Thread: Unexplored Locations (6.1 to 7.0 Thread) *Spoilers throughout 6.0 as well"

Originally Posted by Lyth

The bit about collecting energy from the sun was an inference made by the Sons of Saint Coinach as per the EE. I'm not really sure how relevant it still is given what we know about aether crystals. Do you have citations for the rest?

Ahh... let me guess, are you referencing 1.x material?

Most of it comes from EE, but there hasn't been anything in the game that I'm aware of that has contradicted it and the Crystal Tower as a sun-collecting device is mentioned multiple times as well. Plus, if the Crystal Tower soaked up aether in Silvertear Falls, why is it still the most aether-rich place in the world and not an aether desert like the Burn?

The focus of the empire now shifted from expanding its borders to bettering the lives of those who lived within them. One such undertaking involved the construction of a massive array of spires at Silvertear Falls designed to gather the very rays of the sun and deliver that energy to the homes and manufactories of the empire. With the completion of the Syrcus Tower - or the Crystal Tower, as it would come to be called in the scripture of later eras - the Allagans began their reliance on myriad machina to ease their daily burden and allow them to concentrate on bettering their minds and their souls. For three centuries, not a war was waged on the Three Great Continents, and the bloodshed which had spawned the empire became but a blemish on a forgotten age.

Utilizing the solar energies collected in the Crystal Tower combined with his newly perfected vivification techniques, Amon achieved the impossible. Xande walked Eorzea once again.

Doga and Unei mention it outside of the EE:

Originally Posted by Unei

The Allagan Empire reached its zenith long before our kind came into being. In that glorious age, the Crystal Tower stood tall as the symbol of Allagan pride. Parents took their children there, that they might learn how the nigh-limitless energy it produced brought prosperity to the whole empire.

Originally Posted by Doga

Realizing that he needed more power to wage his war of conquest, Xande turned his sights towards a forbidden source: darkness. In order to learn how to harness this power, he converted the Crystal Tower into a restricted research facility. Wielding the power of darkness requires prodigious amounts of energy - energy that not even the Crystal Tower could produce. In order to augment the shortfall, Dalamud was created and launched into the heavens. On high it hung, gathering the sun’s energy and channeling it to the tower below. However, a miscalculation resulted in a surge of energy that escaped into the land. This triggered an earthquake of unprecedented violence - the calamity that ushered in the Fourth Umbral Era. In the blinking of an eye, the mighty Allagan Empire was laid to waste.

And in the quest itself there is clickable lore dump somewhere that's now available as a Rammbroes dialogue option:

Originally Posted by NOAH Report - Syrcus Tower

During the final years of the Allagan Empire, the lesser moon Dalamud harvested the sun’s energy, which it then transferred to Syrcus Tower below. However, that energy proved too much for the tower to contain. It escaped into the land, causing the earth to collapse into itself. In mere moments, the Allagan Empire was laid to waste.

Originally Posted by Sightseeing Log

Through their research, the Sons of Saint Coinach have determined that the monolith, also known as the Syrcus Tower, was constructed to collect and store the endless energies of the sun.

G'raha Tia then mentions it again in Shadowbringers as he's killing Elidibus:

Originally Posted by Crystal Exarch

Elidibus. So fixated were you on my memories of the future, you failed to heed the lessons of the past. Your obsession blinded you to the true nature of this tower - this beacon of hope for mankind. Created to serve as a reservoir for the limitless energy of the heavens! To harness and bind the boundless - not unlike white auracite!

As for the Allagan Empire being from Eorzea, that's also in the EE:

As Xande learned more of magic’s potential, he assigned many of these ‘mages’ to his newly formed army, where their unmatched strength on the battlefield allowed the young leader to subjugate neighboring lands with limited Allagan casualties. In less than a year, Allag was the largest nation in Eorzea and Xande crowned himself emperor.

Xande knew he would not live forever, but was not about to allow his life’s work come to naught upon his passing, so he carefully groomed his offspring to carry on his legacy. As a result, in the years subsequent to the first emperor’s death, the direct descendants of Xande fostered the growth of the empire by dispatching its armies to the far corners of Ilsabard and Othard. While there was resistance, the empire made short work of all who stood before it, and in time there was not a city in the Three Great Continents where the imperial standard did not hang.

Originally Posted by Lyth

It really depends on whether it was aether rich before the tower was built. Midgardsormr, Bismark, and even the Twelve seemed a lot less interested in the tower than they were in the adjacent lake. Which doesn't really make any sense if it's the tower itself that's the principle supply of aether to the region. And I think that Myths of the Realm is hinting that there's something more significant at work at Silvertear than we had previously thought.

The tower itself is just a conduit, designed to harness power from a source. And it's one that hasn't really been used since Xande tried to open his Voidgate. So I don't see how it would drain the land of aether unless it was actually used to power something.

I was actually more interested in the evidence behind the claims you made about Xande's original tomb, but that seems to be a 1.x reference.

The tower is more than just a battery and a conduit, the sources I posted above state that it's actively taking energy from the sun and then eventually concentrated solar through Dalamud and is referenced as doing such as recently as Shadowbringers. Also stated above, the tower was originally used to power the empire and did so for hundreds of years before Xande's revival and subsequent war against Meracydia. But the amount of sun on the surface of Hydaelyn wasn't enough to power the voidgates that the revived Xande wanted to make so Bahamut was sealed in Dalamud and sent to space as a solar collector to send concentrated solar power down to the tower. The Crystal Tower and any power from the lake are separate things that seem to not have much to do with each other as far as we know right now.

Nothing at all in the game or outside it says anything about the Crystal Tower having anything to do with the great amount of aether in the region while there's plenty of sources saying that it's a power plant that harvested the energy from the sun instead so there's no reason until we have more information to suggest otherwise. An aether-rich region would be the perfect spot for an empire based around a mage army and it also happens to be smack-dab in the middle of Aldenard, which is the home continent of Allag. If it wasn't the capital before the conquering, it certainly was afterwards. The Crystal Tower was specifically created to power the empire and its location makes sense if that's where everything already was, not necessarily because they were harvesting the lake aether.

If it did take from the power in the lake, then the region would have suffered while it was powering the empire and there would be no point in mentioning Bahamut harnessing the sun from space when that alone wasn't enough. If the Crystal Tower had absolutely nothing to do with the sun at all like you're suggesting, an easier explanation would have been to say that Dalamud was a prison and the Crystal Tower used him directly as a power souce much like how that battleship in Azys Lla used the Warring Triad. Dalamud concentrating the sun from space and sending it down to the Crystal Tower just augments the tower's existing power generation methods.


Xande's Tomb was originally 1.0 lore but was also mentioned in EE:

Upon his death, Emperor Xande was interred in a tomb built within a crystalline cavern located in Mor Dhona - reasoning behind this being that it was thought the concentrated levels of pure aetherial energy might repair the corrupted flesh and restore Xande’s soul to his new body. The actual consequences were quite different.

While buried there for its aetherial properties, it seems like the Allagans were either incapable of actively harnessing the power of the region directly Shinra-style or unwilling to since it makes no sense for the same source that mentions "the concentrated levels of pure aetherial energy" to also describe the tower as a solar power plant if only one of those things was true and completely miss the tower harvesting the region's aether. 600 years of researchers have concluded that it's a solar power plant and it doesn't make sense for them to be wrong about that while somehow missing the large amount of ambient aether they already knew about.

If Doga, an Allagan prince, and G'raha Tia, a person who tied his very essence to the tower and also absorbed memories of Allag both say that the tower collected power from the sun, then there's no other better source and that backs up everything else we already know. If the Crystal Tower was a terrible thing that sucked up the local aether then Midgardsormr would have done something about it. It was around for 300 years before Xande came back and was being used the whole time. It's just that he repurposed it later for reasons that required even more energy than it could provide. Unless there is as-of-yet-unsaid lore related to Emet-Selch's designs, the Crystal Tower's original purpose has nothing directly to do with the navel of the world, high ambient aether, or other shards including the Void.

Allag might seem less interesting because it has been framed as subordinate to Amaurot, but it still has value in terms of its relation to both the Void and Meracydia, which are two relative unknowns that we need to understand better.

We've seen this exact same storytelling device before several times over. Introduce the 'commonly understood' telling of events, and then iteratively refine it as we gain a better understanding of things. Even our understanding of something as fundamental as magic has gone from 'umbral and astral' to 'light and darkness' to 'aether and dynamis' in the span of a few expansions. I'm not even going to go into Hydaelyn vs. Zodiark. Allag is no exception here either. Likewise, a lot of the original lore from the Crystal Tower series seems to pin the fall of Allag only on Xande's decision to open the Voidgate. But the Endwalker flashback from Thavnair between Amon and Emet outright states that Xande was already losing the war even before his attempt to summon the Cloud of Darkness brought on the Calamity of Earth and destroyed his nation. It was an act of desperation because he was cornered. And that's an important nuance that wasn't present in our original telling of the story, which made it sound like things went downhill for Meracydia after Bahamut's imprisonment. There's a lot of 'public perceptions' that we're first presented with that are just flat out proven to be wrong as we gain more information.

You can see that the 'functionality' of the Crystal Tower hasn't really been static either across expansions. Even that quote linked from Shadowbringers makes a comparison between the tower to white auracite, which is how it's able to absorb Elidibus' soul (and auracite itself has evolved significantly as a concept since it has been introduced). That's a bit of a new spin on things. The Crystal Tower is a 'conduit', but between what and what? The word literally just means 'to guide or lead'. The source doesn't really matter, whether it's the sun, a bathing pool for sleepy primals, or an angry dragon locked in a false moon. It's transports power, and if there's no 'sink', then it's not draining anything.

Point is, just because we were given an explanation ten years ago on how things might work (as per the Sons of Coinach, who are engaging with this in the manner of a scientific pursuit, at that) doesn't mean that it's some sort of sacred law. Theories are always fallible, and we've been shown that time and time again. The same principles that apply to science apply to lore. You can never get too rigidly attached to a viewpoint, and you really need to keep an open mind and be willing to challenge your beliefs.

Originally Posted by Iscah

I disagree with that being the logic. If the status of something involved in an optional questline is referenced by a different questline, it will reflect your own personal progress. Things don't happen until you personally do them.

Unless they change that policy, it would be very difficult to build on anything connected to the Bozja storyline while maintaining the "maybe, maybe not" nature of Bozja's liberation and any characters you know from that storyline.

The easiest solution would be to just not involve Bozja in any hypothetical Dalmasca storyline. It'd suck to not see Bajsaljen and the others again, but a Dalmasca storyline doesn't require them, and Dalmasca's liberation itself didn't even happen in the Bozja storyline it happened off-screen afterward.

Unless they patch the Bozja story to not require any grinding at all, and somehow make doing the two raids in it easier for people behind the rush, that's the best answer I can come up with.