FFXIV: How To Find Resplendent Feathers To Unlock The Alkonost Mount

Getting your first mount in "Final Fantasy 14" is a simple matter of finishing the first act of the base-game story. Collecting the 200+ other mounts in the game, however, is a different matter altogether. From rewards for relatively easy achievements, to rare drops from dungeons, to prohibitively expensive mounts that are only obtained after extensive grinds through the most obscure content, a full mount catalog requires players to take on nearly every single kind of content the sprawling MMO has to offer.

The fact that newer and even more exclusive mounts are being added with each update doesn't help, either — "Endwalker" introduced a number of prohibitively expensive mounts, including but not limited to the Wivre, the Victor, and, of course, the Alkonost. Players who've suffered their way through the Bozjan Resistance questline will instantly recognize this colorful bird as one of the more challenging bosses seen in Zadnor and The Dalriada. According to the mount's in-game tooltip, this particular specimen is a much more docile sort that was captured in the Bozjan wilderness and is, apparently, more than happy to give the Warrior of Light a lift to wherever they are needed.

That is, only if said Warrior of Light can afford the effort and/or money needed to obtain the whistle for summoning the mount. Here's a rundown on how to get the Alkonost mount in "Final Fantasy 14."

The most basic outline of how to get the Alkonost is rather simple: Players must trade three Resplendent Feathers under the "Out-of-this-world Oddities" section of the trades offered by Nesvaaz, the Au Ra who mans the Totem and Sundry Exchange counter in Radz-at-Han.

But where do you find these feathers in the first place? Unfortunately, they're exclusive drops from the "Excitatron 6000," the special instance only found through completing Kumbhiraskin Treasure Maps. Even worse, not every Treasure Map will yield a portal to this gaudy, theme-park-themed dungeon — and on top of that, not every trip inside is guaranteed to earn you any feathers, never mind all three. These dungeons only reward one to three items per room cleared, and the Resplendent Feather shares its drop chance with 58 other items — some of which are far more mundane and much more likely to appear in place of any rare rewards.

The good news is that the Feathers are tradable on the Marketboard. The bad news is that — somewhat predictably, due to their hard-to-find nature — they are extremely expensive and often cost at least 700,000 gil or more, running the final cost of an Alkonost Whistle at roughly 2.1 million gil. Whether you're planning to find all three feathers yourself or buy them from the Marketboard, good luck. However you do it, you're in for a pretty long grind.