UOD: December 25, 2019

I still see a great amount of people on whenever I play, which is reassuring. I'm not even on during peak US hours. Chat is active, the banks have people at them, the forums remain active. 'Tis all good, if you ask me!

Today was another fishing day. I ran a few more naturalist quests and got exclusively fire red seeds. Grr. I managed to pick up a few seed boxes on vendor search that had some rare colored seeds and a decent stock of peculiar seeds, so I'm not as behind as I was a few days ago. Rakuyn has been doing some hunting as he learns the hang of the new skills he's training, and while doing so he saved me whatever seeds he picked up in his travels.

Short update today, as it was mostly more fishing. Now that I've done so much fishing I regret chopping up all of the fish instead of saving them for professional fishing quests. 120 fishing powerscrolls are just as expensive as they were 3 years ago and I don't care to pay those prices.

UOD: December 24, 2019

Today was another fishing day - and by fishing day, I mean, only fishing.

Once I hit 80 fishing, which didn't take long with Rakuyn's alacrity scroll, I started pulling SOSs out of my Davies' Lockers and doing those.

All in all I spent over 12 hours fishing, while Rakuyn still worked on his necromancy.

It appears that the T-Map revamp included some changes and additions to the SOS revamps. Now regular SOSs aren't completely discarded in favor of ancient ones, at least as far as I can tell from the loot. I've stacked the front of the keep with chests to organize the loot into. There may be a few chests just to throw everything into when I don't feel like organizing what I got, which is often. I managed to get my fishing to 90, so I'm a happy camper!

UOD: December 23, 2019

Planting has continued. I've managed to run a few Naturalist quests to get some more seeds. I keep getting fire red seeds, though, which are nice and all, but I wanted more variety across the rare seed colors.

A long time ago, I mentioned training fishing as another skill I could use on my bard. At that time, I trained a whopping 0.4 points to a grand total of 50.4 fishing. That skill has sat on a holder character until today, when I decided I would give fishing another try.

I bought all of the alacrities available on vendor search, good enough for an hour and 15 minutes, and set off from Magincia with the intention of fishing until my fingers fell off.

The gains were decent. By the end of the scrolls I was up to 70 fishing. I was about to call it quits when a friend I had introduced to UO, Rakuyn, told me he was buying a Deluxe Starter Pack.

For those who don't know, that starter pack includes an alacrity scroll that lasts for a week and gives the user's party members increased skill gains as well, assuming they're within a few tiles of the user.

We proceeded to fish for a few more hours before calling it a night. Or rather, I fished while Rakuyn practiced his necromancy. Since he could cast his spells anywhere he just stuck by me on the boat while I fished around looking for gains.

Three years ago I never would have had the patience to sit here fishing for hours on end. Yet today here I am, fishing. I'm excited to finally be able to fish up my own SOSs on a production sever. I've only ever done SOSs on Test Center before.

UOD: December 22, 2019

I've filled up the new keep design with raised garden beds. I'm fortunate that I had moved the majority of my seed boxes moved over to the keep. When the 2nd 18x18 fell, I simply lost all of my rare colored and peculiar/bonsai seeds. Not to mention my stock of all plant resources, but I'll get it back eventually.

Since it's been so long since I've really played, my plant vendors have little to no stock. I've been working to fix that, slowly. Unfortunately there's only so fast the plants can grow.

I checked the EM soulstone garden a couple times, in the hopes that someone might've turned in either my or Nestor's soulstones. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case, so I've been working on retraining whatever skills I can. I didn't lose too many skills, as I didn't have very many soulstones, but it's still tiring to have to retrain skills I've already put the work into.

I'm glad I didn't really use my soulstones to store all of my miscellaneous skills. While I did lose some things like Cartography and Fletching, most of my skills were already stored on 'holder' characters.

Thus - more cartography training! I picked up a few scrolls of alacrity, talked to a mapmaking NPC, and got to training. It took a bit over an hour, but I eventually reached 95. Then I decided to pick up a scroll of transcendence to take me the rest of the way to 100.

I haven't touched T-Maps since the new revamp earlier this year, and most of my higher end maps were lost, but I still have interest in checking it out at  some point. Luckily, I still have lockpicking stored away on one of the characters so I don't have to spend a few hours at Goodman's Library training on the lockpicking boxes.

UOD: December 21, 2019 - Rebuilding

Something very unfortunate happened earlier this year. The two most important houses Nestor and I owned fell. The castle and my 2nd Malas 18x18. Between those two houses, we had all of our soulstones, rares, collectibles, resources... just about everything.

It was a complete accident, but the damage was devastating enough that it's taken me nearly six months to even try playing again, and in that time I kept seesawing between 'just cancel all the accounts' and 'maybe just prevent the other houses from falling.'

A few days ago I decided that I should force myself to play instead of wallowing in self pity and get an answer for good on whether I could ever enjoy playing again. Perhaps this sounds a bit dramatic, but anyone who has played this game or any other game for over 2/3 of their life and seen all of those years of effort disappear may understand the sting it leaves.

The good news is I still have the keep. Unfortunately, the incident has pushed Nestor away from the game and he's decided to quit for good, leaving the accounts to me again.

In an effort to rebuild I decided a change of scenery with the keep was in order. Since I no longer had the castle to support my plant growing addiction, and the classic layout of the keep didn't leave enough space for all of the garden beds I still had, I decided to start preparing to convert the keep into one of the more spacious custom keep designs that have become available over the past year and a half.

Thus, a mad clicking spree ensued. I didn't have it in me to move all of the pieces into bags and store them, so I went the route of simply letting everything despawn.

It took three or four rounds of despawning, a few hours, an overnight sleep, and a surprise grass tile that was hiding in a corner, but I finally switched over the design.

Welcome to my new greenhouse, using Robin's Nest! I'm not 100% happy with the design, but it was the most open one I could find out of all of the winning keep designs so I'll just have to make do.

So far the game has been fun, and I can see myself still playing. The loss still stings, but it's not completely irreversible. I just need to slowly build up my collection yet again. And re train the skills lost by those soulstones. Phooey.