Getting started#

This page takes you from opening the site to finishing a pull. It assumes nothing about FFXIV experience beyond knowing what a tank, a healer and a DPS are.

Create or join a session#

Open the simulator at yetanothersim.com.

The landing screen has a single button, CREATE NEW SESSION. Pressing it generates a session id, puts it in the page URL as ?s=<id>, and drops you into that session's lobby.

There is no "join by code" field: you join a session by opening its URL. Copy the page URL out of the address bar and send it to the people you want to practise with. Anyone who opens it lands in the same lobby.

The first person to arrive is the host. The host is the only person who can pick the raid, change options, and start, pause, stop or restart a pull. Everyone else plays their character and watches the host's decisions take effect.

If a session sits unused it eventually expires. When that happens the client shows a notice and returns you to the landing screen; create a new session and share the new link.

Claim a party slot#

The lobby lists the eight roster slots, always in the same order:

Press CLAIM on the slot you want; press RELEASE to give it up. Each slot shows BOT when nobody has claimed it, YOU for your own slot, and CLAIMED for someone else's. You may hold exactly one slot at a time.

Every unclaimed slot is played by a bot for the whole pull, so a solo player gets a full party of eight. Which slot you pick matters: mechanics in these encounters are assigned by slot id, not picked at random per player, so m1 and r2 genuinely have different jobs.

There is also an observer slot with its own capacity, shown as OBSERVERS n/m. Observers watch the pull without occupying a roster slot, and cannot claim a party slot at the same time.

Joining while a pull is running#

If you arrive mid-pull, claiming a slot queues you rather than putting you in immediately, and the lobby says so: "Raid in progress. The host must stop the raid for you to join." Queued players enter on the next pull, once the host stops the current one.

Pick a raid#

Once the host presses START, everyone loads into the arena and the in-game HUD appears.

The RAID selector sits at the top of the screen. Only the host's is clickable; for everyone else it is a read-only label showing what is loaded.

Opening it shows the raid browser: categories on the left (Default Lobby, Dancing Mad Ultimate, Debug), raids on the right, and a search box that searches across every category at once. Picking a raid loads it for the whole session and starts it automatically after a short loading overlay — there is no separate confirm step.

Default Lobby is an empty arena with no timeline. It is the right place to warm up on movement, or to sit while people file in.

Practise against bots#

Bot party members follow the encounter's authored bot pattern. They are written for survival and correct mechanic resolution, not for optimal play, and a few of them deliberately take a simpler line than a human group would. They are good enough to show you where a mechanic wants people to stand.

Two HUD buttons make drilling a single mechanic much less painful:

• 🛡∞ toggles your own invincibility, so a mistake does not end the run.
• BOT∞ does the same for the bots, so one bot dying early does not cascade into a wipe and rob you of the rest of the timeline.

There is also a No Cooldowns button that removes the cooldown on your own abilities (Sprint, Anti-knockback, Provoke), which is useful when you are repeating one movement over and over.

None of these change the timeline: casts still resolve on schedule, and damage is still calculated — you simply do not die from it.

Control the pull#

The playback controls sit under the raid selector, and only the host may use them.

PLAY cannot resume a finished pull — once the timeline runs out the host must use RESTART.

STOP is what saves a replay. A pull that is restarted without stopping is not recorded, so if you want to review what just happened, stop first.

The host also has an OPTIONS button, which stops the pull before opening so that changes cannot take effect halfway through a mechanic. It has three tabs:

• WAYMARK — the ground-marker layout: Default (whatever the raid file authored), Standard, Mirrored, or Wide.
• BOTS — the bot pattern to use. Every Dancing Mad encounter that has bots ships exactly one pattern, Default; P4 — Kefka Says has no bot movement at all and says so.
• RNG — the pre-pull random choices for this encounter. Each one can be left on RNG to reroll every pull, or pinned to a specific outcome so you can drill that case. RESET clears every pin. Your pins are remembered per raid in your own browser.

Pinning RNG is the single most useful practice tool in the simulator. Rather than rerolling until the pattern you keep failing comes up, pin it and run it ten times.

Review what went wrong#

After a stopped pull, the host's ▶ toolbar button opens SESSION RECORDINGS, listing this session's pulls with their raid id and length. Pick one to watch it back.

In a replay you get a seek bar, a timestamp you can type into, a jump-to-mechanic dropdown built from the encounter's named sections, and an EVENTS sidebar listing every death and avoidable hit. Clicking an event pauses, seeks to just before it, and switches the camera to the player it happened to.

That last part is the point: the sidebar tells you who got hit by what, and one click puts you behind their eyes a moment before it landed.

The full detail is in the simulator guide.

Next steps#

• Learn the controls and HUD properly: Simulator guide
• Write your own encounter: Authoring overview
• Something looks or feels wrong: Browser & performance help