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.

UOD: January 22, 2020

I had a random trove map begging to be dug up, so I thought it would be a quick and easy process with Rakuyn's help.

Unfortunately I may or may not have accidentally pressed my mind blast macro instead of greater heal and mind blasted myself at a critical moment when a heal was really what I needed.

Cue grey screen of death.

Luckily there were several wandering healers nearby to help us get back on our adventuring way. I've built up quite a stock of mysterious fragments so I decided to throw them on a vendor at 5k per. They've been selling quite well.

Since felucca has better loot for a variety of items, I thought I would try my hand at fishing up some SOSs in fel. The result was less than encouraging. I only got the lowest luck tier of chests, something I never got whilst fishing in tram. I think I'll stick with my trammel fishing adventures from now on.

While sailing around I happened upon another plunderbeacon. I promptly summoned Rakuyn and we managed to take down the ship in a few minutes. Now that we know how to handle these guys, they're really easy!

A little ways away from the plunderbeacon we happened across two orc pirate ships! The first was an easy kill, but the second one kept sailing away as we were trying to cannonball them to the depths.

We also discovered that the pirate lord captains give an incredible amount of 'soul' to fill our ethereal soulbinders with, so we turned in said soulbinders to get some fellowship silver and buy an Ensign title deed. It's fitting since I've been watching Star Trek while on mass Naturalist quest runs.

I took about two hours to run many back to back Naturalist quests. I got 25 fire red/black/white seeds in all, so I'm a happy camper. Someone bought up all of my naturalist plants so I'll have to make sure I stock them as soon as they finish maturing. At a quick glance I believe I'm about a round and a half  of mass-planting away before all of my vendors are at a fully stocked starting point. Then I can concentrate on building up a back stock and cross pollinating for colored bonsai, black, and white seeds.

UOD: January 20, 2020 - A Pirate's Life For Me

Ah. The beautiful gray of failure.

I still don't fully understand how this happened. I looked away from the screen for two seconds to move some cords out of my way. The next moment I was dead. I've never had particular issues handling succubi before. Something about today had all of them scrambling to kill me even as they were actively peaced.

Since killing succubi wasn't going all that great, I thought I would finally try some pirating. The Rising Tide event line added in more ship battles and rewards -shoulder parrot? Yes please!- and I've been meaning to try out this content for a while.

Since I lost all of my cannoneering gear in The Accident I had to start from scratch to craft all of the necessary items. Rising Tide eliminated some of the click spam required to set up the cannons, but the general resources are still the same. Saltpeter is forever over 300gp, costing me between 160 and 200k gold per 500. I sunk a few million into ingredients, crafted wildly, dispensed the resources throughout my cannons, and took off.

Rakuyn decided to join me as he's really big on sea type adventures, regardless of game. His greater dragon proved invaluable in holding aggro and helping us take down some mobs.

Imagine my surprise when the first enemy I came across was a plunderbeacon!

Our first attempt to take the orcs head on ended in failure. My ship got scuttled, and we had to crawl our way back to a nearby shore in order to  repair.

The next time we approached the beacon, I found out that we had to hang out in areas of the water that weren't directly in front of cannons, like above. Go figure. If you don't want to get hit by cannonballs, don't sit in front of the cannons.

Killing the orcs was easy enough once we figured out the sweet spots to stay in and keep our galleon safe. Then it was just a matter of parking some cannons in front of the beacon and firing like mad.

The end result was a very satisfying explosion, followed by a sinking animation of the entire setup.

Rakuyn and I decided to pool our resources together and have one of us turn in all of the maritime trade cargo for points. This plunderbeacon gave us 24,000 Doubloons! We're well on our way to earning our own triton statues, which can then be turned into pets if we so desire.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I've been slowly buying up bones for my tailoring purposes. It took me about 4 days straight of keeping my eye on vendors, but I'm finally at about 90k bones. Today while pirating someone kept spamming chat and asking for 'bulk tailoring bones', offering a measly 1m per 60k.

While I understand that buying the bones yourself would only cost 180k per full stack, the fact that there are only two vendors that stock bones, the max they can ever hold at a time is 999, and restocking takes up to an hour means my time is worth much more than 820k profit.

In any case, I've been keeping an eye on the vendors again to gather up some more bones. In working through my BODs I've realized that I have a lot of bone BODs and it would behoove me to stock up on the bones now before I get around to filling them.

UOD: January 19, 2020

In an effort to build up some supplies, I've been alternating between running the naturalist quest and solen friend quest to build up some more seeds and powder of translocation. Rakuyn and I have been using our bags of sending rather frequently to send treasure map goodies back to our banks.

Rakuyn has been expanding his gameplay into aspects I've never touched. He has necromancy, alchemy, and pretty much all of the melee skills that I've maybe touched once or twice while playing on Test Center many a year ago. As a result, he's exploring and working through gameplay I can no longer help him with. I don't even know what stats he needs to look for on his gear, or what weapons skills he should be using. It's fun to watch him explore this, however.

Training with the crimson and platinum drakes has gone well. I've finished the crimson and added in some magery skills, which I think I may end up regretting. I think I may scrap that guy and concentrate on a different build with the platinum drake once I get those final 13 points.

On the 15th Majestic Oaks Auction visited to run a rares auction. The auction ended up lasting for two hours, with various EM and high-value items being sold.

I don't believe any regular auctions have been run since the couple I wrote about from 2017 stopped their auctions. I don't know what made them stop, but this has been a community event I've missed. Though I've rarely bought from auctions throughout my years, I've always attended them.

In a stroke of genius I thought to try and solo a Lady Mel with the cu I had trained in late 2017.

The quest to kill the insane dryads seemed easy enough... until I aggrod Abcess, who proceeded to one shot me.

Rakuyn came to help, and a bloodbath ensued. All we were trying to do was reclaim our bodies and leave. Instead we spent an hour running in, grabbing our bodies, and taking a few steps towards the entrance before succumbing to more mobs.

Yeeeah... next time I'll try a bit more planning and mob control. Arrogance was my enemy.

I've finished setting up the vendors. They're now all properly named and have appropriate items in front of them to help me with stocking. They're not fully stocked, but there's not much more I can do to speed that process up.

The vendors are successful. I frequently get visitors while puttering around the house, and my white and black plants always sell within a few days. The one 'competitor' full scale plant vendor house that used to exist on Atlantic in 2017 is no longer around, so I'm assuming that makes my vendors the only option a lot of people have. There are some smaller scale plant vendors scattered across the shard, but I haven't seen anything that offers a complete plant variety like my house does. I don't blame anyone, either. The plants can be hit or miss, plus they can be rather tedious to upkeep. You have to really like gardening to keep up with this long term.

On the planting front, I've continued to harvest what I can when I can. The first floor has turned into a seed gathering floor. As I've planted rounds, I've noticed certain seeds are getting low in stock. Having a single floor to separate out the plants that need more time to produce resources helps me remember what I need to do with certain plants. If they're not here (or the lamp isn't on) then I can prune them as soon as they mature.

During downtimes when I'm not feeling up to filling more BODs I swap out provocation for inscription on my bard and mass make spell scrolls. I've been alternating between making gate and recall scroll mostly, but I've started working on a stock of at least 100 of every single spell scroll with a vague intention of selling fully loaded spellbooks. I'm also considering stocking some runebooks and atlases, both marked and empty. I'll have to sit and think on the marked aspect, though. I've kept a marked runebook vendor before and it can be tedious work to fill each runebook, even using a Pen of Wisdom.

UOD: January 14, 2020

I finally decided to try out some of the new aquarium decorations. Since I'm rather limited on aquarium space, I decided to go with the small 1x1 footprint. I threw in 12 random fish I obtained with my GM fisher off the coast of Moonglow. We'll see what kind of rewards I get.

Rakuyn and I have taken to running several treasure maps in our free time. I sacrifice my meditation for Cartography and he sacrifices his meditation for Lockpicking. With our suits' Mana Regen values we've yet to run into any issues needing mana.

The loot is pretty nice. I have a lovely stock of mysterious fragments now, which are used for the Shrine Battles. I've also picked up some decent mage gear for my tamer, who's been needing an upgrade for a while now.

I do miss all of the decorative items I used to get from these treasure maps. Now the most valuable items are the scrolls of alacrity and transcendence. Across a good 30+ maps ranging from cache to trove I've only gotten one vine decoration. Phooey.

I decided to hop on my tamer and kill a few solen queens for their crystal balls of pet summoning. While killing them, I went ahead and ran the Ambitious Solen Queen quest a few times so I could stock up on some bags of sending.

I also decided to try out some more pet training. I haven't trained anything on production servers since late 2017, and the cu I was training back then is no longer considered a good build. That's partly why I didn't train very many pets. I wanted all of the dust from the pet training update to settle before I committed any more pets or resources to training anything. Nowadays there are wonderful resources and sample builds to help you optimize your pets for whatever purpose you need them for.

UOD: January 11, 2020

I've finally done my first Corgul. People have been running it more frequently, or at least more publicly, with the current Forsaken Foes storyline. The ethereal sand is needed to make ethereal soulbinders, which store the souls of various special creatures that can then be turned in for fellowship coins to get a few rewards. As I've been watching quite a lot of Star Trek whilst playing, I definitely have my eye on the Ensign, Commander, and Captain reward titles.

My second round of plant growing and cross pollination has produced 4 more plants that are giving me white or black seeds. I'm not entirely sure how many more rounds will be taken up by plant vendor restocks, but eventually I intend to build up a stash of white and black seeds of every cross pollination variety.

While filling out more of the BODs I have in storage, I've been buying bones from the Mystic vendors in Ter Mur. While most other reagents and ingredients can be found on player vendors, it doesn't appear that anyone sells bones. So far I've gotten around 60,000 through several days of buying.

Since Krampus is still running, I've helped kill him a few times when I'm not doing anything else. I can't say I've gotten anything good, even with doing the prerequisite 3 trade order runs, but it's always fun to participate in these events while they're going.

UOD: January 5, 2020

Yesterday I decided to run through the questline for the new Jolly Roger content  in preparation to get one of the virtue tabards. I thought the Krampus runs were done, so I thought I would turn my attentions to the rest of the content.

Thus ensued a lot of sitting around. A lot of the steps to the quest were gated behind certain timeframes in game, so I found myself sitting and talking to Rakuyn while passing the time by. Eventually I completed the quest, converted my Fellowship Medallion into a blue one, and got on with my day.

I've been running more naturalist quests during my down time. Every so often I run into people doing their own thing, which is really nice to see. Just about anywhere I go, regardless of time of day, I usually run into someone.

Today someone wanted to run the Honor shrine battle several times, and since that's the virtue I wanted a tabard for, Rakuyn and I helped. It wasn't too difficult, though some of the poison-happy bosses are a pain.

It took about an hour to get credit for all 8 bosses I needed, but the end result was worth it. I prefer the look of the tabard over the Hawkwind's robe, and since I can put the Hawkwind stats onto the tabard I get all of the stat benefits too!