How many spikey mushrooms does it take to get 30 iron potions?

Iron potions are the staple of a good warrior, they allow warriors to do additional damage on all creatures, but come particularly handy fighting yetis, skeletons, and jack-o. They can be bought in the snow town Nivalis for 500 GP each. If your character is rich this is a decent price. I've bought quite a few in the past. But I recently spent most of my gold and found myself wondering just how long it took to get 30 potions (actually I was thinking more like 100, but also figured I didn't have the patience).

The answer is: it takes a fair amount of time. I had to split my session into 2 sessions. In the first session I gathered 25 iron potions (which are sometimes dropped when you kill Spikey Mushrooms). The second session I finished off with 5 iron potions. It took approximately 453 Spikey Mushroom kills to accumulate 30 iron potions. I say approximately because other monsters got in the way sometimes: mooboo's, plants, etc. This is a terrible drop rate 0.06%, nowhere near the 1.2% rate that is suppose to happen. Of course just because it's a 1.2% chance of dropping doesn't mean it will drop for me/you, it's 1.2% overall.

Buy or hunt for Iron Potions, whatever your decision the price is still kind of high.

Bone quest

Players wandering below the graveyard

One of the graveyard quests is to collect 50 Bones. With a few friends I imaging raiding the graveyard for bones would be easy, and I think this is the approach a lot of people are taking. I still like a slower game and it seems a few other players seem to as well. While wandering below the graveyard I spotted a few people doing solo and small group raids on monsters.

Group attacks on the graveyard do seem to result in rapid advancement, well relatively rapidly. I've gone from 73 to 75 in a few days (not playing all day of course, just a couple of hours). It's nice to advance, but I really wasn't seeing a lot of bones since players who hit harder get the drops first. In some cases a drop was mine and if I'd already grabbed a few bones and there was a player who didn't hit as hard I'd let them squat on a bone until it became available. It isn't about rushing it but enjoying it.

Lately I've been wandering below just soloing skeletons and I've noticed that all but one skeleton didn't critically hit me - 61 Luck, not at the magic 66 yet, but close - a couple of levels. I picked up 2 or 3 bones this way. It seems you have to kill quite a few skeletons to get bones. I had gem drops, skull drops and lots of no drops, but only a few bones. Still, it's nice not being hit hard by skeletons anymore, it's an encouraging sign that I could probably get all the rest of the bones by myself.

Karma

Despite my last rant about botting I find that usually Karma happens! I try to help new players that try to help themselves. If I see a player struggling with something (mogguns for example) I might offer to help. Recently I spent about an hour hunting mogguns with Kotex (upping his coal collection from 17 to 40 and getting him his first diamond). The only thing I grabbed was a few white fur and a second diamond that showed up. Last night I spent a bit more time helping Kotex in the graveyard (imaging going from mogguns to the graveyard - a pretty big step) along with MoonWolf (a mage who also seems particularly helpful).

I also gave away my (rare) staff to a player who had helped me out a bunch of times before and who I've mentioned in this blog a couple of times before. At some point I might do the mage thing, but for now I still prefer the warrior route. As a rule I don't give away rares, or items of particular value, and I especially don't give items to people begging for it (it just encourages more begging). Earn it! The player I gave the staff to was a mage and he certainly earned it with all his help.

As I started to mention karma seems to come back... Sugar, Prsm and I went Jacko hunting and they allowed me to pick all the drops. I had previously fought jacko 4 times, all of which only resulted in a soul drop, and were difficult because I had to consume a lot of healing. Rikle joined us for a bit and provided healing.

Sugar previously helped me with an Infantry Helment when I needed one for the steel shield quest. I returned it in the form of an extra crusader helmet I had. But Sugar has helped me a few times before, including when I first started blogging about TMW (a previous Tarq character before the wipe).

Prsm helped me brew monster oil for my setzer and with coal. I was really impressed when I was hunting mogguns one time and he came in and killed one in a group I was working on and took the coal, then apologized profusely. Just the apology was nice, especially since I could barely kill mogguns at the time.  But he also gave me 10 coal that allowed me to finally get my warlord plate. It's players like Prsm and Sugar that inspire me to help players like Kotex. But they too deserve a big thanks... so Prsm and Sugar, thank you... your karma kick is coming.

Stop the bots!

Originally I had a different idea for this post, I wanted to talk about a few great players in the game (and I still will) that helped me with Jack'o. Instead it's a rant about the rampant botting that's going on. Currently botting seems to be allowed as long as the player can respond using all characters in the bot train. It shouldn't be... here's why:

* It slows down the server and creates lag. Sometimes it's not noticeable, but I've noticed it quite a bit when botters bot around where I'm training.
* It creates an unfair advantage for botters. Botters with a big train can kill much faster than single players, meaning all the drops end up going to botters.
* It creates an economy where botters have more than non-botters. Whether it's something as simple as oranges, or special event prizes (lots of botting during the Halloween event).
* It creates more of those annoying shops that pm regular players. These occur anyway, but seem to be more prevalent now that botting is allowed.
* It creates a lot more bots.

I've been to the beach a few times (including at 6:50am) the past week and each time someone has been botting there with between 1 to 3 extra bot players in tow. I think players are farming for pearls, which means they'll get devalued. Unfortunately it's also one of the best places for healing drops. Sea slimes drop oranges and red apples at 8% each, 16% chance of getting a healing drop, the highest for any creature. Sea slimes also drop concentration potions. Normally it takes time to farm Sea slimes, but with bots in tow it's easy for them to rack up a good amount of oranges, apples, concentration potions and pearls. I set a goal about a month back to kill 1,000 sea slimes. That goal would have never happened if I needed to fight against botters.

Compiled client versus Ubuntu client

As many of you know special "skills" have been added to the main server, skills like brawling, speed, and poison resistance. Not a lot of information has been posted on the wiki at this point, but the forums have some information.

If you're using the main client from the web site there's a known bug that doesn't let you increment a skill, even if you've specialized in the skill.

I decided to try the git version thinking that it might solve the problem (it did). However after downloading, compiling, and installing the git version someone mentioned that it's no longer going to be the main client, the manasource version will be the new client. It's a bit of a shame because I actually like the main version a bit better. I can't put my finger on the reason why, maybe it's simplicity, maybe it's the extreme north/extreme south running bug I ran into with manasource (where your player runs in one direction and you can't stop him/her).

Whatever the case I hope the client is placed in git repositories and step by step explanation is given for players new to Linux/*BSD.

Git (out of there)

This morning I ran into a bit of a snag updating the auldsbel.dyndns.org tmw server. When I did the git stash and git pull I got the following message:


From git://gitorious.org/tmw-eathena-data/mainline
 + f0154b9...446c7da master     -> origin/master  (forced update)
CONFLICT (delete/modify): .mailmap deleted in 446c7dae4c5a37ccb23b22a103a1f28a6b67fdc0 and modified in HEAD. Version HEAD of .mailmap left in tree.
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

I haven't deleted anything, but I have made several of my own modifications to the source, most of which has been just to add (versus change) npcs. I really didn't want to commit my changes because many are me just playing around. I haven't touched the file .mailmap, so not quite sure whether to delete the file and try to pull it again, or to see if I can match it up to some other .mailmap...

Managing poison

It's quite common for characters to get poisoned during the course of playing, especially at low levels. Around level 70 I started building up a bit of an immunity (idea for devs: if you get poisoned so many times you should start to build up an immunity to that particular poison - e.g. grass snake) against regular snake poison - they still poison me, but the effect seems less devastating than before. Scorpions and spiders still poison me on occasion, but their poison is also less devastating than before.

Mountain Snakes and Grass Snakes still bite with a nasty poison. What I've found is that the poison doesn't actually kill you, it just reduces you to a very low amount of hit points. I have around 600hp and usually get reduced to 20-29hp when poisoned by grass snakes. If you get poisoned try to stay away from mobs of monsters or fast moving monsters that hit quickly. If a monster only does 1 or 2 points of damage you can usually slay the monster while poisoned, but avoid groups because 4 or 5 hp strikes can be deadly when you're poisoned.