UOD: April 30, 2017

In the last week of April I happened to come across a mass-Scalis "run" and joined in on the fun.

I didn't get anything over the course of several bosses, but it was fun participating in the mass destruction of sea-faring creatures.

By this time I had started feeling less butthurt about my plants and began working on them. It's been a slow process as I'm trying to stagger the plants' growth. I don't want to get stuck in a cycle of mass plant tending once every 9 days.

Nestor and I did our first level 7 T-Map. It was interesting, to say the least.

We managed to do one level 6 map after this before Nestor hopped off for the night and I found other adventures to embark on.

One of those adventures was a two-day EM event to bring in the start of a new story arc.

It went about as well as can be expected for an end-of-month EM event. At that point there had been no EM drops for April, and a lot of people were banking on a drop for this particular night.

As usual, there was too much going on and I was too laggy to really grasp what was happening. I do know that the person we were helping turned out to be a Big Baddie and he turned into a big green muscley alien straight out of Space Jam.

My biggest complaint for this particular event is that the fighting happened within town limits. My mage/bard couldn't cast Energy Vortex, Earthquake, or any other of her normal spells. With the crowds and Enemy of One spam, it was all I could do just to sit there and keep myself healed without crashing. I may have gotten one or two hits on the boss.

At one point the boss was teleported to a different area of the city and the fight ended there.

Poor Bennu was berated by one particularly upset man, insisting that Bennu was the worst EM ever and he should stop ever doing events. It was a combination of humorous and sad to see how riled up this person got.

In any case, the day continued and I stopped by the bank before heading back home. Of course, the ne'er-do-wells were at it again. I left before they truly trashed the place.

UOD: April 29, 2017

I finished the desert oasis section on the castle. It's a quaint little escape from the "troubles" of Britannia.

I've been working on the castle on and off for a while. Progress has slowed incredibly, both due to my own boredom at decorating and lower play hours.

I had a moment of sad disappointment in myself. I started a fresh batch of seeds with the intention of cross-pollination. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about the plants and when I finally remembered to check on them each plant was already at its seed-producing stage.

Talk about a waste of one entire batch of plants. This situation discouraged me so much I haven't touched the plants in a long while.

Later in the month, there was a very... controversial? Popular? High profile? IDOC within Luna walls. General chat became an unbearable cesspool for days afterwards. Virtue's Live Auction fell in the middle of the drama that went on, leading to this little tidbit at the beginning of one night.

I've been buying up a lot of sand and grass tiles as part of my grand castle decorating scheme. While taking some older non-stackable tiles to the chest in Britain, I came across yet another disgusting scene.

*shakes head*

Those damn Orcs.

UOD: April 25, 2017 - Orcs Are Filthy

Why, you might ask, is my character sleuthing around West Brit Bank on a late Friday night?

Reconnaissance.

In actuality, I have wanted to see what these weekly "ORC PARTY!"s are all about.

Unfortunately, I was less than welcome within the shabby establishment and had to settle for sitting meekly against the bank walls. Apparently "ORC PARTY!" means "NO HUMIES ALLOWED!"

*grumble*

I'll show them.

At one point there was a full bench of orcs lamenting the humans and their disgusting treatment of orcs. All the while they drank, became rowdy, and left a right mess of Brit Bank!

As the night wore on, the orcs only trashed the bank further, and I began to understand why orcs were treated as subhuman. Who would want to associate with such reckless, messy heathens? What humans would do such a thing to a well known and loved establishment? Don't answer that.

What makes matters worse is they are absolute liars! As they "cleaned up" (I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly look clean to me) one orc thanked another for the mask he had been given. A nice enough gesture, had it not been another Orc lie!

The moment the others gated away, he took off the mask, threw it on the ground, and walked away! Talk about rude!

I can say my desire to see what's so special about this weekly "ORC PARTY!" has dissipated.

Perhaps my silly mood will pass as well. :)

UOD: April 24, 2017

I was doing so well in catching up on my UO adventures... and then real life stole me away from the game. The downside: I'm still about a month behind. The upside: I haven't done very much this month so I'll catch up quickly... assuming I ever actually catch up.

Back to UO!! I tagged along for another EM event at the end of March. This time I paid attention enough to understand that there is some anti-Elf sentiment going on in Trinsic.

Why do I feel like I spend more and more time staring at a gray screen?

This particular situation frustrated me to no end. The particular creature that killed me was still under its invulnerable status. In other words, none of its poor victims could retaliate against it while it railed on us. I had spent a fair amount of time healing and rezzing people, but when I fell nobody moved and I had to find a nearby healer. There were complaints that the single healer wasn't enough, so EM Bennu spawned in several healers.

That same Enemy of One spam happened this time around and I crashed. By the time I got back into the game the boss was dead and everyone had gathered back in Britain. Phooey.

Yet another Virtue's Live Auction came up and I picked up a nice starter set of mini house deeds. Our set was lost one of the times we "quit" the game and lacked the foresight to store our valuables in the bank. Of course, since Ermac emphasized that this was not a full set of mini house deeds, we had to poke some fun at him and repeatedly ask if it was a full set.

Once I won the auction and walked up, I made sure to ask "So this is a full set, right? :P"

A rather short update. I'm getting back into the swing of things.

UOD: April 14, 2017

Building the castle has been completed!!

All in all building the castle has taken 26.5 hours across 16 sessions. Any additional work on the build will be credited towards my decoration timer.

Yes, I'm timing everything. I'm intrigued to know how long it actually takes to do what I'm trying to do.

Since the castle has been completed, I've gotten started on decorating. The 1st floor is getting there. According to Nestor, it's done, but he's the one who "decorated" the middle room and put in that row of fountains. If you ask me, they don't fit with the look I have going for the castle. One of these times he's asleep I will use his account to move the stuff he placed down.

I've decided to create a little desert oasis on one of the roof tops. It's coming along okay, but I want some finishing touches.

One of those finishing touches was at this auction. All auctioneer shenanigans aside, there was a set of water themed deco that was up for 75 million. Nobody seemed interested in it, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted it in time to place my own bid. I figured I would just attend the next auction and buy it up, but the item was no longer being offered by the time the next auction started.

I will have to instead scour Vendor Search frequently until the item pops up. Wish me luck!

UOD: April 13, 2017

I spent one several hour session working on the castle, and it's nearing its final stages. I've started placing down short rough walls and cleaning up the design.

The one thing that has made the process so exhausting is double layers. Or as I call them, hiding layers. In short, the hiding layers help the design look more authentic to custom house designs - that is, while you're running around on the 2nd floor in a covered area, the roof or anything above it doesn't show. Because there's such a height difference between the 2nd and 3rd floor, upper floors would otherwise show themselves if you tried walking in formerly-uncovered hallways.

Nestor requested an oasis of sorts on the top of the build, so this is me raising the "grass" for said oasis. The reason I have to use gozas is because the height of this particular floor is beyond where grass tiles will stay. If I were to put grass tiles up there, they would disappear come server maintenance.

Some day I want to make a series of posts fully explaining the rules of house building, z axis levels, tips and tricks, and why certain things behave the way they do.

Nestor plays on the Enhanced Client. As you can probably tell, I play on the Classic Client. That's great and all, except in circumstances like above where I'm trying to sort through a bag that was filled via EC. It drives me crazy, and I can tell whenever he's been in a container that I've sorted because that bag starts to look more and more like this.

UOD: April 12, 2017

Work has continued on the castle. Nestor had to add his own flair (it is his castle) and threw down a bunch of parrots. I don't like them in that location, but I won't bother with relocating them until I've gotten more of the castle done.

Random champion spawns have continued, though they've died down a lot in the past few weeks. Even the constant sales of real estate seems to've slowed down. Either that or I've stopped paying attention to it.

One thing I do notice, though, is Shadow is forever in need of a home. I feel like it's a running joke on the server now, whenever someone announces a property that even remotely meets Shadow's advertised wants/needs. "Did you check with Shadow on that one?" "I know someone interested!" That kind of stuff. Shadow got on my nerves by spamming his desperate need for a house several times in a short window. I know he's gotten several houses, but through various means he's either dropped the house, resold it, or otherwise lost said house. Part of me wants to pick up a house spot that perfectly fits his wants just so I can lord it over his head.

Petty? Me? Nooo.

Okay, just a little.

Testing out the pet revamp has continued. I got my fill of training up and testing out animals I already own, so I started taming random animals to see how they would fare under the new training system.

Of course that means I have to train up a Super Cow and take him out for a spin.

It would be cool if there were a way on Test Center to set your pet's skills. That way I could really see the full potential of my Super Cow. As is, the cow may be trained up to higher slots but his skills themselves suck.

UOD: April 10, 2017

While Nestor and I were grabbing old unstackable grass tiles and turning them in for stackable versions, we stumbled across what I assume is the weekly Orc night in Britain. If we hadn't been in the middle of working on the castle, I would have joined in. I miss some of that nice roleplaying interaction with people.

I have started working on other ways of raising floors in the hopes of finding something less time consuming. I feel like this takes less time, but I'd have to set aside time to really work with it to see if that's really the case.

I bought some more seed boxes and came across a rather time consuming issue. These particular seed boxes came with super-stacked seeds. The issue I have with seed boxes is there are only two remove options: one, or all. If you cannot hold all of them, you cannot remove all. So I had to individually remove over a thousand seeds before the stack was low enough for me to grab all of the seeds. I've thrown the seeds in a metal box so I don't get stuck having to remove them again, but I don't see myself doing very much with these seeds besides perhaps selling them. They're the normal orange petal and green thorn providing plant seeds.

On Test Center, another update to the pet revamp system went out and the developers added in a Pet Training Advancement Gate. I spent some time experimenting with a lot of different pets and builds.

While I like my dread mare, I feel like I'm going to go with my cu sidhe if everything stays as is.

My cu I copied over from Lake Austin downgraded to a 3-slot pet due to its stats once I enabled the pet training system. I used the gate to train it up once to 4 slots and decided to test out the training/leveling system from there.

While she needed healing at times, Midnight tore through all of her opponents. I noticed that the way I had upgraded her turned her into a high damage in short bursts type of animal. Once her mana runs out she becomes pretty useless. Solution: imbue mana up to 1500!

Using pet power hour and some very lazy battling (at one point I even logged out and copied over a character with enhanced bandages) I got Midnight from 0-18% trained in about 40 minutes. I feel like that's a decent speed.

We'll see what the final product looks like.

UOD: April 9, 2017

I spent a fair amount of time testing out the pet revamp changes. I spent a lot more time than I'd like to admit running around in gray screens.

While we may not participate in spawns as fervently as we did in February, we still answer any calls to aid that we can. It's gotten to the point where I get a lot of greetings from fellow champ spawners that I always find myself fighting alongside.

I've had a better connection to Atlantic in recent weeks, so I've taken to running the Naturalist quest whenever I can. One of my outings took me in range of a newbie (or returned player perhaps) being taught the ropes by another player. It's genuinely heartwarming to see so many new and returning players.

I placed down a guide book to help me remember my cross pollination rules for these garden beds. Like numbers need to cross pollinate with like numbers. I haven't needed the book since placing it, but it'll be good to have in case I forget for some reason.

Work on the castle has continued. I went with this stair design initially to connect the 2nd and 3rd floor. In the end it felt like it took too much space and I changed their setup.

UOD: April 8, 2017

While continuing to test out the pet revamp on Test Center, I came across a rare colored white wyrm.

I knew the devs had added in some more colors to pet varieties as part of this publish, but I didn't think some of the older pets had gotten the revamp. The white wyrm on the right is the old "pure white" color. The silverish one on the left is one of the newer colors.

Even though the stats frankly sucked on the new white wyrm, I stabled mine and proceeded to tame this one. When I took my white wyrm to Luna, I let general chat know that they can check out the color there. I had an annoying moment where someone insisted on fighting me on the white wyrms' color, saying there is nothing new, white wyrms only come in two colors. Even when we explained that there have been some new color additions, he insisted that the color wasn't new. It took someone else calling out their white wyrm for him to finally start listening.

In semi-better news, there was an interesting auction in late March. For this particular auction there were three main attractions: a bane dragon, a dread warhorse, and an 18x18.

Nestor was very interested in the warhorse, and he and someone entered in to a bidding war for the ages.

The bidding lasted several minutes. Battles were fought. Teams were picked. Hashtags were thrown. #teamwill versus #teambella In the end a random third player entered and stole the show with a 775 million gold piece bid. The mare was a 3.something.

Shortly after the mare sold, someone decided to spawn a harrower outside the house. It isn't an auction without someone trying to grief the attendees, is it?

The harrower was quickly killed, and the auction returned. Since the dread horse's bidding had gone on for so long, Ermac cut the auction short.

Last to sell was the previously mentioned 18x18, for 50 million.

All in all, one of the more exciting auctions I've attended.