Final Fantasy IV – Goblin, Cockatrice, Mind Flayer, Pink Tail Farm Maximization

Farming rare drops is a chore. Make it less of one by easily obtaining up to 297 Sirens each playthrough. Spoilers for mid/late game contained herein.

Introduction

All credit goes to Lakmir!

Trawl the forums and you’ll find lots of people looking for the best way to farm for FF4’s ultra-rare drops: the Goblin, Cockatrice, Mind Flayer, and Bomb summons, and the Pink Tail key item. Between all the different versions of the game, plus the changes made for the Pixel Remaster version, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. This guide aims to set the record straight and provide farming strategies for four out of five of these.

You can easily obtain as many as 297 Siren items in FF4 PR, if you play your cards right.

Note that this guide *does* contain some spoilers for middle and late game party members and areas.

Pixel Remaster Specific Changes

There’s a lot of conflicting information about drop mechanics floating around. Claims that drop rates are only 0.4%, claims that you can only get one item per battle. As far as FF4 PR is concerned, these claims are *incorrect*. Drop rates have been adjusted for the PR version, and you have a chance to get items from every enemy in the formation.

As best as I’ve been able to discover, drop mechanics work in the following manner:

• Any given enemy in a formation has a 5% chance to drop an item.
• Every enemy in the formation can drop an item, if you’re lucky enough, even if another enemy of the same type has already dropped an item. I had three different items drop in one battle while farming for a Pink Tail.
• IF an item is dropped, there is a 2% chance for an ultra-rare drop

Additionally, changes to item list mechanics mean you can no longer hoard several stacks of 99 Sirens. However, with a little pre-planning, you can work around this to an extent.

Siren Farming Strategy

This is documented in plenty of places, but in the interests of being comprehensive, here’s how to (relatively) easily farm Siren items. Unfortunately you have limited opportunities during limited windows in the game for this to work, so the rest of the guide will be focused on making the most of the sirens you can get.

You can use Edge to steal Siren items from two enemies:

• Security Eye (Tower of Babel Underground, Floor 7ish)
• Searcher (Giant of Babil)

Important: Note that when you go through the Tower of Babel you do not normally have Edge in your party, and it gets locked off after you leave. However! There seems to be a glitch in the game that lets you re-enter the lower section when you return to the Underworld. Immediately after the event where you steal the Falcon airship, you can land it and take Edge back into the Tower *once.* If you leave the Tower, you will not be let back in.

Edge can steal an unlimited number of Sirens in a single battle. The setup is, minimally:

• Edge: Steal from Security Eye/Searcher
• Rosa: Pray
• Everyone else: Defend

Then autobattle until you start consistently getting “Couldn’t steal” messages.

The first time Edge steals, the Security Eye/Searcher will summon help. Each time after, it’ll fire a beam at a random party member. Having Rosa set up to Pray will generally ameliorate the damage done by the beam, but you may occasionally need to switch her to a more powerful Cure spell.

Optionally: If the Searcher (in the Giant) summons a Mech Dragon, have Rydia set to cast Tornado on it. You’ll get EXP each time it dies and you’ll power-level pretty fast.

297 Sirens

So now that we know where to get Sirens, we still have a problem: changes to the Pixel Remaster version of the game mean you can only hold 99 Sirens. We can use the Fat Chocobo to work around this.

You can, theoretically, steal up to 297 sirens for use farming rare drops:

• Steal 99 from Security Eye
• Use all 99 before going to the moon
• On the moon, buy a Gysahl Whistle from the Hummingway Home merchant
• Steal 99 from Searcher in the Giant
• Immediately use the Gysahl Whistle to stash the 99 Sirens into Fat Chocobo storage
• Steal another 99 from Searcher in the Giant

Farming Rare Drops with Sirens

So now we know how to get a good amount of Sirens. From here, the question becomes “How do I most effectively spend my time farming for drops?”

Once you have 99 sirens, you can use them to farm Goblin, Cockatrice, Mind Flayer, and Pink Tails. Move them to the first slot in your item list, set Continue Auto Battle: On in your settings, then use Sirens in the following locations to instantly spawn monsters with the drops until you get the drop you’re looking for.

• Goblin: Outside Baron
• Cockatrice: One tile left of Mysidia
• Mind Flayer: Just inside the entrance to the Magnetic Cavern
• Pink Tail: Lunar Subterrane, B5. Room immediately to the right of the stairs to B6.

Strategy 1: I don’t care about farming more than 1 Pink Tail.

If you’re just doing this for achievements, here’s your step-by-step:

• Take Edge into the Tower of Babel underground and farm 99 Sirens from the Security Eye.
• Leave the Tower and stash the Sirens at the Fat Chocobo (closest one is in the dwarf castle.)
• Farm 99 more Sirens in the Giant.
• Quicksave at a farm point and use ~50 sirens to farm for one of the drops.
• If you don’t get the drop within 50 sirens, reload your save and try again.
• Repeat until you have all four. Refresh your stock of Sirens from the Fat Chocobo as necessary.

Strategy 2: I want as many Sirens as I can get to make getting 5 Pink Tails easier!

• Take Edge into the Tower of Babel underground and farm 99 Sirens from the Security Eye.
• Leave the Tower and progress the game until you get back to the overworld.
• Quicksave at a farm point and use 33 sirens to farm for one of Goblin, Cockatrice, or Mind Flayer.
• If you don’t get the drop within 33 sirens, reload your save and try again.
• Repeat until you have all three.
• Continue the game until you reach the moon.
• Buy at least three Gysahl Whistles from the merchant at Hummingway Home.
• Enter the Giant and farm 99 sirens from the Searcher.
• Use a Gysahl Whistle and drop them into Fat Chocobo storage.
• Farm 99 more sirens from the Searcher.
• Quicksave in the Lunar Subterrane Pink Tail farm point and use ~40 sirens to farm for each Pink Tail, reloading your quicksave and using your remaining Gysahl Whistles to refresh your Siren stock from storage as necessary.

If you don’t care about the rare summons, feel free to ignore the first several steps of Strategy 2 and skip straight to buying whistles at Hummingway Home.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a place where you can farm for the Bomb summon in this manner, but four out of five is better than nothing!