Reward Tiering is a setting of the randomizer upon generating a seed. Reward Tiering is a concept that generally applies to all Rewards in the game, including events (such as collecting Job Crystals or an NPC giving an item), chests, and also all shops. All Rewards are considered part of one large pool per seed.

Collectibles refer to the placed item, ability, job crystal, or magic yielded from a Reward.

Example:

• Reward: Crystal from Black Chocobo
• Original Collectible: Hunter Crystal
• New Collectible: Chemist Mix Ability

Tiering introduces the concept of assigning a Tier of 1 through 9 to all individual Rewards and all individual Collectibles in the game, such that newly generated Collectibles will be placed in Reward locations that match its Tier value:

Such that in the above example:

Example:

• Reward: Crystal from Black Chocobo (Tier 4)
• New Collectible: Chemist Mix Ability (Tier 4)

Because the Reward event “Crystal from Black Chocobo” is a Tier 4 location, a Collectible of a Tier 4 value was chosen to be randomly placed there.

This generally is what occurs among the pool of all Rewards. A few notes:

• There are exceptions to the above system, but in general, Collectibles will be placed at Reward locations with tiers of equal or less value of the Reward location. So, it is highly unlikely that an Excalibur will appear in a shop in Tule, but might possibly appear in a Mirage Village shop
• Depending on the settings chosen for the seed, the Tiering system will attempt to place all possible unique Collectibles (again, all items, magic, abilities and crystals) in a seed.
  • An exception may apply to job crystals, where each seed has a set “difficulty” rating that limits the number of crystals per seed (There is a setting to guarantee all job crystals, however, to accommodate this)
• Monster-in-a-box locations will always result in a Tier 9 Collectible
• Shops are given a Tier associated with their entire shop, and all open slots in the shop will be placed with Collectibles of matching tiers. Example, Mirage Village Weapon Shop is a Tier 6 location, so all Collectibles placed for sale will be (usually) less than or equal to Tier 6

There is a general flow of Tiering progression from World 1 (beginning of the game) through the Void (the end of the game), with some intentional deviations to encourage certain actions. For example, most Treasure Chests in the Wind Shrine are Tier 1, but defeating the boss and accessing the Wind Crystal event gives a few Tier 4 checks, to reward the player for overcoming the boss and hastening party progression. Areas locked behind Key Items such as Mirage Village, the Pyramid in World 3, and Moogle Village all have high tier Rewards

You can review the list of reward tiers here, and Collectible tiers for items, abilities, magic, and crystals.