In Final Fantasy XIV, you can temporarily transfer to other servers in-game thanks to the world visit system, letting you link up and play with others outside your home server. However, this only lets you visit servers on your own data center. That changed with FFXIV Patch 6.18 released on July 5, 2022. It’s the update that introduced the new data center travel system. Since it works differently, we’ll explain how it use it and what you need to know.
A data center acts as a house that hosts several servers, which helps divvy up the playerbase accordingly. They’re also grouped by region so you can get a better connection while playing, depending on where you live. But choosing a data center for your character to live on is still one of the first tough decisions you have to make. Which servers do your friends play on? What’s the community like on those servers? For some, it didn’t really matter. And now, it matters less thanks to the data center travel system.
How Data Center Travel Works
In a Live Letter from the Producer stream earlier this year, director and producer Naoki Yoshida outlined how the data center travel system would work. And the process was further detailed in the FFXIV 6.18 patch notes. The steps are quite different from the world visit system, so here’s how you travel to another data center.
First, you must initiate data center travel by selecting “Visit Another Data Center” from the character login menu for the character you want to log in as. From there, you must select a data center as a destination and the server you want to visit. Once you initiate the transfer, you will be kicked back to the title screen as the game processes the character transfer.
You cannot cancel or back out while the transfer is processing and must wait for it to finish before doing anything in-game. Once it is done, you can then log in as your character and enjoy your visit. You can play any and all of the FFXIV content and party up with others while visiting a different data center, and your character gets a [Traveler] tag next to their name. If you want to go back, you must repeat the same process to return to your home data center and server.
An example of the using the data center travel system in FFXIV.
With this implementation of the system via Patch 6.18, you cannot travel to data centers outside of your region. For example, if you belong to a server on a North American data center like Primal, you can visit servers on the Aether and Crystal data centers — however, you won’t be able to visit data centers and servers from Europe, Japan, or Oceania. Yoshida mentioned that the FFXIV team may consider opening these borders between regional data centers in the future, and will continue to monitor player activity and in-game economic factors which could influence the decision.
Restrictions With Data Center Travel
All of the same restrictions while visiting a different server apply when on a different data center. If you’re not familiar or need a refresher, here are some of the notable things you cannot do when visiting other servers.
- Access your retainers.
- Access to legendary and unspoiled gathering nodes.
- Sell anything on the Market Board (but you can still purchase items there).
- Access the Moogle Delivery Service.
- Form or join a free company, and view free company information.
- Enter the housing lottery and purchase a housing plot or an apartment.
- Hold or attend Ceremonies of Eternal Bonding (in-game weddings).
- Enter Triple Triad and Lord of Vermillion tournaments, or buy Cactpot tickets at the Gold Saucer.
In addition to the aforementioned restrictions, you cannot use free company chat or cross-world linkshell chat from your home data center. PVP teams chat and ranked Crystalline Conflict matches are also unavailable while visiting a different data center. However, you will be able to join cross-world linkshells that exist other data centers when Patch 6.2 releases in August. On the flipside, chat for linkshells you join on other data centers will not be available in your home data center.
Check out the official FFXIV site, The Lodestone, for all the restrictions applied when visiting other servers and data centers.
FFXIV Data Centers and Which Servers They House
The following is a list of the FFXIV data centers and servers to help illustrate how they are distributed across the world and which ones you’ll be able to visit.
North America
- Primal
- Behemoth, Excalibur, Exodus, Famfrit, Hyperion, Lamia, Leviathan, Ultros
- Aether
- Adamantoise, Cactuar, Faerie, Gilgamesh, Jenova, Midgardsormr, Sargatanas, Siren
- Crystal
- Balmung, Brynhildr, Coeurl, Diabalos, Goblin, Malboro, Mateus, Zalera
Europe
- Chaos
- Cerberus, Louisoix, Moogle, Omega, Ragnarok, Spriggan
- Light
- Lich, Odin, Phoenix, Shiva, Twintania, Zodiark
Japan
- Elemental
- Aegis, Atomos, Carbuncle, Garuda, Gungnir, Kujata, Ramuh, Tonberry, Typhon, Unicorn
- Gaia
- Alexander, Bahamut, Durandal, Fenrir, Ifrit, Ridill, Tiamat, Ultima, Valefor, Yojimbo, Zeromus
- Mana
- Anima, Asura, Belias, Chocobo, Hades, Ixion, Mndragora, Masamune, Pandaemonium, Shinryu, Titan
Oceania
- Materia
- Bismarck, Ravana, Sephirot, Sophia, Zurvan
More on FFXIV Patch 6.18 and Beyond
There’s much more to this update that data center travel, so be sure to read up on everything in Patch 6.18. FFXIV will be offline for a scheduled 24-hour maintenance period to implement the update. FFXIV will be down for maintenance starting on July 4 at 3:00 a.m. PT until July 5 at 3:00 a.m. PT, so be prepared.
But wait there’s more. A new Live Letter covered Patch 6.2 and there’s a ton of new content coming to FFXIV. We got some exciting details on Island Sanctuary, Variant/Criterion Dungeons, the Omicron Tribal Quests for gatherers, and the next round of relic weapons via Hildibrand quests. Also get ready for new main story quests and a batch of Pandaemonium raids when Patch 6.2 drops in late August.
