Daily cost of living?

[Illmaeran]

What do you Loremeisters think is the actual daily cost of living for the average Eorzean? For practical purposes, just how wealthy is the average WoL compared to normal people? How long could one live a comfortable average/normal life on 1,000,000 gil?

[ItMe]

I don't know if there's any way to say when food prices make no attempt at consistency or sense beyond how they mechaically serve the game.

[Vyrerus]

I imagine it varies wildly place to place and person to person. There's quite a number of places where people live in a community that takes care of them, like a small village. We get insights from sidequests and leves.

For instance, Quarrymill actually does hire and house Ala Mhigan refugees to an extent or did. They take up arms for the place while others work in making the Muy Tuy Bean stuff.

It's not like living in our world, certainly not the first world, but not even really the third world. It's medieval times still, with magic, and I'm sure a lot of people are self-sufficient enough to hunt and trap their own game/farm etc.

Just look at places like Isari though or the Azim Steppe. People live there, working the land for their own sustenance. No one really depends on gil at all.

I'd say the cost of living is doing whatever it takes to live. How far gil goes can only really be measured in the cities, and each different city is going to value different things differently. 1,000,000 gil probably gets you pretty far in Gridania, but not nearly as far in Ul'dah. 1,000,000 gil doesn't buy your way into society in The Azim Steppe, so it's practically worthless there except for what you could trade for it at Reunion.

[Cleretic]

There's no context to the actual value of gil; even going by in-game vendor prices, values skew all over the place because the nature of an RPG with a linear progression of locations will inevitably ask you for more money as you progress, regardless of what's being sold or where. The podunk nowheresvilles in Shadowbringers ask more for the same sort of item than the capitalist hellscape that is Ul'Dah; not for an in-universe reason, but because later in the game they expect you to have more money lying around.

So, yeah. Suffice to say, we can't state a daily cost of living or something like that, because we do not have an operable metric to measure with.

[kaynide]

It’s a question that often comes up in fantasy games like FF or DnD and most often the game makers just don’t have a plan or interest to make the economy work. But because it’s fun I often do a lot of legwork to make the economy seem reasonable in my tabletop rpgs.

For FF, let’s take a look under the hood:

Some common, simple food/drink:
Grape Juice: 31 gil
Chicken and Mushrooms: 37 gil
A Honey Muffin: 39 gil
Dzemael Gratin: 457 gil
Beet soup: 1105 gil (wtf, but it is sold in Azim Steppe…)
Sausage Links (just straight links): 3,595 gil

So we can’t work with that…. However… many food items sell BACK to npcs for an almost universal 30 gil tops, which says to that adventurers are just being charged an “adventurers tax” because we clearly have no concept of money.

Other things we see are teleports costing at most 999 gil, or air travel like 120 or so.

Of course there is housing prices.

All that said, I would hazard a guess that (excluding any post 2.0 food sold by vendors), something like 1 gil is roughly 0.10 dollars, US.

That gives us things like a $3 bottle of grape juice, a $500,000 beachfront smallish house, a trip on the “bus” for a $1.20, or $10 for an express ticket (teleport).

It is absolutely not perfect, but I think I could see paying 3 bucks for a cheap chicken dish somewhere. Or maybe splurging on some fancy stuff for around 50 bucks in Ishgard.

[Illmaeran]

So, yeah. Suffice to say, we can't state a daily cost of living or something like that, because we do not have an operable metric to measure with.

That's exactly why I came to ask the people who know a lot more about the minutae of Eorzea than this humble adventurer with more Gil than sense. As you mentioned, the devs make things cost more as we progress through the game because we have more money. If you were to take a guess, assuming all prices for basic necessities were roughly equal, accounting for availability, transportation, etc, would the regular person be able to make it on 25 Gil per day, 100 if you account for rent/mortgage/periodic taxes, etc?

It’s a question that often comes up in fantasy games like FF or DnD and most often the game makers just don’t have a plan or interest to make the economy work. But because it’s fun I often do a lot of legwork to make the economy seem reasonable in my tabletop rpgs.

It is fun! I think about this a lot and decided to finally ask Ye Who Know More Than Me. An exchange of 1 gil to 10 cents makes a lot of sense to me, 3 dollars for a cheap chicken dish seems reasonable. That would make 1,000,000 gil be roughly 100,000 dollars. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Those quests only reward 150 bucks for everything we do? BAH, keep your money you cheapskate NPCS! LOLOL

[kiagenwa]

Those quests only reward 150 bucks for everything we do? BAH, keep your money you cheapskate NPCS! LOLOL

Considering all the preparations that should've been made for a dungeon run and the risks, I think adventurer is a job only for the desperate.
Even the refugees avoid it.

For us WoL it seems easy because the plot armor and scions doing the preparations.
Also when we venture a dungeon first time how did we know the mechanism to progress? Normal people with one life would retreat and retry.

[kaynide]

Considering all the preparations that should've been made for a dungeon run and the risks, I think adventurer is a job only for the desperate.
Even the refugees avoid it.

For us WoL it seems easy because the plot armor and scions doing the preparations.
Also when we venture a dungeon first time how did we know the mechanism to progress? Normal people with one life would retreat and retry.

I believe also, lore wise, only people with the echo can see the “orange hazard zones”.

[VictorTheed]

It's been awhile since I've seen the story, I usually do the story part of the patch and enjoy it but don't touch it afterwards.

But from what I remember the miners and the merchants seem to make an ok living, not sure what the pay is though, wonder if the salt mining industry in Ala Mhigo will ever be visited again so we can see how it's going.

Plus I wonder how much those girls dancing in Ul'dah by the moogle message npc make, I wonder if they make stripper wages ?, Which also has made me wonder if they serve as an escort service for the syndicate members?

[Enkidoh]

I believe also, lore wise, only people with the echo can see the “orange hazard zones”.

This is actually a misunderstanding of the explanation of how Fordola's Resonance power in SB works and is quite frankly, not true (she senses subtle vibrations in the aether from an opponent and can accurately guess which way someone is going to react, she doesn't see AoE fields through it). AoE fields are a gameplay mechanic with no connection to the lore whatsoever, they're there just to help you play the game (this is also proved by inanimate objects such as boulders and machines with no souls having AoE fields, and npc fighters who do not have the Echo also apparently seeing AoE fields in battles and reacting accordingly, well, as much as their AI allows).

Really, there is no need to have to explain every aspect of gameplay with a lore reason for existing, it's just gameplay mechanics.

Plus I wonder how much those girls dancing in Ul'dah by the moogle message npc make, I wonder if they make stripper wages ?, Which also has made me wonder if they serve as an escort service for the syndicate members?

Ironically the MNR's Guild was before the Calamity just a brothel/house-of-ill-repute moonlighting as a 'trade Guild', full of scantly clad dancers that would proposition the miners within. Like a lot of things the Guild obviously tried to clean up it's act to attract new members after the Calamity and so kicked the dancers out (which is why they're now dancing out in the street) and is a lot more staid and buttoned-down (which alas probably isn't helping the Guild's coffers as well as it used to. ).

Just like the MRD's Guild in Limsa originally being in a pirate ship, but the Limsan authorities wanted to give the discipline an air of legitimacy so they forced the Guild to relocate into the headquarters of the Knights of the Barracuda (the Coral Tower), and effectively shear it of it's shady pirate origins.