FFXIV Aether Currents and Flying Guide

So you've got a mount, you're galloping across the Coerthas Western Highlands, and you keep watching other players glide right over your head. That's not a bug or a missing setting. Flight in this game unlocks one zone at a time, and each zone wants something from you before it lets you off the ground. Most of the time that something is a small set of glowing pickups called aether currents. The oldest parts of the map use a simpler rule. How it all fits together is pretty straightforward once you know the rules.

Why You Cannot Fly Yet

Three things gate flight, and you need all three lined up before a single wing leaves the ground.

First, the zone itself has to allow it. Second, you have to earn flight in that specific zone, and only that zone. Third, you need a mount that can actually get airborne. Miss any one of those and you stay grounded, even if everything else looks ready.

Flying wasn't part of FFXIV at launch. It showed up with the Heavensward expansion back in patch 3.0, and the original A Realm Reborn zones didn't get it until years later, in patch 5.3. So every map added from Heavensward onward (Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail) uses the aether current system. The base ARR zones use a lighter rule that we'll get to in the last section.

The part people miss the most: unlocking flight is per zone, not account-wide. Clearing every current in the Coerthas Western Highlands lets you fly there. Walk into the Dravanian Forelands next door and you're back on foot until you do the whole thing over again. It's a little tedious, sure, but it also means each region has a real sense of progress to it.

You also need a ride that flies. The good news is that basically every mount in the game can leave the ground now. They finished that change during the Shadowbringers era, so even your plain company chocobo counts. The first proper flying mount you'll pick up is the Black Chocobo, which drops out of a level 50 Heavensward story quest called Divine Intervention. That same quest is also the moment the whole aether current system turns on for you.

Cities and hub towns are the one place flight never switches on. You can mount up in Limsa Lominsa or Foundation, but you won't get off the ground, and that's by design. So don't go hunting for currents in town. You'd just be wasting time.

When the system opens up

The aether current hunt doesn't even begin until you finish Divine Intervention. Before that quest, there are no currents to find and no compass to find them with. So if you're still working through the base ARR story and wondering why nothing's happening, that's why. Push the 2.0 story to the end, roll into Ishgard, and the system lights up on its own.

Finding Field Aether Currents

The pickups you grab out in the open are called field aether currents. These are the easy ones. No quest, no NPC, no item, you just walk up and touch them.

In the wild they look like a swirling green funnel of wind, kind of a little tornado made of light. When you get close, you'll hear a low humming sound, and that hum gets louder as you close in. That audio cue matters more than you'd expect, because a few currents are tucked behind rocks, balanced on a ledge, or stuffed inside a cave where the swirl itself is hard to spot.

To grab one, walk into it and interact. You get a quick attunement message and a sound, and that current is checked off for good. Attuning is permanent for that character. You don't re-grab it later, and it doesn't matter which class or job you happen to be on. Once it's yours, it stays yours.

How many are in each zone

Numbers matter here, so here's the breakdown straight from the game's wiki:

| Zone type | Field currents | Quest currents | Total | |---|---|---|---| | Dawntrail (7.0), newest | 10 | 5 | 15 | | Heavensward through Endwalker | 4 | 5 | 9 | | Azys Lla (special) | 0 | 5 | 5 |

In the older expansion zones you're hunting 9 currents, and 4 of those are out in the field (the other 5 come from quests). The lone weirdo is Azys Lla, the final Heavensward field map. It has no field currents at all, just the 5 quest ones.

The newest expansion changes the math. Dawntrail zones pack in 15 currents each, with 10 of them sitting out in the field. Square does this on purpose so launch has more to chase. Then, once the next expansion lands, those 10 field currents get trimmed down to 4, and the older maps become quicker to clear. So if Dawntrail feels heavy right now, it'll lighten up over time.

Tracking your progress

You never have to guess how many you've got left. Open the main menu, head to Travel, and pick Aether Currents. That window lists every zone and shows which currents you've attuned and which are still missing. The field ones show as locked icons until you grab them, and the quest ones tell you the exact side quest that hands them out. It's smart to peek at this before you leave a region, so you're not forced to backtrack later.

Field currents don't show on your map by default. That's the whole reason the compass exists. More on that below.

Quest Locked Currents

The other half of your currents don't sit out in the open. They come from quests, some main story and some side errands. When you finish the right one, the current gets handed to you automatically.

Which quests give them

Most zones hand out 5 quest currents. They're split between the Main Scenario Quest (the big story chain, almost always shortened to MSQ) and side quests dotted around the map. The side ones appear as regular quest markers, the little exclamation points, but they're not labeled as aether current quests. You just do them and find out.

Here's the catch that trips people up. A lot of these side quests don't even show up until you've pushed the MSQ far enough. The wiki's zone pages spell out the exact unlock condition for each, and a typical one reads something like "appears after completing [some story step]." So if you're circling a map and can't find the last NPC, it usually means you need to go do more story first, then come back. That's nine times out of ten the answer.

A clean strategy is to roll the MSQ through a zone, knocking out side quests as they pop, and only grind for field currents once the story has moved you along. That way you're not standing around waiting on questgivers that haven't spawned yet.

The Azys Lla exception

Azys Lla is the strange one, as the table above hinted. It has zero field currents. All 5 of its currents come from quests, and most of those are MSQ. You'll basically clear it just by playing the story. If you're at the end of Heavensward and your compass never points at anything in Azys Lla, that's normal and not a glitch.

Don't skip the side quests

Even the ones that look like filler can be worth your time here, because several of them gate a current. The names are usually a giveaway that they're fluff (things like "Baby Steps" or "Hide Your Moogles"), but the reward is real. If a side quest is sitting in a zone where you're still hunting currents, just do it. You can always tell which ones you still need from the Aether Currents window, since it names the quest for you.

The Aether Compass

This is the tool that makes hunting field currents bearable. Without it, you'd be wandering every map squinting for green swirls. With it, the game basically hands you a hot-or-cold pointer.

Where to get it

The compass comes from that same level 50 quest, Divine Intervention. You pick it up at the exact same time as your Black Chocobo, which makes a tidy kind of sense. One is how you fly, the other is how you earn the right to fly. The quest is part of the Heavensward main story, and it lands after you've cleared your name in that duel against Grinnaux de Dzemael. So you can't really miss it if you're following the story.

How it works

Using the compass prints a line of text in your chat log telling you the bearing and distance to the nearest field current. Something along the lines of "the aether compass points southeast, a fair distance." As you move toward it, the distance text shrinks from words like "far" down to "close," and the bearing shifts as you turn. When you're right on top of it, you'll usually spot the green swirl nearby.

Because the readout is just a line of text, most players drag the compass onto a hotbar and mash it while riding around. On controller, you can drop it on a crossbar slot. There's no cooldown worth mentioning, so spam it as much as you like.

Where to find the compass in the menus these days: Main Menu, then Duty, then Collection. It used to live in the Key Items tab of your inventory, but patch 6.0 moved it to free up space. If you're reading an older guide that sends you to Key Items, that's why it isn't there anymore.

If you can't find it in your menus

A few things cause confusion. If you genuinely never did Divine Intervention, the compass won't exist for you yet, so go finish that quest. Back before the 6.0 change, if you threw the old key item away, you could grab a replacement from Gibrillont at the Forgotten Knight tavern in Ishgard, or from Gaufrid over in Rhalgr's Reach. These days the Collection menu version can't really be lost, so this is pretty much a non-issue.

One more thing. The compass only points at field currents. It does nothing for the quest-locked ones, since those aren't out in the world to find. So once your compass stops pointing at anything in a zone, you know you've grabbed all the field currents and the rest have to come from quests.

Flying in A Realm Reborn Zones

The original launch zones play by different rules. La Noscea, Thanalan, the Black Shroud, Coerthas Central Highlands, and Mor Dhona get a free pass. No aether currents, no compass hunting, no side quest checklist. Flight here was bolted on years after release, so the devs kept it simple.

The one requirement

Finish the level 50 Main Scenario Quest called The Ultimate Weapon. That's the capstone of the 2.0 A Realm Reborn story, handed out by Raubahn out in Northern Thanalan. The moment you turn it in, flight switches on across every ARR zone at the same time. No per-zone grind, no compass work. Clear that one quest and you're airborne in all five regions.

This was added in patch 5.3, the same patch that trimmed a lot of the old ARR quest bloat. If you played years ago and don't remember flight being in the base zones, that's because it wasn't. It's a fairly recent addition that made the early game a lot more pleasant to move through.

How to actually take off

Once you're unlocked, mount up in any ARR field zone and jump. By default a single jump is enough to take flight, you don't hold a button or do anything fancy. From there you fly around freely, and you land by dropping to the ground or by hitting the mount button again.

If single-jump takeoff feels too easy to trigger by accident, you can swap it. Head to Character Configuration, then Control Settings, then the General tab, and look for the Flying Mount Takeoff option. Set it to require a double jump instead. Some folks prefer that so they don't accidentally launch every time they hop over a rock.

Why ARR skips the currents

You might wonder why the old zones get off easy while everything from Heavensward on makes you work. Mostly it's a design-age thing. ARR was built without flight in mind, and its maps aren't laid out around currents the way the expansion regions are. Rather than retrofit pickups into maps that were never meant to hold them, the team tied ARR flight to story completion and saved the hunting system for the zones designed with flight from day one.

The trade-off is worth knowing. In ARR you fly sooner, but the maps are flatter and less vertical than what comes later. Once you reach Heavensward, the currents take more effort, but the zones are built to reward it. Floating islands, mountain peaks, caves you can only reach from the air. That's the payoff for all that compass mashing.

A practical note to close on. The Aether Currents window under Travel in the main menu names the exact side quest behind every quest-locked current you're still missing. So whenever a zone feels stuck, open that window first. It'll tell you straight whether to go hunt a green swirl or go talk to an NPC.