Lindblum, After the Attack

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.

You come back to Lindblum and it is not the city you left. The Industrial District is rubble. The Festival is over and will not happen again. Everyone who was shouting about the hunt is quiet.

This is a short visit. There is no boss and nothing here is hard.

Open the hideout chests again

The three gil chests in the Tantalus hideout, in the Theatre District — you already opened these on Disc 1, and they have money in them again.

They are not the same amounts. Last time they were 97, 68 and 282. This time they are 340, 262 and 993. That is nearly 1,600 gil for walking into a room you have already been in.

Do it. It takes a minute and nobody tells you it is worth doing.

The rest of the chests

• Bandana at the Dragon’s Gate, on your way in
• Ore in the studio, in the Theatre District
• Phoenix Pinion and an Ether in the residence off the Business District main street

Our data also shows an Echo Screen at the Serpent’s Gate that no published guide mentions. We have not confirmed it. If you are down there anyway, look.

Cid gives you 3,000 gil

This happens in a scene, not from a chest. You do not have to do anything to get it and you cannot miss it.

Do not shop for Silver Gloves

The synthesis shop is running on reduced stock while the city is like this. The Silver Gloves come back later. Buying them is not urgent and right now it is not possible.

The ATEs

There are three, they are short, and they are the only look you get at what the attack did to the people here. They cost you nothing.

Game Notes

The thing this visit is actually doing is showing you a city you spent an hour in when it was at its best.

The Festival of the Hunt is one of the warmest sequences in the game — a whole district cheering, a timer, a prize, Freya and Vivi and Zidane all competing for it. It happens once. And then you come back and the district that hosted it is gone, the shops are half-stocked, and the loudest thing in Lindblum is nothing.

It would not land nearly as well if the game had not made you spend twelve minutes enjoying the place first.

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.

The Tantalus hideout chests refill, and nobody says so

Three gil chests sit in the Tantalus hideout in the Theatre District. You open them on Disc 1. You can open them again here, and again on Disc 3.

Here is what the published corpus holds:

Seven publishers print the Disc 2 set exactly. Three print the Disc 3 set exactly. They match our field data.

Not one publisher, anywhere, states in prose that these chests refill.

That is the finding. Eleven guides between them have documented a mechanic numerically — three visit-partitioned sets of figures for three chests in one room, printed across pages that do not reference each other — and none of them has written the sentence. The closest anyone comes is Jegged’s Disc 3 page, which is the only source in the corpus to use the word “refilled” about a Lindblum chest at all, and it applies it to Card Freak Gon’s house rather than to the hideout.

The reason is structural, and it is the same reason Pinnacle Rocks read as two places. A route-shaped guide has no page about a room. It has a Disc 1 chapter, a Disc 2 chapter and a Disc 3 chapter, and the hideout appears in all three written by someone standing at a different point in the story. Each writer records what is in the chests when they get there. Nobody is in a position to notice the pattern, because noticing it requires reading three chapters against each other, which is a thing a reader does and an author does not.

Two publishers disagree on two digits

Final Fantasy Wiki prints 292 where the other ten print 262. Deis’ Discs prints 933 where the others print 993.

Both are single-digit transpositions of the majority figure, both are isolated, and both sit in sources that otherwise match. We are going with 340 / 262 / 993, which is what the field carries and what seven publishers print.

The 3,000 gil is real, and our zone name for it is wrong

Our field layer files a 3,000 gil award under the zone name “Town Walls”.

Seven publishers document 3,000 gil on this visit, so the award is real. None of them calls the location Town Walls, and none of them calls it a chest — Cid hands it to you in a scene. It is a scripted gift with no player action attached.

So the amount is confirmed and the placement in our own data is not. This is a naming mismatch in our zone layer rather than a disputed fact, and it is the kind of thing that would have shipped as a phantom chest if we had rendered the table without checking it. Filed as a note against our extraction, not as a chest.

The Echo Screen has no support at all

Our data carries an Echo Screen at the Serpent’s Gate. Zero publishers list it on this visit.

This is not the usual pattern. Normally when we hold something the corpus does not, it is off the critical path — a world-map arch, a side room — and the explanation is coverage. The Serpent’s Gate is a screen every player walks through. Eleven guides covering this visit and none listing an Echo Screen there is harder to explain by coverage.

We are carrying it as unconfirmed and it goes on the playtest sheet.

The Lindblum Card is the reverse case

Six publishers list a Lindblum Card obtainable on this visit. Our extraction does not carry it.

That is expected rather than alarming: card awards are among the id ranges we have not resolved, so our table cannot presently contradict a card claim in either direction. Six independent publishers is more than enough. This one goes in the checklist on their authority, flagged as unsupported by us rather than disputed by us — two different things that a lot of data-driven guides collapse into one.

What is gone

The Industrial District is destroyed and never reopens. Its shop goes with it. Anything you did not take from it on Disc 1 is permanently gone, and there is no later visit that restores it.

The Festival of the Hunt does not return. It ran once. If you did not take the Master Hunter reward then, there is no second chance here or anywhere.

Silver Gloves are not purchasable during this state. The synthesis shop’s stock is reduced. They come back on a later visit. A couple of guides route players here specifically to buy them, which does not work.

The rest of the visit

Four chests, all trivial to reach: Bandana at the Dragon’s Gate, Ore in the studio, Phoenix Pinion and Ether in the Business District residence.

The studio Ore is a second Ore in a room that already gave you one on Disc 1 — worth stating because it is exactly the shape of thing that looks like a duplicate award instruction and is not.

Our field data also shows key item 265 awarded twice, at a branch pair. Same signature as Burmecia’s staff and Cleyra’s shoes: two copies of the award routine with a jump selecting between them. One item. Our id table does not name 265 yet, so we cannot tell you what it is; six publishers listing a Lindblum Card on this visit is the obvious candidate and we are not going to assert it on shape alone.

There is no boss. Moogles at the Inn and the Dragon’s Gate. Three ATEs.

Game Notes

Every so often this project turns up something where the whole published corpus is correct and the corpus still does not contain the answer.

The refill is the cleanest instance so far. Nobody is wrong. Seven guides print 340 / 262 / 993 and they are right; three print 1,273 / 970 / 4,826 and they are right too. The figures are all accurate, they are all sourced, and the fact that the same three chests produce all of them is invisible — not hidden, not disputed, just never assembled, because assembling it requires a view of the room rather than a view of the route.

That is a structural limit of walkthroughs as a form, and it is worth naming plainly: a guide organised by the order you play cannot easily tell you anything about a place across time. Everything it knows about the hideout is split across three chapters by design.

It took a data layer that is organised by field rather than by chapter to see it, and then eleven guides to confirm it.