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71 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
71 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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draft: false
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title: "Ashes to Ashes, Buffs to Buffs"
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aliases: ["Ashes to Ashes, Buffs to Buffs"]
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series: ["aardwolf-journal"]
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date: "2023-03-02"
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author: "Nick Dumas"
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cover: ""
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tags: ["games", "aardwolf"]
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keywords: ["games", "aardwolf"]
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description: "MUDding, reflection"
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showFullContent: false
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---
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## Broad Strokes
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This year I picked up [Aardwolf](https://www.aardwolf.com/), a free MUD ( Multi User Dungeon ), a now ancient form of gaming that takes place over Telnet.
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The game is structured around a couple different gameplay loops, the most central of which is the `remort` and `tier` systems which allow you to reset your level and begin acquiring more skills at earlier levels respectively .
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Equipment gets carried over between iterations of a character, so on a macro-scale the game is about collecting Quest Points to purchase gear and Wishes, special permanent character upgrades.
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Gameplay on the micro-scale consists of traveling between Areas, which may or may not have some amount of public/secret goals/quests. Some goals are as simple as killing a number of target creatures, some can take days or weeks to complete as you gather components and complete tasks.
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After a few weeks of play, I hit level 200, and then 201 as I Superhero'd. I've done a bunch of goals, a bunch of campaigns and quests, and I wanted to try to consolidate and share what I'm learning.
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## Plugins
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I learned really quickly that effective play ~~requires~~ is greatly aided by the use of plugins. Going into full usage examples is beyond the scope of this post, but are planned.
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### mapper
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Above and beyond the most important. The world of Aardwolf is massive, spanning multiple continents and hundreds of discrete zones with their own complex internal, often non-Euclidian geometries. For the most part, it runs in the background quietly tracking which rooms connect to each other and most critically, what creatures have been seen where.
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### snd
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The core micro-gameplay loop consists of campaigns and quests, tasks that ask you to kill a certain number of specific targets throughout the world. snd ( search and destroy ) leverages the mapper's room and mob data to assist you.
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snd scans the output of `cp check` and similar to extract the rough location of each target. You can then use snd commands to leverage the mapper to auto-navigate to your destination area and then find your target.
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### dinv
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Inventory management is a huge deal for me, so learning about dinv was a godsend. dinv will build a database of items held or carried and use that database to do things like:
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- automatically find and use a portal
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- use the mapper to navigate to a vendor which sells the highest level healing potion you can use and purchase a specific quantity
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- analyze your equipment and design an equipment set that optimizes your prioritized stats ( presets are available for all base classes )
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### adb
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the docs indicate that most of its utility is dedicated to helping deal with Enchanting. very cool but not something i'm specced into so I've put a pin in exploring this one
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## My Journey
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I rolled a male Psion Navigator because I've always loved the flavor of these characters, and Navigator was the only one that sounded like it had interesting abilities. Psion ended up being a really convenient starter class. Very quickly on, you start getting get spells that allow you to fly, breathe under water, ignore food and water, and more.
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This probably saved my run; if I had to manage buying and eating food for very long I don't think I'd have kept at it because I hadn't learned about dinv yet. I try to avoid consumables when I'm allowed, so the hassle would've turned me away most likely.
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Another huge thing was joining the [Boot](https://aardwolfboot.com/) clan. Immensely friendly people, and having a clan means having a morgue: your corpse returns to a safe location when you die saving you a LOT of trouble.
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Guild knowledge went a long way to help me learn the fundamentals:
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1) Portals are your friend
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1) don't forget to `mapper cexit`
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2) never forget your detects
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3) lots of doors exist and are accessible, simply not visible on first look
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4) learning the hunt trick (or using snd )
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After graduating the Academy, I really just ground out those levels. Campaign level is tedious and slow, but it paid off. I scored around 8000 total Quest Points before remort. Extremely satisfied with that. I bought a Bag of Aardwolf, which is doing wonders for my carry capacity.
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I didn't spend any time at Hero or Superhero this run, I did not feel good fighting those high level mobs, so I decided to take it around one more time and work on my Global Quests so I can get promoted. Already knocked one out today, so it's not far off.
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