Mogguns with Knight

This evening I had some big help from a player named Knight who joined me hunting Mogguns -- though it was more like I was joining him, he was much more powerful. Knight dropped 3 Coal for me, which was the same amount I managed to get on my own. He was using lightning, which requires ore. I have lots of iron ore, but only had 3 ore on me. I dropped 3 ore for him. Ore isn't quite as valuable since it's easier to get, yellow slimes are easy to kill, even for me (level 52 now).

Earlier in the day I mentioning being inches from getting chaps. I sold enough from my stash and got the chaps.

Shortly after a player named Mistakes held off spiders, snakes and other monsters so I could visit the chest to the north and obtain the short sword for the future Setzer quest.

Thanks Mistakes and Knight!

Just about ready for chaps

I've now accumulated 10 snake skins, enough for the Patchua chaps quest. The next step is coming up with the 10,000 GP. I do have quite a few daggers and hats in stash, so I'll probably make a few thousand, but I doubt it's quite enough. This means a few more log head kills to make up the rest. Going to keep the post short today and the screenshot irrelevant to the topic, I'd prefer just to show who was hanging around Hurnscald the moment I got back.

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.

My Server is working!

So I set up a TMW server and it's working/facing the Internet. I had quite a bit of help from meway getting it going and more help from him getting ladmin working. Thanks to Kage for the hint regarding I.P. addresses and managing certain users.

The screenshot above shows when I first set up my server. I ran into some user problems as I mentioned above, but they're fixed now, at least for the time being.

I'm getting game updates from meway, who also runs a tmw server: meway.dyndns.org.

Setting up an eAthena Server

So the past couple of days I've spent my time building a server to run an eAthena TMW server on. The hardware is as follows:

IBM eServer 220 1.1GHz Pentium III Xeon CPU, 256MB Registered ECC RAM, 2 x 18GB 15,000 RPM UW-SCSI Hard Drives.

I chose Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 for the operating system because it seemed to run best on the hardware.

After a number of bumps and false starts I finally managed to get eAthena on the system and all the servers compiled (including the mapserver).

Unfortunately,I still cannot connect to the server. I can registered new accounts, but not connect to the character server after. I tracked the problem down in the log files and the account.txt file.

What appears to be happening is that the account.txt file is being overwritten so the server account and password can never connect to the character server. Here's an example of the overwritten accounts.txt file. Previously I'd set account 0 with the server connect user name and password. It's been overwritten by this.

2000000 myname  !=5auo$e243bacb2e422cd08b8df957 2010-11-03 03:22:30.934 M       1       0       a@a.com -       0       10.0.0.4        !       0
2000001 myname2 !5[tVd$cca6049992e2c72a225f5fe8 2010-11-03 03:24:47.929 M       1       0       a@a.com -       0       10.0.0.4        !       0
2000002 myname3 !Yt:x}$9051c4dbc4f7201e45a06445 2010-11-03 03:25:58.725 M       1       0       a@a.com -       0       10.0.0.4        !       0
2000003 abc123  !KhRF3$e9244bbe8d67528ff0ec6a7d 2010-11-03 12:10:18.941 M       1       0       a@a.com -       0       10.0.0.4        !       0
2000004 Test    !qv5sK$57523301b6851cc1fbbf7a19 2010-11-03 12:38:01.694 M       1       0       a@a.com -       0       10.0.0.4        !       0
2000005 %newid%

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.