While many places in Final Fantasy XIV hold references to the game’s lore, they are also telling the daily tales of the regular citizens of Eorzea. It’s quite difficult to get a grasp of these stories considering how massive the world is and how much time learning about mundane subjects of each city would take, but one dedicated FFXIV player took it upon themselves to learn more about one of the starting cities’ lore — what the unemployment rate in Ul’dah looks like.
Reddit user u/themadnessman published their findings in their post “I (Badly) attempted to calculate Ul’Dah’s unemployment rate”. Motivated by Any Austin’s Youtube channel and their videos investigating the rate of unemployment in famous locations in the gaming world, from Pokémon’s Pewter City to Resident Evil 4’s Valdelobos village, u/themandnessman did a deep dive into Ul’dah’s society to give us a good idea of what’s going on in such a complex city.
The difficulties of investigating the society of Ul’dah in Final Fantasy XIV
Now, for a survey like this, u/themadnessman had to go through some pretty tedious steps before they could find the answer they were looking for. Since they wanted to know about the unemployment rate of NPCs, they needed to first determine who would be considered in this survey and how they would determine whether a NPC had a job or not – and we’re not talking about being a Black Mage here.
After mapping the whole city, they found out that the current permanent population of Ul’dah is around 430 people. From this total, “students, visitors to the city, children, and retirees” would not be considered when doing the final calculations.
They started the research by talking to the Guards of the Brass Blades and the members of the Immortal Flames as well as the Sultansworn. These are, as any player who has spent enough time in Ul’dah’s streets knows, characters that are easier to identify and interact with. However, the real work was only starting.
As players progress through the game, it’s easy to just assume the characters we see walking around Gridania, sitting in the bars of Limsa Lominsa, or checking the goods sold in each stall in Ul’dah are citizens of these cities. But how does one actually know and find out if they live there and work there?
To know about these characters, u/themadnessman had to use all they had at their disposal. They interacted with all characters that were interactable to learn about them, but in situations where this wasn’t possible, they had to either imply who the characters are from their pop-up dialogues or just look at them and read the visual narrative they portrayed.
The economic scenario of Ul’dah in FFXIV
At the end of their research, u/themadnessman came up with some interesting numbers. First, there are a total of 338 employed people in Ul’dah and 54 unemployed. Conversely, 69 characters are part of the group that can’t be marked as either employed or unemployed. According to their calculations, the 54 unemployed residents represents 13.8 percent of Ul’dah’s citizenship.
As u/themadnessman explained, a large number of the unemployed population in Ul’dah were “mostly situated within the immediate outskirts of the city walls and within Pearl Alley”, which could be expected considering the city’s approach to immigration. Players less informed about the city’s culture might not realize that those 54 people are suffering more than just the anxiety of looking for a way to pay their rent in this digital city. Ul’dah has a culture centralized around money, which is the base to measure one’s value in the Ul’dahn society.
Now, only the time will tell us whether Ul’dah will ever change – or if u/themadnessman is going to do the same with the other city-states.
