Zeno's Complete Beginners Guide

(WORK IN PROGRESS)

This page is intended to be a "by noobies for noobies" type of guide that helps adventurers like me with no past FFXI experience enjoy their journey through Vana'diel.

Game Settings and Quirks

As any 20 year old game would, FFXI has a few settings you'll probably want to change and a few quirks that are good to be aware of.

Game Crashes and Black Screens

On my PC, and for most others I've checked with, any application that wants to grab the full screen (like a Windows UAC prompt) will crash my game. This is also true for me when running the game in Fullscreen mode and hitting alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete. The best solution for this that I'm aware of is to run your game in Windowed mode via the Horizon XI Launcher's settings.

During your time in game, and especially in Jeuno, you will occasionally load into a new zone only to find yourself staring at a black screen with "Downloading" in the bottom-right corner. As far as I know this happens to everyone, and simply reconnecting will be your best bet when you run into this issue. If you're heading out from Jueno to meet with a party it can be very helpful to write down the party leaders name in case your "Black Screen" on the way out. I've also had a couple of times where the whole party will be enjoying some XP grinds in a popular area like Valkurm Dunes and suddenly the whole zone will experience a black screen.

Controller setup and FPS stutters

In my 20+ years of playing MMOs on PC I have never once used a controller, but on FFXI I do! If you decide to try it out as well there are a couple good things to know. If you use an Xbox controller or have other issues the first thing to try is to Enable XInput.

The bigger surprise is the impact the absence of your controller can have on FPS. The common issue tends to be that with a controller enabled, but NOT plugged in, you'll run into intermittent stutters where your framerate drops horribly every second or so. You can fix this by plugging your controller in or by disabling controller input in the Horizon XI launcher.

Addons and Settings

I highly recommend taking some time experiment with the addons and plugins settings in the Horizon XI launcher, and consider downloading the HXUI addon if it hasn't already been added to the launcher.

Be sure to check out the other options in the launcher as well. If you want the game to run at a higher resolution like 2560x1440 but want a larger UI you can set the Window Resolution in General to 2560x1440 and the Menu Resolution in Graphics to something like 1920x1080.

After logging in, there will be many settings that are good to change which are saved per character. To get to the settings you can press the - key twice then use the arrows to select Config. You should explore more as you want but here are some of the ones that are more important:

In Gameplay:

• Sound volume
• Inventory - I'd recommend starting with Sort turned ON and Type' set to 2.

In Misc:

• Damage Display

In Misc 2:

• Background Aspect Ratio -- Adjusting this slider can help make things look much nicer if you're not actually running the game in 4:3!

In Mouse/Camera:

• X/Y Axis inversion - I was going to lose my mind if I didn't change this to Inverted

Another handy setting that is easy to miss is the Alarm Type for party invites, which gives you an audible sound when you receive a party invite. That one is at the bottom of the Party menu.

Getting Started

• EXP Ring starter quest
• Mog house flower quests
• Getting to level 10
• Inventory management
• Partying META