Final Fantasy 14's fanbase has proven its creativity time and again, and many fans treat the popular MMORPG as truly another world. Final Fantasy 14 players have built amazing things with the housing system, performed plays, and more. Perhaps one of the surprise success stories from that fanbase has been the creation of the Eorzea Aquarium.
From the humble beginnings of a self-styled Fisher main suggesting a workaround to a limitation of the game’s housing system, museums have become a massively successful enterprise for Eorzea. Spanning three branches across the game’s four real-world regions and starting an entire network of in-game museums, it’s fair to say the past year has been a whirlwind for aquarium founder Fruity Snacks. Fruity sat down with Game ZXC for an interview diving deep into fishing, museums, and the legendary Cinder Surprise. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Can you give a brief introduction of yourself?
A: I typically just go by Fruity Fruits, Fruity, Fruits, Fruit Snacks. Some variation of Fruity Snacks is usually what people call me, but I am a self-proclaimed Fisher main in Final Fantasy 14. There's literally dozens of us! And one of the primary things I do is fish. I’m the official curator and director of the Eorzea Aquarium and the Eorzean Museum Network, and moderator for the Fishcord. Lots to do with fishing.
Q: What got you into Final Fantasy 14?
A: It was actually something that I picked up back in 2014 or 2015. A friend of mine had just started playing–this was I want to say just after Heavensward launched–and then when I started playing, I played the free trial or something that wasn't even on Steam at the time. I believe I started playing it one night in November and then was like “oops, I liked this game” and just kept playing it since then. It really was a friend who got me into it after a really long week of crunching for a project. They were like “You need something to cleanse your mind and do something silly,” so I made the most outrageous-looking lalafell and started playing.
Q: Why did you build the aquarium?
A: The aquarium didn’t start out as a sort of in-game venue. I wasn't really aiming to make a venue. I was just looking for looking to make a place that fishers on Crystal could all come and meet up at, could use the Free Company chests to store baits to hand out to people as a resource for Crystal to support the fishers.
One afternoon, I realized that every house has limits on the number of fish tanks you can have. Regardless of the size you can only have up to four, six, eight, and ten. I made a comment in the Fishcord–the Fisherman’s Horizon Discord is the central discord for all things fishing and Final Fantasy 14–I said something along the lines of if an FC was so inclined, they could use the FC rooms to get around the limit of aquariums that you can have in a house. You could use that to display all of the aquarium fish. I think I even said it could be Eorzea’s first aquarium or something like that. A bunch of people were like, “Alright, cool. You're going to lead this, and we're going to do it.” And I'm like, Oh, wait, what? And it took off.
I think, within the next few hours, we had enough volunteers for at least half the rooms which is sizable because it was about 14 or 15 people. I had already signed up within the first few hours and we were already gifted a house. I say gifted, it was more that this person had a house that they were using, and they were like, “if you just let me use the house for what I need to use it for–submersibles–you can do whatever the heck you want with it, decorate it, name it, we can change the name to whatever you want, you can do whatever you want for this, I'm here to support you.”
We basically were in this agreement, we didn't have to pay rent or anything. We just had to let them use the subs, and that was fine. We were 100% okay with that, because I had enough Gil at the time to fund the whole build, even if we had to buy a house. Then, we got some donations from a few other people to cover it. We had the house, we were able to start figuring out what we were going to want to do.
One of the primary goals of the aquarium has always been to be a resource for the community. That's how it originally started, we made a bunch of rooms, and we decorated them up nicely. Our main audience, our target audience, was housing designers. We were just going to reach out to the housing guys and say, “Hey, if you want to look at what all the aquarium fish look like, we have them here for you.”
Fast-forward about 28 days, we opened and chaos ensued. I think that’s probably the easiest way to put it. We opened on May 1, 2022, and we were like "yeah, we'll just announce it on Twitter." I think I had maybe 150 followers on the Twitter account that I was posting on, and that changed very quickly. Because by the end of the night, that one tweet went, by all definitions, viral. We estimate over 1,000 people came through the house in the first 12 to 24 hours. That's unique people. It just blew up, and it didn't subside for at least three weeks.
It was not what we were expecting. We were very much like “hey, you know if we can get like a few people to show up,” we had no idea what was going on. We knew this was a one-of-a-kind thing. This was special. But knowing that someone was going to be interested enough to show up was different. People were making alts from Europe and all the other different regions because this was before Data Center travel. A couple of folks made alts that were named like “I'mhere Forfish” and “Aquarium Visitor." People made accounts on Marlboro, just to see it, and sometimes they made them on not-Marlboro because at one point we actually temporarily caused it to close down. But we just kept doing it. We're here to stay. Let's keep moving.
We started doing events. And because there wasn't, and still isn’t, cross-region data center travel, we opened up a full aquarium on the European servers a few months later. And then just this past February, we opened up one on the Oceania servers. So this whole organization, I guess we call it now, caters to three of the four major regions in Final Fantasy 14.
We refer to the first aquarium as Aquarium Crystal, then the EU one, Aquarium Spriggan, and then the one on Oceania is Aquarium Sophia. Basically, it's the aquarium and the server that they're from, except the first one, which we call Crystal because Aquarium Malboro just sounds really gross.
I'm actually standing in the aquarium right now and about five people just spawned right behind me. This is a common occurrence. We estimate we get at least 10 to 15 people a day, which in housing terms is pretty high to our understanding.
Q: How is organizing the three aquariums across different global regions logistically?
A: It wasn't as difficult as you would imagine. We run everything. Initially, we did what we would call cargo alts. We found new servers that offer you free character transfers there. So we would be able to load stuff up onto a character and then just move it over for free. Did the same thing with Oceania. Basically, we put an aquarium in a box, because the people who call Sophia, which is where the Oceania server is, they call that region their home. Their resources weren't as big.
We basically boxed up everything that we could, and then transferred it all over there. They were able to grab it, and they had a good start to what they were going to do. Usually, if it's really expensive on Oceania, it's usually pretty cheap on Crystal Data Center servers. So we'll just buy it here and help move it over and use it there. For other logistics, like people we needed, that's like the primary resource that we have is players. A lot of it's all volunteer. There are a lot of different ways that a person can volunteer for the aquariums, but one of the ways is using an alt character to host a room. If you do that, we basically give them the rooms that we either want to make or that we need to make. Do you want to do this one? Sure. Cool. Here's a budget for the room, you get to keep it, and you can do whatever you need with it. We help level if we have to. Just if someone's like, “Hey, can someone help me? Run me through Aurum Veil?” or something like that, we'll hop in and just quickly run somebody through Aurum Veil.
There are certain things that we can't really help with, but we have these tricks of like if you do leveling roulette when a specific role is in need, you get bonus seals. So that can help get the seals that you need to help level up until you can get turn-ins. If you have at least some dungeon gear by now or if you buy green icon dungeon gear, you can turn it in. It's usually like you have all that you need under 100,000 Gil. Those are just the things that we've figured out on how to make it really quick and smooth.
I don't set deadlines or anything. So it's not like “get this character by here,” we just have a pool of people that we can pull from, and it's like, “hey, go and just level at your pace.” If a patch comes out, I tell people to go play the patch, don't worry about any of the things we're doing, it's fine. So people just do it at their own pace. Sometimes people do it super fast. Sometimes people take a couple of months because they just want to enjoy the story again or something. But regardless of how they do it, we support them equally in that sense.
Q: What kind of events do you host?
A: We've hosted a variety. I think our very first event was about a year ago. We called it Sharkapalooza. Continuing with our work as a community resource, we realized we have a ton of fishers who are rather good at fishing and decided to host an event one afternoon where we would help players get their shark mounts. To get a shark mount, you need to get 10,000 points in a single voyage on the Indigo route of ocean fishing, and so we did that. I think we had to do two or three routes.
We had the aquarium basement converted into a little presentation stage, which I put up like wall partitions. Each partition was a different color based on the time of day that was going to be in the zone, and then I use the anglers’ prints to show the fish that you want to go for at each time. I mimicked what the online resources look like in the game, and before every voyage, I did a quick little presentation of 'here's what you're going to do in Zone One, here's what you'll do in Zone Two, here's what you're going to do in Zone Three.' Then, they would be partnered up with aquarium volunteers who would basically tell them the exact same thing with a little bit more detail while they're actually on the boat.
We took the people who knew how to fish with people who weren't so comfortable fishing, and basically just sat there and did everything we could to help them get that shark mount. I think we had over 100 people visit for the first voyage, and then I think about another 100 for the second voyage because we hit the housing cap. This is something we've learned. There's a population cap for the number of people who can be inside a house at one time. We didn't hit it on opening night, but we did hit it when we were doing our first event. We learned a lot from that.
And so we do those types of events. We want to help people fish or help people get big fish, teach people about fish or fishing, and just generally have fun. At the end of last year, we did break from that and did what we call All Tanks Wake, a play on [the seasonal event] All Saints’ Wake. It was our Halloween event, and we hosted a “murder mystery” inside the aquarium.
Volunteers made characters to tell this story of a missing shark that was in the aquarium. Its official name is the funnel shark in the game, but after the first night, it became the pog shark because it looks like it's pogging. It's actually just a basking shark. If you go look up a basking shark, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. We spent about a month or so developing these characters and this story that took place in the aquarium about how somebody stole the pog shark. Payers had to come show up, they would interview those characters, they could actually be asked questions, and then they would respond in character. People had to figure out who did it and why. It was basically an in-game version of Clue. That was a big success, so we're already planning to do that again this year.
This June 24, we’re hosting Aqueerium Pride Day. The Aqueerium Pride Day is the Eorzean Aquarium’s all-inclusive, multi-region event, celebrating pride across the globe. Each region has unique events going on, from Fish Trains to Ocean Fishing voyages to art parties! This is the second year we've done a Pride event, and we're extremely happy to host it again, this time across the globe.
In North America, we’re starting at 3 p.m. Eastern at Aquarium Crystal, Malboro server, Lavender Beds ward 16, plot 59.
Our European Fish Train starts at 1:30 p.m. GMT at Aquarium Spriggan, in Spriggan server’s Lavender Beds ward 20, plot 34.
And for Oceania, we have an art party at 5 p.m. Australia Eastern at Aquarium Sophia, in Sophia server’s Lavender Beds ward 1, plot 58.
I guess that's basically how we do our events. It either involves fishing, or it's something fun involving the aquarium. The culmination of all this, though, was Fishfest, which happened in February of this year. It was a two-day event, which had a bunch of different fishing-themed activities. It put all the other events that we had already done into practice all at once, so we had an in-character puzzle game guest to do. Another house was lent to us for the event, and we turned it into The Trials of the Big One. It was Namazu-themed puzzles. Players had to go in and solve these three puzzles, which gave them clues as to where the Big One was. They had to then go to the Big One, answer his final question, and then they got a prize. We had some panels where people would talk about specific things about fishing. One person talked about snails and mollusks that are found in Final Fantasy 14 and how they relate to real-world fish and snails. Another guy spent three hours talking about ocean fishing.
We also had Fish Trains, which is a relatively new thing. In hunt trains, you’re going to start in Thavnair and kill the two S-Ranks there, then move to Labrynthos and kill those two S-Ranks, then so on and so forth. Fish Trains are a similar concept where a group of people will meet up somewhere at a big fish window. These are all pre-planned, but not as easily planned as S-Ranks–it's not like 'oh, if one S-Rank is up, they're all probably going to be up.'
You actually have to plan a schedule for the Fish Trains, but it's the same concept–a group of fishers all get together, they all meet up at a single fish they go, “Alright, we're going to hit up this window, then we're going to hit up this other big fish, and then just do that over and over again for however long they want because there's always a fish up.” That was a big hit. That was the first time I think we've had a Fish Train hosted at that scale. I think we probably had a consistent 80 to 90 people, all packed around small fishing holes. It was actually funny. We had people nonstop fishing for six hours. But we were applying the, “Hey, this is the fish we're going to catch, here's what you're going to run into, and here's what you need to know” and teaching people how to fish and showing that, you know, fishing isn't really that hard. It's not really that bad. It's not that boring. It's a lot of fun with friends.
Q: What's your favorite aquarium fish?
A: Oh, if you had asked me before patch 6.4, I probably would have said the Draconian Squeaker. It's an upside-down catfish. It's this little red thing. It's not even a hard fish to catch, it's just really funny because it's this small little fish that swims upside down. Or Aquamaton which is–this is going to sound very strange–it’s the only inorganic fish that can go into an aquarium. It's also the only inorganic fish that anyone can catch because it's a robot. It was made by the dwarves, and it's a legendary fish from Shadowbringers that you can catch in Seagazer Shoals in Kholusia.
And now?
A: Sothis, the first turtle that we can actually place into aquariums. Sothis is just adorable. It's just this little turtle in a tank, and it's just flapping its arms around. It's got this really blank look on its face, and it's just enjoying life. So Sothis is probably one of my favorite fish, but it really depends on the day and what mood I'm feeling. Like sometimes it's a shark, sometimes it's the Unconditional, sometimes It's Warden of the Seven Hues. It's hard to really pick one and stay with it because there's just so many different fish and I think they're all neat.
Q: You mentioned the Eorzea Museum Network. Can you talk a little bit about that?
A: Sure. So the Eorzean Museum Network is a child of the Eorzean Aquarium on Crystal, Spriggan, and Sophia. Aquarium Crystal garnered a lot of resources. Not just in terms of Gil, I think we turn a profit. We turned a profit on the cost of the building within about maybe an hour and a half of opening just off of donations, and it continued to grow. We had this natural skill, but people were like, “Hey, I got fish, I have these rare items, you know, I can get you access to this.” We built this network around the Aquarium, and I wanted to take the success of Aquariums Crystal and Sophia and Spriggan and turn that back into the community for not just fishing, but also for art, lore, or anything that we consider a museum.
We model the Eorzean Museum Network off of the International Council of Museums, or ICOM. Where they have a very clear definition of what qualifies as a museum, and you can submit your venue to the International Council of Museums, and they'll be like, “Yeah, you're a museum. Welcome to the club.” We built something similar with the Eorzean Museum Network, where if you have a museum that you've built, you have a museum that you would like to build, or if you have something that you want help with that could be museum-related, let us know. We will help you get that done. We'll help you with marketing, we'll help you with advertising, we'll help you get the materials.
As I mentioned, we have people who will take over any crafting needs a museum has. We have all these people who want to donate time to build these in-game venues and help them succeed, and so we just turned that to the community. I don't have the exact number off the top of my head, but the Eorzean Museum Network now has at least 19 member museums across every region of the game. There are a couple that we haven't announced yet or aren't done yet.
As I say, that's what we wanted to do. We basically spun up a whole new Twitter account for it and converted the Aquarium discord into the Eorzean Museum Network discord, which is where all the museum network and aquarium dealings happen. That's where all the volunteers work. We have channels specifically for volunteers. If you don't want to volunteer and just want to hang out in the cool community, we have spots for that too. That's where we do all of our announcements, those types of things.
Q: What tips would you have for someone who's just picking up fishing for the first time?
A: Finish your quests. That's the first thing that I usually say. I say make sure you're doing your quests because the quests not only teach you mechanics, but they really help set the tone for what fishing is. Fishing is labeled as a disciple of land, it's considered a gatherer, but it is nothing like botanist and miner. It has its own set of rules. I eventually just started calling it the blue mage of disciples of land, because it was really the first limited job before limited jobs were a thing. That's how different it is. It's like trying to compare blue mage to black mage. That's the same type of comparison that you're getting with fisher to botanist. Yeah, we're both gathering things. Yeah, we both technically have time nodes, but you don't have to deal with having to rush over to The Peaks at two o'clock in the in-game morning during a dust storm after fair skies just to gather some weeds. It's very cut and dry for those.
For Fisher, even Yoshi-P said the goal of it is to slow players down and give a chance for players to communicate with the environment. The fishing quests really set that tone. A Realm Reborn is about getting to grips with fishing and showing what fisher is like, and the impact fishers have on the world and in the environment. Heavensward is a bit of a side trip because you're technically doing it to help someone get power again, but we ignore that. Stormblood is all about environmental impact. Crystalline Mean in Shadowbringers is about how fishing can help people. Endwalker’s Studium is actually the studious questline that was mostly about what I would consider fisher fan service lore.
Q: What is fisher fan service?
A: So in ocean fishing, if you've gone ocean fishing, there are spectral currents. The entire Studium questline is about the phenomena of spectral currents, what they are, and how they're caused. It was actually really fascinating that they decided to go that far into that specific mechanic from ocean fishing and to explain like “oh, it's the confluence of a theory of ley lines throughout the oceans and it affects the fish which is why you have spectral fish and why fish caught during it are more attracted.” I highly recommend doing it.
Q: You mentioned that fishing is designed to be about slowing down and connecting with nature and having a discussion with nature. How does it emulate real-world fishing?
A: Yeah, down to the fish. There’s this little-known fact about fishing; there are probably 60-70 different bait and tackle options for fishers. And a single fish, say the Merithor Goby, can be caught on a huge variety of different baits. But for some of those baits, it will “act differently” in the sense that it might take longer to bite showing that the fish is apprehensive about it, or it will bite quicker showing that it favors it. Every fish is like this.
I do fishing in real life as well. If I wanted to go out and catch trout, I would be using a very specific type of lure if I just wanted to go for trout, because they highly prefer that type of whatever I'm presenting. If I don't really care what I get and I'm more just fishing to see what I catch, I would use a different type of lure because it would be more general to everything that's there, and you'd be more likely to catch different things. But it might take a little longer because it's more generic.
There's a mechanic that fish can get away. That happens in real life as well. It's never, ever guaranteed that you will reel in a fish successfully. I was a level 90 fisher back at the start of Endwalker, and I was, just for fun, catching some really low-level fish, like level five fish, and it got away from me! I'm like 85 levels higher than I needed to be for it and my gear is 85 levels higher, and it still got away. It's just like real life. You'll go out, you'll catch a fish, you'll be like, “yeah, I totally got it," and then he'll just get away.
My understanding of it is one of the primary developers of fishing at a certain point was an avid fisher. And the story goes that they took [Masayoshi] Soken–the composer–on a fishing trip out into the Sea of Japan. He's an avid, avid fisher it seems, and that's really respected or reflected in-game.
Q: How does Final Fantasy 14’s fishing minigame compare to fishing minigames in other games?
A: It is a completely different and very novel take on it. It's actually closer to an actual fishing sim like Ultimate Bass Hunter or something. It's a little bit closer to that than say Stardew Valley or Guild Wars 2. In Guild Wars 2 fishing, you cast into a hole, and you have to have a certain type of bait. There's like a fishing power to make sure you have the right ability to catch, but it really comes down to a reflex game where you have to keep a bar within like inside another bar as it moves around. Final Fantasy 14 is nothing like that.
It's a communication of the environment, a reflection of the environment that the game is taking place in, and builds mechanics around that. Even the fish guide, in which every fish has a description and a guide entry— I like to call that the fish lore, and there's over 1400 fish in the game—each one has a unique guide entry which tells its own story about the world. If you start looking at all of them together, you can see stuff, you can see stories being told that aren't even told like during the main quest or even in sidequests. It's really neat. Very deep. Pun intended.
Q: I assume you've tried the new ocean fishing route. What are your thoughts?
A: Oh, I think the new ocean fishing route is really fun. I'm really happy with how they implemented some of what we call “blue fish.” They're the fabled legendary fish. They're the most difficult fish to catch. One of the rarest fish in ocean fishing. The fabled legendary fish designs are actually pretty fun. Some of what they did with the bait and how it affects fishing, like I was mentioning earlier, we're seeing that for the first time in ocean fishing, and that actually impacts how we approach different zones and different stops based on the time of day. If we're going for points, we recommend or use plump worm instead of krill. But if you're trying to finish, if you're trying to get a mission done or something like that, you need to use krill instead. It's all down to numbers and some of the data that we've collected to show how often a fish is going to bite.
Q: What is your Final Fantasy 14 big fish story?
A: Oh, I have so many of those. There could be the time that I had no idea what I was doing and in one shot landed what is considered one of the rarest fish in the game.
But I think my most recent and favorite one is one of the alts that I was working on. I have alternate characters in every region now to help maintain the aquariums and or visit museums in the different regions. Naturally, the first thing I level is fishing and there's this one rare fish called Cinder Surprise. It's caught in Ahm Arang. It is from Shadowbringers, and it strikes fear into the heart of many a fisher because it is very rare and it has a very long, very low uptime. I think it's 1% out of every 10 days it's up or something like that because it's only up for six minutes, and it's usually days between windows. Anyways, there was a window coming up, and I thought I should try and do that on my Oceania all while I was level 85. I rushed to get to 90.
Then the window opened, and I caught the rare fish, first try on that character. For context, it took my two other characters that had tried for it–who I call Fruity Prime who is my main and Fruity Two who's my EU alt–it took them both 20+ windows to catch this fish. My Oceania alt caught it in one. I speedran. I speed-leveled my character just to be able to catch this fish. And I caught it in one. Very actually anticlimactic in the end, because there's all this big build up, and you're like, “Oh, you're going to get it.” And then I did. It was like I was expecting this big battle, and I think it was literally like the third cast or something like that.
I didn't make any friends that day because it takes months for these fish to be caught. Whenever someone does it in like one try, everyone celebrates. And then there's a bunch of people in the back who are just grumbling.
Q: Is there anything else about fishing or the aquarium or the museum network that you would like to share?
A: Fishing is just a ton of fun, please do it. I'm not just saying that because it benefits me because it's, you know, more people using my guides. I don't make money off this. I do this because I find it very fun. I'm very passionate about it, and I want to really show people that this is a really fun thing that you can do in your downtime. It's one of the very few things in the game that slows you down. We always say that getting big fish is a marathon, not a race, not a sprint. It takes you places in the game that no quest takes you, and it puts you in those zones in very uncommon times. Some of these zones are gorgeous during their rare weather. Every zone has common weather and rare weather, like there's a percent chance that it's going to be a certain type of weather.
Some of the rare weathers are amazing and really transform the zone, and you really get to it… like, this fish is up during rare weather for 10 minutes. So you have to sit there for like 15 minutes, and you just cast your line out, wait for a bite, move back so you have a little bit of time to look around and soak everything in. Like the Lochs during thunderstorms? That is one of the rare fish, and it’s gorgeous because it's right at sunset as well. So you get the sunset plus thunder plus the music. It's all purples and reds. It's gorgeous and I love it. Rak’Tikka at night during Umbral Wind is amazing as well.
So yeah, if you enjoy the game fish because then you'll enjoy the world even more.
[END]
Final Fantasy 14 is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5.
