Giant Cave Maggot(s) - Iten quest

One of the lower-level quests in Tulimshar is to kill 1 of 2 Giant Cave Maggots. Both maggots don't always spawn. I've been up and down looking when people spawned the giant maggots and often it's only one. If you've already done the quest you cannot respawn the giant cave maggots. I mentioned this quest before, but never got a good screenshot of the maggots, just the "iten" they drop.

The giant cave maggots look very similar to giant maggots with a slight colour difference. Don't let this fool you, they are stronger - though at my current level (62) not even close to a match. Rumour has it that the Halloween event has interrupted this quest and that the cave maggots currently are not dropping the iten. Not sure if this is true or not, but I've killed quite a few spawned by other players and seen nothing.

In other news, still trudging along towards 75 iron ore and 150+ coal for the warlord plate, but it's slow going. Gold seems to be accumulating a little easier, and in the brief time I spent in the northern Hurnscald mines I turned up another Ruby - nice.

I mentioned in a forum post that at my current level there's a lag in action. I'm still too weak to battle skeletons (even 1 on 1) but I've finished all the non-magic quests right up until the "Letter"/50 bones part of the quest. Taking the letter was easy, but bones are expensive and skeletons, even 1 on 1, seem to critical my butt. Naturally I've been upping my "Luck" stat lately hoping it might help not only with skeletons, but other monsters to come.

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.

Manaplus 4144 Client

Up to this point I've resisted trying the 4144 manaplus client, but Nard convinced me to give it a try this morning and I found it quite interesting. The auto-target and attack feature is really nice, especially when I came across it by accident (hitting x instead of z). I like the stats it keeps and shows (amount of damage done to a monster).

Nard and I spent a bit of time killing yellow slimes this morning. 

The big news for this Tarq character is that thanks to the assistance of Wayne I managed to brew monster oil and make my Setzer! I also reached level 61. I pumped the points into vitality to take on the mogguns. To this point I haven't put a lot of points into Luck, but it looks like I should be. It may be the point where the other stats are starting to cost too much for the time it takes to level.

Next item goal is the Warlord Plate. Funny enough though I still haven't completed the Noah troupe mask quest. I suppose I should finish it before my next level. I'm also thinking about collecting items for when I become a mage... though the warlord plate will keep me busy enough at a cost of 75 iron ore and over 150 coal... I may end up buying a bunch of coal.

Playing styles, courtesy or hunting...

Maybe it's because I've been playing The Mana World off and on since 2004 but I've grown a bit jaded in my TMW play. I try to adhere to some general principles. I won't hunt an area someone else is hunting (for example: red slimes in the Hurnscald mines) unless they're cool with it. Ditto for the Mogguns, actually especially for the Mogguns because I know how difficult it can be for low (40-55ish) level characters to kill enough to get coal.

Others don't seem to share the same principles, they don't care if you're hunting somewhere, it's an open season in all areas type of attitude. It's also one of the reasons I get frustrated with the unbalanced nature of Rangers versus Warriors. Rangers can do much more damage at a lower level than Warriors... and it doesn't make much sense in reality.

Stacking with ChefChelios

Chef Chelios and I stacked in the Hurnscald mines this evening killing a slew of spiders and black scorpions, enough to increase my experience by 25% over a period of about 15 minutes - less time than I'd spent to get 5% experience by myself - stacking really helps!

I also finally got magic working correctly on my own server: auldsbel.dyndns.org. Now the last thing I have to correct is changing the updates from the main server to my own updates. I've kept them for the moment while I work on other things.

I've set up another development server locally to test scripts out on. The "Captain Easton" NPC in Tulimshar on my server is the result of this. I'm continuing to develop the Captain, swatting bugs on the development server before pushing them to the main server.

falloutboy, tema, leveling and other things

Big thanks to falloutboy for all the iron potions. I spent some time hunting spiky mushrooms and managed to gather up around 70 iron potions when fallout boy gave me over 160 more. I ended up spending a bunch of time killing mogguns (using the potions to help) and finally got enough coal to create 4 ingots. fallout also gave me a couple of jacko souls, so I'm one up on my post about getting one from a yellow slime (which I lost in the server crash). I gave him a few halloween treats, nothing compared to what he was giving me, but I suppose everything helps in the end (we'll see when Gak finally releases the prizes). So all I need now is about 20 more coal and I should be able to make the steel shield. The patch should be pretty easy, I know where Patchua is and I'm pretty sure I have a couple more snake skins (monster points).

Tema helped me out while I was raiding the mines north of Hurnscald. Players tend to coagulate off to the right where all the red slimes are, avoiding the left area where there are actually more slimes, but also black scorpions and spiders. I ventured off to the left because there were already 3 people on the right. Luckily the red slimes seemed to be alone for awhile and I managed to collect a few items for resale (a couple of miner's gloves, some hats and boots, lots of knives). One of the items I was actually looking for and got were the red apples. Red Apples heal 50 damage, not a lot when mogguns do about 39 damage to me each shot, but enough to help when running away. I spent enough time that I leveled one more level. Just as the scorpions and spiders came out tema gave me a protection spell. It helped quite a bit because I started getting swarmed by black scorpions, spiders, and red slimes. At this point another player (with better equipment) came in and got their butt kicked... protection spells make the weak quite a bit more resistant. I was still cautious, but could take quite a few more monsters on at once. Anyway it was Tema's spell that helped me level, so I dropped an ore for him (not sure if he thought it was the slimes, but tema if you're reading this it was my thanks for the protection spell).

A couple of days ago I resolved an issue with my TMW server, auldsbel.dyndns.org. No one should have any more problems connecting to it. For those wondering why there isn't an "Online" status it's because the web server is hosted on a different machine from the game server. I'm still looking for the best way to either symbolically link the file or scp the file over without creating too much traffic/slowdown on either server.

More Mogguns, quests, and red scorpions.

The freshness of the halloween party has already worn off and the event hasn't even finished yet. I got tired of hunting strictly for sweets and decided to keep aiming towards some of the quests, and in the process completed a couple. The Letter Quest, which I'd inadvertently overlooked, but managed to do quite easily. I think even a level 20 might be able to do it. I also collected 25 red scorpion stingers and maggot slimes for Auldsbel (the snake tongues is next and I have all but the mountain snake tongues). In fact I got a bit obsessed with the fact that red scorpions also drop jackolanturns that I decided to keep killing scorpions until I had a few more (7 I think). I also picked up a Perl in the process.

The Setzer Quest seems like it could be in range. 14 more coal for the ingots + 6 coal portion, but I've yet been able to activate the monster oil portion. I'm thinking a requirement of having bought a steel shield may be first. I already have the short sword, so Nicholas should be allowing me to ask how to make my short sword better.

I figured out a strategy for killing Mogguns. I mentioned hit and miss in the past, but I missed something in that strategy. At this point I'm going to hold off mentioning more until I've tested the strategy more fully. The little bit I have tested so far has been successful, though the Mogguns don't seem to be dropping a lot of coal for me this evening: 2.