Shades of Twilight

As usual I was hanging around “The Swamp” outpost trying to make friends as well as getting some sweat to sell.

Then I see over the broadcast – “Free TP Runs to nearby TP! All are welcome”.

In MMO-speak, a “TP” is a “Teleport”. On the world of Entropia, they have these “Teleporters” in their cities and outposts. If you have the teleporter active on your map, you can step into one at your current location and select your destination and you appear at your destination. Yeah kinda like “beam me up Scotty” on Star Trek. However, to teleport to a city or outpost, you first must visit it on foot to “activate” it on your map. So, the offer of a free TP run was hard to pass up.

The above are some pics I took along the way. The group was pretty fun, and the high-levels that brought us along on the TP Run were very friendly – Phunk and Red Sonia. Man, they can kill mobs in like 5 hits with their weapons. Me, I need to shoot like 10 to 15 times before even a tiny daibika at The Swamp outpost dies.

The side-effect of running with them is that I sometimes manage to get loot off dead mobs, and the amount was pretty reasonable for my pathetically small amounts of damage contributed 🙂 Speaking of which, Entropia has a few different looting system in a team. I believe they set the looting system to the most amicable of all – loot distribution by the amount of damage dealt to the mob. If you caused more damage, you get more of the loot. I have no problems with this kind of looting system. It’s only fair I get loot based on my contribution to the kill.

The run started about 4am Singapore time. We visited a few cities and outposts, like Billy’s Spacesport (I already had that one), Twin Peaks and a few others in between. By time we arrived at Twin Peaks it was 6am here, and I really had to go.

It was a fun event for me 🙂

As you may recall, my character was zapped to the other hostile continent the other time, due to a system glitch and some stupidity on my part. I had lost connection to the servers, and tried to relogin. The client says it was unable to contact the servers and asked if I wanted to try “another” server, so naturally I clicked yes.

When the game loaded, I was dumped onto the hostile continent with huge monsters that kill me in 1 hit.

I had to open a support ticket to ask for help in getting back to Port Atlantis… sigh!

In any case, they relocated me back to Port Atlantis, and today I spent some time back in Entropia again. I hung around “The Swamp”, a small outpost near The Stables, somewhat North of Port Atlantis. The primary activity around this area is “Sweat Gathering”. The animals of Entropia seem to excrete sweat which is a component in many of the player crafting items. As such, although you can’t “sell” sweat to the merchants in Entropia, you can sell them to other players who need sweat to make their items.

As I mentioned before, people now are much friendlier than I remembered back in 2004. The girl in the screenshot above, Skye, was very helpful there and gave out something called “Focus”, which was a spell to increase your concentration. This is very helpful when you’re gathering sweat and the animals attack you. You don’t lose concentration and your spell continues to work, gathering the sweat while they attack you.

Of course, there comes a point where you need to run to safety, ie back at the outpost. This is where you can get healed for free (by other players) and generally chit-chat with other players. I found that very few people from Asia play Entropia, so I guess I’m going to have to wake up in the middle of the night again if I ever join a “society” (aka guilds) and they decide to go on a hunt (aka raid).

In any case, today’s session was pretty enjoyable, although I did die once. I also bought some Goblin armour for the thighs too, for 2 Peds 50 Pecs. Not too shabby I’d say. Definitely cheaper than bidding at the auctioneer’s for sure!