The Cargo Ship

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

No chests. No shop. No moogle. No random encounters. One fight and then a city.

You can stop reading here if you want. But there is one thing to get right.

Spend your money in Dali

There is nothing to buy between Dali and Lindblum, and there is a boss in between. Whatever you walked onto this ship carrying is what you are fighting with.

If you skipped the shops because you were saving up, that was a mistake, and it is not one you can fix from here.

The fight is the reverse of the last one

The last black mage punished Vivi for casting. This one does not.

Vivi also starts this fight already in Trance — scripted, not luck — so he opens with his best spells available and nothing stopping him from using them. Wind is the weakness, earth does nothing.

Two practical notes. It lifts off the deck after it takes a physical hit, and once it is airborne your physical attackers stop connecting while its own spells start hitting everybody. And it does not stay to the end: steal in the first few turns or not at all, because this fight finishes on its own terms rather than yours.

Game Notes

The Cargo Ship is eight screens of nothing, and it is deliberate.

FFIX has spent four areas training a particular behaviour: search everything, check every wall, talk to everyone twice, because the game hides things and takes them away. Then it puts you on a ship with a deck and a hold and an engine room and a bridge — all the shapes of a dungeon — and there is not one item on it.

What happens instead is the scene. Vivi has just seen what Dali makes. He is standing on the vehicle that ships them. And the thing that attacks is another black mage, built the same way he was, following orders he was never given.

The game does not need you to open a chest during that. It needs you to be looking at it.

It is also the shortest chapter in the game, which is why one of the major walkthroughs does not give it a page at all and folds it into the village before it. Fair enough as a routing decision, and it does lose something: this is the crossing between the two halves of disc one, and the game paced it on purpose.

Lindblum is next and it is enormous.

How this page was made

Researched across 4 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here.

How we decide what to print

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 1 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

The Cargo Ship contains nothing. Eight field screens, and not one item or gil award in any of their scripts.

Every publisher that covers the area says the same, which is worth stating plainly because it is the only stretch in the first third of the game where the answer to “what did I miss” is genuinely “nothing”.

One consequence: Gamer Guides has no Cargo Ship page at all. Its disc 1 contents run Ice Cavern, The Village of Dali, Lindblum, and the boss is folded into the Dali chapter. If you are following that guide you will not lose anything, but you will not find this area in the table of contents either.

Black Waltz 3

Level 7, 1,128 HP. This is the only boss in the first five areas that every publisher we checked gets right. No spread, no offset, no dissenter.

• Weak to wind (150%). Immune to earth. One widely mirrored Steam guide says “weak to Thunder”; it is wind, same as Black Waltz 2.
• It does not counter Vivi’s magic. The previous Black Waltz answered fire with Fira. This one does not, and Vivi starts the fight in Trance by script. The correct play is the exact reverse of the fight before it.
• It goes airborne after taking a physical hit. Physical attackers stop connecting while it is up, and its spells become multi-target.
• Damage, as published by GameFAQs: physical around 65, Blizzard around 90, Thundara around 150 to a single target, plus Fira.

The steals

• Steepled Hat — 100%
• Linen Cuirass — 25%
• Silver Gloves — 6.25%

Three filled slots is unusual this early. The third is a true 6.25%, not the 6% usually printed and not the “semi-rare” label GameFAQs gives it.

RPGClassics prints “Silver Greaves” for the third steal. Every other publisher, and the game, say Silver Gloves.

All three are ordinary Lindblum stock, so what you lose by not stealing is a couple of hours, not an item.

It drops nothing, and there is a reason

All four drop slots are empty. So are experience and gil — zero of each.

Caves of Narshe is the only publisher that explains it: the fight does not end with the boss dead. Everyone else states the null drop and leaves it there.

Practically: steal in your first few turns. If you spend the opening on damage you may find the encounter over before you have taken anything, and there is no second attempt.

One small spread worth recording since it is the sort of thing that propagates: Final Fantasy Wiki gives this fight AP 5, GameFAQs gives 0, another boss FAQ gives 0, and Game8 prints a dash.

What this chapter actually costs you

Nothing on the ship, and everything behind it.

Boarding closes the Dali underground and, per GameFAQs’ missables walkthrough, the Ice Cavern interior as well. Those are eleven items and eight items respectively, plus two Mognet letters and a Stellazzio coin.

There is also no shop, no inn and no save moogle between Dali’s shops and Lindblum. Whatever you bought in Dali is what you fight Black Waltz 3 with, which is the real argument for spending there rather than hoarding.

Game Notes

An empty area is a difficult thing to write a checklist for and an easy thing to skip, which is why one major guide does skip it.

It is also the clearest demonstration of something this project keeps running into: the guides are shaped by what is countable. A room with four chests gets four paragraphs. A chapter with none gets folded into its neighbour, and the fact that the game deliberately paced a quiet crossing between the two halves of disc one does not survive the edit.

The datamine has the same blind spot in reverse. We can tell you with certainty that there is no item award in any of these eight scripts. We cannot tell you that the reason is a thirteen-year-old black mage looking at a copy of himself.

Both halves are needed, and neither is the whole guide.

How this page was made

Researched across 6 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 1 is marked where sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

How we decide what to print