How to Spawn S-Ranks in FFXIV

So, in my spare time I play critically acclaimed MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, available with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.

And within that game, there are several niche hobbies such as raiding, crafting, gathering, you name it! My personal hobby is “hunting”, in which people get together to kill huge monsters with as many people as possible instead of hogging it to a single group.

I’ll be explaining how to spawn one such monster, S-Ranks, to its bare bones.

To start off, I’ll explain “mapping” S-Ranks as concisely as possible. For context, an S-Ranks’ spot must be whittled down from a series of spots on a map. This can be done via “mapping”.

Here is a map of one of the zones within the game. As you can see, there are two A-Ranks, one B-Rank, and one S-Rank we are trying to spawn.

It is advised that you have both A-Ranks up in order to map. Hunts can’t move into a spot that another hunt has claimed even if it’s dead.

With both A-Ranks up, you kill the B-Rank and it will move to a new spot on the map each time, except for where the S-Rank will spawn. By marking each spot you kill the B-Rank, you’ll narrow down where the S-Rank spawns.

Upon death an S-Rank cannot spawn for another eighty-four hours. Once eighty-four hours have passed, it enters an “open” window. This means the S-Rank can spawn, but not that it will spawn. In the first photo above, you can see the “invisible timer”. This is a hidden timer that is random every time, and must pass before the S-Rank can be spawned.

In the second photo above, if I make two attempts when the invisible timer is still active, they will fail. However, if I make an attempt after the invisible timer has passed during the open window, the S-Rank will spawn.

Once you have figured out where the S-Rank will spawn, you have to know how to spawn it. Some hunts have Random Number Generated (RNG) triggers, and some have “guaranteed” triggers. Guaranteed triggers mean that on your first successful completion of the trigger, the hunt will spawn. RNG triggers mean that your attempt essentially is like a die, and you have a 1 in 6 chance of it being successful.

RNG triggers compounded with the RNG aspect of the invisible timer means you can waste a lot of time doing spawn attempts not knowing if RNG is failing you, or if the invisible timer has yet to finish. The most you can do is keep trying!

S-Rank triggers are clues given out by non-player characters (NPCs) in game, and people share the solution when they’ve figured it out. While clues can be hopelessly vague, the game will often reuse common triggers, such as gathering, killing enemies, or performing the trigger on the spawn point.

Once the triggers at the beginning of a new expansion are figured out, they are usually listed on hunt tracker websites so that new hunters don’t have to scratch their head and figure it out themselves.

Now that we’ve run through nearly all you need to know, you need a way to get started. One of the more important things of hunting is making sure we keep track of S-Ranks. In the first image above, I’ve provided a list of websites of the preferred tracker website of each data center.

In the second photo, these are hunt Discord servers where you can talk to other people who already know about spawning S-Ranks or are trying to get started as well. These discord servers will quickly get you integrated into the community. If you would like a more in depth explanation, or fashion yourself a visual learner, you are free to watch this video as a supplemental guide.