UOAlive Day 75: Jolly Roger Treasure Maps

 

On OSI, my bard runs around with a monstrous stash of lutes tuned to Stones. To do this, you have to run the Jolly Roger questline. Today I decided to finally do the questline on this server and claim my beautiful unique bard music reward.

Unfortunately, on this server playing the lute in the correct place with the music sheets doesn't for some reason. I'm going to have to submit a bug report one of these days.

After that failed, I spent the rest of my UO time today working on treasure maps. Across all of our hunting and IDOC looting we've gotten a decent stock of level 1-3 T-Maps, so I do some now and then just to keep our chests from overfilling. The gold is a major bonus, as so much of what I want to do revolves around having gold.

UOAlive Day 74: Organizing

 

Today I decided I would try and help out the crew by organizing our IDOC loot. For a while now, we've been throwing all of our IDOC loot into the skeleton containers on the porch of Balf's house. Snow has been keeping the loot organized, but it's a big job and we've started running out of space.

I ended up sorting out a ton of mysterious fragments, instruments, armor refinements, and talismen.

I also found an extra recipe of rotworm stew, so I went ahead and grabbed that.

That was pretty much it in my UO world today. Organizing all of the loot from your adventures can take a lot of time, especially when you have real world tugging at your attention as well.

UOAlive Day 73: Decorating A Castle is Hard

Today I spent a bit of time working on the kitching and dining area of my castle. I decided to spend some Sovereigns on the decorative kitchen set to see how I liked the look of it in my build. I stopped because a color and furniture combination I settled on requires some natural dyes in colors I don't have yet. I should really make a check list of things I need and want to do. I have so many half scattered projects across my houses.

Bought powder of fortification and fully fortified everything I could in my suit. I'd like to replace my pants eventually, but they hold a critical amount of my resists I need for all 70. Their maximum durability is only 50.

We had two IDOCS today as well. Snow ended up bringing a newer player to one of them to show him and we all had a friendly chitchat before the house fell.

They ended up leaving a message on the bulletin board in the house, which I found later as we were all sorting through the loot.

UOAlive Day 72: Plundering Some Pirates

 

Today was the day! I was ready! Pirates beware! I did my normal daily plant tending and Holy Grail escorting, then promptly got my ship ready and sailed off to find some pirates.

The first structure I came across was a plunderbeacon. I should've passed this up, in hindsight, as there are no pirate captains to drop the fated shirt, but it was fun seeing if I could even solo this structure alone.

It took a good 20 minutes, but I managed it! I did have to use my rowboat to get close enough to attack all of the mobs, as there was no way I could get my ship close enough to cast spells without my ship also taking damage. That was annoying, but in the end I was able to get all of the crew killed and the beacon destroyed.

It took about five minutes of sailing before I came across an orcish pirate boat. I wasn't 100% sure this was who I was after, but I also just wanted to have fun blowing their ship up with cannons.

It took me a while. I don't deal much damage and the orc crew members have a lot of health. In the end I had to crash my boat into theirs to lock them in place and slowly whittle each of them down using provocation and magery. The orc captain had the shirt I wanted, so I decided to repair and be on my way.

The repair was expensive in resources, but I think the prize was worth it.

Before I could complete my transmog look, I needed a specific tailor BOD color cloth. I quickly threw a few of those together before I had what I needed.

This is my before...

And this is my after! Not 100% perfect, and I'll probably make adjustments along the line, but this is the best my character has looked so far on this server.

All of my adventures have had my pockets empty and my fame levels wanting, so I took some time to kill hiryus and replenish both.

When I got sick of that, I took some more time to mine some ore and granite. At some point I hope to set up a stone wares vendor, but who knows when or if that'll happen.

UOAlive Day 70: Sailing Prep

 

I have found it. The ultimate weapon. Everybody shall bow down before me in fear of my might. There is no saving Britannia for what I have in store. I shall cut swaths across every being who dares stand before me. Even the players! Especially the players!

Nevermind that there is no non-consensual PvP on this server, or the fact that always have been and always will be horrible at PvP.

Snow let me know that I could transmog my tabard to a much better looking shirt. I rushed to the UO Store, bought my transmog potion, got my shirt...

and was told by my transmogrification potion that 'that is not a valid robe-slot item.'

GRRRR. I double checked with Snow on the shirt, and she said that this is a special shirt dropped by some pirate captains that for some reason is coded as a robe slot item. So I would have to kill some pirates and make sure I loot their clothes off their body to be able to finish my character's look.

Thus began a mining spree. I know that I can spend ingots on High Seas cannons and cannon supplies at the magical stone exchange, and that exchange turns out to be much cheaper resource-wise than crafting all of the goods myself. I also know that I will run through a potentially inordinate amount of ingots, wood, and cloth repairing my ship and cannons for these battles.

However, I needed more ingots than I had and I wasn't willing to pay vendor prices when a few hours with a shovel and some beetles will suffice just fine. :)

UOAlive Day 68: So It Begins

 

As the evidence of my Holy Grail quest repeats grows, the raised garden beds on the roof of my main castle finally have finished producing seeds and I've collected the results and moved the beds to the Greenhouse.

I also started on my fresh, bigger, better, grander first batch of plants. The first batch isn't so bad - only 90 plants total for a goal of 45 resulting seed types/colors. The second batch won't even be that bad, either; 98 plants for 49 seed types/colors. The third one, however, will kill me. 256 plants for a total of 128 different seed types/colors. I may end up splitting that last batch in two or three. I haven't decided yet. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

UOAlive Day 66: I Am Compassionate

 

Finally, after what feels like ages, I have achieved my second path in compassion. There's not much more I can do to make this go faster, unless I want to grind out dungeon escorts for higher compassion gains per individual escort. I'm still limited to 5 escorts per 24-hour period, though, and for about a half hour's worth of work I'd rather just escort Holy Grail quest NPCs so I don't have to deal with all of the mobs that tend to hang out around the higher reward escort quests. Seeing as these are custom NPCs, I don't even know how much compassion they give. For all I know these guys give the same amount of compassion per run as the dungeon escorts. In any case, I'm sticking to the Holy Grail. It is the Holy Grail, after all. :)

In other news, I've decided to go ahead and re-start my plants using my better, faster, but more intensive method. I'll keep tending to the plants from my old route, but once they're done producing seeds I'm going to concentrate on the better path forward.

UOAlive Day 60: Another IDOC

 

Today I didn't spent much time actively playing UO. Instead I sat at this IDOC while I worked on my plant spreadsheet. I figured out that I messed up some of my calculations with the way I'm currently growing my plants, and there's a much faster, albeit resource and time intensive way to get all of the original 17 plants in all of their 13 color variations. I'm kind of torn on this. On one hand, I don't want to overwhelm myself and make a mistake that may cost me several weeks' worth of progress if I mess up this new route. On the other, this wouldn't be the first time I've planted a metric buttload of plants and I really want all of the plants, dangit!

I'll sit on this while I let my current batch of plants grow and wait a bit to make a decision.

UOAlive Day 59: The Greenhouse & Plant Emporium

 

The Greenhouse & Plant Emporium on UOAlive

I've been a treasure map fiend over the past several days. Such a fiend, in fact, that I've ended up with over two million gold. That's more than enough to place a third castle... in fact I've been wanting to set up a greenhouse that's meant exclusively to grow and sell plants. Hmmm....

In the end I went ahead and placed the castle. In a worst case scenario, I'll decide this was a bad idea, take everything out of the castle, and tear it down, in which case I'm only out time. A lot of time. It took me about 12 hours to finalize this design, and I still managed to not include everything I wanted. There were a few places where I wanted to add some window 'boxes' to place some campions, but I immediately placed down my unused garden beds and filled them with plants so I guess this is the final design.

The first floor will be the main floor. The first room you go into, at the top left, will be the vendor set up. I intend to separate out each vendor by plant type, then separated further by 'plain/dull' and 'bright' varieties. There are additional vendor spots for more vendors for me to add as I see the need, whether for natural dyes or plant resources. The room behind the vendor room will be my storage for the entire house. It'll house backup stock, seeds, and resources, as well as any additional stuff I may find I need as time goes on.

The entire rest of the house is exclusively designated for raised garden beds. If you look in the picture above, the golden circles in the white floor section are where I've already planned out some garden beds.

The rest of the house is much the same. I went for a very aesthetic look, simply because I didn't want to stare at a borg cube for the rest of my time playing here and using this as a greenhouse, but at its core everything is designed with function in mind.

Any suspicious 3x3 or 2x3 tiles are where I've specifically planned for garden beds to go.

In all, I have specific places planned out for 98 raised garden beds. There's plenty of space for more garden beds, but that will be a ways down the line before I ever reach that point. If I ever reach that point hehe.

As a part of adding to my garden bed collection, I went ahead and spent 4000 Sovereign points (received by turning in Kudos and/or completing achievements) on six garden beds. I've been letting my sovereigns build up as I can't think of anything I want to get with them at the moment, so I figured a little boost towards my plant growing desires won't go awry.

Technically it's 'cheaper' to spend gold on individual raised garden beds from the magical stone exchange, but my bank is tapped and these sovereigns were free for just being logged into the game. After this I'm probably going to hold onto my sovereigns for other things I can only buy on the UO Store, but this is a nice fallback if I need a few garden beds and don't have the gold to buy them.

UOAlive Day 56: House Update & I Know Nothing

I'm slowly fixing customization errors and adding new bits and pieces to my Luna moongate house to get it decorated. I still can't decide whether this house will have any function outside of the eventual vendors I will add. It's in a handy, easy-to-reach place for all of my characters, but I will eventually have my own set of house teleporters to travel to my different houses. Maybe I'll end up splitting stuff? I don't know. I'll have to think on it as time goes on.

The only part of my main castle that sees any action is the roof. I've been throwing all of my plant related stuff up here, and I haven't bothered to take down the Holy Grail stuff I laid out to show the crew what the rewards are. 

I'm waiting for the plants on the raised garden beds to stop producing seeds so I can remove them and do some customizing in the kitchen area. I've discovered that some of the decorating tricks I like to do, such as 'breaking' house add-ons, doesn't work on this server. That has changed how I intend to set up counters, sinks, tables, etc. in quite a major way. It's frustrating, but I'm also looking forward to the ways in which I can stretch my creative muscles to get a good look within the confines of UO.

Occasionally I find legendaries while I'm looting mobs. I know that if they're legendary, they're typically not something you want to get rid of. I'm a bit lost if it's anything non-mage related, however. I have no clue what stats are good on a sampire's suit (wait, isn't sampire spellcaster? I don't know, this is beyond my knowledge). Or a 'dexxer' suit? if that's still what they're called? I know there's information out there, but I struggle to parse it out into terms I can understand. I know I could, but I enjoy the builds I play on so much I don't really have much incentive to look into other builds.

Looking at this piece, outside of the ridiculous resists it seems to have, I have no clue if it's good or not. It doesn't fit typical mage leggings I would want. I'm just going to have to ask one of the crew if they know it's any good LOL.

UOAlive Day 55: More of the Same

 

On the Holy Grail front, we've had some issues with the mobs that drop crucial keys needed to progress the questline ending up locked behind the very doors they hold the keys to. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but given that these mobs don't attack you unless you attack them... *shrug*

The good thing is, the keys all drop with 2 uses, and they have no expiry timer, so I've kept a backup stock to help when a situation like this happens.

I actually started organizing my Luna house a bit. I don't think it'll ever be perfect until I move my main activities to one of my other houses, but this is good enough for now. I'm not too incredibly fussed on making sure everything has a nice and neat permanent home, as even my scattered bags and containers across the floor have their specific purposes, but I would like this to eventually get cleaned up and look nice.

I've continued running treasure maps whenever I find myself wondering what to do. I appreciate that all of the relevant treasure map skills are free skills on this server, so you don't need to create a character exclusively for treasure maps, nor do you have to sacrifice skills in order to complete them. Just grab whatever character you want to do them on and train the relevant skills, then you're good to go!

Haha mentioned a while back that he wanted a ton of large shadow granite tables, so I took some time to make a bunch and spam them in his second floor. I don't know if or when he will notice the tables, but they're there and all set up for whatever he wants to do with the house. He still hasn't gotten back to Snow and I on us building him a custom castle design, as he doesn't care to do it himself and just went with one of the prebuilt custom castle designs. I don't think he really cares any more, since a lot of the crew have moved on to other games as their primary game. They still play UO, but only for special big events or to help out with IDOCs.

UOAlive Day 54: Daily Habits & Treasure Maps

 

My mornings have turned into plant tending, followed by a run of the entire Holy Grail questline. Depending on how many other people are trying to do the quest, it takes me between 50 minutes and an hour to do a full run of the quest. Not bad, given a huge portion of the questline is gated behind escort quests that have a five minute cooldown timer.

I've started doing Treasure Maps. This has been an interesting experience. On OSI I only ever touch the two highest difficulty treasure maps, because what I'm usually after is specific loot drops outside of the gold you get across all treasure maps. On this server Hoard and Trove treasure maps are really hard to come by, so we make do with Stashes, Caches, and Supplies. I'm also quite poor in comparison to what I've built across years of playing on OSI. It makes sense, but I still carry a lot of my old preferences in content I do because I'm not used to gold being anywhere near a primary concern. I've quickly learned that this is a really great way to make a lot of gold if you have a lot of treasure maps close together. At these low levels, even my bard clears each chest in less than ten minutes, including the time it takes to locate the chest location! 

That's pretty much been my day. I set up a very rudimentary T-Map loot drop off point at my Luna moongate house. Eventually I'll go through it and sort it... just like I've been intending to clean up everything else in that house...

UOAlive Day 53: A Quick IDOC

 

I didn't end up doing much in the world of Britannia today. There was another IDOC, so the crew and I set up our characters at the house and chitchatted while we did other things. I got back to cleaning and again, once the house fell, I helped throw the goodies in our drop off spot before getting back to cleaning.

UOAlive Day 52: Double IDOC

 

Snow ended up placing a house near Yew, and she's found a weird basement under her home that she can get to but can't really decorate. Overall, it seems pretty buggy.

I do remember reading older forum posts on the UOAlive forums about cellars being removed due to bugginess, so we're thinking this is a remnant from that old system.

Today we had two houses go IDOC. I set up my characters to AFK at each of these houses while I did some cleaning and tidying up my home IRL. I helped shove all of the stuff we managed to grab into our designated IDOC drop off area, but I didn't stick around to see what all we got.

UOAlive Day 51: Monty Python & The Holy Grail

 

King Authur's initial quest text for the custom Monty Python questline on UOAlive

I woke up today eager to try out this new quest, so after doing my daily plant tending I ran off to start the quest line.

The quest turned out to be quite easy, if you knew the source movie in combination with aspects of UO's lore. Where my knowledge failed, I was able to Google enough information (if Luna isn't the city of Paladins this quest is referring to, where else is referred to as such?)

I took screenshots throughout the process but they're rather redundant for those who don't care about the storyline and just want the loot. The admins have indicated that they really want people to try before they ask for help, and the players themselves seem to want to figure out the quest line with spoiler free hints, so maybe I'll save an in depth write up for later once people have had a chance to organically try out the quest.

As I was working on the quest, this notification came up from the admins.

I ended up taking that down time to quickly check all of our IDOC runes to see if any houses were about to fall.

Once the server came back up, it took me about three hours to complete the questline. I received an Arthur's Token and various decor items, which I thought was neat, but at that point the biggest value I had from the experience was the quest story itself. It seemed like a perfect blend between Monty Python and Ultima Online.

After checking Discord, however, I found out the token could be turned in for a further reward.

 I ended up picking the mage's staff, as I had no clue whether this quest was repeatable and I figured something for a mage would be best for what kinds of characters I play.

The first thing I noticed was this tabard in the chest. This has insane stats for a robe slot item and really frees up faster casting and faster cast recovery stats that I would normally primarily carry on my jewelry. 

In all, there are quite a few great things you get while you complete this questline. The heritage token is quite nice. I don't know if I'm going to use the Nee Landscaping Deed, which adds the waterfall, plant, and benches, as their palette doesn't fit the build style I've gone with. The display case is gorgeous, and I want to find out a way to incorporate it into my house decoration. That's a down-the-line goal, though, as it'll take me a very long time to fully decorate my houses. Assuming I don't grow bored of the designs and change them.

On a hunch, I decided to see if this quest is repeatable. Turns out, it is! So I set off to run the quest again and ensure I marked all of the runes I needed to optimize my quest completion on later runs.

Since this quest involves a lot of escorting, I've decided to stop looking for damsels in distress on Ice Island and instead just run this quest every day while I'm trying to gain in Compassion. That way I also build up a stock of the quest rewards for decorating down the line.

Since I've been needing to update my suit, I took this time to go through our smorgasbord of gear that we've been collecting over the past few months and get my gear up to par. I now have full 70 resists, FC/FCR, Spell Damage Increase, and I've pumped my character as full of mana increases and mana regens as I could manage without sacrificing my resists. I don't think this will be my true endgame suit, but it definitely has made a massive difference in how I perform when out adventuring.

I finished out my day by turning cotton into more cloth. I occasionally go around Britannia and grab whatever cotton I can find, but turning the cotton into bolts of cloth and then cut up cloth is something I don't do as often, because it can be pretty time consuming. This way I'll slowly build up a nice stock of cloth to do whatever with, whether that's BODs, training, ship repairs, or general crafting.