Dorion Mode - A blog by Robinson Dorion.

With the client booted and account creds submitted, Elvin Coaljob was delivered to the shores of Eulora landing on a beach with a big hill behind him and two small islands a short distance across the water.

He stumbled onto the beach and got the bearings of his mind's eye by tracing his finger across the symbols on his brow, from right to left : a headstone to quit, a question mark for help, a gear for options, a clock and a corked flask filled with purple fluid for information, a blue covered dead tree book with a star affixed to the front to mark spells, a paper and quill for quests, a backpack of inventory, a hammer and rolling pin for stats and skills, a dialogue bubble for communications and a window to hide the toolbar with a right click and change its style with a left click of the digital finger.

Next he inspected the window with tabs on the left hand margin reading : Main, Channels, NPC, Whisper, Guild, Group. The body of the window is broken into a fat response window atop a thin command input window. He got a feel for the key controls on the board and satisfied the urge to get a better view of the land and sea by first walking, then running up the hill. Out of virtual breath, but nevertheless invigorated, he issued the /pos command which yielded, "Your current position is 7.780 44.860 298.620".

Above, the beach, below, the hill with town in the distance.

He stood for quite a while --some may say too long-- and consulted the various help pages⁽ⁱ⁾ which both emerged from his ancestral memory and which he found by following the layers of links within links in the reading on Eulora, commands, claims, mining, crafting, index of resources, tidbits, maps, bots and more you'll have to track down for yourself.

He tried some explores and started finding some claims to resources, first some Boulders, then Rickety Reeds and Clumps of Dry Grass and Solid Branches and Bird's Nests. Claims consist of an exploration marker, a key to lock and unlock the claim and a scroll with directions (aka enumerations, recipes, blue prints) for how to build it. He noticed a that after some time, his keys were turning to Little Bits O' Nothing, but that's precisely what Tiny claims call for. Before long, after reading about Eulora's first grade, he tried his hand at building some of the claims himself⁽ⁱⁱ⁾.

He met up with Foxy Foxster by the fire in the town and took her up on the deal she offers for the lbn at 110% of the quality adjusted base value. She fronted him the enumeration and materials to build a craft table for crafting things, which yielded two tables and tinker's petrified feelings and sentiments. He paid her back in lbn the next day.

While he was getting some coppers for the lbn he was accumulating, he wasn't getting any experience because he didn't have any skills! This means he was acting like a fungible click slave, so he decided to choose differently. Through whispering with Foxy, he decided he wanted to pursue the skill of gathering as a starting point to get a better lay of the land and perhaps a bit of the sea. Lucky for him she had quite a few of the gathering skill books, one of which she gifted him. He took the question mark that was the skill and voila, now each time he explored he started gaining experience. After enough time at a given level he'd stop gaining experience and would have to level up by paying for training from the NPC that hangs out in town, one Heina Draggenfort. Heina didn't quote Elvin how much leveling up will cost ; if he had enough money for the level, he got it and if he didn't have the money, she told him so. The cost is determined by how much is expended at a given level. In Elvin's case, he's exploring bare handed so far, so the damage⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ done to his body goes into the training. When he starts using tools, each use of the tools will reduce their durability, the value of which will be the input when he trains. By now he's at level 35 in gathering and the cost to level up has increased each time, and on top of that, the rate of the increase has increased each time ; i.e. the slope of the training costs and its derivative have yet to abate. As the Euloran saying goes, "The best things in life are actually quite expensive".

Once young Coaljob started leveling up, his activity was limited by his few residual coppers from prior trades and waiting to trade his teeny tiny little bitty baby batches of lbn with Foxy. He offered to buy some coppers for Bitcoin from her and she countered with an offer to front a stack's worth of lbn, which turns out to be the magic number of 9999^(iv). As the lbn Elvin was accumulating was consistently quality 11, with a base value of 11, and factoring in the 10% premium Foxy pays, this came out to 0.11*11*1.1*9999 = 13309 ECu.

As Elvin let the Foxybot loose and leveled up, he started to gather a more diverse array of resources and claim types. For some, seeing is believing, so have a map.

I modified the map1.script to awk for the claim type rather than resource type.

By now Elvin's has over 2/3 of the lbn stack he owes Foxy and is getting his bearings on the environment and its constraints to improve the automation on the lbn gathering process and his returns.

1. With the client I'm using, system logs were not enabled by default (chat, crafting, exploring, position and recipes were), but were switched on via Options -> Interface -> Chat Logs. [^]
2. He's not in first grade yet as he doesn't have the building skill. [^]
3. He's died a bunch of times by now. Fortunately, death is the only free thing in Eulora atm. [^]
4. Because the Planeshift monkeys sprinkled it into the coad legacy Eulora is based from and which couldn't handle any bigger stacks. [^]