Square Enix has restored a feature that Final Fantasy XIV players have been asking about for the better part of half a decade: the ability to gift items from the Online Store to other players. The change quietly went live on April 2, 2026, and while the announcement landed without much fanfare, the community reaction has been unmistakable. "Finally" is the word you'll see most often in the threads.
What Changed
The Mog Station β Final Fantasy XIV's external Online Store β once had a fairly generous gifting feature that let players send a wide variety of cosmetic items to friends. That feature was severely curtailed in October 2022 after a wave of fraudulent transactions revealed how easy it was to use the system as a vector for chargeback scams and stolen-card laundering. Square Enix's response at the time was to gut the feature almost entirely, leaving only a narrow set of items giftable and frustrating a community that had used the system extensively for birthdays, expansion launches, and just casual generosity between friends.
The April 2026 update walks a meaningful chunk of those restrictions back. As of now, seven categories of items are once again available to send as gifts:
- Mounts (Single Character)
- Minions (Single Character)
- Emotes
- Orchestrion Rolls
- Face Paint
- Chocobo Barding
- Fashion Accessories
That covers most of the cosmetic items that players actually want to gift to each other β the mounts and minions in particular have always been the centrepiece of the gifting tradition, and their return is the headline of the change.
The New Guardrails
Square Enix hasn't simply rolled the system back to its pre-2022 state. There are new guardrails designed to make the kind of fraud that triggered the original restrictions much harder to pull off.
The most significant new requirement is a friends-list cooldown. To gift an item to another player, that player must have been on your friends list for at least three real-world days. This is a deliberate friction point β it makes the system useless for one-off scams against random accounts while preserving its usefulness for actual friends and Free Company members. It's a clean solution that frustrates the bad actors without inconveniencing the legitimate use case very much.
The second meaningful restriction is around Account-Wide Mounts. Those remain ineligible as gifts, and Square Enix hasn't given a timeline for whether they'll be added in a future update. Account-Wide items are higher-value purchases, and keeping them out of the gifting system reduces the financial exposure if a fraud attempt does slip through.
Why It Took Four Years
The long gap between restriction and partial restoration tells you something about how seriously Square Enix takes the underlying fraud problem. The 2022 incidents weren't a one-off β they were significant enough that the company has been clearly hesitant to reopen the door without the operational tooling to monitor it properly.
The friends-list cooldown is the clearest sign that the current implementation is the result of substantial back-end work rather than just a configuration change. That kind of system requires Square Enix to track a lot more state about every gift attempt than the original feature did, and it requires the financial fraud team to have visibility into gifting patterns that they presumably didn't have in 2022.
What's Still Missing
Notably absent from the restored categories: outfits and weapons. Cosmetic appearance items that change your character's actual gear are some of the most-requested gift categories in the community, and they remain locked behind the original 2022 restrictions. There has been no specific commentary from Square Enix on whether they'll be added back, but the staged approach to this rollout suggests it's at least possible.
The other missing piece is anything related to currency or services β Crystals, character services, and account upgrades remain firmly outside the gifting system. That's almost certainly permanent. Currency and service items are the highest-fraud-risk categories by a wide margin, and there's no real reason for Square Enix to expose itself there.
The Producer Live Connection
The timing of the restoration is interesting. April 2, 2026 was about two weeks before the next Letter from the Producer Live broadcast, which is scheduled for April 17. Producer Live broadcasts traditionally include both gameplay reveals and operational updates, and there's reasonable speculation that the gifting restoration was timed to be one of several quality-of-life announcements that the team wanted to land ahead of the broadcast rather than during it.
The community has been particularly vocal about quality-of-life requests over the past year β the gifting restoration is one of several long-standing asks that have started moving recently, including a streamlined Wondrous Tails interface and changes to the Duty Finder's role lock behaviour. The April 17 broadcast is expected to address several more, and Final Fantasy XIV players have circled the date.
How to Use It
If you want to send a gift, the process is largely the same as it was before the restrictions. From the Mog Station, select an eligible item and choose the gift option, then enter the recipient's character name and home World. The system will verify the friends-list cooldown automatically and either complete the transaction or explain why it can't.
It is, in the most literal sense, a small change. But for a feature that the community has been asking about for four years, it's a meaningful one β and it's the kind of slow-but-real responsiveness to player feedback that has kept Final Fantasy XIV's relationship with its audience as healthy as it is.
