Sunday, January 18, 2015

Hunting "Eco"

You have heard people use the term “Hunting Eco” plenty of times within the Entropia Universe or my previous posts. But what does it mean? If you have been suffering from big losses during your hunts then this post will be very helpful to you. It will also be helpful for new players as it will give them an understanding on what Eco is and how to not overspend their PEDS.
So what does it mean to Hunt Eco?

Before I can explain what Eco hunting is…let me explain a little bit about weapons in the Entropia universe…Just like any item that you might find within the game itself…weapons themselves have a specific value you can buy and sell them for to the Trade Terminal (Or TT for short) usually referred to TT value of the item. Well not all weapons can be bought from TT as some need to be crafted. Every time you use a weapon, the value of its TT decreases a bit. Some weapons might have a big decrease while others will have a smaller decrease and this is what we call Decay. There will eventually come a time when the weapon becomes unusable.
The game features 2 different types of items…Limited Items denoted by the (L) at the end of their names and unlimited items which we refer to as UL. Limited (L) items cannot be repaired at all and once they have reached their minimal usage capacity cannot be used anymore, ever again…UL weapons on the other hand can be repaired to increase their value back to the original TT.

Now these weapons can further be divided into two more categories…the ranged weapons and Melee weapons. Melee weapons don’t have any further costs associated with them because you don’t have to buy ammunition…but ranged weapons tend to have a slightly higher cost because you are also spending ammo every single time you use them.

So how does this relate to Eco Hunting? Well Eco hunting is a term used to refer to hunting more economically…what does this mean? It simply means that when you go on a hunting run, you are trying your best to hunt the mobs with the least possible cost while keeping your returns to their maximum level. How do you go about this? Well the first thing you can do is to hunt mobs that are closer to your level.  For example if you are a new player it is only sensible to hunt creatures like Bercycled Puny or Gallards because they will be closer to your levels and as your hunting skills increase…you can move on to bigger prey. Also try and hunt without armor…because every time you are hit while wearing armor…its value decreases. So its advised that you hunt only creatures that you can hunt without wearing any armor at all. Another thing you can try to do is don’t just go out there and hunt them…try to swunt them as well…swunting is the act of sweating the creature dry before killing it.

Try not to also hunt without having the creature related mission on you. By completing the mission you also get other rewards which can keep your costs low but your profits high. If a creature has 10 hp…you can check the HP of most creatures on entropedia.info…don’t try to kill it with a weapon that does more damage than you can afford. Try and use a weapon like SI HK110 or a Psy-blade something low.


This is all I can tell you about hunting Eco, if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message and I will try to answer it or add it to the post.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Benefits of Skilling on a Mothership

There are many benefits to skilling on a Mothership in Entropia. Firstly, you can quickly complete your apprenticeship instead of going through the long process of hunting, healing or crafting for months before the progress bar reaches 100%. The second one happens to be actually the most important of all…and caters towards people thinking to start their crafting career.

In the past crafters had to craft Basic Filters until the quality rating on the blueprint was 100 and then move on to another one…eventually reaching a point where they could get Blueprint Comprehension skills unlocked…Blueprint Comprehension skill is a very important skill in game for crafters. It raises the success rate of an item being crafted slightly and helps to keep costs down. If you took the normal route and began by crafting Basic Filters expect to spend more than 1000s of PEDs in crafting useless TT junk. Another advantage of skilling on a mothership is that it raises majority of your crafting skills at the same time.

But if you choose to follow the Mothership skilling path then you could at least save all those funds and put them to better use later on. So how do you skill on a mothership? When I say skilling on a mothership, I mean you become part of their repair crew for as long as you want to keep increasing your crafting skills or until you finish your apprenticeship…You do need some tools though and they won’t come cheap...I didn’t say it was going to be free skilling…it costs to increase your crafting professions but overall on the long run it is also 10 times cheaper than just going out and crafting from level 0 till you hit level 10 in a certain profession of crafting.

What you need?

First make sure that you have space downloaded otherwise you won’t be able to get summoned onto a mothership. Usually motherships going out for repair runs will post in the rookie channel or the planets respective channel. Currently the one mothership that I know of that does daily repair runs is the Kronan owned by Granny from NBK society. They have quite a helpful bunch of people.

Second you should make sure that you have sufficient amount of Vehicle RK-5’s. Vehicle RK-5 should cost you about 8 to 9 PEDs per piece and each Vehicle RK-5 will last you for at least 3.5 to 4 hours. You will also need welding wires. At the current MU, 50K of welding wires should cost you around the same as well. 1 Vehicle RK-5 and 50K welding wire should be enough for a 4 hour repair skilling run unless you want to do more. You can always buy them on the Kronan itself as well from the crew.


I hope this was helpful enough so what are you waiting for? Get your tools ready and Happy Skilling.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Space the New Frontier: Transportation and Mining to hit Entropia

MindArk has been focusing on space a lot in the past few version updates that they have made and the changes they have planned for space will finally bring a lot more people to it. In the past, people only flew through space to visit other planets or become space pirates (I wouldn’t want to be one). But in the latest Developer Notes #10 – Galactic Transport for version 15.1 of Entropia that was released in December, MindArk has finally changed a few things.

The removal of planet specific auction sections as well as making it possible to buy all your materials and enmats from other planets via auction has made a lot of people very happy. One reason behind that is that it will improve the economies ingame for smaller planets that are there. Personally the one part that makes me happy right now is the fact that space cargo missions will be added to the game soon. This will actually help to increase the number of people flying around in space greatly.

Though I am not yet certain about what I want to do when space gets revamped but I can tell you that I am thinking of probably becoming some sort of space courier (Depends on a lot of factors). Though a lot of people might also wonder why I didn’t choose to become a space pirate…I have my reasons behind that…first people might hate me for it…secondly it requires a person to spend a lot of free time camping for potential space victims and at this moment free time for me isn’t really an option considering the busy schedule that I have. There is also the fact that you might have to team up with other pirates…now here is a question…how can you trust a pirate?

MindArk also mentioned something like space mining, I don’t expect it to be implemented right away and I am sure it might take them a long time before it even becomes possible to see something like asteroid mining (or space mining) but at least we can hope and pray that it becomes a reality. I do believe that it might be something quite unique and different from the planetary mining system that they have.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The Loot Factor

Maybe you did a google search on Entropia to see what others were saying about it…you read a couple of articles…a few comments here and there…and you found out that a lot of people are saying that Entropia universe is all about the loot. That it has no gameplay whatsoever, everyone is in it for the loot. Majority of the folks play Entropia to make a profit, get good loot, a global, score a hall of fame or receive their ALL TIME HIGH. If there was no loot at all then a person wouldn’t be able to dream of becoming rich while playing Entropia. You might be thinking the same thing right now and you might be right about it but let’s face it…Entropia universe in the end is a real cash economy game and everything within the game can be sold for real world money…

I used to play Eve online before…not anymore though but something about the game struck me lately while watching Eve Online Videos…it’s not really the videos that struck me but the comments posted below them. A big part of the comments were actually about how much Inter-Stellar Kredits (The ingame currency of Eve Online universe, ISK for short) everyone is making per hour. The satiation rate in Eve online is actually worse than it is in Entropia Universe and soon everyone within the game itself will stop caring about how fun it is. All they will care about is how much ISK they are making per hour. They won’t play the game how they want to but instead will be more focused on how they read someone was making a lot of ISK on the internet. In your downtime, your thoughts will be focused on calculating how much ISK per hour you are losing instead of having fun with your family and friends or you know socializing. This factor is one of the main reasons why many hardcore gamers in Eve online quite, they stressed out. Within the game due to the articles you read, you are forced to make the most productive choices possible and then it kind of becomes like a real life job…except for the fact that you don’t get paid for it. Every day you try to increase the amount of ISK you make and at the end of every month it slightly increases. Maybe in a few months you will be able to buy your own PLEX (A pilot license extension which is an alternative way of playing the game without having to spend your own cash). But then you realize in a few months the price of the PLEX went up and you have to work harder, way harder than you used to make even more ISK to keep up with the price change. I have heard of cases where people are making second and even third accounts in order to keep making ISK. Do you think that is fun? Please do enlighten me where is the fun in it? Are you playing the game the way you want to or are you just being a robot and doing whatever everyone else are doing? This is one of the main factors plaguing the gaming industry nowadays and not only does it kind of make old players want to quit but also scares away new players that want to try the game out. The one thought that is running through their heads the entire time is “OH MY GOD THAT PLAYER MAKES 1 BILLION ISKS A DAY AND I AM ONLY MAKING PENNIES, I AM NEVER GOING TO GET CLOSE TO THAT.”

Okay so you are wondering now hey that’s Eve online…everything is about loot in that game…well let’s give you another example…let me give you an example of another game where loot has played a great part too. If you look at the diablo series, even before the addition of the real money auction house it has always been about the loot. People used to play Diablo 2 over and over again just for the chance to acquire good loot and with Diablo 3 it was the same case as well. It doesn’t matter whether the game is an online one, offline, solo or even co-op for that matter. They will keep grinding for hours and hours on end just for that split second of feeling good that they got good loot. I am sure other games will have the same effect on people as well.


My point with this entire post is…why should it matter if loot is important or not in Entropia? Of course it is important in the Entropia universe after all it is a real cash economy game…you are spending real money for everything…but there are also people within the game that don’t care about the loot that they get or their percentage of return. Neither do they care how “Eco” (I will explain this more in a later post) they are playing. If you do a simple search on Google on the different games that I mentioned you will receive 1000s if not 100s of topics on how to make ISK in eve or how to make PEDs in Entropia. I am not exactly sure what impression this post will make on you but the main reason why I wanted to make this post was to give you something to think about the next time you start discussing Loot with others. Just play the game as you want to instead of focusing on making ISK, PEDS or Gold. You should be the master of your own game; others shouldn’t be affecting your decision making.

Question for the Audience

This post is more like a message that I wanted to get across to the people that have been reading my blog. There might be some that like reading this blog and there might be others that don’t like the blog at all. Majority of the times my topics have my personal opinions in them but there are also some topics where there are hard proven facts that I have posted. The question that I wanted to ask people was since there are weeks before I can actually post something due to me just being focused on one game. Would you like it if I started blogging about other games too? If so what games would you like me to add here as well…

I can blog about Eve online since I used to play it before and then there is the new game that will be launching soon Star Citizen as well as after time diaries…though there isn’t much going on the in the last one. I am aware that there are a lot of topics that I haven’t covered when it comes to Entropia Universe but I will get to them in time. They all take solid research to be done on them and I like to personally research things before posting about it. So everything will be made available in due time.

Since I know there are only a few people that actually read this blog…or just pass through here your comments will be really helpful so don’t be afraid to give me your personal opinion on this. I can try and play other games too; they don’t necessarily have to be from the ones that I mentioned above.

Ammo or Shrapnel in Loot

One misconception that people from time to time get is that the people over at MindArk offices hate them because majority of the time they find ammo in the loot that they get. This is hardly the case though; the good folks at MindArk don’t hate you. There is actually a reason behind why you might always be looting ammo from mobs. It’s actually a flag (I don’t mean an actual literal flag) which we term as the disable auto-generated loot.
Now all of you might be wondering what this flag does. Game developers use this flag to prevent the drop of certain loot items like Empty Skill implants (ESI), hides, enmatter etc from the mobs on which the flag is set. On those mobs one will only find creature specific loot or ammo or shrapnel.

Creatures of Puny Maturity are the main mobs within the game on which this flag has been set because it doesn’t quite make sense to spread out a few PECs of loot here and there in the varying amount of trash item stacks and it might make the game seem more expensive than it already is if all the TT value gets spread all over the place.

Another set of mobs that also received this flag was the big shared loot mobs…why you ask? Imagine you are out hunting with a group of random individuals…you are probably fighting in this example...a shared loot longtooth spawn…and after its untimely…or timely demise you take your pick…some players probably one or two got high TT value loot items like ESI’s or stuff while others get the “You have received no loot” message or worse trash loot. You would complain, wouldn’t you? Unless you are one of those looters, you would complain about it. In order to prevent this aforementioned situation and keep player complaints to a low (Trust me they have been complaining for a while about this). MindArk decided that the best course of action for this situation was to flag them.

Don’t ask me why you can’t get PED in your loot, it was possible a couple of years ago but they were forced to change it due to some legalities.