If you’re trying to make some gil or train your chocobo’s combat abilities in Final Fantasy 14, you may be looking to grab some Thavnairian Onions. However, there’s only a few ways to get them, and one of them involves growing crops and cross-pollinating to get seeds.
While the process can seem daunting, it’s actually not so bad, as long as you have reliable access to a garden and can consistently tend to your crops.
Below, we list all the ways to get a Thavnairian Onion in FFXIV, whether it’s from a quest or from gardening.
Where to get Thavnairian Onions
There isn’t really a steady place to get Thavnairian Onions from if you’re not growing them.
You can either pay for them on the marketboard (they’re about 170,000 gil on my server in Primal, as of this writing) or you can score two of them by doing two Heavensward side quests: “Landing a Stable Job” and “A Hunter’s True Nature.”
If you’ve already gotten those two and you don’t want to cough up the gil, then you’ll have to resort to growing them.
How to grow Thavnairian Onions
To grow Thavnairian Onions Seeds, you need a house. It can be your Free Company’s house or a house that your buddy has given you partial ownership of, but it needs to be a house and not an apartment, since you can only cross-breed plants in the Deluxe Garden Patch that you can only place outside of houses. You can buy these garden patches from any of the housing merchants inside the housing wards.
Once you have your Deluxe Garden Patch, it’s time to get planting. There’s a few ways to crossbreed Thavnairian Onion Seeds, but this was the easiest way to do it for us. Here’s what you need to start:
- A Deluxe Garden Patch in the yard of a house (as previously mentioned)
- 4 Curiel Root, Mimett Gourd, Pahsana Fruit, Sylkis Bud, or Tantalplant Seeds. It’s up to you which one you pick, and they don’t all have the be the same seed. Just grab four of whatever is cheapest on your server. These seeds are the most expensive part of this process, but you will only ever need to buy four of them until you start gardening something else. They’re all obtained from crossbreeding other crops, so if you want an onion fast, it’s best to just buy them rather than to make them yourself. (You can totally take that approach, though this guide will not get into detail about how to do so.)
- A bunch of Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil, which you can buy from the marketboard or get in exchange for Tomestones of Poetics
- At least 4 Old World Fig Seeds, which you can purchase from the marketboard for cheap
It’s worth mentioning that after buying this stuff, you will effectively be able to create an infinite amount of Thavnairian Onion Seeds, so long as you tend to your plot. The only things you’ll need to keep getting are topsoil and fig seeds, but the other stuff is a one-time purchase. You will make the gil back from the four expensive seeds almost immediately.
Once you’ve rounded up your seeds and fertilizer, you’ll want to start cross-breeding them to get Thavnairian Onion Seeds. Follow the steps below to do so. (We learned how to do this via FFXIV Gardening!)
- Plant your Curiel Root, Mimett Gourd, Pahsana Fruit, Sylkis Bud, or Tantalplant Seeds in the odd numbered plots with the Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil. We’ve marked it in the above diagram with a picture of a Curiel Root, since that’s what we used.
- Plant the Old World Fig Seeds in the even numbered plots, also with the topsoil.
- Tend to your plants for five days until they are ready to grow. All of these crops need to be tended to at least once every 48 hours or else they will wilt.
- Do not harvest the odd numbered plot plants (in my case, the Curiel Roots). Leave them there.
- When they’re ready, only harvest the figs from the even numbered plots. You should get some Royal Kukuru Seeds from this harvest, unless you are very unlucky.
- Plant the Royal Kukuru Seeds in the even numbered plots (where the figs used to be) with the topsoil. If you didn’t get enough Royal Kukuru Seeds, fill the remaining spots with Old World Fig Seeds (with topsoil, again).
- Tend to your plants for another six days. Royal Kukuru Seeds need to be tended to once every 36 hours or else it will wilt.
- Harvest the Royal Kukuru to get Thavnairian Onion Seeds and the Old World Figs for more Royal Kukuru Seeds. There’s a 50% chance to get Apricot Seeds instead.
- Keep repeating steps 5 through 8 until you have enough Thavnairian Onion Seeds to suit your fancy.
After this process, you can plant the Thavnairian Onion Seeds in another garden plot to get your Thavnairian Onions. Once you have the seeds, you can plant them inside of a flower pot indoors (if you’re like me with a paltry small house that can only fit one garden plot outside). You will need to water the onion crops for 10 days before they provide an onion.
Note that it’s entirely possible to get really unlucky with your crops. It took us three weeks of Royal Kukuru planting before we got any Thavnairian Onion seeds. Out of the 12 we planted, we only got two onion seeds, but a whopping seven apricot seeds. RNG just be like that, sometimes.
If you’re just starting out in the massive world of Final Fantasy 14, we have tons of guides to help you. We have a beginner’s guide to get you started, along with guides detailing when you’ll get your mount and which Grand Company you should join.
If you’re starting but are feeling overwhelmed, we have guides to help with picking a job and a guide that explains how long it takes to beat FFXIV and catch up to current content.
We also have guides on side content, like ocean fishing, relic weapons, and Island Sanctuary, for those who want to take a break from it all.
