With the release of the new Dawntrail expansion for Square Enix’s MMO Final Fantasy XIV, the hunt is on. By that I meant literally hunts, a series of side activities that task players with tracking down and defeating progressively more difficult enemies. The rarest and most difficult hunts are S-Rank and require specific circumstances to trigger an appearance, and those circumstances are a mystery that players must unravel based on only a handful of clues offered in-game. One specific S-Rank hunt in Dawntrail is so mysterious that players spent days trying progressively more absurd tactics to summon the elusive enemy. Turns out, all they had to do was wait.
The S-Rank in question is Kirlirger the Abhorrent, a special hunt in the Urqopacha region of Dawntrail. The enemy was introduced on July 30 as part of the large 7.05 patch that also saw the addition of the new Savage raids and a series of job changes. But after a full day in the game, nobody could find Kirlirger. In fact, players didn’t catch sight of the elusive prey until August 2, three days after his release. The S-Rank hunt just spawns on extremely rare weather conditions—there must be a new moon and fog in the area, and new moons occur roughly once every real world day and a half, so waiting for fog to also coincide with that took a few days. So if you are trying to hunt the elusive S-Rank down, just pay attention to the weather.
Before Kirlirger appeared, players were losing their minds trying to find out exactly what the spawn conditions were. The only thing they had to go on was a cryptic description of the character and his personality. Kirlirger’s bio hinted that he’s a master of sneaking up on his prey despite his large size, a villain who preys upon local merchants trying to transport goods. While people did theorize that fog may have to do with his spawn condition, a lot of other possibilities were also raised. Confused players tried everything they could: running around on alpacas, dressing up as merchants, wearing sunglasses, using certain spells on the spawn point, and more. If you are thinking that there is no way a spawn condition could be that specific you’d be wrong, just check out this list of existing hunt conditions the game has used in the past.
In the end, despite all the admirable attempts of the community, it just turned out to be a waiting game for Kirlirger. But it was still fun as hell to watch everybody come up with the most outside-the-box conditions possible to try and make the elusive S-Rank appear.
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