New areas of The Mana World

The main server of The Mana World has added a new area filled with undead creatures. I'm not terribly fond of the mist which is extremely bright. The skeletons are difficult to kill, even at level 68 I almost got my but kicked. The reward for killing a skeleton was almost 5,000 experience, but they can do almost 350 hp damage if they score a critical hit, a couple of those will wipe out most characters. Poltergeists were much easier to kill on their own, and the experience was similar, but don't even attempt to attack a Poltergeist in an area swarming with them, you'll due in seconds. One might do 1 point of damage, but 15 can knock you down to nothing pretty quick. I haven't tried attacking Will'o'Wisps yet. I did a little wandering around but haven't found any kind of town in the area. Skeletons and Lady Skeletons will attack you on sight, and they move quite rapidly. Most of the other undead won't attack unless you attack first.

Training Day

I found a good training place in the desert caves for those high level characters (I'm 68) who can handle a couple of mountain snakes, but not 5 or 6 a time. In addition to mountain snakes this area is filled with yellow slimes, which means more iron ore drops, spiders (keys and infantry helmets), and of course skins, tongues and eggs from the mountain snakes. Spiders usually give around 300xp, mountain snakes over 400xp, and red slimes (which also frequent the area) drop some nice stuff that's worth 500+ gold. You won't level fast, but if you're on that last 20% it's a nice place if you can spend the time. So far it isn't filled with other players.

Helping a higher level character

You never know when your knowledge will come in handy... For example, I'm a level 68 character, and along with Kamu, currently 76, we hit the snake pit. Kamu is much more powerful than I am... but I got to help him today, by referring him to my instructions on how to compile The Mana World under Ubuntu 9.04.

There are instructions out there, but few as simple as what I've posted I think... Hopefully it really does help him out, because lack of storage really sucks!

eAthena server confusion

So I checked out the eAthena server to our mediacentre PC in hopes of trying some things locally, got everything set up and ran the eathena.sh start script only to get:

charm@mediacentre:~/eathena$ ./eathena.sh start
Starting eathena monitor...
./eathena.sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Not sure what's going on here. Think it's the paths and that I've messed up somewhere. Both git repos were put in: /home/charm under their respective directories. I set up a symbolic link to tmwserver:

ln -s eathena-data/ tmwserver

And that's in ~ (home)... so eathena.sh should be looking at it. Wondering if I was suppose to check out the eathena-data directory in the eathena directory and symbolically link it to eathena/eathena-data? Hmmn... better to move on to something fun for the moment, the cocoons await.

Cocoon hunt

Of course my romp in the forest north west of Hurnscald continues for cocoons. I've managed to amass enough that I now have 7 robes (that's 7 x 150 cocoons = 1050 cocoons). I've been asked why I'm wasting my time when I could be stacking, levelling up fast, and just buying the cocoons with money. The answer is pretty simple: while stacking will raise my level faster it doesn't help a lot with money (keys are worth next to nothing and helmets only drop once in a blue moon). But there are lots of benefits to hunting for cocoons in the forest north-west of Hurnscald, including: usually you also hunt herbs (I gave away 1200 herbs, 300 of each kind yesterday for a drop), there's also a lot of clover patches, and while I still haven't found the elusive 4 leaf clover, I'm sure cutting the patches doesn't hurt (rumour is they spawn somewhere around every 500 clover patches, I think I'm close to that number by now). There's also other creatures around (gave away 200 bugs legs yesterday also). Ultimately it's a collector's breeding ground.

One bone headed thing I keep doing is giving away Iron Ore (it was to a good cause for a drop), but I found myself needing it for Orange Dye... Not a big deal since I haven't got enough cocoons for my 8th robe yet. I've been keeping a lot in storage, the storage in The Mana World seems quite stable for the moment.

Money does seem to be a bit of a problem. I'm not sure how others are amassing great wealth because hunting bat's teeth and wings is a lot more boring than herbs and cocoons. It seems better to empty pockets and hunt red slimes for gloves and leather shirts since they're 1k/ea and they drop with enough frequency that it seems better than hunting bats. Granted they don't stack in inventory the way bat's teeth do, but I always try to keep lean and mean.

Today's objective, one more silk robe, and half of level 68.