New areas of The Mana World

The main server of The Mana World has added a new area filled with undead creatures. I'm not terribly fond of the mist which is extremely bright. The skeletons are difficult to kill, even at level 68 I almost got my but kicked. The reward for killing a skeleton was almost 5,000 experience, but they can do almost 350 hp damage if they score a critical hit, a couple of those will wipe out most characters. Poltergeists were much easier to kill on their own, and the experience was similar, but don't even attempt to attack a Poltergeist in an area swarming with them, you'll due in seconds. One might do 1 point of damage, but 15 can knock you down to nothing pretty quick. I haven't tried attacking Will'o'Wisps yet. I did a little wandering around but haven't found any kind of town in the area. Skeletons and Lady Skeletons will attack you on sight, and they move quite rapidly. Most of the other undead won't attack unless you attack first.

Helping a higher level character

You never know when your knowledge will come in handy... For example, I'm a level 68 character, and along with Kamu, currently 76, we hit the snake pit. Kamu is much more powerful than I am... but I got to help him today, by referring him to my instructions on how to compile The Mana World under Ubuntu 9.04.

There are instructions out there, but few as simple as what I've posted I think... Hopefully it really does help him out, because lack of storage really sucks!

eAthena server confusion

So I checked out the eAthena server to our mediacentre PC in hopes of trying some things locally, got everything set up and ran the eathena.sh start script only to get:

charm@mediacentre:~/eathena$ ./eathena.sh start
Starting eathena monitor...
./eathena.sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Not sure what's going on here. Think it's the paths and that I've messed up somewhere. Both git repos were put in: /home/charm under their respective directories. I set up a symbolic link to tmwserver:

ln -s eathena-data/ tmwserver

And that's in ~ (home)... so eathena.sh should be looking at it. Wondering if I was suppose to check out the eathena-data directory in the eathena directory and symbolically link it to eathena/eathena-data? Hmmn... better to move on to something fun for the moment, the cocoons await.

Self-inflicted adventure, my robe quest...

I've imposed a self-inflicted quest, to get a robe of every colour! As you all may know it takes 150 cocoons for 1 robe. So far I've collected enough for 4 robes. Collecting cocoons has a side benefit of collecting herbs. I collect in the forest north-east of Hurnscald where the silkworms are really plentiful, so are the herbs and the squirrels which drop herbs. Some nights I can collect a lot of cocoons, other nights are slower, so I concentrate on hunting herbs too.



I recently gave a player 13 mushrooms, so I set a secondary quest to replace them. The going for mushrooms is slow, only 2 collected, but I'm up to another 75 cocoons, half way to the next robe.

One of my problems is that I haven't been generating money. In fact I've been spending it on the dyes (dark blue/black are not dirt cheap). So now I'm concentrating on the cheap dyes for the next batch... then I'll head to the snow town and hunt some bats for cash.

Setzer is mine...

The setzer sword quest was a lot more involved than I expected and seems to only be slightly different than the knife, which actually does more damage and was simpler to get. I also thought I needed 12 snake skins for the quest but think I ended up using 2.

Currently I'm half way through level 65. I've completed all the quests on the Wiki Walkthrough. I actually tried magic for a little bit but discovered you really need to be a collector to get it (both a collector of items and spells, so you need to write down everything and go around pestering people for information). But the change did spur me to find another way to have fun, collecting items. My goal now is to collect certain amounts of different items. Yesterday I fulfilled 100 red scorpion tails. I was spurred on to this goal when some new character tried to sell me a couple of red tails and one black tail.... I wanted to repond "I have 100 already," when in fact I actually only had 54.

So I've decided to be a collector of items. It seems pretty sensible to me to collect things like silk cocoons because robes can be made out of them. I thought I might also collect some perls, logs, and cloth. I started collecting small mushrooms. I must have killed 100 mushrooms just to get 3 or 4 small mushrooms, they were not dropping a lot. I'll post some of my collection at another time.

Level 60 - grass snake quest

I already mentioned in my last post that I've jumped to level 60, due largely in part to stack fighting. From the information I've gleaned it's going to be difficult to get the Setzer, even at my level because of my stats. I can reset my stats to arm wrestle for the golden scorpion stinger, but it may end up not being enough.

My current goal is to work up a couple more levels and invest those points into vitality which will hopefully better prepare me to do battle with grass snakes. I bumped into Stooball the other day who suggested that it might be possible at level 60, but that I'd really have to reset my stats and allocate them well.

Stack Fighting

One sign of a seasoned The Mana World (TMW) player is stack fighting. Stack Fighting is when players stack on top of one another in order to hit monsters. Monsters swarm in and players hit in tandem. There appears to be not only an experience bonus for stack fighting, but a defense bonus since attacks seem to be relatively distributed.

Last night I ran into a player who was overly concerned that I was around killing a few walking trees, they player kept screaming, "mine." It turns out the player was level 33, almost 30 levels less. I'm nicer than a lot of players who would have on purpose gone around and destroyed all the trees and taken the logs on this player. Teamwork is pretty necessary in this game, especially at higher levels it helps develop faster.

Dramatic improvement - steel shield and protection spell

I'm not sure what the protection spell does other than raise evade by a couple of points, but I had it cast on me and I seemed to be almost impervious to snake attacks (not mountain snakes, but regular snakes). I was taking on 3 or 4 at a time with barely a scratch. The steel shield has made it possible for me to reasonably attack regular snakes and suffer in the range of 5-10 hits. So hit and run is much easier. This plus a protection spell left me fighting snakes alone and doing well. I picked up about 8 snake eggs and 1 tongue completing the amount of tongues I need from regular snakes in the Auldsbel quest. I still need 2 mountain snake tongues and I'm not yet powerful enough to do snakes plus mountain snakes on my own without the protection spell. Funny enough the protection spell only seemed to raise my evade from 96 to 98... there must be something else at work. Does this mean if I put more in agility or luck that I'm going to dramatically improve my odds? I can't imagine so.

I still need about 11 ore for the best helmet I can get... the only thing left then would be the Setzer (in terms of things to acquire for power). Then it's all fun, buying dyes and changing clothes, completing other quests, and eventually going after the skulls again. I also noticed that the steel shield is good against black scorpions, they seem easier to battle even 2 at a time.

After steel shield stats...

Annukka sold me a snake skin for 5k, it was the last component I needed to get the Indian to make the leather patch. With the leather patch made I was able to finally get the steel shield made. Armed with the steel shield my defense went from 85 to 98, a big jump! Now I'm going to concentrate on getting the proper helmet, which means 12 more iron ores. I think I'll attempt to fight for these. I still haven't forgotten the Auldsbel snake tongue quest. I'm actually only 2 mountain snake and 5 regular snake tongues away from completing this task. The Setzer short sword seems a long way away. I can't imagine how I ever thought I would get it so many levels ago.

Have thought about creating a magic character, but so far just having fun figuring out the fighter.

Level 57 - new stat strategy

After a romp in the 'bat cave' aka the 'cave snake cave,' I leveled up to level 57. It took some hard work to get that last 5%. At this point leveling is very difficult. My dexterity is now 51. According to the Mana World wiki the 50 to 60 range should be enough to hit even the highest level monsters. My problem now is that certain monsters, like the mountain snakes, take quite a bite out of me (20 points a shot). I noticed other characters only take 1 or 2, much like what happens with me and cave snakes. Not sure if this is a combination of their dexterity and luck or if they simply have a higher defense. The steel shield is a possibility now, but only likely if I either buy a snake skin for the strap or if I keep leveling up so I can kill the mountain snakes easier. I've developed a new attack strategy for certain scenarios. I don't want to say too much at this point, but I'll reveal it in the near future - it seems to help a great deal in certain scenarios, but it's not very helpful against the mountain snakes ... at this point.

My stat strategy will be to concentrate on Luck, Agility and Vitality. Vitality seems to be promoted pretty heavily on the wiki, but if monsters are doing large damage on you it seems more sensible to put stat points into something that will take critical hits away (luck).

Bone Knife Quest

So I decided to take on the bone knife quest before the Setzer Quest. The Bone Knife is slightly better than the short sword I have already and ANY advantage at this level helps. I'm part way through the quest having killed enough Evil Mushrooms to secure 10 small mushrooms, enough evil mushrooms being A LOT, I almost leveled and I'm level 53! (about 73%) Now I have to kill enough black scorpions to secure 9 more black scorpion tails (I already have one). Unless I get some help from other high level characters it's hours of work and lots of healing potions. I used 35 tiny healing potions about 10 small healing potions just in the mushroom killing frenzy. Besides the fact that all the evil mushrooms come at you at once I had to deal with the frustration of other parties swooping in on the mushrooms I was trying to kill (having hit them a few times), and Mouboo's getting in the way. Mouboos are a real annoyance when you're trying to kill Evil Mushrooms. The goal is the bone knife... I'm guessing sometime this weekend... work has been crazy and I need to spend time away from the computer...