Final Fantasy 14 crafters despair at in-game calculator discovery after doing manual math for way too long

Final Fantasy 14's crafting community has been left in shambles after discovering a quality-of-life feature that's made an age of doing mental math totally unnecessary.

Heaps of craftable items in Final Fantasy 14 require other materials you come across in different ways. What bits are needed for whatever you fancy crafting is labelled clearly enough, though things get a tad wholly when you need to craft a multiple of one item.

Over the years, crafting enthusiasts have got around that by using a third-party tool or leaning on the ways of old – counting on your hands. It's a bit of pain, so Square Enix eventually added a quality-of-life feature around Shadowbringers' launch that not only displays the recipe tree and breaks down the raw materials list, but lets you add a multiplier to show off just how many resources you need for however many of what you fancy crafting.

Better yet, you can lock those lists to your screen, which proves handy as they won't disappear during teleports and serve as a constant reminder of what you need while you're out gathering materials.

Every now and again, though, a group of crafters discover those quality-of-life features exist and, when that does happen, despair usually follows.

"This has been in the game this entire time and I'm only finding out on my last uncapped crafter? At level 78? I've been doing the math by hand this whole time?" Tweets the latest poor soul. "When I tell you I let out an anguished gasp."

In fairness to them, Final Fantasy 14's patch notes are lengthy beasts, and it's especially to miss if you've taken a break. The MMO has also boomed in popularity over the past few years, so plenty has joined after the in-game calculator was introduced. If you get a moment, though, you may want to check 'em out.

Final Fantasy 14 fans want FF16's best new feature, and now so do I.

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.