Cheating? .dat's not cool!

Even though I'm busy studying with finals I, as well as Jean, want to continue to give you a reason to check in our blog often so we'll be trying to get back into the daily update routine. Whether it's a long informative post, an interesting story about our experiences in Vana'diel, or just a short humorous screenshot caption, we'd like to give you some worthwhile and entertaining reads.

That being said, I began recently looking into the world of modifications and 3rd party tools for FFXI. No I'm not planning on hacking, I don't fancy the idea of being banned. But really it's very interesting how many applications and large communities there are out there devoted to these applications such as fishbots, PLbots, NM claiming bots, POS/speed hacks, etc etc. I was also surprised just how easily it was for someone to find such programs.

Anyway more on FFXI Hacking: Exposed in later posts.

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While doing research I stumbled upon this FFXI enhanced map set which I recently started using and I find it immensely useful. This requires the use of dat swapping, so if you're personally against this (for whatever reason) or you're afraid you'll mess something up don't do it.

Firstly you need to be on PC, as you have no way of managing files on ps2 and xbox360, well no easy way anyway.

Next you need to visit this link and download the map set. The zip file is roughly 27.1mb and it has been scanned and contains no viruses.

Before you go on, BACKUP YOUR FILES! Yes incase you do mess up or choose to go back to the originals at a later date in time backup the maps in the folders you plan on replacing the dats of.

Now unzip the zip file into your \PlayOnline\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XI folder overwriting all existing maps.

And now you have a nice new set of maps to use in place of the maps the game provides you with. These maps include NM spawns, coffer/chest locations, hidden areas of maps not present on the originals, and other nice things you'd find on a map if you went to a website such as ffxi-atlas.com.

Example of what my west altep map looks like now.

Also note that this doesn't magically give you the maps you don't have, if you don't have the map of an area... yeah.. you still won't have the map of that area, quit being lazy! And enjoy :)