Iron Ingots for Warlord Plate

Warlord Plate is expensive: 100k plus 15 Iron Ingots (150 coal + 75 Iron Ore) plus another 30 coal for a whopping 180 coal, 75 iron ore and 100,000 gp. If we buy coal at an average of 2,000gp/coal it would cost 360,000 gp (without even getting iron ore which averages more per unit). Finding coal can be a pain. I spent an hour killing Mogguns (which drop coal) and in that hour collected 12 coal. If we say that 12 is an average per hour it would take 15 hours of game play to collect enough coal for the armour. Again we'd then need to hunt for iron ore. So what's a player to do? 6 hours and 180,000gp just to get coal, but the problem is then getting the money.

I spent about 15 minutes hunting red slimes this evening and came up with about 6,000gp worth of items I sold. The problem is that for the most part I was alone. A couple of players dropped by and killed a few slimes, but I had at least 10 of those 15 minutes alone. If more players drop in when you're hunting red slimes the chances of getting a higher amount of money goes down. But let's assume it's 3:30am in the morning and few people are about. If we spent an hour it would translate into 24,000 (4 x 15 = 60 minutes, 4 x 6000 = 24,000) gold pieces. To make 360,000 we'd have to hunt for 15 hours (360,000/24,000).

Either way, collecting the coal, or collecting the money, it's going to take an average of 15 hours to get the coal.

Gems in a row and other quests

Last night Tarq spent some time in the mines north of Hurnscald. Still a little too weak to take on Mogguns without aide, I figured it would be good to collect up on the Iron Ore for ingots. TMW has gotten a little loopy since I left and the demands for the Blacksmith quest are extremely high. Lets take the warlord helmet for example: it requires 9 iron ingots and 18 coal. Since each ingot consists of 10 coal, 5 iron ore, and 1,000gp the ingot cost alone is: 90 coal, 45 iron ore, and 9,000gp. Add the other 10 coal and 10,000 to make the helmet and the cost is: 100 coal, 45 iron ore, and 19,000 gp. For warlord plate you're looking at 15 ingots, 30 coal, and 100,000 gp or an ingot cost of 75 iron ore, 150 coal, 15,000gp for a final tally of: 180 coal, 75 iron ore, 115,000 gp. At level 51 I've managed to draw out enough mogguns to get 1 coal, but I took an awful beating.

The problem is that at level 51 I seem to be stalled. I've completed most of the lower level quests, except for the expensive and annoying noh mask quest (which involves going back and forth between Hunrscald and Tulimshar). I had decided to stick to the northern mines looking for iron ore. The problem was that it appears other people had the same idea and the mines were crowded with people looking for ore.

I remembered that iron ore is also dropped by the yellow slimes in the mines south of Tulimshar. So I ventured to Tulimshar and started mining for ore in those mines. There I found both Kinichi and Moody (at separate times) also doing the same. It occurred to me that at this point it's almost a better thing to do, here's why:

The monster points master Ishi is located in Tulimshar. Black Scorpions, Giant Maggots, and Snakes all give a fair amount of monster points. Some of those monster points can potentially translate into snake skins.  This means potentially not having to tackle mountain snakes later for the jean chaps quest. As a matter of fact I'm now 1 skin shy of that quest...

Client side bugs?

This morning the TMW client crashed in Ubuntu 10.04. This is to be expected of software once in awhile and it crashed gracefully, not bringing anything down with it. But one thing I noticed is that while I retained the items in my inventory my shortcuts had changed. Just after logging in I rearranged my shortcuts so that I'd have a number of healing items in the shortcuts (and Iron Ore because it makes it easier to track when you're yellow slime/ore hunting). After the crash happened, in Hurnscald thank goodness, the client showed the shortcuts exactly as they were before I rearranged them. This seems to indicate a couple of things:

1. Items are stored server-side (good, I don't want to lose them to a crash).
2. Shortcuts are stored client-side.

It's a bit of a minor annoyance, but I'd prefer to lose shortcuts than items.

I also noticed that over the years I've taken a lot of screenshots of my stash and statistics, which is pretty boring. I really notice this now trying to remember old friends and wish I had taken more screenshots of group events. In the future I'm going to make a concentrated effort to have more group shots. There's a lot of interesting players out there.