Arguably the best part of playing a game like FFXIV is the ability to customize multiple aspects of the game. Not only are players able to choose the clothing they wear and spend countless hours on the Market board or farming Duties to get the aesthetic they are looking for, but players can take it two steps further by being able to farm Mounts they can ride around the world and Minions they can summon to hang out with.
Though I’m personally more of a Mount Collector, being someone who is regularly completing side content like Tribal Quests to get all the Mounts in the Game, I will still always look for Minions on the Market board or in times of prolonged downtime I will casually farm for them in Duties like Variant Dungeons.
While Minions provide few methods of value to a player in FFXIV, there are several Minions which have incredible idle animations and some which can be interacted with using emotes. Minions that I can interact with tend to be my favourites because they give me something to do when I’m in the queue and need to keep my hands busy.
Quite frankly, so many of my streams become me interacting with my Minions and trying to figure out which emotes work with them especially since I’ve added a redeem to randomize my Minion a few months ago. The obsession has gotten to the point where I’m debating focusing all of my Gil farming on purchasing as many Minions as I can so I can catalogue what interactions each one has.
But I digress, today I’m going to cover the multiple ways you can Summon your Minions. I’ll try to cover any questions you have and provide you with some side solutions if there is any customization you are hoping for.
Note: If you have any questions about FFXIV that you want me to cover feel free to leave them in a comment below, you can also ask me while I am streaming on Twitch, YouTube or in our community discord.
HOW TO SUMMON A MINION IN FFXIV
While there is no default Hotkey to Summon a Minion or access the Minion Guide, it is relatively quick and easy to find when you get used to the UI in FFXIV.
If players have kept their settings on Default, they should see a series of round buttons in the bottom right of their screen above their Gil or whatever currency they are currently displaying.
The first button is the Character Menu. Here you can locate the Minion Guide option which will open up your catalogue of any Minions you have collected.
This option will not be available at the beginning of the game and players must unlock at least one Minion either by purchasing it on the Market board, by winning it from a Duty or by completing quests which have a Minion as a reward.
If players would like quick access to the Minion Guide, they can simply open the Character Menu, hold their Left Mouse Button on the text and drag it onto one of their Hotbars. Alternatively, players can hit “P” on their Keyboard to open their Actions & Traits Menu, head to the Main Commands section and locate Minion Guide in the right-hand column. This is also a draggable button that can be placed on a Hotbar and will be the easiest way to place it on a Hotbar if you are playing on the Console.
While players are in the Minion Guide they will simply need to right-click on the Minion they would like to Summon. If players already have a Minion out, clicking on Summon should immediately summon the new Minion, however, there are times when this will simply put away their current Minion requiring them to hit Summon again.
Unfortunately, the Minion Guide is quite annoying to navigate, especially when you have a good amount of Minions. I personally have 261 Minions currently, and I regularly struggle to locate new ones I’ve just unlocked or ones I want to show off because the images are quite small and their ordering is somewhat all over the place. Admittedly, the former is my fault as when players unlock a new Minion it will be highlighted with a green circle, however, if you did not interact with previous Minions you’ve unlocked they will remain highlighted until interacted with. *cough* I rarely remember to do this.
Something that helps me when visually searching for a Minion is right-clicking my the top part of the menu and selecting “Scale Window” then choosing 200%. While this will cover a big portion of your screen, it will also make the icons for Minions quite a bit bigger and will help you see things more clearly. I will typically reduce the size of this menu afterward, though it is not necessary as you will rarely be in this menu and thus should not be too invasive. That being said, changing the window size of one menu will not affect the others, so you can have each one set to a different size.
If players know the name of the Minion they are looking for they can utilize the search function that is beside the page numbers, depicted as a magnifying glass. Most Minions have straightforward names that should be easy to remember, however, there is the odd occasion where players will be searching for a Minion for a while as they may have a specific name that pertains to their character or the actual mob name.
Players can sometimes get around the difficulty of searching by enabling the “Include Body Text” function as the body sometimes has more specific keywords that are more descriptive for a player who doesn’t know the ins and outs of all the elements of the game.
HOW DO YOU UNSUMMON/PUT AWAY A MINION IN FFXIV?
Unsummoning or putting away a Minion follows the same process as Summoning the Minion. Players must locate the Minion they currently have out and then must right-click the Minion Icon and select dismiss.
It usually isn’t an issue to locate the Minion you have summoned if you used one of your favourites or are familiar with the name of the Minion, however, if you used the Minion Roulette, my best advice is to summon the first Minion on your list and dismiss it.
I regularly find myself putting away my Minions when I’m not streaming on Twitch as often the Minion Roullete will land on a Terrestrial Minion which ends up triggering my ADHD symptoms when I’m trying to silently work or focus as their footsteps tend to be constant. You can, of course, turn off these sound effects in the menu, however, sometimes the simplest solution is to just put the Minion away.
WHAT IS THE MINION ROULETTE IN FFXIV?
When players are in the Favourites tab (the Star) of the Minnion Guide they may notice a button in the bottom left corner. This is the Minion Roulette trigger.
While players can open the Minion Guide at any time to initiate the Minion Roulette, this is typically a button that is placed on an extra Hotbar for players who regularly want to switch out their Minions.
If players want, they can set this on a hidden Shared Hotbar and bind it to a Keybind, though this is quite unnecessary as it only requires a single button press and I can’t see a player using it frequently enough to justify the use of a Keybind.
Nonetheless, by default, this button will randomly select one of your many Minions, allowing for anything you’ve learned to appear.
HOW DO YOU SET UP YOUR FAVOURITE MINIONS?
Players can select a maximum of 30 Minions to be marked as favourites. As mentioned, these will all appear in the first tab of the Minion Guide depicted by a star.
Here players can organize their Minions, placing them wherever they see fit as unlike the other tabs of the Minion Guide, these positions can be adjusted and will remain persistent any time a player opens the Minion Guide.
While Minions will appear in order of when they are favourited at first, players can also leave spaces between the slots leading to further organization and customization. The only issue is… 30 slots is generally not enough for all of a player’s favourite Minions, especially if they have hundreds of them, so get ready to adjust this often if you are a Minion hoarder.
Similar to how a player would summon a Minion, players must navigate to the Minion they would like to favourite, right-click on it and select Add to Favourites. Players can also use this method to remove the Minion from their favourites.
HOW DO YOU USE THE MINION ROULETTE ONLY FOR FAVOURITE MINIONS?
If players would like to limit the Minions that appear when they use the Minion Roulette all they have to do is head to the Minion Guide and select the option at the very bottom “Only select from favourited Minions.” Much like the Mount Roulette, players may see some Minions more frequently than others in the Roulette, however, this is completely random as there is no secret code that dictates certain Minions appear more often than others.
Unfortunately, there is no way to have both the regular Minion Roulette and the Favourite Minion Roulette active at the same time as they utilize the same button. Instead, players must always head back to their Minion Guide if they want to enable or disable this functionality.
CAN I MAKE A HOTBAR JUST FOR MINIONS?
You can absolutely make a Hotbar just for Minions and this is actually what I did for a very long time.
I really should write a post about all the different types of Hotbars you can create for ease soon, but the following is going to be a shortened version of Hotbar things to keep in mind.
The first thing you need to make sure of is that you always utilize a Shared Hotbar when you want to set up a Minion Hotbar. This will make sure that you can always see the Minion Hotbar no matter what Job you are playing.
To enable and disable Shared Hotbars players must first enter the Character Configuration by hitting Escape then click on the Hotbar Settings icon on the bottom left of the screen and then select the Sharing Tab.
Any of the Hotbars that are filled in with Yellow Boxes is a Shared Hotbar.
Now, to remain clean players may want to have the Minion Hotbar hidden unless they choose to see it. For this, I would strongly recommend building some Macros.
Open your User Macro menu by hitting the XIV button in the bottom right of your screen, above your currency and select whichever slot you want it to take. The slot number does not matter.
Select an image that correlates to what you associate with Minions, for me it was the Star, and make this the macro Icon. Now input the following code:
/hotbar display #ofHotbar [on/off]
If you want the Hotbar to disappear on its own the following will be your macro:
/hotbar display #ofHotbar [on/off]
/wait #ofSeconds
/hotbar display #ofHotbar off
The [on/off] text acts as a toggle, allowing you to open and close this Hotbar at any point which is why I suggest you always have this as part of your Macro. Though a wait timer will generally hide a Hotbar without issue, if players change zones or trigger another Macro it will sometimes leave the Hotbar Displayed, allowing this toggle to be your quick fail-safe.
As someone who has made 8 unique menus which currently use two different Hotbars due to laziness, I sometimes get myself in the position where two Hotbars are displayed directly on top of each other which can be extremely annoying, which again is why I strongly recommend having the failsafe toggle.
Okay, okay you twisted my arm… I’ll write the guide today on how you can do that! I promise.
CAN YOU USE A MINION IN INSTANCES OR DUTIES IN FFXIV?
For the most part, no players will not be able to have Minions summoned during instances or Duties. This unfortunately also includes the Island Sanctuary, which is odd for a reason I’ll cover shortly.
Whenever players enter an instanced Duty such as a Dungeon, Trial or zone such as Eureka, The Forgotten Land or Bozja their Minion will be put away, though it will still be out when they return to the Overworld.
This means that a player will not have to summon their Minion over and over again each time they complete content which would be extremely annoying.
CAN I PLACE MINIONS IN MY HOUSE IN FFXIV?
No, while players can place things like Retainers and Vendors in their Housing, players will not be able to place their Minions in this area. While this would be a cute addition to the game, especially after the capability to leave your Minions out around your Island Sanctuary, there does not seem to be anything to suggest this will be added to the game.
If I was to hypothesize whether this would be added in the future, I would say it is only likely when the Playstation 4 is no longer supported as currently there are issues with too many objects loading at once on the PS4.
In my opinion, the only reason Minions are permitted in Island Sanctuary is because the number of objects is limited immensely and while there are limitations set for how many objects a player can place in their house, it is much higher than in Island Sanctuary. I still wouldn’t get my hopes up for a future where you can select idle minions to hang out in your yard, but I think we are all excited to see what the future of the game will look like when the PS4 is dropped. (Sorry PS4 players, but I’m sure you also agree deep inside.)
IS THERE ANYTHING A MINION IS GOOD FOR IN FFXIV?
Realistically, the only thing that is worth it when it comes to collecting Minions is their utility in a Gold Saucer game called Lord of Verminion.
This can be described as a strategy board game that utilizes Minions to battle each other with each Minion having various stats and combat abilities to help strengthen their team.
While I’d say that Lord of Verminion is a pretty niche game, it is a great source for MGP especially if players are focussing only on their weekly challenge logs.
Now, while players can get by with a few Minions when playing PVE Lord of Verminion, players who are more serious about the game, especially in regards to PVP, will typically go out of their way to hunt for specific Minions in duties or on the Market board. Quite frankly this isn’t a requirement as Minions don’t range in differences too drastically and there is no such thing as an “Overpowered Minion.” However, depending on what stage you’re completing in PVE or what the current “Meta” is on your server, some will come in more handy than others.
Otherwise, the only real utility of a Minion is for bragging rights or for glamour. For a long while I specifically collected only red Minions since the Job I AFK’d on the most frequently was the Red Mage. I have a somewhat ungodly obsession with my Red Mage being fully red, Black Mage fully black, White Mage fully white and Blue Mage fully blue. Call me cliché because I truthfully am, but there’s just something so utterly wrong with doing something else with these jobs in my head.
TEXT COMMANDS THAT PERTAIN TO MINIONS IN FFXIV
There are a few text commands you’re going to want to be aware of when it comes to Minions. Some of these will be emotes you can use to activate hidden animations with your Minion and others will be quick-access tools to get to menus faster.
Players can summon a particular Minion with /minion “minion name”. The Minion name must be exactly as it appears, including spaces and capitalization and must be between two apostrophes, so an example would be /minion “Baby Bun”
As I’m not someone who actually remembers the name of Minions and realistically couldn’t be bothered to use this function, I’ve never used it. However, if you are someone who wants to build yourself a pseudo-Minion Roulette that includes more than 30 of your favourites, it might be worth utilizing this in a macro. Doing this is quite simple as all it would require is a single macro, though there will be no random element to the order in which they appear.
The Macro would go as follows:
/minion “minion name”
/minion “minion name”
/minion “minion name”
If you are feeling spicy you could utilize the <wait.#> function, though I wouldn’t recommend it. Players do not need any additional commands to make this Macro work, though players should be aware of certain limitations. Unfortunately, any time a player utilizes another macro or has to restart the game, this macro will restart from the beginning. This will greatly limit the number of Minions you see as macros can only be executed line by line and there is no true random function that can be utilized when it comes to Minions.
Otherwise, a very helpful text command is /minionguide which will open up your Minion Guide if you don’t want to search for the Menu. Realistically this won’t be as useful when you memorize the UI in FFXIV, but for players who are still adjusting to menu options, it can be quite a bit faster than simply searching for the Menu if you don’t have it on your Hotbar.
There are also many text interactions a player can use with their Minions and I have written about that here.
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