FFXIV portraits — a.k.a. those little semi-animated images of your Warrior of Light that appear before each round of Crystal Conflict and other activities — have a small problem. They’re not showing up for most players. At least not properly. So, if you’ve noticed your heavily customized portrait not showing in dungeons and the like, you’re far from alone. There’s a simple reason for it, too. Though it’s pretty annoying.

Basically: changing nearly anything about your FFXIV character switches portraits back to their default state. Which is to say the bland, dead-eyed stare that appears if you don’t customize your “instant portrait” setting at all. That includes switching a single armor — even if you glamoured over it with the “correct” piece or just toggled your helm on or off.

The change is usually accompanied by an error message saying your portrait failed to load for… some undisclosed reason. This can get a bit annoying to see over and over again — not to mention quite ugly when you’re also subjected to the bland default portrait on top.

Now we know the specifics of the issue, but what’s the actual solution? Well, that’s where things get even more annoying.

In order to make the portrait feature work consistently after Patch 6.3, you need to save a new instant portrait for every class and/or job you play in the game and save them with whatever gear you happen to be using in the content you wish to play. You can do this under the “Portraits” section of the Character menu — right beneath the related “Adventurer Plate” option.

Luckily, you should already see a portrait saved to one of your 45 available slots for every class you’ve unlocked up to this point. Albeit with the default portraits. Even if your saved portraits are the default images with your current gear selected, however, you’ll still get the usual error message until FFXIV sees you’ve updated your portrait. Oh, and you need to do this manually.

Every single time you change your gear.

This seems to be a mix of both bugs and just some fussy design decisions. You can always tell if a particular portrait isn’t “saved” by looking for the yellow triangle symbol with an exclamation point inside it (as seen in the screenshot below).

ffxiv portrait not showing

The one bright side to all of this is that FFXIV isn’t really a “loadout game.” Once you reach the level cap on a particular job, you’re probably not changing around your gear too super often. Whatever best-in-slot gear you have is what you have. At least until a new patch rolls around or you grind out a particular piece of gear each week.

In either case, the simplest solution to remove the error message is this:

Open the Portraits menu
Select a portrait you want to change or fix
Click the “edit” button above your portrait
Press the gold “save” button at the bottom of the Edit Portrait window

You can also right-click (or press the square button with a PlayStation controller) with the portrait highlighted and choose “Restore Default Settings.” Neither of these options will provide you with a custom portrait on their own, but they will remove the yellow error icon.

This, in turn, seems to alleviate the issue in some cases. Even then it seems pretty hit or miss. Even portraits that don’t show the yellow error icon will still bring up the error message in dungeons and other group content — all while defaulting to the basic portrait of your character. You can see for yourself by loading into an unsynced dungeon. That way you can skip the queues, check if the image loaded correctly, and leave to try again.

Other common tips you can find among the Final Fantasy community right now include:

Press the “Update Gear Set” button in the Character menu
Check to make sure small things like rings don’t have the wrong Glamours set
Make sure the gear in your Adventurer Plate and Instant Portrait match

After trying all of these options in a variety of different orders, though, I still wasn’t able to make my Gunbreaker portrait work properly inside of multiplayer content. Even after unequipping and reequipping my gear set multiple times, as well as resaving my Adventurer Plate and Instant Portrait with the exact same set, the game still believes that the two gear loadouts are different.

I couldn’t even apply my portrait settings directly to my Adventurer Plate (which is one of the options in the Portraits menu). The game recommended unequipping and reequipping to resolve this issue. Which, as previously stated, didn’t work.

What finally (sort of) worked for me was trying the exact opposite solution. It went like this:

Open the Adventurer Plate from the Character menu
Select “Edit Portrait”
Adjust the portrait to your liking and press “Reflect Current Gear”
Click “Save”
Return to the Character menu and select the Portraits option
Right-click or press Square on the Portrait for the same class as in your Adventurer Plate
Select “Import Settings from Adventurer Plate” from the dropdown menu
Click “Confirm”

ffxiv adventurer plate not showing

This has allowed exactly one of my Instant Portraits to work in multiplayer content at a time. To get it to work for others, however, I need to manually redo my entire Adventurer Plate from scratch and import its data to the proper Portrait slot every time I switch classes.

Every. Single. Time.

To sum it all up: the current system seems both finnicky and buggy. This, in turn, makes it incredibly difficult to tell when you’re doing something wrong and when FFXIV is just plain broken in this particular case. Square Enix has yet to make any kind of public statement about the issue, even as players themselves have been pretty vocal about it on forums and social media. Because of how widespread and obvious the issue has been, it seems like something the team will certainly address at some point soon.

In the meantime, you can simply toggle “Use as Instant Portrait” off by clicking on the small, rectangular button in the bottom-right corner of the Portraits menu. That’s what I’m doing with most of my jobs until the issue is resolved in a more official capacity, anyway.

Portraits Not Showing in FFXIV Guide - Tips, Fixes, & Solution

It's a really fussy process, but there are some ways around it!

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