How the timers work

Eorzean time

Eorzea runs on its own clock, at a fixed ratio to real time. One Eorzean hour lasts 175 real seconds, which makes a full Eorzean day 4,200 real seconds — 70 real minutes. Time of day is derived directly from the Unix timestamp, so it needs no server and never drifts out of sync with the game.

eorzeaSeconds = unixSeconds × (3600 / 175)

Gathering node spawn windows

Unspoiled and legendary nodes open at fixed Eorzean hours and stay up for a fixed number of Eorzean hours. A node listed at 4:00 for two hours is available from 4:00 to 6:00 Eorzean time, every Eorzean day — which is once every 70 real minutes. The countdown is the distance from now to the next opening, converted back into real seconds.

Of roughly 6,000 gathering nodes in the database, only about 870 are time-restricted. The rest are always available and show no timer, which is the correct answer rather than a missing one.

Weather, and why fishing is harder

FFXIV weather is not random. It is a deterministic function of time: each zone has a table of weather chances, and the game picks from that table using a value derived from the clock. Weather changes every 8 Eorzean hours (1,400 real seconds).

Because it is deterministic, weather can be computed forward. The forecast value is a 32-bit hash of the Eorzean day and the weather period — a faithful port of the well-documented community algorithm. That is what makes a real fishing forecast possible: many fish require a specific weather, a specific preceding weather, and a specific time window, all at once. This site simulates the rotation ahead and reports the next windows where every condition lines up, rather than only telling you what the weather is right now.

Crafting profit

Profit is computed by walking a recipe's ingredient tree recursively, up to five levels deep, and comparing the cost of the inputs against the sale price of the output. Where an ingredient is itself craftable, the cheaper of buy it and craft it is used. Prices come from Universalis, a community-run market board API, and are specific to the data center you select.

What these numbers do not account for

• Market prices go stale. Universalis reflects the last time a player uploaded data for that item. A quiet item can be hours or days out of date, and profit figures are only as fresh as the listing behind them.
• No taxes or retainer fees. Profit is gross: sale price minus ingredient cost. It does not subtract the market board tax.
• No HQ modelling. Costs and sale prices do not distinguish normal from high-quality items.
• Spawn windows assume live server time. If your device clock is wrong, every countdown on the site is wrong by the same amount.
• Window length is assumed, not recorded. The dataset stores the Eorzean hour a mining or botany node opens, but not how long it stays open — no mining or botany record carries a duration. Every window on the site therefore assumes the standard three Eorzean hours, which is 8 minutes 45 seconds of real time. Fishing records do carry their own timings and are not assumed.

Where the data comes from

Node, recipe and levequest data is extracted from the game's own data files and bundled with the site, so browsing works without any external service. Item art is bundled too — the same set the iOS and Android apps ship — so no image is fetched from a third party when you load a page. The one live call is to Universalis for market prices.

Found a number that looks wrong? Tell me — spawn data in particular is community-sourced and does get corrected.