Quan's Dwelling

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.

Quina’s old master lived in a cave outside Treno. You walk there through a forest full of encounters — no chocobo, no ship, just a walk.

This is entirely optional and it opens in stages. You can come now, but some of it will not be here yet.

What you can take today

• Three Ethers — one at the entrance, one by the spring you reach on the rope, one up the ladder in the upper chamber
• Scorpio, a Stellazzio coin, in the wall just south of the spring

That is it for now, and it has been available since long before this chapter.

The spring is free healing

Full HP and MP, as many times as you like, at no cost. There is no moogle and no save point here — plenty of people remember one, and it is the spring they are thinking of.

Come back later for the rest

Two things need prerequisites you do not have yet.

The clock on the patio holds Running Shoes. To get at it you need Vivi and Quina both in your party and you need the airship you are given later this disc. That trip also triggers the scene with Quan, which is the actual reason to come.

Ophiuchus, the thirteenth Stellazzio coin, appears in the same spot as Scorpio — but only once you have handed the other twelve to Queen Stella. There is nothing there until then, so do not go hunting.

And if you are doing the chocobo sidequest, there is a dive spot here later.

One thing you can lose

There is an ATE called “Home Sweet Home”, and you lose it permanently by collecting Vivi from this cave at the wrong moment rather than letting him go home in Treno.

If you are going for every scene, do the card tournament first and come here afterwards.

Game Notes

Quan’s Dwelling is the most skippable place in Final Fantasy IX and it is where the game keeps one of its best scenes.

Nothing points you here. No character asks you to come, no quest marker exists, the walk is through a forest of random encounters, and the reward for the first trip is three Ethers. A player could finish the game having never once opened the door.

And if you bring the right two characters at the right time, you get Quina standing on a dead man’s patio, talking about food, while a piece of music plays that the game has been saving.

That is the whole design philosophy of this game in one optional cave. The best thing in the room is not in the chest.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 2 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Four screens, three discs

This is the most extreme case of the pattern we have been tracking. Four field scripts, and the content in them unlocks across three separate points in the game:

Publishers reflect that by disagreeing about which disc the place belongs to. Four file it under Disc 2, five under Disc 3, one FAQ’s contents page files it under Disc 4, and a forum poster guessed Disc 4 and was corrected in his own thread.

Nobody is wrong. The location genuinely spans them, and a route-shaped guide has to pick one chapter to put it in. It is the Pinnacle Rocks problem again — an area whose halves have different schedules reads as two places — except here there are four schedules.

We have put it here, where the middle of its content becomes reachable, and the page says plainly what is not available yet. That is the only honest option: the alternative is four pages about one cave, which is exactly the failure we keep documenting in other people’s guides.

Our Ether count is right, and the placement is not

Three Ethers, unanimous across four publishers. Our data shows three award instructions.

That is worth a line on its own. This is the seventh or eighth area where we have checked an item count, and the first in a while where the instruction count and the real count are the same number. The rule stays — the table counts instructions — but it is a caution, not a subtraction.

The split is a different matter. Publishers put one Ether in each of three separate sub-rooms — entrance, spring, upper chamber. Our data attributes two to one screen and one to another. Same total, different distribution, and on a four-screen map the distribution is the only thing a reader can use.

So the total is ours and the placement is theirs, which has been the standing arrangement since Lindblum.

The fourth zone-name miss

Our field layer labels the screen with the Running Shoes “Fishing Area”.

No publisher anywhere uses the word fishing about this location. The Running Shoes come from examining a stopped clock on the exterior patio. The thing that is on that screen and does resemble fishing — the chocobo dive spot — pays out nine Ore, fifteen Topaz, a Tiger Racket and a Red Rose Card, and never Running Shoes.

So our label appears to have merged two separate interactables on one screen into one wrong description. After “Town Walls”, “Corridor” and “Brahne’s fleet”, that is four, and the standing decision — never render a zone name as a location — has now earned itself four times over.

Worth noting what makes this one worse than the others. The previous three were merely unsupported names. This one is a plausible name that points at a real mechanic on the same screen and attaches it to the wrong item. A reader told to go fishing for Running Shoes would find something to do and it would not work.

The Running Shoes are the third source in the game

They come from the clock — three publishers, and one older guide calls them “Hermes’ Shoes”, which is not an item in this game and looks like a naming slip rather than a variant.

What is worth pinning is that Running Shoes now have three separate sources: this clock, the Amdusias fight at Treno’s Knight’s House later this disc, and Tantarian in Alexandria’s library. Auto-Haste is one of the better abilities in the game and a reader who misses one route has two more.

No single guide we reached lists all three, because they are in three different chapters.

Ophiuchus, and a decode holding

The thirteenth coin appears in the same spot as Scorpio after the other twelve are handed in. Three publishers, no dissent, and one states outright that no Stellazzio coin is missable.

Our id table put Scorpio and Ophiuchus in the same field — 311 and 316, in one script — and the zodiac ordering predicted both. That is the arrangement the publishers describe: one place, two coins, one of them conditional.

It is a small confirmation and it is the kind we now weigh properly. Both competing orderings we tested would have put some coin here; what matters is that the specific pair matches, and the pair only falls out of the zodiac reading.

The one thing you can lose

“Home Sweet Home”, an ATE, permanently lost by fetching Vivi from this cave instead of letting him go home in Treno — or by coming here before the card tournament.

Two publishers warn about it and a forum thread has a player describing losing it in real time, having found out only afterwards from “multiple FAQ sources” rather than from any one guide.

That is the whole area’s missable list. Everything else — the Ethers, both coins, the shoes, the dive spot — is permanently available, and no publisher says the area ever closes.

One uncorroborated claim: a single poster says the Vivi timing also affects a Namingway Card. Nothing else supports it, and the Namingway Card is otherwise documented as a card-tournament branch prize, so this may be the same mechanism seen from the wrong end.

No moogle, confirmed by silence

About a dozen sources describe this cave, several room by room. None mentions a moogle or a save point. Our data has no save-point marker in any of the four scripts.

Five of them do describe the healing spring — free, unlimited HP and MP restoration — which is almost certainly why people remember a save point being here. It does everything a moogle does except the part you actually need.

Second area now where an absence of our moogle marker lines up with publishers describing no moogle, after Madain Sari. The inference stays inferred, but it has stopped being a coincidence.

Which way is it?

Three publishers say east from Treno; two say west. Nobody reconciles it and we cannot from here.

Recorded because it is a small, pure example of a thing this corpus does: a fact every guide states confidently, half of them backwards, with no mechanism by which any of them would find out.

Game Notes

Two sources in this batch were not walkthroughs, and both did work no walkthrough could.

One was a dedicated Stellazzio page that holds all thirteen coins in one table, which is how the Ophiuchus condition is legible at all — in a route-shaped guide that condition lives in whichever chapter the author happened to be writing when the player would plausibly finish the set, which is nowhere in particular.

The other was a chocobo dive-spot list, which is the only reason anyone knows what this cave pays out to a player halfway through an unrelated sidequest.

Neither is a walkthrough and neither would be much use as one. They are references — organised by thing rather than by route — and between them they cover the two pieces of this location that the eleven route guides could not hold onto.

We have now hit this four times: the moogle FAQ, the Stiltzkin lists, the Stellazzio tables, the dive-spot lists. The corpus is not short of information. It is short of documents shaped like the questions.