Wanted to play for a couple of hours during FFXIV maintenance, ended up playing 5. There's so much new stuff, pretty good shit too, some might have been patched before I don't know I haven't played in forever. I found some egyptian ruin thing under the desert, which led to an icy area, found some speed boots and some double jump shit in there, makes everything so much easier, even though I end up killing myself from fall damage pretty often when travelling. Found wall climbing claws very quickly too. Also found some weapon that shoots seeds, you get seeds whenever you cut vines and herbs and what not, it's pretty awful as a weapon but it's free ranged attacks basically.
Fairly early I went right of my starting point and there's an area with like red moss and black trees, can cut the trees for shadowwood or something, makes pretty good weapons fairly early and since it was just tree cutting I could do it before the mobs would come. Can also make cactus armor from the desert cactus, while not great it's very easy to collect some. Kinda skipped the early shit because of that and went straight for iron then platinum(for sword/pickaxe, I'm using Tungsten now to make armor since it's more common).
I don't really remember much thoguh I'll probably check the wiki if it has a 1.2 updated page or some shit.