Off-site Screenshot test poster

If we repeat the athletic course, or catch fish, or make food for the faire, we can get more tickets. We need 15 to get one of everything that isn't the fireworks so... let's see some of the other stuff you can get into at the faire now that we've finished the story campaign.

This repeatable quest requires us to either know how to cook, or be willing to pay a premium for food someone else has cooked.

Greetings, my gourmet-inclined friend! Since you've stepped up to speak to me, I presume that you're looking to take part in the one and only Iron Culinarian Challenge? Oh, happy day! Don't fret if this is your first time, for the rules of the challenge are simple enough. First, I will prescribe for you a particular dish. Next, you'll procure the necessary ingredients and get cooking. Finally, you'll bring your creation back to me for inspection. If your culinary creation is up to snuff, you'll win yourself a Faire voucher for your efforts!

And now, without further ado, the dish you'll be preparing for us is...battered fish! Never saw that one coming, did you? It's a simple yet tasty treat that really is all the rage among faire-goers at this time of year. Crispy on the outside, lightly flaky on the inside...if you've never had it yourself, you really owe it to yourself to give it a try!

I'm not gonna lie, doing this quest gave me a craving for hand-battered fish. None of that greasy fast food crap from A&W/Long John's. No, I mean the real shit.

If you're in need of fresh haddock, the friendly fisherman just over yonder would be happy to part with one of his catches...for the right price, of course. Now go forth, friend, and fashion a culinary creation that will win the hearts of all who partake in it!

This is going to serve as something of an introduction to the crafting and gathering systems in the game. Battered fish is a simple enough thing to make, but it requires some preparation.

First off, gonna equip my Culinarian set so we're ready in case this fellow sells everything we need.

This is another thing I'm gonna have to blow up to show.

This is what the crafting interface looks like. On the left we can search or browse our recipes by level category, in the middle, we can see what the things we can craft are, and on the right are the ingredients. So let's search for "Battered Fish".

When you search in the crafting interface, it searches all of your crafting logs. So if, for example, leatherworker had something that started with "batter" then it would have also shown up here. Luckily, the only result is the recipe we need. It requires some haddock, a popoto, some olive oil, and table salt. It also needs some elemental shards as catalysts.

So let's see what the fisherman offers for sale.

He sells a bunch of bait and fish, including the elusive haddock! But he doesn't sell any of the other ingredients, so we'll have to track those down. Thankfully, third-party tools are here to help! While we could very easily make our own olive oil and salt, there exist vendors that sell intermediate cooking materials as well. So...

Let's open up the handy dandy Garland Tools Database. Which, hey look at that, is already looking at the battered fish item. If you click on the "Crafting" tab, then you will see...

This shows us where we can find all the individual components the easiest. Here, it lists Haddock as being sold by "Holasfhis" on the Limsa Lominsa Upper Deck. The database doesn't assume that any individual seasonal event is taking place. But we can safely ignore that and instead look at the oil and salt. Both of those are sold by the "Sahagin Vendor" which is a minor spoiler for much later in the LP.

Popotos, however, only have a feather icon and a zone. This means that we can only get those from level 20 Boatnist gathering nodes in the Eastern Thanalan; thus ET, Lv. 20, Feather.

If we open up the in-game gathering log, we can confirm that the website is correct. Popotos can only be found in the Eastern Thanalan, from a level 20 node, in a subzone called the Sandgate. And because it's Eorzean potatoes we're finding, we can make a pretty educated guess that we won't be mining them from rock walls. Thus, we need botanist.

Simple enough so far, right?

So let's put on our botany hatchet and go dig up some potatoes!

This also gives me a chance to show off teleportation. You just click on the little teleport icon and pick your destination from a list. In this case, it will cost us 261 gil to teleport from Eastern La Noscea to Eastern Thanalan.

A short animation plays...

And then we're dropped off next to the aetheryte in East Thanalan! Let's find the Sandgate and then go vegetable hunting.

Sandgate is way to the south from where we are.

After a few moments, we see some blue gathering nodes on our minimap!

Level 20? Check. Sandgate? Check.

Popotos? Check! Alright, now time to explain how this works.

See this bar at the top? We only get a certain number of gathering attempts per node. In most cases, it's 4 attempts per node, unless you get bonus attempts because Reasons. Gathering is as easy as clicking on one of the items we want. The percentage listed next to it is our chance to gather the item.

The smaller percentage is the chance that we get a high quality (HQ) version of the item. Think of a HQ item as the perfect version of that item. In this case, it would be an absolutely gigantic potato with no bad spots or rot.

Gathering jobs have some skills that let them increase the yield they get from each gathering attempt. So we can literally double the number of potatoes we gather by just using this one skill!

...hahaha. Of course. That symbol means we just got a HQ item.

High quality items get a little sparkle on the icon to show that they're special. Normally getting HQ stuff is worth the effort, but in this lone case it isn't. Battered fish is a recipe that doesn't have a HQ version. So we don't need HQ ingredients. So, time to demonstrate something else...

You almost never want to do this. But if you right click on a HQ item, you can lower the quality (somehow).

Our final stop on the ingredient tour is Western La Noscea, to a town called Aleport.

We need to go to a fairly high level area. WLN is a level 10-20 zone, but it has a cordoned off section that's 40+. We need to go to that area.

The MSQ will eventually send Ginger this way, so we'll explore the zone in-depth then. For now just enjoy the ride.

Past the Tidegate is the domain of the Sahagin. Everything here is level 44 and above.

The vendor in this friendly encampment sells both table salt and olive oil for nominal fees. 10 units of oil costs us a whole 80 gil.

We now have 10 of all the ingredients, except Haddock. And we can buy 9 more when we get back to the fairegrounds. So...

Back to the Isle of Endless Summer we go!

Confirming... we have enough ingredients to make 10 helpings of battered fish. So we'll just hit the big Synthesize button on the bottom.

A cute touch is that while I'm making the fish, Brendori sits down at a small portable stove with a cast iron pan.

While crafting, you have different skills that improve progress or improve quality. If you can get the Quality bar high enough, you have a better chance of creating a HQ item. But at the same time, you have the item's "durability" to worry about. The entire time you're crafting, each action you take reduces the durability by 10 points. So in this case, you have to craft the fish within 6 actions or the synthesis fails. There are skills you eventually learn that will restore durability points to an item you're crafting.

Super high level crafting becomes something of a puzzle. There are solvers out there on the Internet that you can plug your crafting stats into and give it an item you're trying to create, and it will give you the most optimal set of actions to use to get there.

In this case, Brendori's cooking gear is good enough that the 33 points of Progress necessary is cleared in a single step. Indeed, she improved the Progress by a whopping 466 points!

While making the other 9 servings, I try maxing out the quality bar to see what happens. Even at 100% HQ chance, I still got a NQ serving of battered fish. If you look in the crafting screen, it even tells you that you can't make HQ battered fish.

Like so. It also mentions that quick synthesis is unavailable. So we can't mass produce the fish and go AFK.

A few minutes later, we have all ten servings. We can turn these in, one at a time, to get 10 faire vouchers! Recall that we only need 15 to get everything.

Take a whiff of that simply scrumptious aroma! I can only assume that you have what I think you have? Why, just look at it! Freshly caught haddock, battered and fried to a deep golden brown! Why, if I hadn't already wolfed down ten pieces just today, I doubt I could keep myself from devouring it on the spot!

But I jest. You may rest assured that your most mouthwatering creation will find a good home in the tummy of one of your fellow festival-goers. Take this Faire voucher as your reward, and take pride in a job well done. Farewell, and should you ever be so inclined as to show off your skills with a skillet once more, you know where to find me!

To get the same effect I had to go through, re-read the above text nine more times. Or don't because I just madly clicked through it too.

Let's put on our fishing pole and talk to this catgirl for the fisher quest. This one isn't nearly as involved as the cooking one!

Welcome, fellow adventurer! As you surely see, it's that season of the year again, and the Moonfire Faire is in full swing! I trust that you're enjoying the festivities? If you're just dying for the opportunity to flaunt your fishing skills for all the realm to see, then you've come to the right place! Welcome to J'nangho's Angling Extravaganza!

The rules are simple. I name a fish, and tell you the quantity of said fish I require, and you go out and do the fishing. Then you bring your haul back to me for fame, fortune, and fabulous prizes! ...In the form of Faire vouchers, that is. Got it? Without further ado, your assignment is thus: catch for me three specimens of only the freshest haddock!

Have you ever had haddock, friend? It really is quite the treat, especially battered to a golden brown. Mmm, haddock... And with that, I say go forth, my friend! Go forth with fishing rod in hand, and lay claim to the bounties of the sea! I shall be waiting for you with bells on-and with an ample amount of vouchers to reward you for your efforts.

"Mmm, haddock..." indeed. Anyway, this is super easy. Like before, our journey starts with the fisherman.

While the game does have a fishing log, like the gathering log, it only works for stuff you've personally found. Because Haddock can only be caught during the faire and this is my first faire, I have no idea where to find it. But in this case, the quest log saves the day.

Back to the fishmonger we go. I'm taking a wild stab in the dark here, but because the quest to catch the fish was level 5, the level 5 bait is probably a good one to use. So we'll buy a handful of pill bugs.

When you fish, what bait you use on the hook determines what you can catch. So we have to open up our tackle box and select the 20 pill bugs.

Then we just select a nice enough spot and cast out our line!

While I don't believe I've ever seen text like that before, it shows we're in the right place to catch Haddock. Although something is missing...

One of the skills you get as a level 1 fisherman is to put a little green glowy bit on the end of your rod. It's purely cosmetic, but I find it helps me see when something's on the line.

See how it moved to the side? Once it does that, we just have to reel in our catch. There's no minigame, it's just a test of patience.

And it's that easy! Fishing can be pretty relaxing unless you're trying to be an insane completionist and go after all the big fish in the game. Don't do that. It's not worth it. Nobody who's done it thinks it's worth it.

Even when you're in the right spot, getting the right fish isn't a guarantee. So just be patient.

But eventually we get there!

Do I smell what I think I smell? Why, my mouth is already watering at the prospect! If you have the haddock, pray hand it over with all speed! Would you look at this! Why, this haddock is so fresh it feels like it could jump out of my hands and flop its way all the way back to the sea! Not that I'd let that happen, of course. Your catch is going straight to the hands of a skilled culinarian, who will make a tasty feast of battered fish for the faire-goers. At any rate, you've proven yourself worthy and then some, and this voucher is your reward-take it with my blessing. We'll be here until the faire finishes up, so if you're looking to show off your skills again, you're welcome at any time! Until then, fare thee well!