The Evil Forest

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.

The ship you spent the first two hours on is now scenery. You can walk through it, which very few games would bother to let you do, and everything inside it is yours for the next half hour and then never again.

Rob the wreck

Sequence first: the Prima Vista is broken open in the trees, Baku is standing on the bridge, and there is a fight coming that you win by not dying. Before any of that, go through the ship.

Cargo outside. Cabins inside. A bunk bed with money tucked in the sheets. A hallway room, a cargo room with something easy to walk straight past, a meeting room. None of it is guarded, none of it is unique, and all of it is behind a door that shuts for good when you leave the forest.

The one people miss is not in the ship at all when they look for it. After Baku, go back. A room that was locked during your sweep is open now, and there is an Ether in it. It is the one pickup here that requires you to search a place you have already finished searching.

Baku is free money

He hits reasonably hard and he cannot actually take anything from you. Fire hurts him, Slow sticks, and the fight ends when the story wants it to.

So spend it on Steal. He is carrying a Hi-Potion and an Iron Sword, and the Iron Sword is a genuine weapon upgrade sitting behind a one-in-four roll — not the near-impossible chance most guides print for it. Zidane should be doing nothing else until it is in your bag. Steiner will be swinging it inside an hour.

Blank hands you the actual reward

The key item he gives you in the cargo hold is not a consumable. It is the thing that turns equipment into a teaching system — gear you wear starts feeding you abilities, and from this point on what you put on a character matters for reasons that have nothing to do with stats.

If you skimmed the tutorial text, this is the one to go back and read.

The spring is unlimited

There is a clearing in the forest with a spring in it that restores your whole party, HP and MP, for free, as many times as you like.

The game does not sell this hard and it should. Everything that follows this area is a solo ice cave with no shops and no inn. Grind here. Two or three levels off the local wildlife costs you ten minutes and makes the next two hours comfortable rather than tense.

There is a moogle in the tree stump next to it — you can only see his pompom — and he wants the letter you picked up in Alexandria. Check Mognet twice while you are standing there.

The cages want a hostage, not a win

Two fights in this forest are the same enemy wearing the same name, and neither of them is really about damage. Each one has somebody in it, and every turn it spends not attacking you, it is draining the person inside.

Losing them is a game over. Not a setback — a game over, in an area that has been nothing but free rides up to now, roughly ninety minutes into a forty-hour game.

So the rule for both fights is: stop the cage, do not out-heal it. Hit it hard and hit it now. If it has an arm up, get rid of the arm.

Strip Blank before you sleep

At the camp scene after the escape, Blank leaves. He leaves wearing whatever is still on him, which includes a Silk Shirt — and he is gone for a long, long time.

Open the menu. Take it off him. It is not a unique item and you can buy another eventually, but “eventually” is a while away and the very next thing you do is walk into a cave alone.

Game Notes

The Evil Forest is where FFIX stops being charming at you.

Everything before this has been a performance — a play inside a play, a fake ticket, a kidnapping that goes right for the kidnappers. Then the ship burns, the ship crashes, and the game drops you into a place where the trees are hostile, your friend gets taken, and the way you rescue him is to run before it is finished.

And it does not let you go back and fix it. The forest seals. Blank stays where he is. The game’s first real lesson about itself is that it will let a thing go wrong and then keep going, which is a strange and quite confident thing for a game with this art style to do in its second hour.

It is also the last time for a while that anything is free. The spring is the most generous mechanic in the early game and it exists exactly once, in exactly the place where the game is about to take your party away from you.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 3 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Fifteen of the twenty-three things in this area are permanently losable, which sounds alarming and mostly is not. Nothing here is unique. The equipment is ordinary shop stock and the consumables are on sale in the same forest. What you actually lose by rushing is the treasure count, four Active Time Events, and one shirt that walks off on somebody else.

The forest and the wreck inside it seal when you leave. No guide has ever found a way back in.

The one loss worth caring about

Blank’s Silk Shirt. At the camp scene after the escape, open the menu and take his equipment off him. He leaves wearing whatever is still on his back and he does not return for a very long stretch of the game.

It is not a unique item — Silk Shirts appear in shops later. But the next thing that happens is a solo boss fight in an ice cave with no inn between here and there, and an extra Silk Shirt in that window is worth considerably more than the same item bought in disc 2.

This is the only pickup in the area that requires you to do something the game never hints at.

The one that requires going back

The Ether in the instrument store is behind a door that does not open until the Baku fight is finished. By then most people have stopped searching the ship. Go back for it.

The steal rates published for this area are wrong by a factor of four

FFIX gives every enemy four steal slots and the chance attached to each slot is identical for every enemy in the game: 100%, 25%, 6.25%, 0.39%. Slot order, not enemy identity, is what sets the odds.

That single fact rewrites the two steals in this area that anyone cares about:

• Iron Sword off Baku is the second slot. It is 25%, not the 6% widely printed.
• Iron Helm off Plant Brain is the second slot. It is 25%, not 6%.

The figures of 70/23/6 in circulation come from a description of the steal formula that treats the common slot as “whatever is left over” and then splits the remainder. It produces numbers that look reasonable and are not the game’s. Guides publishing 100/25/6.25 have it right.

Practically: people reset the Baku fight over the Iron Sword because they have been told it is a one-in-sixteen roll. It is a one-in-four roll and it is worth three or four attempts, not thirty.

The rest of the steal list here:

• Baku — Hi-Potion (100%), Iron Sword (25%).
• Prison Cage, second fight — Broadsword (100%), Leather Wrist (25%).
• Plant Brain — Eye Drops (100%), Iron Helm (25%).
• Dendrobium — Tent (25%), Ore (6.25%). Tents cost 800 gil at this point in the game, which is why the ordinary forest wildlife is worth stealing from at all.
• The first Prison Cage has no steal list whatsoever. Do not spend turns on it.

There are two Prison Cages and the guides have merged them

One of the most persistent errors in FFIX coverage is a single HP figure published for “the Prison Cage.”

There are two of them. They are different encounters with different HP: 513 and 533. Guides printing 513 and guides printing 533 are each correct — about one fight — and wrong to present it as one number. Only the second carries a steal list.

The second also drops Eye Drops and a Phoenix Down. One source lists an Echo Screen in place of the Eye Drops.

Boss figures

A note on where these come from, because it is not the simple story we expected. The game’s battle table stores these four fights at 10,202, 10,513, 10,533 and 10,916 — exactly ten thousand above the published figures. Around twenty-five boss records across the whole game carry the same ten-thousand gap, and the published number appears nowhere in the game’s files.

We do not yet know what the extra ten thousand is for. What we do know is which number you fight: Plant Brain dies in about twenty turns to a level-7 party, which is 916, not 10,916. So the published figures are the right ones and the raw table is not what to quote. Our own first reading of this went the other way, and the working note on it is kept rather than deleted.

What is not ambiguous: Baku and Plant Brain are both weak to fire, Baku takes Slow, and Plant Brain drops a Phoenix Down and three Potions.

The cage fights, tactically

Both Prison Cage encounters hold a party member, and the cage drains that character on every turn it is not attacking you. If the captive dies, the game ends. This is the first hard fail state in FFIX and it arrives about ninety minutes in, after an opening act in which literally nothing could go wrong.

Do not try to heal through it. The drain is faster than your healing and you are racing a timer either way. Remove the arm if it has one up, then kill the cage.

Everything else, in order

The crash site. A Phoenix Down in the salvaged cargo outside the wreck. Cinna is selling — this is where you buy the Hi-Potions and Tents you will want in the ice cave.

Inside the wreck. A Wrist at the bottom of the stairs on the left. An Ether against the back wall of Vivi’s cabin, and 116 gil in the sheets of the top bunk — not a chest, you have to examine the bed. A second Ether in the room immediately south. A Rubber Helm at the far end of the cargo room, which is a hidden pickup rather than a visible chest and which three separate guides flag as easy to walk past. A Potion on the southern side of Baku’s meeting room.

Blank’s Medicine is given in the cargo hold. It is a key item and it unlocks equipment-taught abilities, which is the real reward of this area.

Two contested placements. The Bronze Gloves are put beside Baku on the bridge by four guides and at the top of the spiral staircase by one. The Leather Hat is placed in the south room by three, on the ship’s exterior by a fourth, and in the entrance hallway by a fifth. Search all of those spots; the disagreement costs you a minute, not an item.

The spring. Full HP and MP, free, unlimited, repeatable. It is the intended place to pick up a couple of levels before the boss and it is the last free restore for a while.

Monty is in the tree stump beside the spring with only his pompom visible. Deliver Kupo’s letter and check Mognet a second time for another one to read. One guide files this delivery as lost with the area; a dedicated moogle FAQ says Monty reappears later as a travelling moogle and the delivery is not missable. Nobody has tested whether the later Monty accepts the letter, so do it here.

The four optional Active Time Events count toward the watch-everything achievement, and this is the first place in the game where you can permanently fall behind on it. Two sources say watching “Time to Escape” is what unlocks “My Little Baby”; a third says it gates two later events rather than one.

Game Notes

This area is where our own numbers and the published ones part company for the first time in a way that changes play rather than trivia.

The boss HP discrepancies do not matter much at the controller — 916 is 916 however the table writes it down. The steal rates matter enormously, because a 6% chance and a 25% chance are different decisions. At 6% you skip the Iron Sword or you savescum for it. At 25% you take three swings and move on, and you walk into the Ice Cavern with a weapon you were told to give up on.

The reason the wrong figure is everywhere at once is that it is inherited. One description of the steal formula, written a long time ago, got copied forward into guides that had no reason to doubt it. Nothing about the resulting numbers looks obviously wrong — 70/23/6 is a perfectly plausible-looking distribution.

It just is not what the game does.