FFXIV Hunts Guide: A-Ranks, S-Ranks, and Hunt Trains

Hunts are one of those FFXIV systems hiding in plain sight. You walk past the Hunt board, glance at the bounties, shrug, and move on. Thing is, the open-world Hunt scene is where a big chunk of players farm tomestones, seals, and nuts every single day, plus mounts, minions, and the gear upgrade mats you actually need. A-ranks spawn on timers all over the map, S-ranks pop up under some genuinely wild trigger conditions, and player-run groups called hunt trains sweep through entire expansions killing everything for a pile of rewards. If you've never touched the Hunt, it's the lowest-effort way to stay drowning in currency.

Unlocking the Hunt in Each Expansion

Every expansion runs its own Hunt system with its own unlock chain and its own currency. The catch is that it's not one switch you flip. You unlock them in sequence, and they all build off the original ARR unlock plus a single Heavensward quest called Elite and Dangerous. Here's the order and what each one needs.

The shared starting point: ARR's "Let the Hunt Begin"

Before anything else you need two things. Be at least level 50, and hold the rank of Second Lieutenant in your Grand Company. The GC rank part trips people up more than the level does. If you're sitting at Second Lieutenant already, good. If not, grind some company seals and rank up first.

Once that's sorted, grab the quest Let the Hunt Begin from the NPC for your Grand Company:

• Maelstrom (Limsa): Trachraet, Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks (12.7, 12.8)
• Twin Adder (Gridania): Scarlet, New Gridania (9.9, 11.4)
• Immortal Flames (Ul'dah): Mimio Mio, Ul'dah Steps of Nald (8.6, 9.4)

One quirk worth knowing: ARR doesn't have a physical Hunt board object like the later expansions. Your bills come straight from the Hunt Billmaster NPC at your GC headquarters, who also happens to be the one you trade your currency to. The money here is Allied Seals, and it's the only expansion that uses them.

Heavensward: the gate for everything after

HW hands you a four-quest chain in Foundation, all clustered around the Forgotten Knight tavern. You need Let the Hunt Begin done first, plus that Second Lieutenant rank. The chain runs like this:

1. Let the Clan Hunt Begin (level 53) from Aytienne
2. Better Bill Hunting (56) from Eustacia
3. Top Marks (59) from Yloise
4. Elite and Dangerous (60) from Ardolain at the Forgotten Knight (13.0, 11.8)

That last one, Elite and Dangerous, is the real key. Every expansion from Stormblood onward checks for it before letting you start its chain. So even if you never plan to hunt in Heavensward, finish this quest or you'll hit a wall later. HW also switches your currency over to Centurio Seals.

Stormblood through Dawntrail

From here the pattern repeats. Each expansion gives you a four-quest chain that appears after enough main story progress and that same Elite and Dangerous prerequisite.

Stormblood runs the Veteran Clan Hunt. All four quests come from Estrild in Kugane (10.3, 10.2), starting with One-star Veteran Clan Hunt at level 61 and finishing with Elite Veteran Clan Hunt at 70. You pull bills from the boards in both Kugane and Rhalgr's Reach. Still Centurio Seals here.

Shadowbringers is the Nutsy Clan Hunt. The opener is Nuts to You (level 70) from the Hume Lout in the Crystarium (12.1, 15.0), then the rest come from Halldor. Boards live in the Crystarium (9.5, 9.4) and Eulmore. This is where Sacks of Nuts show up for the first time, replacing seals.

Endwalker is the Guildship Hunt. Start with The Hunt for Specimens (level 80) from the Diminutive Gleaner in Old Sharlayan (11.2, 12.0), then continue with Northota. Boards are in Old Sharlayan and Radz-at-Han. Sacks of Nuts again.

Dawntrail is the Dawn Hunt. It kicks off with A New Dawn, a New Hunt (level 90) from the Wing of Protection Scout in Tuliyollal (11.8, 13.7), then hands off to Bol Ogaw, the local huntmaster. There's a single board in Tuliyollal (13.8, 13.6). Sacks of Nuts once more.

So the short version: Second Lieutenant plus Let the Hunt Begin unlocks ARR, then chase down Elite and Dangerous in HW, and each new expansion just stacks another four-quest chain on top. Most of it you can knock out in one sitting once you're sitting at the level cap.

Hunt Marks and Rank Differences

Once unlocked, every expansion spawns three main tiers of marks out in the open world, plus a bonus fourth tier from Shadowbringers onward. They behave very differently, and knowing the split is the whole game.

B-Rank: the chill one

B-ranks are passive, permanently-spawned monsters. They respawn about five seconds after you kill them, which means there's always one sitting on the map for you. Each ARR zone has one, and zones from HW onward have two. Look for the little blue marker next to the name.

You don't get a reward for killing a B-rank on its own. The only way B-ranks pay out is through your weekly Elite Mark Bill, which points you at one specific target. That's once per week per expansion, worth 100 of the local currency and 5,000 gil. Easy money if you remember to grab the bill. Totally solo-friendly, no group needed.

A-Rank: the train fuel

A-ranks are the bread and butter of the Hunt. These spawn on a respawn timer with no trigger required, and that timer starts the moment the previous one dies. In ARR the window runs roughly three and a half to five hours. From HW onward it's four to six hours. They're scattered across the zone, two per map from HW on and one per ARR map.

Combat-wise they sit around a dungeon boss in difficulty. A single player can struggle, but a full party chews through them without much trouble. A-ranks don't need a bill, and you can claim the reward every single time they spawn, as often as they pop. That's the whole reason trains exist: enough A-ranks stay alive at once that a group can hop between all of them in a single run.

S-Rank: the rare headline act

S-ranks are the boss-tier marks everyone shows up for. They carry long respawn windows (anywhere from about 42 hours in ARR up to 84 to 132 hours in the later expansions), and they flatly refuse to appear on their own. Each one needs a specific trigger action to actually spawn once its window is open. More on those triggers in the S-Rank section.

When an S-rank spawns, the whole zone gets a chat message: "You sense the presence of a powerful mark." That's your cue to drop everything and get there. These hit hard and have real mechanics, so show up with a crowd rather than trying to solo one. The payout is the big draw: 100 of the local currency plus 100 Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, claimable on every spawn.

SS-Rank: the surprise encore

From Shadowbringers onward, killing an S-rank has a random chance to trigger an SS-rank. The game spawns four minions in the corners of the map. Kill all four within five minutes and the SS-rank itself appears, with its own zone-wide message about an extraordinarily powerful mark. SS-ranks pay double what an S-rank does: 400 Sacks of Nuts and 200 Poetics. Each expansion that has one, Shadowbringers' Forgiven Rebellion, Endwalker's Ker, and Dawntrail's Arch Aethereater, is a juicy payday if you happen to be online when it fires.

How credit actually works

The mechanic that matters most: hunt rewards are based on enmity, meaning aggro, not raw damage. Your whole party's enmity gets pooled together, so showing up in a full eight-player party is how you lock in full credit. Fly in alone, poke an A-rank once, and you'll probably get partial credit or nothing at all. Join the party, pile on, and you collect the full drop. That single rule is why people bother organizing into trains instead of everyone running solo.

Joining Hunt Trains and Etiquette

A hunt train is exactly what it sounds like. One player, called the conductor, scouts where all the live A-ranks are, then leads a crowd from mark to mark, killing each one before moving on to the next. A clean Dawntrail run hits all twelve A-ranks across the six zones and nets you somewhere around 480 Sacks of Nuts plus a big stack of tomestones. Not a bad haul for about half an hour.

How to find one

The hunt scene runs almost entirely through player coordination rather than in-game matchmaking. Your best bets are:

• Discord servers. Centurio Hunts and Faloop are the two big relay hubs, with channels split out by data center. Both run bots that auto-call A-rank and S-rank spawns, on top of live human relays.
• Hunt linkshells. In-game cross-world linkshells where scouts post spawns the second they see them. These tend to be faster than Discord for live stuff. Ask in shout chat at a busy aetheryte and someone will usually toss you an invite.
• Party Finder. Conductors sometimes leave a permanent PF listing open so latecomers can find and join the train mid-run.

When you spot a train forming, jump in the party, join the linkshell, and follow the conductor's flags.

Train etiquette, the unwritten rules

Here's where it gets social. There are no hard rules enforced by the game for open-world marks. Anyone can attack anything at any time, and the developers have said so outright. But the hunt community has strong norms, and stepping on them makes you unpopular fast.

The big one is don't early pull. When a mark gets called, wait for the relay and the countdown before you engage. Yanking an A-rank the instant you land means everyone still flying in misses out on credit, and that's the fastest way to get quietly dropped from a linkshell. Let the conductor or the designated puller set the pace.

A few other norms that'll keep you welcome on the circuit:

• Wait for the call. A shout with the mark flag and a quick countdown ("3... 2... 1... pull") is the signal to go.
• Don't leave a mark half-dead. Commit to the kill, then move on.
• Relay spawns you find. If you stumble onto an A-rank or S-rank that nobody's called yet, post the flag in shout and your linkshells. The whole system runs on people sharing.
• Use flags, not raw coordinates. A <flag> link opens the map for everyone. A typed "x12 y34" makes people hunt around for it.
• Stick with the group. Mount up and fly to the next mark with the train. Lingering to loot or wander just splits the party.

Pull timing for S-ranks works the same way but a little looser. Whoever spawns an S-rank might set a pull time so the crowd can gather, especially when zones are congested and travel queues are long. If no pull time gets called, just go with the flow and pile on when the rest of the zone does.

S-Rank Spawn Conditions

This is the part of the Hunt that's almost a separate game unto itself. A-ranks and B-ranks just appear. S-ranks refuse to spawn until someone performs a very specific trigger, and even then only after a long cooldown window has passed. The result is a dedicated subculture of spawners who map out locations and grind triggers for the rest of the community.

How the window and the trigger interact

Every S-rank runs on a cooldown-and-window system. After one dies, or after server maintenance, it enters a cooldown where it can't spawn at all. Then a window opens up, and somewhere inside that window a hidden timer sits. If that timer runs out without a spawn, the mark goes "capped," meaning it's guaranteed to pop the instant its trigger is performed. Before cap, the trigger still has to fire, but there's some RNG in the mix for a few of them.

The key point: an S-rank never just appears out of nowhere. The trigger has to happen. That's why dedicated hunters kill B-ranks over and over to map out where the spawn points are (since an S-rank reserves one fixed point that B-ranks and A-ranks never use), and then grind whatever weird action that particular S-rank needs.

The trigger flavors

Triggers fall into a handful of recurring types, and Square Enix reuses the same ideas across expansions:

• Landmine and minion triggers. Walk or fly over the spawn point with a specific minion out. Nandi in Upper La Noscea wants any minion at all. Kaiser Behemoth in HW needs the Behemoth Heir. Gamma in Stormblood spawns the Toy Alexander right on top of you during evening hours.
• Weather and moon phases. Laideronnette in Central Shroud spawns about six minutes into a second straight rain. Mindflayer in South Shroud needs you crossing spawn points at midnight during a new moon. Croakadile wants a full moon.
• Kill counts. Grind a specific enemy until the mark pops. Minhocao in Northern Thanalan is 100 Earth Sprites. Leucrotta in HW is 50 each of three different mobs. The Endwalker trio like Sphatika and Ruminator follow the same 100-of-three pattern.
• Discard triggers. Trash items from your inventory. Salt and Light in Stormblood is 50 discarded items. Ophioneus in Endwalker is a stack of five Egg of Elpis. Neyoozoteel in Dawntrail wants 50 Fish Meal.
• Death triggers. Chernobog in ARR and Safat in Coerthas both roll a chance when a player dies in the zone. Safat hunters literally jump off cliffs to drop themselves to 1 HP over and over. Armstrong in Endwalker wants you wearing imperial gear when you die.
• FATE chains. Nunyunuwi in ARR needs every FATE in the zone to succeed for an hour straight. Senmurv in HW is the Cerf's Up FATE cleared five times in a row.
• Gathering and fishing. Croque-Mitaine needs you mining Grade 3 La Noscean Topsoil during evening hours. Zona Seeker wants a Glimmerscale fished up in clear weather.

Most of these are guaranteed once the window's right, but a handful are pure chance (Croque-Mitaine, Lampalagua, Bone Crawler, and a few others), so the trigger might take several tries before it sticks.

Respawn windows by expansion

ARR S-ranks each run on their own window, usually somewhere between 42 and 84 hours. The Garlok and Laideronnette sit on the shorter end around 42 to 48 hours. Safat and Agrippa pull toward the long end at 60 to 84. From Heavensward onward, every S-rank shares the same window: 84 to 132 hours, dropping to 50 to 80 after maintenance. So you're looking at roughly two and a half to five and a half days between kills on most modern marks.

Tracking and relaying S-ranks

You're not expected to memorize all this. The community does the heavy lifting through trackers like Faloop, FFXIV the Hunt, and Bear Tracker, which log kills and estimate when windows open up. When a spawner gets a trigger to fire, the spawn floods through the linkshells and Discords within seconds, usually with a pull time attached. Your job is to be on a relay, watch for the call, and get to the zone fast.

Spending Your Hunt Currency

All that killing leaves you with stacks of currency to deal with. Each expansion pays out in its own money, and each has its own vendors, so you'll be juggling a few of them at once.

What you earn and where

The reward split by expansion looks like this:

| Expansion | Currency | A-Rank | S-Rank | SS-Rank | |-----------|----------|--------|--------|---------| | ARR | Allied Seals | 40 | 100 | - | | Heavensward | Centurio Seals | 40 | 100 | - | | Stormblood | Centurio Seals | 40 | 100 | - | | Shadowbringers | Sacks of Nuts | 40 | 100 | 400 | | Endwalker | Sacks of Nuts | 40 | 100 | 400 | | Dawntrail | Sacks of Nuts | 40 | 100 | 400 |

Every A-rank and S-rank across all expansions also drops Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, 30 for an A, 100 for an S, and 200 for an SS. Current-expansion marks toss in the current capped tomestone on top, about 10 per A-rank, 30 per S-rank, and 50 per SS-rank, but only if you're on a level-capped job. The capped tomestone name changes every patch, so don't get too attached to whatever it's called right now.

Allied Seals (ARR)

Trade these to the Hunt Billmaster at your Grand Company. Allied Seals lean practical. Aetheryte tickets are the everyday win here, since each one covers a teleport and the savings add up fast if you jump around a lot. The rest goes toward minions and glamour gear. Nothing flashy, but the teleport savings alone make a weekly ARR stop worth your time.

Centurio Seals (HW and SB)

Head to the Forgotten Knight tavern in Foundation and talk to Ardolain or Yloise. Over in Rhalgr's Reach it's Billebaut and Leuekin, and in Kugane, Satsuya. The headline purchase is the Clan Mark Log at 500 seals each. Save up six of those logs (so 3,000 seals) and trade them to Bertana in Idyllshire for the Wyvern Horn, which teaches the Wyvern mount. Centurio Seals also buy Heavensward and Stormblood upgrade materials, minions, orchestrations, and glamour accessories.

Sacks of Nuts (ShB, EW, and DT)

This is where the good stuff lives, and the vendors are scattered. Xylle in the Crystarium and Ilfroy in Eulmore cover Shadowbringers. J'lakshai in Old Sharlayan and Wilmetta in Radz-at-Han handle Endwalker. Ryubool Ja in Tuliyollal (13.9, 13.4) takes care of Dawntrail.

The big-ticket items are mounts at 3,200 nuts each: the Forgiven Reticence from Shadowbringers, the Vinegaroon from Endwalker, and both the Automatoise and Brachiosaur from Dawntrail. There are also achievement mounts you can't just buy, earned by racking up A-rank and S-rank kill counts over time, like the Triceratops, Victor, and Ullr.

Beyond mounts, Sacks of Nuts buy the current expansion's gear upgrade materials, the twines and glazes that augment your tomestone gear, plus cracked clusters. Those clusters trade at the Materia Trader for high-tier combat materia, which is either a direct upgrade for your gear or easy gil on the market board.

What to actually prioritize

If you're just starting out, work backward from what you need right now. Tomestones come fast from trains, so let those fill your capped tomestone weekly allowance first, since the top tomestone has a hard 450-a-week cap and a single train gets you most of the way there. Then spend nuts on whatever's bottlenecking you: upgrade mats for your current gear set, mounts if you're a collector, or cracked clusters to either slot materia or sell for gil.

The one thing not to do is let the currency pile up untouched. The caps on nuts and seals are high enough that you won't usually bump into them, but Poetics cap at 2,000, and one good train can shove you straight into that wall. Spend as you go, especially the Poetics, on things like relic weapon steps, old gear for glamour, or whatever your jobs happen to need.