Clearing the Journal

Last Sunday, and again yesterday when I jumped back into Final Fantasy XIV — I did so with purpose. A mission. A mission other than the Main Story Quest. The MSQ could wait. Right now I needed to do something far more pressing.
Clean up the Quest Journal.
I’d chipped at it here and there before, unlocked some of the end-of-Heavensward dungeons, that kind of thing. But there was still so much there! I’d left a lot behind from A Realm Reborn and it was getting to the point where I couldn’t pick up any more for the journal being full.
And these were of course just the Blue Quest markers — ones that unlock things. Where ‘things’ can be anything from a dungeon or raid through to new game mechanics. So I wasn’t keen to just drop ’em! They had to be done, and it seemed like the time was now.
Which set me down the path of unlocking… a range of things. I think I spent the most time on the various beast tribes.
I don’t know why, looking back now in retrospect, but I had thought the whole Beast Tribe ‘thing’ was something introduced in one of the later expansions, if not the latest – Shadowbringers.
I took each one through to the point of bringing up the big ‘Beast Tribe Quests Unlocked’ toast message with the accompanying BOINK sound.1
After that, I left them be and dropped the quest lines. I figure if I later work out I actually need something from any of them it’ll be easy enough to head to the appropriate base of operations and start the questing from there.
I also unlocked another couple of classes — Gunbreaker (which jumps straight to level 60) and Mechanist (which only goes to 30). I add these to the also recently unlocked Dark Knight and Astrologian classes (both of which start at level 30).
There are four classes I still haven’t unlocked on this character yet — Scholar, Dancer, Red Mage and the special Blue Mage job.
Bard still leads the way though at level 65, which puts me in a good spot for still not having to do any sidequests through Stormblood. Yay!
Beyond all this though; I also unlocked access to the first turns of the Bahamut and Alexander raids. I haven’t started down into the Bahamut raids yet, but I have done the first turn of Alexander’s. And it went really quickly! Both in terms of the queuing and the run itself. I was surprised, actually.
Without looking into the details, I was curious how many separate instances there were. Turns out? A looot. So it makes a little more sense now.
My quest log is hardly empty. But I do have it down to 10/30 which it appears is enough to start the itch for forward momentum through the MSQ again. Perhaps I’ll queue for the raid steps as I go, though. :)