Aetheryte teleportation is a huge part of Final Fantasy 14, both in terms of lore and as a core gameplay mechanic. And I’m sure we have all had that experience at the start where teleportation was a real luxury before the gils started coming in. But did it ever occur to you why it *costs* gil tho? Because in most MMOs you get to teleport for free.
So in Final Fantasy 14 it’s not really apparent, right? You’re not exactly spending any fuel apart from your own mana, and you’re not exactly asking someone to teleport you across the Aetheryte crystals either. So why *does* it cost money? And why doesn’t everyone use it?
Well, the lore part of the answer is actually very interesting: Aetherytes are essentially huge crystals that are actually made up of crystallized Aether, or the magic that everyone uses in the in-game world.
The maintenance cost of Aetherytes in Final Fantasy XIV
Aetherytes are also not something that can be used by anyone willy-nilly; it requires a pretty good amount of internal magic, or mana, for you to actually be able to use it. Which, conveniently enough, is present in a lot of adventurers. And even then, it is not something you can just do back-to-back, as there is a cooldown on how often you can teleport around.
So it makes sense that only a few members of the Eorzean society can use the Aetheryte crystals for frequent travels. And more often than not, these are adventurers with a knack for magic.
Now, getting back to why Aetherytes need gil to work is just a matter of maintenance cost. No really! During the Calamity War event of FFXIV, there were a number of Aetheryte camps across Eorzea that were destroyed. Which naturally led to a massive reconstruction effort from what I can only imagine as the Aetheryte companies that maintain the crystals. But, like in the real world, a massive reconstruction effort like this naturally costs a lot of money, leading the company to go into debt.
And as such, this is why it actually costs money to teleport; to essentially pay back the debt, the Aetheryte company charges the users a teleportation fee when travelling from one place to another. Although in-game the money gets deducted from your gil count automatically, in lore there are Aetheryte guards present at every major crystal to collect those fees and protect the crystal all at the same time!
