Gathering Time, or the End of Regular Quests

With the completion of the ring quest I've now done all the non-magic quests except for the Graveyard and Terranite quests, both of which are still too difficult for level 67 Tarq.
The Graveyard quests are listed from level 60, but I've found that I can only take on one skeleton at a time and only if they don't get a critical strike on me (which means more Luck and Dex are in order).
So what to do in this downtime??? Well this is usually the point where I invent my own quests. At some point I will turn mage and start doing the magic quests, but for the moment I'm content being a fighter. As I see it there are a couple of things I can do: 1) help new players and 2) gather components for spells.
The ring quest required 50 coal and 100,000 gp. The coal didn't take very long to collect, but the 100k took awhile considering I just spent 100k to get past the last present problem I had in the Christmas quest. I ended up trading in 36 roots I was storing for when I became a mage. So with roots in mind as a spell component one of my new quests will be to gather 50 roots. Along the way gathering raw logs, which are also a useful low level spell component.
When I played 11 months ago I had a robe in almost every colour, and I collected all the cocoons to make each robe, so obtaining 1600 or so cocoons is a secondary quest.
Of course there are a lot more spell components, and one of the important ones involves the various leaves, so I'll be hacking on plants for awhile.

The Main Server crash, levels, and items...

Everyone on the server is talking about the main server crash. Tonight much of the server was restored, but I still ended up losing 2 levels, some coal, a diamond, a pirate's striped bandana, and the Infantry helm Zoix gave me the other day.

Ah... but the TMW community is wonderful, Sugar helped me out again with an Infantry helm. Thanks Sugar!

I made up one of the levels tonight. I also collected a lot of roots, so I might be able to buy back some of the coal.

This time I'm keeping the items I want to keep on my person. Freeyorp had a backup of the server minus the items in the stash. My thought is that if the server crashes again someone may have a backup (again minus the stash).

Just to set the record straight the server didn't "crash," though I keep saying it did. The story as I understand it is that someone at the hosting centre accidentally reboot the wrong server (the tmw server) and when they did that there was a write error with the database.

It's a good lesson for backups...

Making The Fluffy Quest More Fun

When I played The Mana World over a year ago one thing I didn't notice was how much effort killing fluffies was (maybe I just don't remember). When it took 47 fluffy furs to get the winter mitts (Agostine quest) I thought I'd check to see if anyone else had such bad luck, and it turned out that some of you had much worse luck! In some cases the number of fluffy furs needed for the mitts approached 100.

The wiki is responsible for spreading the rumour that it takes around 30 furs to satisfy Agostine for each quest. But what Agostine accepts is based on a random event, and as one player noted, subject to a Gambler's Fallacy.

So I played more and it occurred to me that part of the reason it seemed so frustrating was that Fluffies don't seem to drop White Furs very often. So I decided to count the next 32 furs (in the screen shot 2 went to another quest leaving me with 30). The following is the amount of kills it took to get a White Fur:

21, 17, 3, 58, 18, 2, 28, 6, 19, 17, 2, 1, 5, 21, 8, 5
20, 1, 6, 14, 17, 29, 17, 4, 8, 1, 14, 18, 15, 34, 15, 1

Yes, at one point it took 58 Fluffy kills to get a white fur. But if you average all these numbers out it comes to 14.625 Fluffies per white fur. It still feels like a long process, so I decided to make a game of it. I noticed that I was about half way to my next level. Knowing I'd also need cash and that roots from Log Heads generate about 200gp each I decided to alternate between killing Fluffies and Log Heads. First I'd kill about 10% experience of Fluffies, then 10% experience of Log Heads. Log Heads give more experience than Fluffies, so what I did was make sure that I ended my Fluffy kills around 10% by only ending when I picked up a white fur. In one case this worked out to about 13% of Fluffies, but I leveled up.

As I write this I haven't yet gone back to Tulimshar. The stakes are higher than they were a year ago when you could just walk to Tulimshar. I'm quite sure I'm shy of the 15k Agostine will ask for and not sure 30 furs will satiate his lust for fur, so I'm thinking it won't hurt to try this technique for one more level, perhaps making log heads 20% of experience so the process goes quicker.