Following my costly trip to Magincia, I found myself in a familiar situation - broke but honorable. And yet, I'm still in a much better place than I had been - I'm not completely broke, nor am I lacking in all reagents, just ginseng and blood moss, and while I've only got a few keys left, I really only need one in order to repeat my profitable adventure to Lord British's dungeon, which I can do much better this time. Plus, I'm not only honorable, I'm valorous too!
I started this session with a shopping trip to Skara Brae - the cheapest place to buy ginseng, blood moss, and food, spent nearly everything everything I had, and gave my last coin to a beggar. Then I took the moongates to Britannia by way of Yew, where I made one detour to the shrine of justice.
Long, boring, and repetitive story short - I was able to easily replicate my dungeon raid, except this time I had the foresight to prepare several dispels ahead of time, and robbed the Balrons' cache five times, for a haul worth over $5,000. And I could have gotten even more, except that I ran out of healing spells.
The balloon escape from the Hylothe entrance took me to the hills east of Lock Lake this time, a longish walk from Britain, free healing, and access to the moongate networks.
$5,000+ will buy me a lot of reagents. It's enough to buy over 200 of everything, and your inventory maxes out at 99!
As with last time, I went to Paws first, but this time I bought 99 ginsengs, 99 garlics, and 99 black pearls. And immediately crafted all of it into magic spells so I could buy more ginsengs, more garlics, and more black pearls. All in all I get 99 Awakens, 99 Cures, 21 Fireballs, and still have over $3,000 left.
Next, Moonglow, where sulfurous ash and spider silk is cheap. With these, plus the reagents brought from Paws, I can craft 28 Blinks, 99 Dispels, 3 Energy Fields, 98 Heals, 99 Lights, and still have $1850 left over.
Finally, Skara Brae, for blood moss, as well as more sulfurous ash and ginseng. I spend the rest of my money here, but it gets me 81 Blinks, 1 Heal, 99 Opens, 2 Protects, 99 Quicknesses, and 26 Sleeps. Not many reagents are left over after all this crafting.
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| My magic arsenal after this session |
Did I mention that all these spells have to be crafted one at a time, and reagents purchased nine at a time? Each spell that I craft, I need to hit 'M' to enter reagent mixing mode, select the spell I want to craft, key in the ingredients, hit enter, and I have to do that 99 times for each spell to max out my supply of it. And when I run out of an ingredient, I have to talk to the vendor, select the reagent, hit '9' to buy nine, type in the correct amount of currency to pay, and repeat the process ten more times to fill up. It's not a great user experience!
So then I thought. Why not do it again? I went right back into the dungeon and farmed the balrons' gold - $9,999 of it. This took 13 awakens, 9 cures, 13 dispels, and 15 heals - a total cost of about $400 including the cost of the magic key to get in and the YUP spell to get out.
On the way out, I noticed something funny that I hadn't before:
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A secret passage where ettins are eating dinner! At the moment, though, exploring wasn't on the agenda, so we turned back and left.
One long, long balloon ride later, we landed by The Deep Forest. Cool - we had some unfinished business in Empath Abbey nearby.
- I spot a false wall on the east side of the throne room, but this led only to a forbidden treasure room with a guard, and an uninteresting bard playing his lute by the moat outside.
- The locked door in the throne room goes to a grove with four people walking around, each offering a clue about the virtues. I know most of this already from my pilgrimages, but it's all here in one place.
- Benjamin the Bard tells me that Love alone makes Compassion.
- Thomas the Tinker tells me that Love and Courage combine to make Sacrifice.
- Lastro the Ranger explains that Spirituality is based on Truth, Love, and Courage.
- Deirdre the Druid says that Truth tempered by Love is Justice.
- Marcy's lady-in-waiting, when asked about the horn, tells me the paladin Malchor can lead me to it.
- Malchor is found at the healer's, and tells me to search for the horn on an island off the tip of Spiritwood.
- Brother Antos tells me to meditate on love at the shrine to find the candle.
- The ankh in the western cloister can be spoken to, and when asked about "love," sends me back to the bard in the hidden passage.
- The bard tells me the candle is found in a "secret place" hidden off Lock Lake.
Spiritwood's a nice, long walk south, which gives me an opportunity to map out a bit of the terrain along Britannia's west coast.
And then I blinked around the cays, searching everywhere, until I found it.
Incidentally, I figured out how the "blink" spell works. It isn't random, and it isn't fixed, but it is based around the tiles loaded into memory.
The world is divided perfectly into uniform sectors which are 16 tiles wide and 16 tiles tall. At any given moment, you have one sector completely loaded, and also you have two buffers of tiles from the eight surrounding sectors loaded.
You have:
- The 16x16 map of the current sector, shown in the middle
- An "inner buffer" extending three tiles in all four directions, shown highlighted in green.
- An "outer buffer" extending another five tiles in all four directions, shown darkened.
That gives a total of 32x32 tiles loaded at any given moment, which also happens to be the size of the minimap displayed when you use a gem. Any time you step onto the outer buffer region, it will load a new set of 32x32 tiles from disk into memory, and re-orient your minimap.
So here's what Blink does. After picking a direction, Blink teleports you to the farthest loaded tile in that direction which is legal to traverse.
In programmatic terms:
- Move in the selected direction until you hit the edge of the minimap.
- If you wound up on an illegal tile (e.g. ocean, mountain), move backwards until you hit a walkable one.
In any event, the cumulative experience from this adventure brought me to level 7 and Katrina, still rather combat-ineffective but no longer so fragile, to level 4.
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