Your landlord in Final Fantasy 14 won’t demolish your house during the pandemic

If you have a house in Final Fantasy 14, you won’t be evicted if the COVID-19 outbreak is keeping you — in real life — from keeping up your virtual property.

“Taking into account the world-wide spread of the COVID-19 (also known as ‘novel coronavirus’) and the economical effects of various cities going into lock-down, we have decided to temporarily suspend automatic housing demolition,” developers wrote Thursday night on The Lodestone, the FF14 official community hub.

Yes, this is serious; Final Fantasy 14 players know that a housing plot on a server is a coveted thing and getting one can take quite a lot of in-game effort. Square Enix limits the number of plots and, back in April 2019, it introduced auto-demolition. That is, if a player didn’t enter their estate for 30 consecutive days, a countdown timer would begin and then the Vogons would show up to make way for an interstellar highway.

The suspension of auto-demolition is an acknowledgment that players might be strained by real-life impacts regarding COVD-19’s spread, so no one is going to lose their virtual home if they have more pressing concerns.

The counter was suspended at 11 p.m. on Thursday; it’ll resume again at some point, but Square Enix did not indicate when.