Entropia Universe

Back to Planet Calypso

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I arrived back on Planet Calypso much the same way that I left it the first time. Being ferried by some one else. Except this time it was Greg and not some one my friend paid to pick me up.

Planet Calypso is the largest planet in Entropia Universe. As far as I can tell, the map here is about twice as big as Arkadia or Next Island. It’s also the most popular planet in the game and I believe where it all started. I distinctly remember those “MMOs you should play in (insert year here)” lists always having Planet Calypso and not Entropia Universe listed. There might have been some ads too that said Planet Calypso as well but I’m not quite sure.

The planet also boast the largest economy in the game. Often, I’ve seen suggestions of taking goods from one planet back to Calypso to sell because the market is bigger. A dangerous proposition as Space is an open lootable PVP zone. Go figure….

Like all of the other planets, Calypso has it’s beginner quests that give you free stuff. Guns, mining probes, a healing device. All things I’ve seen before and don’t seem to a lot of use to me now. But in a game such as this one does not forgo free stuff. So I ran around to different NPC’s with the exclamation marks to pick up my free goodies.

I tried to pay attention to the story being told. But honestly, I can’t remember a lick of it. I left off getting something off a beached boat for someone for some reason. I’m usually the read every quest or line of dialoge guy but Entropia’s writing isn’t’ doing it for me. Next time I go back to questing I’ll make an effort to pay more attention. If it’s anything like the last two planets I don’t think I’m missing out on too much. Maybe some fun dialogue here or there. Besides, shooting different shaped, sci-fi, slot machines is the real entertainment here right?

Speaking of hunting, Calypso does have a nice feature of the Codex. The Codex is a little progress bar that fills up depending on how many and what maturity level of mobs you’ve killed. Once a rank has been filled up, you get to choose a reward that is x amount of PED to a skill. This makes targeting skills/professions you want to level up easier. As the rank increases, the amount of mobs needing killed to fill it up increases but so does the reward. This replaces the old iron missions that I saw on Arkadia. I can’t decide if filling up a percentage bar is as satisfying as killing 5000 caraboks but the rewards are certainly better. I’ve been using mine towards the Paramedic Profession so I can use auto loot pills one day.

It’s worth noting that Next Island had this too but I totally forgot to write about it….plus I didn’t have much experience with it there.

We’ve been on Calypso for about a month now but I haven’t been playing nearly as much as I was in March. By far, the most interesting thing we’ve did was a team hunt with eight or so other players.

There was an event running a few weeks ago where Marcimex came to the surface. Typically, these guys are hard to get to and there’s some sort of boss you need to kill before you can get to where they spawn. For this event they were just in a field ready to be shot at. So Greg gathered up his friends list and we went out there with low powered weapons to hunt these things.

The idea is everyone was using weapons that did about the same DPS. Loot in this game is based on damage done so this spreads the loot out evenly. The bigger creatures can lead to bigger drops and you can potentially get more than you would taking one down by yourself. We were out there for a few hours, it was cool seeing other people in the game in a large party setting and we even got a few decent drops. I don’t think it was enough to cover the costs of what was spent (because why would it be?) but it was something a bit different to do.

Entropia’s new game smell and the initial curiosity I had for it is starting to wear off. I find my self logging in on my own less and less. I guess the novelty of it all is wearing off. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the game in the last 3 months. There’s still pet taming I haven’t tried out yet and two more planets I haven’t visited so there are at least a few more posts to come.

Next Island and Ancient Greece

Kluwes2 Comments

This is the second post attempting to sum up everything I’ve done in Entropia since March.

Next Island was our next stop on the tour of Entropia Universe. There awaited beaches, roving hordes of monkeys, and the end of my mentoring. This is where most of April was spent.

Next Island was a colony set up to be a utopia built on science and reason. Separate from Earth and far away from all of it’s problems. A colony ship was sent, and this “First Wave” was sent with a bunch of robots to help set up the colony. The second wave was suppose to bring more people. They never came and the robots went about building anyway.

First off, I want to say that the writing on Next Island is much better than Arkadia. The quests have some humor to them and there’s a lot more exposition to set up the planet. Some time’s there’s too much but overall it’s a much better written set of quests. My favorite of which is Helen’s Super Epic Hunting Adventure.

Go forth and kill 10 boar. No! That’s way too easy! Go forth and kill 25 boar! No! There’s nothing epic about that! Kill 25 boar and 17 papoo! But not the smart talking papoo like Sebastian, of course.

Go forth and slay 63 Mutant Boar and 63 dumb papoo! And by dumb I mean mute because it’s rude to judge the intelligence of a creature you can’t even talk to. 

Helen Venture

Words to live by for sure.

Next Island’s native wildlife include mostly, you guessed it, Papoos and Boars. There’s Red Papoos, and Yellow Papoos, and Grey Papoos. And then there’s village boars, mutant boars, sand boars…ect.

But then there’s also GIANT elemental drakes and snakes. So you get some variety.

Next Island has a bunch of different wave events. Once you walk in to the area the wave event starts and you better hope you have enough ammo to get through it. It spawns ever increasing amounts of creatures at various levels. You would think this would culminate in a boss fight but we only found one wave event with an actual boss. The rest just kind of ended. Pretty anti-climatic.

I watched Greg lose 100 PED killing these birds….

The issue for me with Next Island is there wasn’t really much I could do at my level. Mobs that I can kill on my own either take to many shots for the loot they give or don’t have good enough spawns to make hunting there enjoyable. I think once I have some more levels on me, Greg and I could come back here for sure. I also noticed a decent size community here. I even logged on one weekend to see a giant Hide and Seek community run event going on in chat.

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a sub area on Next Island that can be accessed by a teleporter in Orpheus Cave. Much like Next Island, it doesn’t feature a whole lot to do for a player at my level but it does feature some pretty landscapes and cities. With Greg along, I did get to see some of the native wild life. Mainly, Cyclops and Minotaurs.

We didn’t stick in Ancient Greece long but we did stay long enough to grab a few teleporters if we wanted to visit again. I also ran a quest chain which gave me a nice beginner unlimited sword for when I want to train melee.

Finishing Mentoring

The whole reason we came to Next Island this early was for me to get the Atlas armor when I finished the Mentoring program. When we arrived I was at about 95% completed so I just needed to get out there and hunt for a bit to fil it up . It was a bit slow to fill since the aforementioned level problems for me here but I did manage to fill it up after a few Papoo hunts.

When you’re ready to graduate there’s a button you have to press on the mentoring menu. The mentor then has to log in to approve it and once approved both parties get their rewards. The rewards for the disciples are much better than for the mentors. I think that’s to encourage new players to link up with old ones when starting out.

Like everything in this game so far nothing goes right the first time. I clicked my button, Greg approved it, I saw a nice flashy congratulations animation. I opened my inventory to find….a Pixie Armor set….That’s the set you get if you finish mentoring on Calypso and it looks terrible. Apparently this happens so often there’s forum posts about it dating back years. .

So I did something I’ve never had to do in an online game before: I put in a support ticket. Which was an adventure all on it’s own. I was descriptive as can be and armed with screenshots and time stamps. Only to get through the whole thing only to be told there was an error and to contact support….Attempt number two went through though adnd 3 days later my garish Pixie armor was replaced with my sleek Atlas Armor

Yay!

Leaving Arkadia for the Moon

Kluwes3 Comments

Since it’s been a bit since my last Entropia post I’m going to try and summarize the events of the last month in two posts. This is the first.

The whole reason we started on Arkadia was to fill up the Mentoring experience as quickly as possible. The rewards are too good to pass up: an armor set with some nice stats and a vehicle. The mentor doesn’t get much, I think Greg got some gloves or something.

Once my mentoring experience was around 95% we planned to leave Arkadia behind and go over to the planet of Next Island. So when I completed my mentoring I would get the reward armor from Next Island. I thought the Atlas armor looked the coolest.

Once I was around 93% we left the Carabok fields and headed over to Akaas so Greg could show me instances. With instances, instead of killing mobs outside, you get to kill mobs inside. And for that privilege you need to craft/buy a key to enter the instance. Luckily, it’s only one key per person.

Oh, and you also enter the area through the head a giant snake.

As with most things in Entropia, it’s not exactly user friendly to get in there. Greg and I spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out how to start the thing. It involves talking to NPCs and then a door in the correct order otherwise you get a 2 minute loading screen that can’t be closed out of until it fails to load anything….

Once inside, the structure of the instance is kill creatures in the room to unlock the next room. After a certain amount of rooms you go down a level. Lather, rinse, repeat until you get to the ground floor with the big boss! Kill the boss, open the chests and leave. It’s basically a dungeon.

The levels of the mobs and the density of them increase depending on the level of instance door you open. What makes instances different is the monsters don’t drop any loot. All of the loot is given at the end. I believe the split is based on damage dealt. I assume so anyways, There’s a nice little score board that tells you how much damage each player in the instance is doing. So it’s either there for that or just so you can yell at your friends for not pulling their weight.

The highest we went was the Akaas 3 door. That one was rough for me since I couldn’t do enough damage to clear out mobs fast on my own. Greg definitely carried me through that one. I did end up looting an actual item from the chest that run: a mind force chip worth about 12 PED. I got lucky though for doing so little damage over all.

After finishing up the Akaas instances we headed off to the Arkadian Underground to take a look and the mobs there and run some different instances. These instances were much the same as the Akaas instances but they had cool Sci-Fi tunnels. They were also a lot shorter, taking about 5 minutes to complete.

We also took a look at some of the mobs in the Underground. I have to hand it to Entropia, it has some of the most interesting creatures.

Like this one:

And this one

The Underground was our last activity on Arkadia. We got is Greg’s ship and flew to the Arkadia Moon. Which really didn’t have a lot to do. There were some creatures we could hunt but weren’t really worth it. There’s also a daily quest there which awards 2 PED of universal ammo. That’s not a ton but it’s something.

The daily also awards pieces to a Hazmat suit. The way you get the quest to even start this is talking to an NPC choosing a very specific set of conversation topics before he let’s you start it. This quest has to be run 18 days in a row to get the full hazmat suit. I ran it once and that was enough for me.

This is the most exciting thing I did on the Arkadia Moon

We didn’t stay there long before leaving for a Next Island. Where my mentoring armor awaits me!

Eight Thousand Caraboks

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This is a Carabok.

For the last two weeks, when I’m not out and about with Greg, you can find me in the carabok fields outside of Celeste Quarry. There, the caraboks spawn in the hundreds, as far as the draw distance can display.

The caraboks are small, defeneless creatures, with 10hp. But they’re also level 4 which makes them great for leveling skills on the cheap. And right now, leveling skills is my top priority.

As far as I can tell, skills experience is rewarded sometimes on hit but always on a kill and they’re awarded semi randomly. Based on the weapon used, there’s a pool of skills that can gain xp. These assortment of skills in turn level up Professions which are sort of like classes but are mostly just more skills.

For example hunting with a laser rifle will guve xp for skills related to the laser rifle and hunting. Once enough points are obtained in those skills The professions related to laser rifle hit and damage will level up. But there are also skills shared by various professions so sometimes I’ll see a BLP weapon profession level up without every using that weapon type. The Profession levels seem more important than the individual skills as they determine what equipment can be used effectively.

At this time, Planet Arkadia still has the classic Entropia missions. These ask you to hunt x number of creatures. Once turned in, they award skill points and offer the next tier of the mission which is to kill more of that creature.

The carabok started out with a mission to kill 75, then 400, then 5000….and now I’m here on the kill 10000 missions with 3,000 more hunted.

I know the spawns, I know where to look for more when there are too many people on my ureent hunting ground, I can spot a carabok from a mile away.

I’ve become one with the carabok.

EU: Space Taxis and Sweat Sellers

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For the past few weeks Greg has been planning the best way to introduce me to Entropia Universe. I made sure I followed his instructions to the T. I set up my account, downloaded the launcher, downloaded the correct planet data, and made sure I could actually log in, and purchased the Starter Gold Pack. All of this had to be ironed before hand out since we were going to stream the whole thing.

The plan was to start on Planet Arkadia because Greg thought it was the planet with the best new player experience. There’s a nice quest chain that takes the player around the map and teaches the basic mechanics of the game. It also rewards a hoverpod (pictured above) to drive around. It also has some good skilling spots which would be beneficial after I ran the opening quest line.

Things didn’t exactly go as planned.

The first sign of trouble was immediately out of character creation. I had entered into Genesis, the tutorial zone for Planet Calypso, not Planet Arkadia. We thought I might need to get through this basic tutorial and at some point I would be able choose what planet I wanted to start on. So I went about doing various tasks: learning how to use my weapon, learning how to mine, learning how to interact with the world and how to spawn a vehicle.

Mostly, I learned how to navigate the obtuse UI. The normal key mappings are there: J for quest Journal, M for Map, I for inventory. There’s also an Action library that lists all of the actions available in the game. These are buttons ranging from emotes to system preferences all in one long list. At least it’s searchable.

Each action can be placed on the screen too quicker access. There isn’t a typical hot bar but these icons can be moved around like desktop icons. F10 also brings up a keyboard lay out to map icons to keys. It’s a bizarre layout, probably due to it’s age, but now that I’ve played with it for a few days it’s not so bad. The one nice thing about the UI is that every window can be moved around. I haven’t quite figured out if it can be resized though.

Once I reached the end of Genesis I frantically looked around for a way to start on my preferred planet. We traveled over to the wiki which clearly showed there should be some teleporters around to choose a spawn. The wiki must have been out of date because there were no teleporters to be found. So hoping for the best I talked to the NPC to take me out of Genesis thinking I might get a choice right at the end.

I was deposited straight on to Planet Calypso and Camp Icarus. A literal world away from my friend. What had happened was that I was suppose to download the launcher from Planet Arkadia’s website instead of the Entropia Universe website. I was also suppose to make an account over there as well in order to start on the planet. I still don’t quite understand why but that turned out to be what the problem was.

But for the time being we had to solve the problem of getting me off of Calypso and on to Arkadia. And this is where I got my first introductions to warps.

From my understanding, players own ships that can travel real fast between planets and they sell this service to other players. Space can be traversed by smaller and slower craft but since we were streaming we didn’t have time to wait for an hour an a half one way for Greg to come pick me up. Before I knew it I was getting a private message from a pilot who would come pick me up in 5 minutes. Fresh out of the tutorial, I had no idea what to expect but I kept getting messages about how it would all work. I would be summoned to the ship, we would be making a stop at another planter, Toulan, and then I would be brought to Arkadia Space station for Greg to pick me up. Space is also a PVP zone so it was recommended to log out if I had tradable items on me during travel. 10 minutes later, I was in Arkadia Space station and it only cost Greg the price of a small cup of coffee.

So now I’m in the correct place, on the correct planet, with the guy who’s going to show me around the game. So far so good. I get in Greg’s little flying vehicle and we make the short journey from the space station to the planet itself. Once there, we land at the Arkadia Welcome Center and I make my way to the NPC to start the starter quest chain. There’s just one small problem, he won’t talk to me. He tells me I’m not a citizen of Arkadia and will need to talk to the passport Official next to him. The passport official tells me I’m not a citizen either and won’t issue me a passport either. Well he will, but I have to pay him a bribe of ten thousand bottles of sweat…..oh boy.

At this point Greg’s reaching out to his various contacts to see what we’re doing wrong. What was suppose to be a 15 minute tutorial has turned in to 2 hours. Eventually, we arrive on the answer, we need the passport to start the quest chain. And so the hunt for a sweat seller commences.

Lucky for us, sweat is plentiful as it’s the main resources people who want to play for free collect to sell. The general consensus is it costs more money in electricity to run your computer than you would make sweating monsters. But people do it any way. In fact, the first time I had ever seen Entropia Universe was years ago when Greg was AFK sweating on his laptop while we were playing some other game…it did not look appealing at the time. So of course, it would all come full circle and back to sweat to get this adventure started.

We found a sweat circle in all of it’s glory at Celeste Outpost. In about 5 minutes Greg was able to rustle up a seller. Finally, after about 4 hours I was able to start the quest chain on Arkadia, got my hoverpod, and actually started going through what Greg thought would be a good introduction to the game.

I can’t think of a better introduction to a game than what it took us to get to that point!