wanted to do this because i realized how unwieldy and complicated FFXIV's zone connections are as of the current xpac, and how basically nobody ever uses them more than once. here a link between nodes indicates that you can go from one to the other either by walking through a point on the map or interacting with a character / object. airship links are not included, since they would make the map much worse. i include a node on this graph if it appears in the list of "zones" on the wiki, UNLESS it is a small, dead-end zone where no combat happens (like inn rooms, the waking sands, throne rooms in capital cities) OR if it is a zone that you can only access during certain quests. it is not a perfect classification. but there's so many fucking zones.
phenomena:
- longest path is 17 zones i think (from mare lamentorum to gangos)
- limsa to western thanalan is a single link that connects two halves of the graph. if not for that then it would be impossible to get from one side to the other
- it's frustratingly almost possible to display this as a planar graph with no self-intersections, but there's exactly two ferry links that make this impossible - gridania to lavender beds, and western la noscea to lower la noscea.
i think it is fun to try to figure out which areas of the graph correspond to which areas in-game just from the topology. labeled graph under the readmore (includes mild spoilers for dawntrail in the form of zone names)
