Challenge Log: Gold Saucer

What is the Challenge Log?

The Challenge Log is – as the name suggests – a list of challenges that can be tackled each week. There are multiple sections inside the Challenge Log for various areas of the game such as Dungeons, Levequests, Crafting or, well, the Gold Saucer.
You can unlock the Challenge Log by starting the quest “Rising to the Challenge” from I’woltann in Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks (x11.4, y11). Once unlocked you can find the challenge log under Menu > Logs > Challenge Log

The GS Challenges

There are a total of 17 challenges that can be cleared each week for a total of 95.000 MGP! Here is a short overview of the challenges and the amount of MGP they give:

Won’t this take ages each week?

Not necessarily. In theory most of this stuff can be done in less than two hours with only Mahjong and Chocobo races really raising the time needed higher by a good chunk.

If you want to be very time efficient, you could skip Mahjong and Chocobo Races and be done with most other stuff in said two hours and go home with 64.000 MGP minimum which is still a good deal, especially if paired with the weekly fashion report and the potential rewards from the activities themselves.

So what is this ~2 hour efficiency way? Well, it is more my personal way to go about things, but it might help you get on track as well. Of course, there might be better ways to do things but this is more or less intended for people who feel overwhelmed on how to approach the Challenge Log.

First of all, keep track of the time for GATEs. GATEs always start at the full hour, twenty minutes past and forty minutes past. You can always ask Gatekeeper NPCs to see what the next GATE will be. This will also give you an estimate on how on time you have to be for the gate. “Any Way the Wind Blows” and “The Slice is Right” have pretty short register times, so being on time will be very important. “Cliffhanger” can be waited out a few minutes if you are confident in finishing it in a short time. “Leap of Faith” and “Air Force One” both have more than five minute timers for registration and can therefore be postponed by a decent amount of time.

Why is it so important to be aware of what the next GATE will be? Because this will decide how much time you have in between the GATEs and what you should best approach in that time. If you only have a short time inbetween, for example if you start “Leap of Faith” very late and need the full ten minutes to finish it, which will leave you with only a few minutes until the next GATE will start, you should only do things, that can be done in such a short time like mini-games. If you however participate in “Slice is Right” but fail in the very first round, you will have almost 20 minutes until the next GATE which will be great for queuing in stuff like Chocobo races or Triple Triad. So, make the best use of your GATE intervals.

Now, as I already mentioned, use short GATE intervals for mini-games. The easiest way is to find a mini-game you can easily win in. My personal favorite is Out on a Limb but Moogle’s Paw might also be a good and easy choice. With those games where one win can net you 50 MGP, you can finish off Size Doesn’t Matter and From Small Things in one go by simply playing it three times.

If you have a longer or medium interval, you might want to jump into the Triple Triad Battlehall. Here you can fight out all the matches needed for the Triple Triad challenges in one go. I recommend playing against Wyra “Greenhands” Lyehga as she has the weakest deck and the easiest rules (All Open, Same) to fight against. Winning ten matches against here will fill out all TT challenges except the Open tournament one. The Open tournament one involves having actually an Open tournament available, queuing for it and then fighting out 3 matches against up to 7 other people. Therefore this should be done after you have cleared your GATE challenges as the time needed is a big unknown.

For another longer interval, you can play out your 5 matches of Lord of Verminion. Don’t worry, if you don’t understand the mechanics or fear of playing against other players. A very easy way is to start up any of the Verminion challenges and then lose. Yes, if you do nothing and let the COM defeat you, you might not earn any MGP as reward from the match itself, however it will count for the Lord of Verminion challenges. So “afk”ing 5 games will net you a nice amount of 27.000 MGP in about 25 minutes without doing anything at all. Mind, you might have to pause those 5 runs for a GATE run, so keep in mind your upcoming GATEs. If you want to be faster done you can try the Lose method on NPC matches in the duty finder or you can try to find a fast way to clear an earlier Verminion challenge. The 4th challenge can actually be done decently fast (1-2 minutes) by solely using poppet-type minions to down the boss real quick.

Having followed those tips, you should have achieved the majority of the challenge log except Chocobo racing and Mahjong. It is up to you, if you want to also clear those for the extra 30k MGP, however note that actually winning 10 chocobo races might be hard if you don’t have a decent chocobo, and you might be better off sticking to just participating in 20 races and then sticking to GATEs for the missing MGPs. Mahjong matches as well take a very long time. For the measily 5.000 MGP payout, it is more advisable to skip this challenge and instead earn those 5k from some extra GATEs as that is a lot faster even with wait time between GATEs included.

The WIP sections

I am terribly sorry that there are still a few sections of the Gold Saucer missing. Some of them are still being worked on, some of them require a bit more time for research. For the time being, all I can do is refer you to other good places where you can do elaborate reading up on the different things yourself.

Mahjong:

While I myself am not much farther into ffxiv’s Mahjong than having played the tutorial match once, I found those nifty guides that might help you along while our very own SDS Mahjong master is working on his very elaborate (and later stand alone) guide for us.

Mahjong for Dummies is a power point slide that explains the game basics in a simple manner.

FFXIV Doman Riichi Mahjong Strategy Guide is another (website-based) guide regarding the basics of Mahjong and winning strategies for the ffxiv ranking system.

Lord of Verminion:

FFXIV Lord of Verminion – While this site might look a bit outdated, it actually features a list of all minions, their stats as well as elaborate guides regarding all Verminion challenges.

Chocobo Racing

FFXIV Chocobo Racing – I wish I could ever live up to this site but so far I have yet to see a guide more elaborate or better than this one regarding Chocobo Racing, Chocobo Challenges or even Chocobo Breeding!

Conclusion

I hope this guide was helpful to any reader who might have stumbled upon this. For feedback or further questions, I am always available on our Discord server, so feel free to hop on it and send me a message.

Thank you for reading!

Jace Nolan, Sleeping Dragons