How ONE Area BREAKS Final Fantasy XIV's Weather System

[@TheVivi13]

I probably have a thousand hours sitting in empyreum by our fc house and I never knew this place had jump puzzles.

[@CafColeo]

I think this must be the least-known jumping puzzle in the game because not only is it there but there's four (nearly identical) jumping puzzles there

[@lordhughmungus]

They're in the Firmament as well.

[@TheVivi13]

@@lordhughmungus that makes sense, aren't they pretty much the same map?

[@lantearia]

They are. The Firmament was us "building" the Empyreum, after all

[@jefferyspurlock4272]

My favorite Weather thing from FF14 was when they first introduced the weather to game. "It's always raining in dry bones"

[@BetaXeeta]

OK SO IM NOT CRAZY ABOUT THAT

[@jefferyspurlock4272]

@ there were even jokes about it in the patch notes “attempted to dry out dry bone. Attempt failed”

[@karameldanzen]

this is how i learn there's a jumping puzzle in empyreum

[@CafColeo]

There's actually 4, but they're all pretty much identical

[@stonex3077]

@@CafColeo they are not all identical. the ones in the firmament are identical however.

[@zephdef1781]

​@@stonex3077"pretty much identical"

[@BranBal]

"The fix for this is surprisingly simple! BEHOLD!" **YT plays a ad about black friday** Nicely done, KZbin! Nicely done 👍🏻

[@CafColeo]

My channel's not even monetized why is youtube putting ads in an 8-minute video 😭

[@BranBal]

@CafColeo YT is a greedy bastard

[@Toksyuryel]

@@CafColeo All videos on youtube are monetized, the setting only controls whether or not you get a share of it

[@Zack_Wester]

@@Toksyuryel correction youtube runs add to pay for youtube. then the chanel can run more ads to earn money. (early on youtube played one ad like every 3-6 video (video been max lengh of like 15 min). this was before 99% of all channels could make money the requirments was harder to get like you had to com from outside you could not start on KZbin. and you knew you was on a add chanel because they was the only one that could play 2 ads on one video. the chanels ad . and then if you are unlucky or only watch ads supported chanels/videos the youtube running cost video.

[@Kikuflare]

0:52 To be fair, the reason I didn't include Empyreum in my tool is because it's of no interest to me as a fisher 😂 7:33 I'm not sure how other forecasting tools have implemented the weather value calculation, but I took a look at my code and it was a fairly easy change to make. If you send me the weather table for Empyreum I'd be happy to push an update to my tool.

[@CafColeo]

Hello Kiku! Your tool is the one I actually use for a lot of stuff so I'm very happy to see you here! I think a lot of people either left Empyreum out because it has no fishing or tried, saw it didn't work right, and removed it (Donut/proyebat went that route I believe until we cracked it over the summer) but since it has no fish it's not really... an urgent fix, for anyone, ever, lmao. Here's the table: 0-4 Snow 5-24 Fair 25-64 Clear 65-79 Clouds 80-89 Fog Or in a more raw form, 15 5 | 2 20 | 1 40 | 3 15 | 4 10 15 = snow, 2 = Fair, 1 = Clear, 3 = Clouds, 4 = Fog

[@Kikuflare]

​@@CafColeo Thank you for looking into this. I was made aware of your findings a few months back but it was not a priority for the reasons you've stated. I suppose being called out in a video is a good of a reason as any to motivate me to do stuff, haha. I've pushed a commit that adds Empyreum and the fixed weather value calculation to my forecasting tool; it should already be live now. If you don't mind, could you verify that the weather is correctly forecasted? I've quit FFXIV so regrettably I am not able to verify by myself in game.

[@CafColeo]

@@Kikuflare It'll take a bit more time to be 100% certain, but so far in-game and what the Skywatcher NPC is reading are all perfectly aligned with what you have up through 6 weather transitions, whereas a naive mod 100 approach has already been wrong multiple times. I'll let you know if I see any inconsistencies.

[@iagodiago]

This is the KZbin content I love. Very niche and random things being explained in a detailed manner

[@UmbreonMessiah]

I think what's more interesting than the problem is that the solution is *so simple* yet has not been implemented yet. It's clear that they just don't even care that the weather is "messed up" and don't see it at all as a priority to fix...otherwise, they would have taken the 5 minutes to do it.

[@CafColeo]

A lot of these tools are basically in a semi-abandoned state, tbh. The forecaster devs I've spoken to or who have reached out to me have either fixed it pretty quick or made clear that Empyreum is not relevant to their tool and won't be added. I think as this knowledge percolates through you'll see more tools working properly- many of the ones that don't have it fixed aren't even updated for Dawntrail yet.

[@konpbitz2913]

I play 14 to run away from bit operations and yet they always follow me. Still really fascinating video! Didn't know stuff was this complicated

[@mistahnice]

weather's also important in eureka and bozja, and many of the same tools are used for achieving rare NM spawns and farming for rare lockboxes/fragments

[@CafColeo]

Yup! Eureka/Bozja both follow the exact same weather algorithm and have their own spots in the same big weather table as the overworld. One that surprises people sometimes is that the frontlines PvP zones also have shifting weather that can be forecasted this way even though that's definitely 100% aesthetic.

[@thalesn]

This is an interesting point, since we are getting a new exploration zone in Dawntrail.

[@FarelForever]

Most curious.... useless in practice, but that's the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night!

[@Celis.C]

Rainbows are predetermined, too. I'm still trying to figure out how their algorithm works.

[@dojelnotmyrealname4018]

So it's more of a "modulo(sum(table)) thing than a "module 100" thing. Which I guess does make sense that you'd code it that way.

[@NatiiixLP]

Yea, but it's a funny outlier for no apparent reason. If it's client-sided, it doesn't matter, but if it were server-sided, you'd have to perform unnecessary calculations for each row. Cheap calculations, but unnecessary nonetheless. My guess is that it wasn't reverse-engineered from the code directly, and was instead deduced from observing the patterns, so they couldn't have known how it was actually implemented. And/or the implementation has changed over the decade that the system existed.

[@sepvlchr]

I have big feelings about empyreum as someone who put in for a house the morning it first was released, i was so excited to live in ishgard's gloomy grey environments. and lo, they probably thought people would not want that, and endeavored to make a separate seed for the region. T^T

[@CafColeo]

Yeah, they definitely figured people would want nicer weather in their housing area. It's only like a 5% snow rate. Well, 5 out of 90.

[@arashikou6661]

Your reasoning for doing Fix #2 at the ends is spot-on and really well-explained, in a way that’s understandable for people who aren’t software engineers. If someone tried to do Fix #1 at my job, they’d get told to go back and do #2, so good instincts!

[@NotNite]

A really interesting watch - thanks for making this! There's not a lot of technical FFXIV content on KZbin. I checked the sheet myself out of curiosity - there's also one that has a rate sum of zero, but it's probably just unreleased content.

[@CafColeo]

There's a lot of fun stuff in that table! My personal favorite is the old version of the Diadem, which has a 1% chance of hyperelectricity, as opposed to how it occurs on the field nowadays which is as the totally-unpredictable precursor to the Noctilucale fate in Azys Lla

[@pwnorbepwned]

Welp, I have a new jumping puzzle to try.

[@sageata_verde]

And this ishow you know you are a programmer when you understood most of it, but googled part of it.

[@TheSoundNinja]

Halone noticed the housing district, and took that personally.

[@FruitySnacks]

WOOO WEATHER TALK

[@FluffyKiri]

Somehow, I'm not surprised to see you here. 🤣

[@MrPetpet111]

Though unrelated to weather but Empyreum. If you go to Subdivision at the stage closest to the medium house and the pool. There's something that kind of breaks the immersion if you had seen the maps OoB. So only in the subdivision you can see the back of the buildings from the main division in the distance.

[@Rtonyan]

Never did I expect a random youtube video to tell me my lil personal weather forecasting tool had a bug in it. Additionally, this makes me believe that Ishguard is just a mess because the Daidem has weather logic which I can’t make sense of too, every ten minutes it swaps between one of four umbral weathers and snow. Not Eorzean time, real life minutes. Even though its an instanced zone like Eureka and Bozja, which both use the standard weather system (and even rely on it for a bunch of stuff). Previously I tracked the ‘weather numbers’ of these transitions, but they didnt make any sense, but maybe that was because I was using mod 100, and I assume that no weather tracker could reasonably predict out of instance since the swaps seem to run per-instance. anywho i feel very sniped by this recommendation, thank you.

[@CafColeo]

Which one is yours, out of curiosity? And I haven't personally confirmed this, but what I have been told is that the way the Diadem weather works is that it cycles through the 4 umbral weathers in a random order, but won't repeat one weather until a full "set" is complete- but the order is random for each "set," so you can have orders like levin-duststorm-tempest-flare-flare-duststorm-tempest-levin, so a random person who joins right after the first levin and stays for over 2 hours would see flare happen twice in a row and never see levin. I need to actually park myself in the Diadem for a while to manually verify that though, so I'm not 100% on it.

[@Rtonyan]

@@CafColeo just a little polgon that basically only myself and a few of my friends use, not any of the ones named in this video for sure lol, but I am certain it uses the mod 100 logic. And that would make sense for the Daidem, I assume designed so folks dont get screwed by not seeing the nodes they need for hours.

[@dacomputernerd4096]

Technically the results mod 100 and mod 90 can be the same, if it happens to be less than 90 above a multiple of lcm(90, 100)=900. So there was a roughly 1 in 10 chance of the empyeum weather forecast being right occasionally.

[@CafColeo]

While I was making this I needed to get some clips of the in-game weather being different from the predicted weather, and coincidentally at the exact moment I started trying to do that, the two were identical for 6 weather windows in a row (about 2 hours). I was malding lmao

[@TKGPYT]

Dark Souls et al do the same thing with their drop tables, they usually add up to 1000 but sometimes it's 100 or something unusual. It makes it easier to reason about as the squishy human reading them if you keep them the same, but then it really throws people off when they aren't. I wonder if this even happened on purpose, or if it used to add up and then they lopped off 10 points at the last second. Pretty cute, anyways.

[@DerpHavenn]

this is supper mario broth levels of esoteric knowledge. good job!

[@Runeknight101]

My question is- why doesn't Empyreum share the exact weather of Firmament given they're in the SAME GEOGRAPHIC AREA.

[@CafColeo]

Genuine answer: the weather in the firmament is kind of crappy (snows a lot etc) and they probably figured people wanted "nice" weather more often in the housing districts. It's clear/fair a TON of the time in Empyreum.

[@lantearia]

You mean foggy, right? Because I used to spend a lot of time there, and I enjoyed making jokes about how much fog there was

[@munem939]

I mean, the devs could've just created a variable within mod() and that variable sums up everything in that row from the 2nd row onwards. That way they can create dynamic weather without consorting to the same modular value

[@centxiv]

I've never had a reason to check the Empyreum weather haha

[@CafColeo]

Literally the only reason you would ever need to is for gposing, and the hardcore gposers already have... methods... to get the exact weather conditions they want for photos lmao

[@GabrielUzumaki100]

This made me curious, how does the 'Tension' weather on the Black Shroud works? Is it dependent on the RNG at all since its related to Odin fate?

[@CafColeo]

So weathers associated with FATEs like tension, quicklevin, hyperelectricity, and royal levin are "masks" that just sort of cover up the real weather without actually blocking it or affecting it in any way (you can still catch weather-dependent fish, etc). How those weathers work exactly is a bit dependent on the FATE they go with- in the case of Odin, Tension will be continuously active in the area of the Shroud where he's spawned until he is either defeated or despawns. Since FATEs have their own totally independent system for spawning and spawn times, it's best to think of it as completely separate from the main weather system.

[@GabrielUzumaki100]

@CafColeo Very cool! Thanks!

[@MissEbet99]

I never knew I needed that information! ty

[@configchan1062]

If the game can handle differently sized tables, then the obvious thing to do is make every area use a table sized to a different prime number. Without getting too deep into the modular math explanation for why this is, using different primes would minimise the amount of synchronisation between areas.

[@Ynfiniti]

I don't understand everything you said, but it sounds quite interesting

[@linah1998]

how does this work for areas with special weather, like Fate-related ones? Are "normal" weather conditions' numbers lowered to allow it to still be 100 overall?

[@CafColeo]

Fate weather isn't "real" - it's just a mask placed over the actual weather, which keeps ticking away underneath, unobstructed. You can still do any weather-related task (i.e. fishing) while Fate weather is active as if it isn't there. MSQ weather like Endwalker's Apocalypse or ShB's Everlasting Light, on the other hand, just completely replaces the local weather and blocks every weather-related everything from happening until it's cleared out, but only for you. One that's been tripping up a lot of people recently is that copper sharks, which are the best orange scrip farm in DT, can't be caught in the last DT zone if the special story weather is active, so if you haven't completed the main story or if you activated NG+ they just aren't available. So essentially: no, the normal weather is unaffected by local special weathers since they either aren't "real" (fates) or are 100% personal (MSQ)

[@petrus9067]

Hey i love seeing specific facts like this about games! I also have a somewhat related very genuine question: do you know if it would be possible for them to make different weather lengths? (Like say, only make it cloudy for 2 hours or something) I ask this because in the tropical zones of dawntrail, it makes sense that it rains a lot, but as someone who lives in that biome, the rains here are actually average to strong showers that last around 30min, or less even (well, depends on the season a bit of course but still) while in ffxiv if its raining it's gonna rain for 8 hours or something. And i wish that was changed somehow xD anyways, really cool video

[@CafColeo]

I think if they did it would require a total overhaul of the entire system- the algorithm is programmed based on an assumption that the weather changes at the 8-hour markers, changing that in any way would throw the whole thing out- I show a javascript version of the code in the video, you can pick through it yourself to see what I mean if you want. In side areas and minigames anything is fair game (chocobo racing has extremely fast weather changes for example) but unfortunately I think the overworld is going to stick to the "established" rules for the forseeable future.

[@petrus9067]

@CafColeo i see! Well, that's what i expected. Thank you for the answer :) it's a mimor thing indeed so i doubt they'd bother

[@HildeTheOkayish]

Very interesting video! I do wonder though if checking the table size would be the best way to future prove it. I can very much imagine that there will be a future update where a table exists that contains 1 value more then actually used in the game itself just because someone forgot to clean it up lol. Though for now I agree that it is probably the best way to go about it

[@CafColeo]

So, there's already instances of the tables having weird duplicate entries (Gridania has rain twice in a row, for instance) - but the way they're laid out right now I think makes it impossible for the table to include things that aren't used in the game at all unless they just straight up listed an invalid weather type, which would probably *actually* break something.

[@sepphero9639]

i wonder if adding that to more zones really would actually delink things 🤔 like, just because you calculate it with a lower mod doesn't re-randomize it to my understanding, just shifts its temporary place like the result of 78 mod(60) will still always be 18 to my understanding, so the weather of 78 in thanalan would still always be locket to weather 18 in that new zone. might have missed something so i dunno

[@CafColeo]

The idea (which is not really a serious suggestion, more of a fun idea) is that if each area uses a different mod, they'll have totally different final weather numbers. If you have 3 zones that are mod 98, 99 and 100, and the final unmodded weather number is 2796763416, the 3 weather numbers are 20, 51, and 16 respectively, rather than all being 16.

[@sepphero9639]

​@@CafColeo sorry but how i understood you it's first doing the mod (100) and after that the from the result of mod (100) they took the mod(90) for that it would always be the same weather, at that point you can just copy paste the corresponding weather into the diagram and save the calculation work. if it's from the "original number" though that does make a lot of sense. thanks for explaining :3

[@arcanine_enjoyer]

Empty Empyreum isn't real it can't hurt you...

[@okurakuu]

I love math and I love FF14 and I love fishing. I love this video!

[@SeedlingNL]

Good job finding that one out! Now go fix Diadem weather forecasting :P Though I'm guessing that area has a custom calculation entirely, and it likely involves mod 4 somewhere :P For those that don't know, Diadem is on a 20 minute cycle, rather then Eorzea time. It alternates 10 min of snow with 10 minutes of 1 of 4 Umbral element weather types.

[@CafColeo]

To copy from a reply I left on another comment a while ago: "I haven't personally confirmed this, but what I have been told is that the way the Diadem weather works is that it cycles through the 4 umbral weathers in a random order, but won't repeat one weather until a full "set" is complete- but the order is random for each "set," so you can have orders like levin-duststorm-tempest-flare-flare-duststorm-tempest-levin, so a random person who joins right after the first levin and stays for over 2 hours would see flare happen twice in a row and never see levin. I need to actually park myself in the Diadem for a while to manually verify that though, so I'm not 100% on it."

[@princeofhalcyon]

I don't need calculations to know 9 out of 10 times its raining in Gridania

[@Nazuiko]

im betting the first weather section is meant to be 15 not 5, OR they carried the 1 and forgot; ie, programmer errors

[@jemm113]

Someone else mentioned that the internal programming might use “table_size” as the modulo variable instead of a static integer as a way to protect against errors such as that with testing and implementation. So there being a typo’d number makes sense since they might not have caught it since it doesn’t actually break anything!

[@Sllandre]

Your riping of a twiter thred i alrdy saw Jokes aside, this is really cool! I did see the thread you made back then, and thought it was cool as well. Thanks for showing this off!

[@BWA85]

Simple answer... It's above the clouds.

[@Naoto-kun1085]

I often wonder why videogame developers choose such convulated ways to calculate such simple things as weather instead of just making a weather list and looping it 😅

[@thalesn]

The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. But ofc.. the real challenge is to know which is the easiest solution.

[@argentpuck]

I'm not a programmer. Couldn't this just be fixed by making entry 142 in the weather pattern lookup table properly sum to 100?

[@CafColeo]

The FFXIV devs could do this. We can't.

[@Seth6097]

Niche content ❤

[@wontononionslicer1004]

Bro found the nexus

[@tatlxtael2303]

Wait weather has an effect on the game other than Tension/Ominous????

[@audeng8485]

There are soooo many fish that only let you catch them under certain weather conditions. On top of that, the A Realm Reborn Sightseeing Log has weather requirements. There’s this annoying vista in the cave where you meet Y’shtola (if you start in Limsa) where you have to /pray at 6-8 am when it’s raining, in the exact right spot without a vista marker. Weather just makes it that much worse.

[@MidnightWonko]

I mean, all that you suggest sounds neat, and I agree, but why would they bother making stuff seem a bit more natural like that when they can just slap the same cookie cutter mechanics onto everything and call it a day? I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Good guess on the weather there, though.

[@StarshadowMelody]

oh hey I live here.

[@LysLilyRose]

Just like in real life !! Nice !!

[@thed4rknss673]

that's genius

[@KainsAddiction]

For whomever reads this. Nothing is "random". Everything is "pseud random". It's basically an oxymoron

[@HildeTheOkayish]

Not necessarily. There are some random number generators that use things we know are random because the laws of physics say they are, like the background radio noise. Those numbers are truly random. Even if you knew the state of the entire universe beforehand you would not be able to predict the next number generated. Now tbf it is unlikely ffxiv uses any of those methods because why would you? Pseudo random is cheap to calculate and has the benefit that it reliably creates the same number with the same input. Which for games especially is very useful.

[@KainsAddiction]

@@HildeTheOkayish I'm talking about in programming. It's impossible for a computer to just create something random. Just for sake of the argument, even something like background radiation is also certainly not random but never in a billion years will be be able to caluculate or show the logic of it. If you want to start delving into quantum mechanics there maybe truly random things there, but I only say that because I know virtually nothing about that disclipine; not that smart.

[@grapz2245]

Yes. But. That distinction doesn't matter in 99% of cases. Many random number generators you can use typically generate non-weighted values, meaning that any number is just as likely as any other number. In other words, the statistical deviation from random by being psuedo random is corrected for.