Island Sanctuary Leveling Guide (2025)

Last updated on Oct 04, 2023 at 17:00by Shikhu21 comments

This page contains an overview on leveling up your island in FFXIV'sisland sanctuary mode. This page includes unlock requirements for each islandrank and costs so that you can plan ahead.

Island sanctuary is content intended to be taken slowly and steadily over timefor example while waiting for queues, party finder or nodes while making slowand steady incremental progress every day.

You can however speed through most of your island if you want to. Thetutorial will take you to Rank 4. The builds unlocked at Rank 4 help youa lot to get to around rank 7-8 where it is advised to take it slower unless youwant flight at Rank 10.

Listed below is a table showing every unlock so that you can planaccordingly how you want to level and where you want to start taking it slow.

Your main source of experience during this is from constructing new buildings and gaininga first time bonus. For later ranks, your main experience is simply gathering 10xp ata time. If you take it slow, you can gain around 6k a day from daily content.

At first you will simply be given a series of quests and 'visions' thatact as your basic tutorial for unlocking everything. By the end of thisyou should be part way through rank 4.

Only spend your Seafarer's Cowries on upgrades and not on the cabinshop you unlock. It is a bit of an early game trap that can cause youto heavily time gate yourself.

At this point it is not worth stockpiling materials, wait until youunlock more tools so that you can gain more items from each node.

Seafarer's Cowrie Costs:

• Cropland II - 1000
• Pasture II - 1000
• Pathfinder II - 500
• Pathfinder III - 1000

Ranks 4 and 5 are the first ranks after the tutorial. Your first priorityshould be to upgrade your cabin and build any landmarks that you haveroom for. If you did not build a second workshop i would also do that.

Upgrading your cabin allows you to upgrade your cropland and pastureso that you can grow more crops and catch more animals. Catch animalseven if they are not on your final list of animals you want so thatyou have as many leavings as possible at daily reset.

Rank 5 will allow you to clear new land using the pathfinder mammetand to be able to build your first granary giving you materials to upgradeyour workshop later on. Set your granary to gather Raw Island Garnetuntil you have 9. This is used in your workshop upgrades.

Do not send out the granary for a whole week as it costs a lot of cowrieswhich you do not have, take it day by day.

It is advised to run three workshops before your second granary so that yougain more Seafarer's Cowries and island xp.

After or while everything is building spend some time catching rare crittersyou may want on your island and gathering a range of materials that you may needat higher ranks. I would advise continuing to rank up fast here so that youcan get the later benefits.

Seafarer's Cowrie Costs:

• Cropland III - 1500
• Pasture III - 1500
• Pathfinder IV - 1500

At rank 6 and 7 you will need to start gathering even more items and cancertainly be a place that people start to take things slower which is okay. Youunlock a restraint for medium sized animals allowing you to get more diversityin your pasture.

Hitting rank 6 unlocks your workshop and granary upgrades, the granarymaterials are not used here but you want to start upgrading these buildingsas soon as possible. Do not forget to interact with them once they are builtso that you start having their benefits after you have viewed/skipped theupgrade cutscene.

Rank 7 unlocks the cabin which should again be your priority, once thatis upgraded you again gain a cropland and pasture upgrade. You may start to berunning low on Seafarer's Cowries at this point so the pasture is yourpriority before the cropland. Both are needed before doing later upgrades.

Seafarer's Cowrie Costs:

• Pathfinder V - 3000, Pasture and Farm must be upgraded first.

Rank 8 is where it's recommend you stop and take it slow. You gain theability to upgrade your Workshop and Granary to rank 3 which is veryimportant as you start to become heavily gated by cowries. If you have notalready it takes 6,000 cowries to upgrade both

At this point you will have very few buildings to upgrade and landmarksto build so all of your Experience must be from gathering. With a ranked up Workshopand Granary you can gain around 6,000 a day so you will reach rank 10 in aroundthree weeks.

Once Pathfinder V is complete and the landmark is built, you unlock aquest giving you 5,000 Blue Cowries and 7,500 experience to your island rank, so takethat into consideration. Rank 10 and Pathfinder V will unlock the ability tofly.

With flight unlocked you gain access to new items, faster xp farming andnew animals for your Pasture. Feel free to collect those when their time andweather windows appear.

I would still recommend just taking it slower at this pointand allowing your workshop to provide the majority of xp. Even ifyou are unable to follow recommendations perfectly, simply makingsure your workshop is always crafting will give you the most xp.

You can, of course, speed through this within a few days To do thatyou would want to fly to the top of the mountain and farm the nodesavailable in a loop. This is by far your most efficient xp per hour. Once youunlock the caves at Rank 12 there are compact nodes locationsallowing for efficient xp, but also gives you a wider range of materials.

If you are taking it slow, this is a good opportunity to work on maintainingyour island. Working on the farm layouts you want and collecting rare animals.

Rank 13-15 provide a range of building upgrades to take a look at aswell as pathfinder VI which at this point is not really a worry cowrie wise. It isimportant to ensure all buildings have been upgraded to IV and all landmarks have beenbuilt at this point to continue your progression. Dont forget to clickthe signboards for upgraded buildings and landmarks for your island toreceive the effects of their upgrades.

Within this level range, there are a few ranks that are incredibly easy topower through using XP given to you by quests, building new equipment and upgradingyour facilities. Rank 16 is mostly completed by quests and so is rank 19.

This leaves rank 17-19 as the area you may consider actively grinding for. There arenot many unlocks here, only seeds at rank 18, so I would advise taking it slowly andjust using Workshop crafts to finish your progression. If you do want to actively farm,then feel free to at the top of the mountain again.

The final thing to do at Rank 19 is simply to ensure everything is upgraded toRank 5. This will allow the final parts of the story to be unlocked as wellas the new Felicitous Favors mechanic.

From here we recommend the following:

• Complete the pasture of your dreams with rare animals.
• Have your farmland setup as per our recommendations.
• Plan your materials and workshop to start farming Seafarer Cowries for all the glamour and cosmetics you may want.
• Use Felicitous Favors to obtain more mounts.
• Purchase all the mounts, minions, fashion accessories and more.