UOAlive Day 107: Honest Adventures

 

The plants have started reaching day seven, so I spent this morning cross pollinating everything I could.

I still fail to see what I'm doing wrong with fermentation. As far as I can tell, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I believe it's just meant to be an incredibly difficult process.

Ever since I achieved Seeker in Honesty, I've been enjoying a small discount on my purchases from NPCs. After looking into what it would take to get to Knight, I decided to throw some time into training some Forensic Evaluation.

I ended up making a new character and used a soulstone to transfer 50 points of Forensics onto my bard, then ate an Alacrity scroll whenever I had a decent amount of Honesty items ready for turn-in and mass used Forensics on all the lost items.

Thus began a multi-hour Honest Marathon. I spent about half an hour running through the forests of a corner of Britannia, picking up any Honesty gear I found. Then using Forensic Evaluation to narrow down the city. Then I located the NPC and dropped the lost item on them. From what I've read online, this is the quickest way to achieve Knighthood in Honesty. Lots of running around and patience!

It took a little over two and a half hours for me to get to Follower. Since I didn't have anything else planned for the day, I decided to keep going.

Along the way I happened to discover the spawn location for a couple of daily rares. 

A completely innocent interaction between two strangers. Nothing to read too much into ;)

I also had a completely honest and above board conversation with a mysterious stranger in the middle of the woods!

While looking for one particularly hard to find NPC for an honesty chestpiece, I ran across somebody else who just happened to enjoy the view of that particular building. ;)

In the end I found the location of four daily rares! I'm super excited about the bookshelves and drawers. They'll come in handy when I decorate the castle!

By about 6 PM I managed to snag Knight in Honesty. I celebrated my day of hard work by relaxing.

Just kidding, I took about 45 minutes and ran a Humility Hunt. By this point I was pretty close to 10,000 fame, and I figured getting this out of the way late in the day would give me an excuse to relax tomorrow and do other things.

In the end, a day of work has brought me a nice discount on all my NPC purchases. I don't know if I'll need to do weekly maintenance on Honesty like I do with Justice and Compassion, but either way it's worth the effort!

UOAlive Day 106: Multi-IDOC

 

I've been experimenting with fermentation in the Cooking BOD reward fermentation barrel. The long and short of it is it hasn't gone very well. LOL

Usually when a house is IDOC, I park one account at the IDOC and go resource gathering on another account. If the house falls while I'm doing this, I park my resource gathering account somewhere safe while I loot all the goodies from the IDOC. 

One nice thing we've found across many of the IDOCs are various resource stashes. This has been incredibly helpful to those of us who usually do the resource grinding for the group. This particular bag ended up being less fruitful than its weight promised - most of the weight was in unsmelted ore. 

 This IDOC only had one thing I was interested in: the empty toolbox on the porch. I still haven't discovered where this daily rare spawns, and I can think of a few ways I can use it in decorating.

I ended up getting all the loot from the IDOC. The rest of the containers had normal starter gear, resources, and loot. 

This particular house fell at about 11 PM my time. The loot ended up being a bunch of lower tier stealables and decorative items. 

There was one other person there at that point, and after a friendly chat we ended up splitting the loot between ourselves and wishing each other a good night.

UOAlive Day 105: IDOC Tower

 

A large Tower near one of the Fel shrines went IDOC today. It fell around noon and seemed to have a lot of low level junk. 

The admins did a quick login gift of a tree that looks gorgeous for autumn, so I threw one of them up at the Luna Moongate house.

UOAlive Day 103: More of the Same

 

The last couple of parents from my previous batch of plants have struggled to recover from the Misadventures of Me, so I've decided to throw the towel in on a few and set them to decorative. Luckily I've already gotten enough of the seeds I needed for the next few rounds.

A small sandstone house went IDOC today as well. The chests were full of ores and granite. Overall it wasn't a big grab.

UOAlive Day 102: Taming Tests

 

Every morning after I do my IRL morning chores, I spend about an hour tending to the plants. I've enjoyed doing this for the past couple of months, however I'm incredibly eager to be done with the process so I can move on to using garden beds exclusively.

Something thing we've built a stock of across our IDOC adventures is some pre-trained pets. I finally decided to take a few of these pets out to see if I could use them on my tamer. So far, there are a few that I can see myself using more often. More testing is needed, however.

Not much was done in the world of Britannia today. I've been trying out a different server of a different game with the friends I've mentioned throughout these posts. I don't think I'll stick with that particular server, but I've enjoyed some of the adventures we've been on and memories we've made.

UOAlive Day 101: Seeker of Humility

 

One of the things I still struggle to keep up with is the difference between ServUO based gardening and OSI-based Gardening. In my personal opinion, OSI gardening is a lot more forgiving than ServUO, and it can be really hard to commit to old school plant-bowl-and-potions based growing on ServUO in any meaningful way long term when the plant growing timers are very much dependent on your active input into the system. If I plant something at 6 AM one morning, I need to check that plant and tend to it at exactly 6 AM every single day until it reaches the desired age if I don't want to lose any efficiency in time. On OSI, I just have to check at some point during the day and tend to the plant. The only daily check the server does for age and tending coincides with the daily restarts.

In any case, part of why I attempt to grow at least two seed-bearing parents to full maturity while building up my seed collection is to cover loss of desired output through disease, mess-ups, and black/white seed mutations. Fortunately I think I'm still able to get everything I need even with some of these hiccups.

I decided to turn in a few scribe quests for a personal project and came across this lovely accounting anomaly. Thank goodness this is being very precise! :)

Since I grew bored of waiting to receive red books, I took some time to run some Humility Hunts. I've found that my bard can handle hiryus quite well. Usually I start a humility hunt and hunt for an hour or two until I've hit 'Lady' fame status, then turn around and Sacrifice that fame to a mob to gain Humility. It's not something I do every day, but eventually I hope to be able to hunt more nasty mobs for higher fame gains without worrying about gaining in Humility.

Today's hiryu hunts have brought me one step closer to Knight of Humility! Woo! I don't quite remember if there's anything good one gets from having high Humility, but it's something fun to do and I've enjoyed having little silly goals every day I play.

UOAlive Day 98: Home Stretch & General Organization

 

Today I've begun the home stretch for my grand plant growing adventure. The final round has been planted and I've had to temporarily claim the third floor of the castle to fit all the plants.

Fortunately, I don't see myself pushing to decorate this area of the castle any time soon. The plants are free to claim the area for the foreseeable future.

I took a bit of time to organize the last lot of IDOCs the crew and I have managed to snag over the past couple of weeks and made some mental plans for how I want to decorate certain areas of the castle.

In preparation for some long term plans I have in mind, I ran through many of the cotton fields across Trammel and Felucca to grab some cotton. Sometimes when I do this, I'll finish by running the cotton through some spinning wheels and looms and gather the cut up cloth. Other times I just leave myself a container of cotton to get to later. Either way, it's a quick thing I do when I can't think of anything else to do and it helps cut down my resource costs for decorating and such.

UOAlive Day 96: Yet Another IDOC

 

Today one of the runes in our Greatly Worn runebook went IDOC, so Snow and I spent a decent portion of the day parked here with our characters on one screen while we played a different game on our main screen. 

At some point some petty drama broke out in the in-game general chat, with people giving unasked for opinions about others' playstyles, and Tr1age, one of the admins, stepped in to remind everybody to be kind. 

I know this server is smaller than Atlantic on OSI, for example. However, I appreciate how active the admins are in maintaining a playful, kind community for players of all ages and experiences. The players that are here are incredibly active and helpful towards others, and I appreciate the admin's hand in fostering such a wonderful atmosphere.

The house fell in the early afternoon where I live, leaving Snow and I to grab most of the goodies. It appears that this house was used as somebody's dropping grounds for their adventures - their many bags and containers suggested fishing and treasure maps. Unfortunately the loot wasn't super exciting. We got a few cool things to use as deco, though, so we were happy.

UOAlive Day 95: Toothless Hunting & Virtues

 

I've made a few attempts at taming a Toothless for myself over the past few days, but something has always ended up snatching him from my grasp. The story of this guy is a silly drama for another day. In the end, somebody else took this Toothless home with them.

This guy ended up spawning as a paragon, so I lost out on the opportunity to tame myself one. Over the past few weeks, the Toothless spawn has seen a constant string of hopeful tamers.

I finally got myself to Seeker of Sacrifice as well. I don't know how long I think it'll take for me to reach knight in all virtues. My little steps towards that goals have gone well, however, so I have no complaints.

UOAlive Day 92: Quick Grinds

 

Today I took one of the repair benches we picked up from an IDOC, placed it in the guild Fortress, and pre-stocked it with whatever crafting repair deeds I could. I know we can easily access the public rune library repair bench, but sometimes it might be nice to have our own repair bench while we sort through our goodies.

I spent some time in Ocllo killing murderers for Justice. I also did some maintenance work on my compassion via the Holy Grail quest.

After doing a bit of reading on the benefits of honesty, I took an hour to run around Britannia and find lost NPC gear. I turned in a couple hundred pieces at various lost and found boxes until I found myself a seeker of Honesty. Not bad for a quick day of play!

UOAlive Day 91: SEED BOX!

 

Snow realized this morning that she was able to claim a seed box before we expected to be able to. She let me know and I immediately grabbed one for myself. I'm holding off on spending the rest of my veteran rewards on seed boxes, however, because I know they have caused problems on this server in the past. Apparently they used to be tied to a lot of crashes and about a year ago the admins took the item completely out of the server and deleted existing ones. Reading through the Discord channels tells me there used to be quite an active gardening community that then grouped together and shared their seeds to get everybody back to where they used to be. Since plant growing is such a big part of the game for me, I don't want to put all of my seeds into an item that may end up being removed. This is really handy to have to identify seeds right off the bat, though!

I ran a few treasure maps today. I need more gold after I spent a good chunk of it on some stat petal rose vases from the gold sink stone.

I set up the petal vases on my Luna Moongate house steps and let the crew know where they could pick up some of their own stats.

Then I took a decent bit of time and organized the mass of treasure maps we had slowly accumulated over many adventures and IDOCs.

Throughout the day, I bought as many reagents as I could from various vendors around Britannia. While doing so, my beetle bugged out and ended up showing double for a moment.

I've been slowly pre-stocking things I know I'm going to want to have for various long term projects. One of those things is an inscription goods vendor.

UOAlive Day 90: Black Seed Mutation & IDOC

 

Today was a cross pollinating day for my plant growing. I managed to get another black seed mutation. I'm happy about getting these, because these are rarer seed and plant varieties to have, but it cuts down on the expected seeds I intend to get when each round finishes producing seeds.

We had another IDOC today. I ended up spending most of my time sitting by this house while I handled stuff around the house IRL again. It ended up falling after everybody else had gotten off for the night, so I was the one who grabbed all the loot.

I'm not entirely sure this specific IDOC was worth it. It looks like somebody went SOS fishing and treasure hunting, grabbed all the loot, and shoved it in their house without sorting through it at all. There was a lot of trash for me to clean up and resources for me to consolidate. Sometimes, cleaning up this IDOC loot can feel like a full time job LOL.