Tica the alternate, leveling between 20 and 40

Tica the alternate pounding on some cave snakes

Tica is an alternate player I started on the main server about 2 weeks ago. I've played Tica for a few hours here and there. Playing Tica instead of Tarq lead me to a few observations, some I've noted before, some new.

Cave snakes are good for leveling between levels 20 and 40. Find them by going north in Arkim's "Bat cave." Why are cave snakes so good? You only need 20 cave lamps to do the Doug quest which adds 5k experience and 5k gold. Cave snakes also occasionally drop jean shorts. Jean shorts are one of the components needed for jean chaps. And here's the kicker, you don't need to fight mountain snakes to get skins for jean chaps - just be sure to visit Aidan and Ishi when you start your character to collect monster points. Trade in monster points and sometimes you get snake skins (and other goodies like Iron Ore).

As long as you don't create a new login your stash is shared between characters. This means your level 1 character can have decent armour, helmet and perhaps weapon if you've not traded everything away with your main character. I equipped Tica with chain armor and a crusade helmet.

When you reach level 40 make sure you do the Bone Knife quest, even if you already have one from another character. The bone knife quest is worth 50,000 experience. At level 40 this is almost half a level for you. Probably your other character already has the components (black scorpion tails and mushrooms), Tarq did (actually he needed a couple of scorpion tails).

I also noted that at level 40 there are significantly more points available to be put into stats. I think I had something like 60. Be sure to use them wisely.

Prsm for GM!

I've known Prsm now for about 6 months. He's up for election as a GM on the main server. I think he's an excellent candidate, always helpful, never selfish. If you know Prsm, please vote him in on the forums.

Getting Ubuntu to recognize current manaplus

There are several The Mana World clients floating around. The Mana World web site links to a really old client in the downloads section. Many people switched to the 4144 client which until recently was located at http://tmw.cetki.com/mana/. Recently it's been updated and switched to http://mana.cetki.com/.

Linux users if you installed the old client 1.1.2.20 and go to install the new client you'll find both your Gnome menus and the command line link to the old manaplus client. But if we find the paths we get:

$ whereis manaplus
/usr/games/manaplus /usr/local/bin/manaplus


Both the command line and menus recognize the old manaplus because the /usr/local/bin/manaplus is part of the PATH statement:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games


The simplest way to change our Gnome menu is to click system then preferences then main menu and select the games tree then click on the manaplus icon and click the properties button. Chance the command from just manaplus to /usr/games/manaplus.

But this doesn't solve the real problem, which is the path for manaplus is looking to /usr/local/bin first. And why does it do this? Because it's before /usr/games in the $PATH list. In Ubuntu we can change this by editing the /etc/environment file at the PATH section:

sudo vi /etc/environment
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"


All we had to do is shift /usr/games from the end of the file to near the beginning. As long as it's before /usr/local/bin the newer version of manaplus will take. Note that if you do this you do not need to change your Gnome menu as per above.

The PATH doesn't take immediately. You need to log out of your xsession (but not reboot) and log back in for the PATH change to activate.

Manaplus 1.1.2.20

Recently I compiled the 4144 Manaplus 1.1.2.20 as per these instructions: http://tmw.cetki.com/4144/ubuntu/. One of the things I noticed that was slightly different was when someone killed a monster any drops I tried to pick up too early were labelled as not mine. I like this slight change. Of course all drops if ong enough can be picked up by anyone.