FFXIV Wiki:Status effect revamp

< Wiki to-do list

Project description

Rework how status effects and their icons are presented on the wiki.

Members

Gurgum (talk), Erin Umbreon (talk)

Status

Backlog

Last updated

7 October

Discussion

Talk page, Discord

Overview

This project is taking up space in my mind as "the status effect overhaul" but really is about several distinct topics:

1. The current {{status effect}} icon template has issues.
   • Having to specify "buff" or "debuff" every time you use an icon is annoying.
   • The current system, where we have a small hardcoded list of names and everything else has to be specified by filename, is not super intuitive for editors.
   • I (erin) have been working on {{game icon}} for a bit now, and it works for basically everything except status effects; it would be nice if it worked for status effects too.
2. We don't currently have status effect descriptions on the wiki.
   • Is this even something we want to change? What use would it have?
3. The list of status effects on Status effects should be more comprehensive, and ideally not be manually maintained.

Erin Umbreon (she/it • talk) 18:19, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Tasks

• 🗹 Decide on the overall strategy for status effect data going forward. - The plan is to start making pages for the statuses. {{Status effect infobox}} has been created, and patch 7.56 status pages have been created. Gurgum (talk) 12:16, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
• ☐ Create missing status pages. These will be added on an as-needed basis, as there are open questions about disambiguation, etc. Subtasks:
  • ☐ Determine what to do about historical patch data. Teamcraft has patch numbers for statuses going back to the beginning, but it's not always accurate. We might consider using their data but flagging it as needing review.
  • ☐ Status effects may be applied by enemy actions, which we don't create pages for. Example: "Tender Anaphylaxis", with an action by the same name. We should figure out what to do with enemy actions so that we don't end up with orphaned status pages.
  • 🗹 Figure out what we want to do about the many, many status pages that have the same name as the related action, such as "Battle Voice". Those statuses and actions would all need to be disambiguated. Is it still worth creating separate pages for the statuses? Should we consider setting the status as a subobject on the action page? - For now, we will NOT make any status pages for statuses that share a name with an action. - Gurgum (talk) 13:37, 7 October 2026 (UTC)
• 🗹 Deprecate {{status effect}}

Notes

• Many status effects have multiple versions, including versions with different icons, dispellability, max stacks, etc. (Example: Stun) For the moment, I'm keeping things simple by creating a single status page with the earliest version's icon & details. I'm not planning to add more fine-grained details for now (like stack size), as those are the elements most likely to differ between versions. - Gurgum
• Many status effects share a name and a nearly identical icon with the action that applies them (i.e. Battle Voice). The action describes the status, so we're not gaining much by creating those pages & icons. For now, status pages with the same name as action will not be created automatically.
• When creating pages for old status effects, we pull the patch number from Teamcraft. Those should be reviewed for accuracy.
• Many status effects are only used to enforce certain mechanics for enemy encounters, or are only used to denote an enemy's current state, or represent obsolete/retired actions. The Fandom version of the Status Effects pages has approximately 2,400 status effects listed (2,220). Ideally, the scope of the project should be determined - are the three categories listed useful to readers? Alyko (talk) 15:21, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

Proposal for mass page creation

I propose the following to create pages for status effects while avoiding duplicates. A duplicate is defined as a status effect that shares all three of the following with a different status:

1. The name
2. The icon
3. The description

If any of the three are not shared, the status is not considered a duplicate and a page would be created for it.

A status that shares a name with another status effect, but not the other two characteristics, would be disambig'd as follows during initial page creation:

Name (internal id), for example Growing Dread (5136)

This allows easy identification of duplicate names for manual renaming later, into pages with more descriptive names. - Dr Agon (talk) 22:56, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

There was some talk in Discord about avoiding multiple pages for status effects that have the same name and mostly the same effect. We still want to be able to use {{i}} to show a particular instance of the effect; we don't currently have a way to do this, but I think we could.

We could modify {{i}} to support using a hash/anchor in the referenced pagename, i.e. {{i|Some page#Some section}}, in order to reference a subobject on the page for semantic data lookup. This would allow us to have individual semantic data for each instance of a status effect (even giving them different canonical names if needed), while still grouping them under a single page. We'd then need a subobject template to define individual instances of each status effect, and give the subobjects IDs that determine how to reference each individual icon. Erin Umbreon (she/it • talk) 23:49, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Would we multiple infoboxes on the same page (one per status effect instance)? This may cause issues for running the infobox updater script. Dr Agon (talk) 00:11, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure what would be best from a template perspective - it could be multiple infoboxes; it could be one top-level infobox for the "primary" instance of a status effect + "sub-infoboxes" a la {{Recipe}} for other uses; or it could be a single infobox that contains all the information for every instance of the status, where the subobjects are defined internally. Erin Umbreon (she/it • talk) 00:55, 3 October 2026 (UTC)