Entropia Universe through Zaps eyes, page 2

Career choises, character development, community and economy

There are 3 basic career choises; hunter, miner and crafter. Avatars arent bound in anyway to a certain career. I´we tried all of the main professions and different combinations during my years in Entropia. Trading is also possible. You can do personal trading or use ingame auction.

I have guided many players in their early stages of this game and from experience I´we found the following to be a good way t o get started:

Learn the controls and basic actions. You can set your controls to your own liking. You can make hotkey rows through F1-F9 so possibilities are wide in range. But even the basic settings work well.

Explore. Its worth while to get to know your surroundings to realise the vastness of the gameworld. At first you need to roam around on foot and collect the teleports in different cities. You can travel between known teleports instantaneously. On your travels to collect the TP´s you are bound to get to know new people and you will never have too many friends, will you?

On these walkabouts you might want to get a map to follow. JaxMap is a good site with printable maps made by players with teleports and routes clearly marked.

You don’t nesesserily need a gun or other gear. More experienced players are often making so called TP-runs with new players. On these runs you see a lot of different mobs, mutants and robots and you get a feel for the world. And of course with an experienced guide you learn more.

If you deside to explore on your own, you will propably run into some fierce creatures. Even with your new beginner weaponry and armour there is a great number of mobs that will kill you with one strike. But don’t worry… dying is free, and you will be revived at the closes revival station and after a little wait gain back full health.

Sometimes you might get stuck in a place you just don’t seem to find away out alive. You keep dying and reviving at the same place over and over. Take it easy, wait a little and ask for help from another players reviving to the same place. Usually you don’t need to wait for too long for a hero to guide you to clearer waters.

Skills and choosing a career

You gain skills by doing different things. The higher the skills the better the results, what ever you do. Even as a beginner you will have almost a hundred different skills and there are more to unlock as you progress in your basic skills.

There are few attributes that have an affect on everything you do, like intelligence and strenght and such. Specialiced skills such as rifle skill mainly just affect that one area of expertice. For those willing to spend money but dont have time to use for building skills its possible to buy skills from other players. So you can transform from a n00b to an ûber in a day… if you don’t mind the cost.

Lately I have mainly concentrated on mining. Calm and peacefull activity seems to fit me the best. But mining isent boring, far from it. For minig you need finders and mining probes/bombs. The tools are different for ores (like iron) and for enmatters (like oil). So you drop a bomb and hope something good to turn up and when you hit the big one… you are not far from a heartattackt and/or crapping your pants.

The picture is from my sofar best find. ~9000 ped worth of Blausarium with a markup of 140% at the time. So that 1 bomb made me 13000 ped = 1300 US dollar. Items are valued by laws of supply and demand.

For hunting you need weaponry, you can not make any damage with your bare hands. Untill you gain some skills you should keep to the selection from the Trade Terminal. For example an Opalo rifle is a good choice for a beginner and even for more experienced hunters for its good economy. An Opalo will cost you 3,70 ped and uses 2 medium cells per shot. Medium cells cost 1ped / 100 ammo. You can easily kill smaller mobs with it and learn the basics of hunting. You are really better off with a smaller gun in the beginning for bigger the gun or tool gets the more skills it reguires to handle with efficiency.

Crafting is done in the cities with crafting machines. You need a blueprint, a blueprint book and the materials needed to make your desired item. Books and basic blueprints you can be bought from a technican and materials you can either mine for yourself or buy from other players or from auction.

I would succest to get to know the world of Entropia Universe very well before going into crafting. In crafting you can loose a lot of peds in a short time specially if you don’t really know what you are doing. Learn about the skills and the demand of different items. Badly composed crafting session might end up costing you thousands of peds in half an hour.

All the professions are connected to each other in a way. A miner searches for materials, crafter makes them into tools and weapons which miners and hunters use. A hunter also get crafting material as a part of loot they collect and he can also keep his miner buddy next to him alive.

Events and societies

MindArk organizes few times a year events that are tied to the backround story. The events usually last for few days up to a week or two. A city might be attacked by a robot army or unusuall mobs might be found somewhere. Sometimes these official events provide special prizes to players. Unique items like weapon or armor with sicnificantly better statistics.

MindArk also had a competition for the best Entropia related video. And lot of laughs was generated by the search for people who most resemble their ingame avatars.

Societies are the Entropia version of clans. Players can form a society to work together for a certain goal or just to play together and have fun. Some socs are specialised to hunting, mining or even trading.

Sometimes MindArk provides events for socs also. Landgrab is a fight to conquer a piece of land and hold it agaings rival socs for few hours or a day. Winner gets the taxing right to the landarea for 6 months. Sometime ago MindArk annouced making some changes to landgrab rules. After the new rules and landgrab system is set the fight for land areas will continue.

Some players and Socs organize events for others. My soc, Hunters Unlimited, is activly hosting several weekly hunting events.

In the picture my socmates and I are getting ready to start a beacon mission. Beacon missions are short quests for teams. The team goes to take control of a spaceship from the robots which are conctant threat to occupants of Entropia.

On the forums you sometimes see players organizing real life meetings and happenings. There has been meetings of a few players upto meetings of few dosens depending of the country and city where they took place. There has also been LAN-parties, different gatherings, MegaZone playing, paintballs… you name it. And through the forum you get to see a climbse of what was going on even if you couldn’t be there.

Economy and big money

Economy in Entropia is real money based and you can transfer money in and out of the game. Commen laws of offer and demand determine the prices of items you cant buy from the Trade Terminal, like mined materials, animal parts, tools, weapons and such.

All items have a tt (trade terminal) price that you will get for selling the item to tt. As a ground rule if you cant buy it from tt its not worth selling it to one either.

Some rarer weapons, armours and tools have skyhigh prices on the open market. Prices might be more then 100 000 ped = 10 000 US dollar. Items like that should be concidered more like investment then a tool.

Biggest amounts of money change hands in selling and buying land. A player can own a landarea provided he has a thigh wallet. For his money landowner get taxing rights to all hunting and mining on his land. The land prices are not common knowledge because most of the deals are made between 2 private players. But we do know that if you are dreaming of becoming a landowner in Entropia Universe you should have atleast 250 000 ped to spend.

The highest price in Entropia history was payed for the virtual banking licences sometime ago. MindArk auctioned off 4 separate licences. All prices rose up to about 1 million ped. 1 was sold to a Russian online bank, 2 to individual players and 1 buyer wished to stay anonymous at the time, now we know it was Anshe Chung.

I´m almost surpriced to find myself still involved with the same game after 4 years. Writing this article made me realize that the on going development of the game has kept me interested. With every VU I find myself looking for new features even we get a prief glance of them from MindArk.

Another thing keeping me in Entropia is the wonderfull people in its community. The team spirit is unbelivable strong in Entropia. Almost everyone is ready to help others and its not exceptional to help or be helped by a player you don’t even know.

One of the resources of the community are the dozens of usefull web pages designed by players to provide information and services to help everyone playing.

I see myself easily living in Entropia for the next four years to come and beyond.

This is just a preview of the game, hardly even scratching the surface, but you are welcome to join us. And come to say hello if you happen to meet me or my wife (ingame & RL) Mrs-Zap in game.

Zap