills. We don't know what this means. Two crystals in one sea? One crystal with two wills?

Then, where is this Zodiark?

Physics in FFXIV are kinda weird. You dig into the planet, you might cross a boundry into the aetherial world, as if the physical world is a separate world projected from the aetherial, and the physical - at this point in spacetime - is shattered into 14 sub-frequency dimensional planes. In the sense that our planet is connected to the aetherial sea and Hydaelyn, you could say Hydaelyn is literally the planet. In the same sense, I think Zodiark is literally the moon. I think He was thrown out of the sea and became a separate entity, trapped in an aetherial rift. In the physical world, we see this as a different sphere separate from the planet, but dead. No aether, no life. Dig into the moon, you might find yourself in the Chrysalis. (Might.)

Are 7 shards (knowing we had 7 calamities) already Rejoined

Yes. The Ascians say so, Hydaelyn says so, there's no reason not to take it for granted at this point. (Yet?) The shards have been going their separate ways for 10,000+ years, so none of the same nations should exist, none of the same people should exist, nothing should be the same except maybe chunks of the geography. In that sense, while aether does have memory, would people being born today have any more memory of the other worlds than we do our own?