Things Far West ** Some Spoilers ** and Happy New Year

[Elowin]

Happy New Year everyone. Although I can live with 2001--do I have a choice--a more realistic year would be 9001. Although a man like Christ was significant, Man's development of early trade around 7000 BC was far more significant. Just my two cents on 1-1-01.

The party has settled down again and finished exploring all the land and sea mass in the game west of The Enchanted Isle and Skull Castle, i.e., The Lost Sea and Isle of Sands. Outside of the Talrik's treasure on top of the eastern most Collasium building, I found one other treasure chest sitting by itself on the bottom of the sea sort of east of the big island in the center of The Lost Sea (IIRC). Is there anything else noteworthy under water besides the treasures and Collasium? What about The Endless Sea--anything play out down there? BTW, Talrik is sort of lame. He keeps asking me if we found his treasure and we think we did but there seems to be no recognition of it to relate. Likewise, Miruth, the rogue guild master, keeps rewarding the party's Bard and Barbarian for completing the Leprechaun quest--everytime these two return to the Thieves Shop.

[Elowin]

Teleporting and Call of Home are cool--now. I found my shells by turning respawn up to high for another hour of searching and the last batch of three yielded two breathers so it went faster. This was the second time in the game I had to resort to spawning. I have one or two extra shells and seeds now that I have sold for safekeeping. No one in the party is a good pickpocketer but I think the game handles this wrong because even when I sleep or paralyze a crab or any other creature I cannot find anything. And if they are awake and the text indicates the rogue has been caught there is no battle over it. The NPC just stands there letting us practice and fail on it. When an NPC is awake (not a crab) I found only minor stuff so we have given up pickpocketing. BTW, when you actually STONE an NPC you cannot kill it with metal _but_ you can with fire. We ended up stoning sharks and crabs underwater, carried them to the surface sand somewhere and then cast burning haze on them to kill them. We found one shell on a crab this way. Sometimes you can see the shell appear when the crab dies but then it _immediately_ disappears and is lost. Nuff said about all of this--got to get back to Collasium. Have a nice 9001 and I hope your "struggles" with W&W are fruitful and you continue to enjoy the game.

This math is completely made up, but I think it's about accurate. I'd like to say that 70% of crabs *HAVE* shells, and that, when killed, 50% of those will drop them. It is in the second figure where pickpocketing becomes useful, for, though you'll still run into the 30% that have no shells, you won't lose the ones that just don't appear.

My final resolution? After getting rebreathers for all 6 characters and helmets for only 4, I got bored and left my two warlocks back at Brimloch, and did collassium with just the 4 fighters (paladin/samurai/ninja/assassin). The samurai knew enough Sun to be useful, the Ninja knew Moon all the way up so he could do the teleport/call of home thing. There really wasn't much to fight in Collassium, it was easily the shortest "dungeon" in the game (it took me like 30 min... I spent twice that much time stealing shells so I could go there!).

After it was over I /gladly/ sold off my rebreathers & helms, 'cause I never found anything else of note underwater.

BTW, the leprechaun thing is another known bug... unavoidable