Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
Ah yes, I forgot to mention this. It would take some reworking of the storyline to allow acquiring mounts earlier.

Chocobo porters also allow renting a chocobo to ride yourself starting from level 10. Details on this seem to be scarce, but I assume you get to ride it until you dismount.


Out of curiosity, how many and which quests were those? Over 500 gil per teleport is basically 'porting between the major Eorzean cities; I seem to recall the fee between Gridania and Ul'dah being around 350 gil and between Gridania and Limsa Lominsa just over 600 gil. Teleports internal to a region are in the 100-300 gil range. There's a few points in the storyline where the quests have you hopping all over the world, but for the most part they tend to stick in the same region for a while. Doing job quests at the same time can certainly mix it up though.

Early main scenario quests give around 200 gil per quest (although some relatively simple quests give nothing), and around level 20 it seems to jump to 1000 gil or more. Since there's usually a few main scenario quests plus a bunch of side quests at the same location, it should be easy to earn more than the teleport fee before moving to the next location.
So the first actual mandatory teleport that could cost you over 500gil, starting from Vesper Bay, is when you get the memorial quest (its part of the choosing your GC story here). Other teleports were not actually mandatory but rather necessities and/or interest points that I highly doubt anyone would ignore (hence the air quotes I put over the word). For example, to unlock the hair styles, you unfortunately have to travel to each state and pick up a package from an npc, then go back to Jandelaine. If you want to unlock your first dances of the game, that's another travel around the states, which once again, depending from where you tele, can get you close to 500. So the pattern becomes that if you're looking to unlock something in the game from early and you're in a preferred world where you level very fast and more unlock quests show up rapidly practically everywhere you turn, you could rack up quite the travel debt, especially if you're a complete newbie and you're trying your hand at just about everything. Like wereotter mentions, there are other venues to diminish those expenses and experienced players playing on alts may use those frequently but I just don't see a new person remembering those or making use of those frequently once they attune to an aetheryte.