UOD: August-October 2020 Catchup

A picture of the keep with a bunch of mature plants in the garden beds.

The beginning of 2020 took me away from UO. I don't think that needs to be expanded upon much. I had other priorities.

That did mean I missed the return of the Treasures of Tokuno and the 20th Anniversary Invasion story arc, but reading the forums tells me the most I missed out on was stocking up on more high percentage SDI spellbooks. As I'm happy with what I have for those spellbooks I'm not too concerned.

Above is what I returned to in terms of my plant growing operation. I had been trying to restock the vendors after somebody bought all of my green plants. I've left the vendors to sit for over a year before with very few items running completely out of stock. While my black and plain plants always sell within a few days, the regular colored ones tend to set for a good while. This time I was completely out of stock. I don't know if it was the sudden spike in people playing, someone setting up a naturalist dye shop, or just people wanting some color to decorate with.

My garden bed setup at the time allowed me 4 'batches' of plants worth of planting and took about a month and a half to go from 0 to fully stocked. Unfortunately (or fortunately, from a shopkeeper's point of view), the day I stocked my last vendor and went to plant for my backup stock someone bought up all of my plants again. Since then I've worked about 2/3rds of the way through restocking and added in seven more raised garden beds. I want more garden beds, but I'm not willing to pay the new prices for them since inflation hit pretty bad in March.

The screen set up when I mass fill BODs. Usually I pull all of a single type and quantity in normal and exceptional variants, do the math on how much leather or cloth that'll take, then set aside that amount and slowly pull from it into my backpack as I 'make max' and periodically fill the BODs as I go.

I took a few more days to mass fill more BODs. I finished up the spined bods, then ran out steam on the horned. At the rate I'm going they'll maybe be done by the end of 2021.

Magincia docks with a bunch of people in the middle of killing Scalis.

People still consistently run Scalis, so I try to catch them whenever I see someone call out in general chat. I haven't gotten anything good yet, but it's still fun.

The keep, displaying a bag full of Naturalist colored seeds after a day of running the Naturalist Quest.

At the beginning of September I took several days to nonstop run Naturalist quests. I figured if I did them enough I'd be set for a good while. A good while turned out to be about a month. Turns out black plants are insanely popular. I could go for longer before another Naturalist run-a-thon, but I don't want to dip too far into the black plant seeds I've built up from cross pollination in case of a special order request.

I believe I ran the quest about 250 times when all was said and done. I'll start another round of quests one of these days with the exclusive goal of obtaining black seeds. Wish me luck; they don't seem to come often.

The keep, showing the rainbow of two batches of plants nearing maturity. Campions and poppies.

At the beginning of October somebody started clearing out all of my Naturalist colored plants every day. That worked for a while, as I'd had a back stock built up, but now that I've depleted that I have to go a few days in between restocking that vendor in order for the plants to mature. I can't fit all of the seeds for a new batch to start every day for constant restocks. I've been thinking about what I need to do to rearrange the beds to fit more in my Naturalist section, but so far nothing has come to mind. Maybe I'll set aside an area on the first floor where I usually plant seeds that need to fully mature for 17 days for seed retrieval.

Luna moongate depicting a nice crowd of people.

The population has continued to be high and steady. I'm not even on during peak times and this scene above has been normal whenever I'm on. I do catch a lot of the late night PvP talk, however, which isn't always fun. I try to stay in general chat as I can catch a good sale on pets or items I'm after, so I grin and bear the off topic chat unless it gets particularly rowdy.

A classic keep design surrounded by people waiting for said keep to fall.

At the beginning of September a keep about two screens away from mine fell. I hadn't touched any IDOCs since 2017 and there were some changes earlier this year to how IDOCs work, so I thought I would attempt to get some loot and see if I could obtain another keep.

A mass of people punching the barrels to receive the IDOC loot.

The whole event was interesting, to say the least. This was the most people I'd seen on a single screen outside of EM events.

I got a few older exceptional items and a book of alacrities, which are sitting in a bag somewhere in my 18x18. Nothing grand, but I think I know a bit better how IDOCs work and can get more loot somewhere else down the line. I'm not exactly an IDOC hunter, though, so it may be a while before I attend anything else.

The Feudal Castle design, 99% undecorated.

On Lake Austin I made some efforts to try and organize the contents of the castle. I've been meaning to decorate it for a while, but it's rather hard when you don't have the skills to make furniture nor are there any vendors with decorative items or resources to train up said skills.

While cleaning out the castle I found a very, very, very old story I'd written as a nine year old. I cringe at the story nowadays, but it's one of those pieces of history I don't want to let go of. One of the beautiful things about UO is the history etched into every house, book, and individual shard. I know I would eventually regret it if I trashed this, and it's a harmless book, so why not keep it?

A mass of chests opened and displaying a full trash can.

As a part of that cleaning kick I also decided to clear out the keep of a lot of extra junk that has accumulated over the years. I've kept a lot of older magical items with the intention of disenchanting for imbuing ingredients, but as I haven't used them and they're just taking up space I went ahead and turned them in for clean up points. I know I'll get more gear to disenchant later down the line, and chances are that gear would be better to use.

The third floor of the Stones Greenhouse, the main focal point being the new Shard Shields hanging above the stairs.

After nearly a decade of refusing to touch my veteran rewards, I finally splurged and used 4 rewards for some shard shields. I got two Atlantic and two Lake Austin shields, one set of each shard, so I can easily transfer between the two.

I intend at some point to transfer from Atlantic to Lake Austin with some resources so I can begin training up some crafting skills, but right now both shards are full on character slots and I haven't decided whether I'm going to delete a character or not. I could finally buy my 7th character slot and storage increase, but I'm holding off until I decide whether I actually want to put in the time to train up the skills.

A Tokuno style ship with six crab traps floating off the east side.

I've spent some time working fishmonger quests in an attempt to obtain some fishing powerscrolls. I haven't been particularly successful, partially because I keep ended up with lobster and crab orders. Lobster and crab fishing has quickly become the bane of my existence. The current order I'm working on wants 10 spiney lobsters. I've fished for about six hours across many different sessions and am finally at nine lobsters. Eugh. In the future I may just suck it up and buy the lobsters and crabs off of the vendors instead of suffering through lobster fishing.

A work of art depicting a log forest covering all four floors of an 18x18.

In my attempt to expand my plant growing operation, I converted Nestor's old malas 18x18 into a plant growing house. This series of log pillars are my way of forcing everything into the moving crate so I don't have to worry about it for now.

A simple Borg cube to help facilitate plant growing.

 Since I don't have garden beds to fill this house with yet, I'm slowly adding in some more traditionally grown plants. So far I'm sticking with one batch, which amounts to 65 plants, as I don't want to accidentally overwhelm myself with hundreds of plants that require daily maintenance. Eventually I hope to fill this house up with more garden beds.

On Stratics the administrators have asked for help in more community contributions to their wiki and articles. In their post they stated that anybody who signed up under the Stratics or UO Stratics website could submit articles, so I figured I would sign up and contribute something about house building/decorating, fishing, or treasure maps. The issue is, there's nothing on my dashboard and I'm too much of a shy person to message or post to an administrator telling them that their post is wrong about anybody being able to submit articles. I've seen somebody else post about having an issue with posting and it seems an administer has to manually add in the ability for an account to post, so that's nipped that in the bud. I'll stick with posting here for now.