BODY: The frozen Fourth is getting bigger. On October 31, during the keynote at Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival 2026 in Tokyo, Square Enix pulled back the curtain on two more of the drifting "continent ships" that will serve as explorable zones in Final Fantasy XIV: Evercold — and revealed that players will be building a second town of their own.
The third survival region is the earth continent ship Sessrúmnir (セスルームニル), a hub where agriculture and mining drive the local economy. The fourth is the wind continent ship Skíðblaðnir (スキーズブラズニル), a region built around airship construction and shipbuilding craft. Both were shown as walkthrough footage set to unreleased battle and field themes, the format Yoshi-P's team has used at every Fan Fest keynote to let the audience hear new music before any official soundtrack drop.
The bigger surprise for the Makuhari Messe crowd was Hyaltadona, a second player town for the expansion — residential and communal space that the community develops collectively, rather than the ward-and-plot housing model veterans have fought over for a decade.
The areas slot into an expansion that now has a firm date. Evercold launches February 23, 2027, with early access from February 19, on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC. The same keynote confirmed the new ranged physical DPS job Zephyr, which fights with a crossbow and a summoned familiar, alongside new content including Gauntlet of Power and a Evangelion collaboration narrated by Misato.
The insider take
The Norse naming is not decoration. Sessrúmnir and Skíðblaðnir are both vessels from Norse myth — Freyja's hall and the folding ship of the gods — and Japanese players spotted the pattern on day one, which tells you the remaining continent ships are already half-guessed on JP forums. The player-town reveal lands differently in Japan, too: housing plot scarcity has been the single most persistent complaint on Japanese Data Centers, where lottery rounds routinely go to a handful of winners out of hundreds. A second communal town reads less like a new feature and more like a pressure valve the development team knows it owes the domestic playerbase.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).