Terra

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.

Nine screens of roots and branches down to a village. No boss out here, no moogle, and no way back to a lot of places you have just left behind.

Six things to pick up

• Coronet — across the stepping stones
• Elixir and Dragon Wrist — the path by the pond, the Wrist down a dead end
• Remedy and Mythril Racket — the treetop, one at the bottom of the web and one at the top
• Demon’s Vest — at the tree base

If a guide tells you there is a Minerva’s Plate in Terra, it is right and it means the village. Look for it in Bran Bal, not out here.

Fight the Movers

Three of them per encounter, and 23,801 experience — against 18,816 for a Ring Leader and 17,096 for a Hecteyes. It is the best fight in Terra by a distance, and it is cheap: 7,352 HP and weak to everything but earth.

(It is not the best experience in the game, whatever you may have heard. More on that in the complete guide.)

Two things to know:

Delta Attack will kill you if you let all three line up — it needs all three healthy and standing. Damage one and the threat is gone.

And Virus turns the whole thing off. Movers and Ring Leaders inflict it, and a character with Virus gains no experience at all from a fight. You can grind here for an hour and come away with nothing.

Carry Vaccines. You can steal them from Ring Leader.

Quina’s stops

• Hecteyes — eat one for Roulette. It is undead, so a Phoenix Down and an attack will kill it outright.
• Ring Leader — Magic Hammer, if you missed it back in Burmecia.

Two characters drop out shortly

Publishers disagree about exactly when, but Steiner and Dagger go out of commission around the end of this stretch — at the village, most likely, rather than in the trees. Don’t build around either.

Do your equipment pass now, too. What follows is a run of boss fights back to back with no chance to re-equip in between.

Game Notes

Terra is the first place in Final Fantasy IX with no people in it.

Every location so far has been somewhere someone lives, or lived, or died — a town, a castle, a village, a ruin with a caretaker. Even the empty places had a moogle in them. There has been a moogle in essentially every location in this game for forty hours.

There is no moogle here. There is no shop, no save point, no letter to carry, no one to talk to. Just roots, and a very long way down, and encounters that give absurd amounts of experience because nothing that lives here was designed for you to meet.

The game does not point at any of this. It just stops putting moogles in rooms.

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.

Minerva’s Plate, settled three ways

Eight publishers list a Minerva’s Plate among the things you pick up “in Terra”. Our field data puts it on a stairway in Bran Bal, one block on.

We flagged that as a disagreement. It is not one, and the way it dissolves is worth the space.

First: read what those publishers actually say about how to get it.

Every publisher who describes the route describes a staircase. Terra’s nine screens are a hilltop, a downhill path, stepping stones, a path by a pond, two bridges, a treetop, a tree base and a cutscene. There is no staircase in Terra. There is one in Bran Bal, and our field script for it is named for it: Bran Bal / Stairway.

Second: the item lists decompose exactly. Caves of Narshe gives a ten-item haul for its “Terra” chapter. Split it against our two blocks:

Ten items, and the split is clean — including the Elixir count, which is the part that could not have come out right by luck. Our Terra block holds exactly one Elixir; Bran Bal holds two, in the Storage and the Laboratory. One plus two is the three they printed.

Third: the blocks are not adjacent by accident. Terra’s screens are ids 2600 through 2608. Bran Bal begins at 2650. Forty-one ids of daylight between them — this is not a boundary we had to guess at.

So nobody is wrong. Bran Bal is a village in Terra, and a chapter page that covers both will say “Terra” and mean the chapter. We are splitting at a finer grain than a chapter, which is the whole point of splitting at all.

Look for the Plate in the village. It is on the next page.

The six chests, and a very tidy block

Six chests on four of the nine screens. The Hilltop, the Downhill Path and both Bridges hold nothing.

A note for anyone following our chest work: every chest in this game is one signed value, and we pair each one to its award by a byte offset that has run anywhere from 102 to 109 across the whole game. Terra’s six all pair at exactly 105. It is the cleanest block we have read — six chests, six pairs, no variance at all. Nothing rides on it; it is simply what a stretch of field script looks like when one person wrote all of it in one sitting.

The Movers

7,352 HP, 23,801 experience, 2,300 gil. They appear in five formations in total — three in Terra, two in Pandemonium — and nowhere on Gaia at all.

Correction: they are not the best experience in the game

We wrote that they were, on this page, and our own data falsifies it. The correction is worth more than the claim was.

Sorted by experience, the Mover is thirteenth:

The corpus agrees and always has. Two publishers point at Grand Dragons in Popos Heights for both experience and AP; one adds Yans on Vile Island and the Chimera trick in Memoria. Nobody recommends Movers.

The error was ours and it was a simple one: we saw 23,801 sitting next to Terra’s other two enemies — Ring Leader at 18,816, Hecteyes at 17,096 — and promoted “best in the area” to “best in the game” without running the sort. It took thirty seconds to check and we checked it one page too late.

What is actually true, and is the reason the reputation exists: a Mover is cheap. 7,352 HP, weak to seven of the eight elements, and dead to almost anything you throw. The return per unit of effort is excellent even though the raw number is mid-table. That is a different claim, and the honest one.

The Mover’s other reputation is for AP, not experience. Our enemy table carries no AP column, so we can neither confirm nor deny it, and we are not going to repeat it as though we had.

Only one of the three is real

Every Mover encounter is three Movers. Here is what the three actually are:

We had read this off our own tables and left it as a probable reader artefact — two enemies with zero experience looked like a parsing failure. It is not. Game8’s Mover page gives the same three figures in the same three slots, which means our name-mapping inside multi-enemy formations is sound.

And it goes further than the experience column. The two outer Movers are stripped in every reward table there is — no experience, no gil, no steal list, no drop list, and no card. Their card field is the “none” sentinel, not a card id. They are not weaker Movers. They are scenery with hit points.

Which tells you what they are for. The formation’s move list is Virus Combo, Firaga, Delta Attack, Spin — and Delta Attack is a three-caster move. The outer two exist so that Delta Attack can happen.

So: break the formation. Fandom’s read of the AI script is that Delta Attack fires only when all three are healthy and standing, which means you do not have to kill anything — damaging one of the outer pair is enough to switch the move off. Killing the centre one, on the other hand, throws the encounter away.

They are flying, and that is the whole element table

Movers null Earth and are weak to Fire, Ice, Thunder, Water, Wind, Holy and Shadow — everything else, in other words. Caves of Narshe says they absorb Earth; our field reads null. The practical result is the same and we are not going to pretend the difference matters at the table.

What does matter is why. Movers carry the flying flag, and in this game that flag comes with Earth immunity attached. We checked it properly rather than assuming: 206 enemy records in the game are flagged flying, and 205 of them are immune to Earth.

The single exception is Trance Kuja. We have no explanation for that and are not going to invent one.

Virus is the actual difficulty here

A character with Virus gains no experience from a fight. Not reduced — none. You can grind Movers for an hour with a Virus-ed party and finish with exactly the levels you started with.

Two of the three Terra enemies inflict it:

• Movers — Virus Combo
• Ring Leader — Virus Powder
• Hecteyes — does not. Its moves are Absorb, Roulette and Hypnotize.

The cure is a Vaccine, and the pleasant surprise is where they come from:

All three Terra enemies carry Vaccines, including both of the ones that give you Virus in the first place. You do not need to have shopped for this. You do need to check your party between fights, because nothing announces that a character has stopped earning.

Quina, and the two skills on offer

Hecteyes — 9,567 HP, level 51, 17,096 experience. Weak to Fire and Holy, halves Shadow. Eat it for Roulette.

It is flagged undead, which is the mechanical reason a Phoenix Down kills it outright. That flag is worth a line of its own: sixty-nine records in the game carry it, across nine enemies — Zombie, Skeleton, Ghost, Wraith, Soulcage, Mistodon, Dracozombie, Whale Zombie and Hecteyes — and that is precisely the set publishers call undead. No surprises in either direction, which after the Movers is a relief.

Steal a Phoenix Pinion off it while you are there.

Ring Leader — 9,569 HP, level 51, 18,816 experience. Weak to Wind, nulls Earth (it flies too). Eat it for Magic Hammer if you missed Magic Vice back in Burmecia on Disc 1; this is the second and last easy source. It drops an Amethyst and gives the Ifrit card.

Roulette is also available from Ghosts and Zombies much earlier, so if Quina already has it, there is no reason to hunt Hecteyes.

Your party, and a disagreement we are not going to paper over

Publishers do not agree on who you can bring.

• Jegged says all eight are selectable for this chapter, with Zidane mandatory.
• Gamer Guides says Steiner and Dagger are out of commission and you will have to replace them — but says it on its Bran Bal page, not its Terra one.
• GameFAQs recommends gearing Zidane, Vivi, Dagger and Eiko before Terra, then notes that at Bran Bal you should “put anyone in your party to fill Dagger’s spot.”
• Caves of Narshe says only that “the party will change again for a bit” and to reformat to suit.

Read together, the honest version is: the reshuffle is real, it names Steiner and Dagger, and it bites at the village rather than in the trees. Our own checklist previously stated it as a Terra restriction. That was too early by one block, and we have corrected it.

The practical advice does not change. Do not build this stretch around Steiner or Dagger, and expect to be asked to replace them shortly.

Caves of Narshe adds the part that actually costs you if you ignore it: after this you get a run of consecutive boss fights with no chance to re-equip in between. Do the equipment pass now.

No boss, no moogle, no Stiltzkin

Five publishers confirm the field is boss-free, and Game8’s boss section says so flatly. The moogle is in Bran Bal, and Stiltzkin is there too — in the Storage, a Diamond, an Ether and an Elixir for 2,222 gil, which our field data shows as three award units in one room.

That is his seventh set of eight. The eighth is at Alexandria on Disc 4 for 5,555 gil. What makes the Bran Bal one matter more than its position suggests is that it is the last one behind a door that shuts — the Disc 4 stop is in a town you can walk back into, and this one is in a village you cannot.

What the Shimmering Island closed

The full list, for the record, since you are now on the far side of it: Conde Petie and its Mountain Path, the Desert Palace, Esto Gaza, Mount Gulug, Fossil Roo, both Gates, the Iifa Tree, Observatory Mountain and Pinnacle Rocks.

Gone with them: Morrid’s rare coffees, the Amdusias fight at Treno’s Knight’s House, Conde Petie’s Coloured Stones, the Oglop trade, and Daguerreo’s shop stock including the Rune Blade. One publisher warns it can also cost the top Treasure Hunter rank.

We said what we had to say about this on the previous page, where it could still be acted on. Here it is just an inventory.

Game Notes

The Minerva’s Plate thing is the most instructive small problem we have had on this project, because for about a day it looked like a straightforward case of our data being right and eight publishers being wrong.

That reading was available. It was also lazy. Eight publishers do not independently hallucinate the same chest, and when the corpus is unanimous against us the first move is to assume we have misunderstood the question rather than that everyone else has misread the game.

The question here turned out to be “what does Terra mean”. To a guide writer it means a chapter — a stretch of play you sit down and do, trees and village together. To us it means a block of field scripts with a boundary we can point at. Both definitions are useful. Only one of them is ours, and it is not the common one.

What settled it was not our data winning. It was noticing that every publisher who bothered to give directions mentioned a staircase, and that Terra has no staircase in it. The corpus contained its own correction; we just had to read past the noun to the instructions underneath.

The Elixir count was the part that made it certain. One in the trees, two in the village, three on their list. You do not get that by accident, and it is a much better proof than anything in our own files — because it is a number we did not choose, in a source that had no idea we were checking.