rangifer’s diary: pt. lxxxv

Suboptimal as a community

For those unaware, Suboptimal is the name of an in-game alliance that I lead, which is currently composed of the following five guilds:

• Oddjobs (open to all odd-jobbers who don’t leech),
• Flow (open to anyone, but focused on outland permabeginners),
• Southperry (open to all islanders and all campers),
• Newbology (open to all islanders and all campers),
• and Victoria (open to all viclockers).

It’s a pretty cool alliance, if you ask me ;), but you’ll notice that the alliance is already full — five is the maximum number of guilds that can occupy a single alliance together. I had a discussion about this, in alliance chat, with Red (Permanovice, Battlesage, illadvised, Dreamscapes, Hanger) and jung1e (Plucks). Naturally, even as a full alliance of five whole guilds, Suboptimal tends to be pretty sparse. Most people do not opt for playing MapleStory in unusual ways (notice that this statement is more than a little bit tautological), and of those who do, some will treat it — in one way or another — as a kind of “vacation”, away from their “main” character(s). So it would actually make sense for us to go beyond the limit, and add even more guilds to Suboptimal; having so many guilds in a single alliance chat might sound spammy, but for an alliance like Suboptimal, a better word might be “cozy”, or “inclusive”. We floated the idea of actually making a suggestion thread on the MapleLegends forums to allow some mechanism for increasing the alliance size cap beyond five — it already starts at only two anyways, and you have to purchase expansions with mesos. But we knew it to be unlikely that such a change would be made to the game, so we considered some other approaches to this general problem of uniting “people who play MapleLegends weirdly”.

This general problem of uniting may sound familiar to those who are already familiar with the Odd Job Initiative, something that I have talked about in previous diary entries. And indeed, all of this falls under the purview of the Odd Job Initiative.

One possible option is to try to cram more “guilds” into a single alliance chat by creating “superguilds” that subsume two or more other, smaller guilds. In the process of subsumption of these virtual guilds under a single superguild, each one must naturally sublate its identity, including the distinctions of who belongs to which virtual guild, the name of the guild, the emblem, etc., in favour of some compromise. Furthermore, in the case that the virtual guild started its life as a real guild, the transformation from a guild into a virtual guild means losing members — in many cases, lots of members, some of whom may be inactive or may be taking a temporary break from the game. These rather extreme compromises make superguilds possible, but generally distasteful for most people.

On the other hand, the internet obviously exists well outside of just the game (viz. MapleLegends) itself. In this vein, the two platforms that Maplers (at least those who play MapleLegends and similar servers) are actually familiar with, and that they are willing to use, are Discord™ and forums (in our case, the MapleLegends forum in particular). I already had previously proposed the idea of a Suboptimal–Dream meta-alliance (which includes the five guilds of Suboptimal, in addition to GangGang and Chroma of the Dream alliance; we share a headquarters in channel 6 of FM 9) Discord™ server. So I floated that idea, along with the idea of simply a Suboptimal Discord™ megaserver.

Of course, for such a server to exist, it would need an emblem…! And alliance emblems don’t exist in-game (only guild emblems), so we were free to come up with whatever. While brainstorming ideas, I suggested a snail (like an ordinary Blue Snail, for example), but with Mano’s Rainbow-coloured Snail Shell as its shell. Slime (OmokTeacher, Thinks, Ginner, Slimu), the talented pixel artist that he is, put together just that!:

There it is! The emblem of Suboptimal!! Why a rainbow snail, you ask? Well, the rainbow snail reminds me that opening the door to oddball ways of playing MapleStory has a wonderful and profound effect: it makes things more colourful. When playing MapleStory conventionally, the premise is essentially this: pick one of the dozen or so different jobs, and be the best version of that job that you can be. While this is certainly fantastic on its own, opening the door to other styles of play makes things unboundedly more colourful. Also, we are all LGBTQIA+. Maybe. Just kidding, you don’t have to be LGBTQIA+ to be a Suboptimal member. We accept straights too :)

In any case, we now have a Suboptimal Discord™ server dedicated to all manner of oddball styles of play, and if you’re already in the Oddjobs, Flow, or Victoria Discord™ servers, you already got an invite. I’m considering opening this server, in an appropriate way, to non-oddball players (including other members of our meta-alliance, and possibly also those who may simply be curious), but that decision has yet to be made. If you’re interested in joining, feel free to drop a DM and/or friend request by me on Discord™ capreolina. <3

With all of that said, I always feel that there must be more work to be done in this space. What exactly the next step is, however, I do not know.

Raffling… still‽

So, the Valentine’s Day/Lunar New Year (LNY) event of 2022 has ended. Or has it…?

As it turns out, if you started a raffle quest before the event ended, the quest persists until you complete it — even though the event is already over. So I took the opportunity to do just a few more raffles…

And I got a few Prestigious Coins out of it! Not bad at all!! And, due to the raffle quest of my daggermit alces, it was the first time that I ever fought Yeti and Coketumps. But as we shall see, it will not be the last…

메이플 아일랜드

Over on Maple Island, I had the good fortune to duo some Dangerous Forest (DF) with islander extraordinaire (and leader of Newbology) jung1e (Plucks), on my islander ozotoceros, while on GM buffs! jung1e was kind enough to let me have the bottom layer (which is full of juicy Orange Mushrooms), so I tried a quick & dirty @epm test:

90.8k EPH o_o Spicy!!

And, he was also kind enough to gift me a spare cat mug random chair! So now I have two of the LNY 2022 event chairs on ozo!!:

At the end of our training session, ozo hit level 44 :D

And finally, I was honoured to, uhm, do the honours of levelling up both jung1e and 1sme (Ismezin) with a single Pig!!:

Grats again to these two epic islanders :3

Suboptimal vs. the world

As always, I did some nifty bosserinoes with the Suboptimal krew. While I was hunting for Tough Dragon Skins on my darksterity knight rusa, I came across a Levi! So I asked in ally chat if anyone wanted to kill Levi, and daggermit Keppet responded to my call:

In total, we killed two Levis, but the first one dropped a chair!!:

And I won the roll, so rusa now has a snazzy (and rather adorable, I might say) dragon chair!:

During another scheduled event, Level1Crook (Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer, Lanius) and I were unfortunately the only ones in attendance. But we didn’t let that stop us from killing some Ravs:

And some Papal Atlases, too! Level1Crook dared me to touch the spicy ball, so I did:

Ow. But I did survive…:

And here’s a nice action shot of us killing clockless Paper Lattice:

The meteoric rise of one “d33r”

As I showed in a previous entry of this diary, my vicloc clericlet d33r managed to raffle a really nice pair of Tangy Earrings, with 2 INT and 1 LUK clean! Naturally, these earrings were my next target for my adventures in vicloc gear upgrading. Ear INT 60%s are a bit difficult to come by, but I did manage to find enough additional ones to finish off the earrings. I also tried (and failed) a CSS3. In the end, these earrings totally failed, passing only 40% of the slots (much less than the advertised “60%” pass rate of the scrolls that I used…), meaning that my (+3) salad earrings are still superior by a 1 TMA margin >.<

Footnotes for “The meteoric rise of one ‘d33r’”

*Anglophones love to get twisted up about how to pluralise octopus. One of the two most prevalent plural forms is octopi /ˈɒkt.ə.paɪ/. However, this is a hypercorrection based on the misconception that octopus comes from a Latin second declension noun octōpūs, when in actuality, the word octōpūs only exists in Latin as a New Latin word in third declension, whose nominative plural is octōpodēs (*octōpi is thus not a word at all). This New Latin pluralisation reflects the pluralisation in Ancient Greek, which is the actual origin of the English word octopus (Ancient Greek: ὀκτώπους). This New Latin word, and its Ancient Greek origins, naturally produced an alternative way of pluralising the English word octopus: octopodes /ˌɒkˈtɒ.pə.diːz/. Although it would seem that this form is thus the “most correct” way of pluralising octopus, in actuality its use is quite rare (many Anglophones would likely find it to be exotic-sounding), and some English dictionaries do not even list it. The alternative is to regularise the word according to English norms of pluralisation (which happens naturally with most words of foreign origin anyways), which gets us octopuses /ˈɒkt.əˌpʊ.sɪz/, the form that I use here.

Cyn × Noble

I attended the wedding of LunaS2 (Cyn) and NobIe (Cexy, xNoble, CtrlNoble, Amaging, 1122), where we got some moving (but definitely Platonic…!) vows from NobIe:

The analogy with PB&J is humorous, but appropriate. Who doesn’t like a good PB&J, the holy & immortal sandwich of kings?

And we also got some… perhaps less Platonic “vows” from Cyn, after some prodding…:

o.o"

Grats again on the power marriage, you two :]

Sweetest nut hath sourest (g)rind

Over at everyone’s favourite library packed with hammer-wielding bodybuilder monks, I helped my marksman friend xBowtjuhNL level up, on my darksterity knight rusa:

Ramon likes to emphasise just how much he hates 7F, but he was so close to levelling, that it was the most reasonable option at the time…

And there it is! Level 172~!! o_o Big numbers!!

I did also two or three grind sessions at Galloperas (Gallos) on my woodsmaster capreolina, duoing with sniper Level1Crook (Lanius, Lvl1Crook, xXCrookXx, Macer):

Inching closer to the big level 135 :]

And finally, I was delighted to be joined by NZPally (NZIslander, LoveIslander, NZFire) at 7F, again on my darksterity knight rusa, after beggin— I mean, politely asking in the Suboptimal Discord™ server if anyone wanted to 7F with me so that I could use my hoarded GM buffs :)

Ty again for the party! ^^

Moloch horridus

That’s right; it’s time for more horny lizard fighting, on my darksterity knight rusa!

I did one such HT run in which we sold HTP to a baby buccaneer by the name of BuccBeak:

Unfortunately for us, the run didn’t quite go as expected. Here’s another screenshot from the same run, wherein you may notice the distinct lack of bishops. As it happens, this is not the result of me cropping the screenshot…:

You can see SmallMight’s (SiriusPlaque, NobleFantasm) Armour Crash at the bottom of the image, as there are no bishops to Dispel the HT heads’ WDEF buff. This is pretty important, as the WDEF buff cuts our collective DPM down by a factor of ≈2 or so.

And worse yet, our other dark knight (Lance) also bit it ;~;

Soblet, who had been bravely performing sed target duties without any bishops, got unlucky with a combination of debuffs and bit it as well :[

This meant that someone else became the new sed target. Hmmm… I wonder who came into the map second…

Ah, well, that’s not too bad. Heroes make decent sed targets, I suppose.

As we were desperately trying to kill the last remaining head — the middle head — I wasn’t so sure that I could actually hit it from the right-hand side of the map. Without a right head to Rush into, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to reach; and even with the right head alive, Rushing seemed to only work 10%〜15% of the time. Jayem told me that it should be possible to get into position, if I really carefully tap the left arrow key while in mid-air to precisely adjust my position on the platform. After some trial and error, I was able to finagle my way to the exact sub-pixel(!) position necessary to reach with mid head with my Crusher:

And finally, after all that, we may have lost our bishops and our sed target, but at least we got a MW20!:

Oh, and I also got a Horntail Chair!:

Unfortunately, BuccBeak disappeared at some point during the run — he didn’t die, but must have disconnected at some point.

In a later run, we tried selling HTP to BuccBeak again:

In this run, we were blessed by GM Nightzy’s (Nightz) witchy Funk buffs:

This run went a bit better, but we still managed to trigger mass sed before the mid head was down LOL:

But, in the end, all was well, and BuccBeak got his HTP. And rusa hit level 162~!:

During another run, we once again failed to stop attacking the arms in time to avoid triggering mass sed while head(s) were still up. In this case, I unfortunately got sealed immediately before getting a surprise mass seduce (the first mass sed of the run), so I died as a result of not being able to use Hero’s Will…

Here’s another mass from the same run, while mid head is still up and kickin’:

This run was true suffering. Not only were we getting massed while the mid head was still alive, but the mid head absolutely refused to die. Constant weapon cancel after weapon cancel after weapon cancel after weapon cancel after…… Someone complained that we should get two MW20s for our efforts, to which CDNLP replied “fuck that, we better get three”. With great displeasure, we looked upon the drops after we finally slew this stubborn HT, to find no MW20s at all:

Oh well, at least we got an MCP… And at least rusa hit level 163~!:

W h e w . Looks like rusa is now Technically Qualified™ do some Neo Tokyo stuff…? In any case, she finally surpassed the 800 base DEX mark!:

Now that I’ve got a few HTs under my belt, I’d like to talk a little bit about how I approach HT, from the perspective of a poopy DK.

The preheads are, of course, pretty straightforward: you kinda just stand there and attack. For the preheads, I use a pretty typical pet autopot setup: I have plum onigiri on both my autoHP and my autoMP, have my autoHP threshold at 35%, and have my autoMP threshold at around ≈5%. The autoMP is mostly there for 1⧸1 attacks; I often manually use Sorcerer Elixirs when my MP is getting low.

Once we get to the main body, though, I have to completely redo my autopot setup. At the moment, my MAXHP with HB is “only” about ≈27.8k or so, so I’ve been sticking with the following setup: Ginseng Roots on autoHP at a threshold of 30%, and Sorcerer Elixirs on autoMP at a threshold of ≈5%. As you can see, this is likely to result in overhealing; in the worst case, my HP gets just barely low enough to pass the threshold, and my pet heals me to about ≈70% HP. This is well above the zerk threshold of 55%, so you will often see me rawring to get my HP back down. Once I get to 30k MAXHP with HB (or very close to 30k, e.g. 29.8k), I might try doing this same thing but with the autoHP threshold at 25% instead. If any DKs are reading this, please let me know your experience with zerking in HT!

At the beginning of the main body fight, all of the body parts are alive (duh), and most attackers will be hitting the legs. However, I can’t cleave the legs (the legs are just a single target), so I generally prefer to attack the left head and mid head at this point, since it’s fairly easy to hit both at the same time with Crusher. If both of these heads are weapon cancelled (which seems to happen a lot, especially when HT first spawns), or I just need to rebuff everyone, I drop down to the bottom and attack the legs for a bit. I only move back up to the heads if they are both “up” (i.e., not weapon cancelled). When attacking the left & mid heads, I have to be careful to only Rush rightwards if my current HP exceeds ≈12.5k or so. I usually look for ≥13k to ensure that I don’t die by Rush inexplicably yeeting me into the air and causing me to touch the deadly left head.

Once the legs are killed, most attackers are now attacking the tail. The tail has notoriously high WATK (it probably deals ≈25k touch damage or so to most PCs), so rather than getting up close and personal with the tail so that I can melee attack it, I continue attacking the left & mid heads. Most warriors (even paladins and heroes) will do the same. The main difference is that now, when both heads are weapon cancelled, I don’t attack the legs (as they are dead) — I attack the wings. Of course, it’s a bit difficult to hit the wings without also hitting the left arm here, but it’s not a big deal yet, as no one has attacked either arm at this point. I do like to stand on the rightmost edge of the higher platform (instead of the lower one, which is also further to the right), in order to avoid attacking the arms more, while still hitting wings consistently.

Once the tail dies, not that much changes, except that things get more crowded for me, as everyone comes up to attack the left & mid heads with me.

Once the left head goes down, things suddenly get a lot less dangerous for me, as I can no longer die by touching the left head! And, at this point, everyone crosses to the right-hand half of the map to attack from there. Now I’m trying to cleave the mid head and right head at the same time, which is honestly excruciatingly difficult as a DK. It’s certainly possible; I always strive to cleave both heads, but the length of platform that allows this to happen is actually only one (1) pixel wide (possibly less than one pixel, I can’t be sure)! So if Rush doesn’t miraculously get me there, I have to very carefully scooch my way leftwards, subpixel by subpixel, until I can confirm that my attacks are hitting the mid head. And then, five seconds later, I get knocked off of the platform and have to start all over!! 😡 The confirmation that I am actually hitting the mid head usually comes in the form of the Crusher hit-marker; as a result, HTing with one or more other DKs makes this significantly more difficult! How am I supposed to tell if I’m hitting‽‽ And again, if both the mid & right heads are weapon cancelled, I can attack the wings.

Once the wings are down, I usually try to take it easy on the arms. As you can see, I find myself in a lot of HTs where we accidentally trigger mass sed before all of the heads are down… F3… Once mass sed is finally triggered, I know to look for the purple glowing middle-finger wiggle animation to determine when a mass sed could be cast. Even with all of the heads down, the falling rocks on either side (bottom left or bottom right) of the map can actually be surprisingly deadly — because I’m zerked, I have to be very wary of getting seduced while at low HP and dying to the rocks. Usually, a single plum onigiri is enough to get my HP high enough to survive sed without Willing, as long as the heads are all down. I also know how to spot the mid head’s dispel animation, which helps throughout much of the fight — especially if the arms start mass seducing while the mid head is still up…

Moar viclockin’

Oh, you thought that the saga of d33r was going to be the only vicloc content in this diary entry? Think again!

I sold five GFA60s to vicloc STRginner illadvised (Permanovice, Dreamscapes, Battlesage, Hanger) in exchange for an outland Ear INT 30% for me to sell on my FM mule :] And you’ll never guess what happened…

10 WATK, 1 STR gloves on the first try??? Holy moly!!! To celebrate, illa came up with a new look, based off of their outland STRginner Permanovice…:

Like two peas in a pod.

I later accidentally committed manslaughter on my vicloc dagger spearwoman d34r…

I SWEAR I JUST KILLED ONE (1) JR. BOOGER! That’s it!! Please don’t banish me to the L Forest ;~;

Also on d34r, I attended a GM event by the name of “Bomberman”:

The idea is pretty simple: there’s a few small platforms that you can stand on to avoid dying to the golems at the bottom of the map, and a GM goes around, placing bombs on those platforms at will, designed to blow up and knock you off of the platforms. There are a lot of people, so it can be difficult to keep track of where you are, and where the bombs are. Once enough people have been eliminated and only ≈5 or so remain, the GM often goes invisible to make the game more difficult. In the first round, I managed to be the fourth-to-last one standing. I didn’t get hit by any bombs, I am just bad at MapleStory and missed a jump from one platform to an adjacent one:

Unfortunately not good enough for a prize! You have to be the last one standing! So in the next round… I did the exact same thing:

Fourth place again, and again because I simply could not make a simple jump u_u Someone in the sea of gravestones even asked “who just jumped off” when I fell… 😳

In the third (and final) round, I managed to make it to second place, but was not able to best my opponent. This time, I did actually get knocked off by a bomb (thank god):

So, no victories. But hey! At least I’m consistent!! And I still got a Scroll of Secrets~:

OA STR 30%!!! That’s easily one of the best possible rewards from turning in the SoS, considering:

• It’s a 30% scroll, which is obviously very powerful on its own, but even more incredibly powerful because vicloc doesn’t naturally have 30% scrolls other than the cape 30%s that drop in the APQ bonus stage!
• It’s a scroll for STR for overalls, none of which (10%, 30%, 60%, 70%, 100%, etc.) occur naturally in vicloc!
• Scrolling overalls for STR is very powerful for many vicloc jobs, from warriors, to archers, to pirates, to bandits, etc.!

So, we shall see the fate of this blessed scroll in the future… I can’t wait to see it blow something up!

Also on d34r, I was fortunate enough to duo part of a basket with vicloc crossbowman Thinks (Slime, OmokTeacher, Ginner, Slimu) at ye olde FoG:

And finally, I did a lot of standing around and waiting for big undead monke guy to spawn, in an attempt to finish d34r’s shield. So far, it’s essentially perfect! As a Silver Ancient Shield that started with 3 DEX clean, I have now passed four Shield STR 60%s on the first four slots!! Just need three more of those pesky scrolls!!!

This is the message that is broadcast to all PCs that are in the map when Faust spawns:

I’ve always thought it was a bit strange that Faust appears amidst the “blue” fog. The surroundings are all very Ellinia; green everywhere, plus some brown for the wooden log platforms. There’s really no blue to be seen anywhere, not even on Faust itself. But, it wasn’t until very recently that I realised the probable reason why the message says “blue” in this context. It’s common in many languages to have a single term that encompasses what is referred to in English as two separate colours: blue and green. English has no real colour term like this (other than smashing the two words together to get grue or bleen), but Korean has such a term: 파랗다 (parata). This term is ultimately from 풀 (pul), meaning “grass”. Another term from this root is 푸르다 (pureuda), which means “blue” or “green”, depending on the context (and can also be used figuratively).

Deer 2

The owner of IGN Deer came back and found me, seemingly just to taunt me…

As it turned out, she was having some pretty serious issues with getting a stable connection to the MapleLegends servers, so she just kept D/Cing. :[ But she was around long enough for me to notice that she was a permabeginner, so I invited her to join Oddjobs:

Great… Now people are REALLY gonna think that IGN Deer is me!!

In any case, Deer showed off her Omok skills in a livestreamed Omok match against the OmokTeacher (Slime, Thinks, Ginner) himself:

As it turned out, even while quite rusty on Omok due to not having played it in a long time, Deer was very strong!! I don’t know anything about Omok, but OmokTeacher said that she’s very strong, so I believe him.

I later found out that, indeed, I didn’t know Deer before learning that she was the owner of said IGN. The IGNs of her main characters are Japansy and Japanties… But don’t be fooled — ­I am not IGN Deer!! I offered to purchase the IGN (after Red informed me that this is, in fact, not considered RWT), but they said that they didn’t really want to sell. So you can now see her in the Oddjobs and Suboptimal Discord™ servers as “Deer v.2”…

Hittin’ big bad guys with a stick

It is time for our regularly-scheduled boss-beating with our resident darksterity knight rusa…!

I did a pair of Zak runs with freshly level 135 shadower Bulgoki, as well as Harlez and xBowtjuhNL. That’s four members of the MPQ krew in one Zak! :P

And, during a JC run while rusa was level 161, I tried to do a clean @dpm 5 to check out my damage:

Heyo, 180.8M DPH ain’t half bad for SE, Echo, MW9, and a Cider! Once the clones start rolling out, my DPM really goes up ^^

Meet tara

Oh boy… That’s right, deer went and made yet another peepee poopoo garbo odd-jobbed character to add to her collection >.<

Or did I?? Meet rangifer’s lil sis, tarandus!!

RANGIFER IS DEAD! LONG LIVE RANGIFER!!

Or rather, long live tara! I like calling her tara because tara is a prefix of tarandus, and also I think that Tara is a pretty name. Her name was easy to come up with (at least, after I decided that I didn’t want to reuse rangifer), as rangifer is a monotypic genus, that is, it contains only one species: Rangifer tarandus.

You probably already guessed that tara is a pugilist! However, she is not a carbon copy of her big sis rangifer. Here’s an overview of some of the differences:

• tara has a different subjob: she’s a shield pugilist! I debated between shield pugilist (for its extra damage) and shieldless pugilist (for its, in my opinion, superior æsthetics :P), but ultimately decided that using a shield would be worth it in the long run.

• tara is a lil washy…! For better or worse, brawlers/marauders/buccaneers have considerably less MAXHP than their warrior counterparts, despite often having to get even closer & more personal to their enemies to pull off several of the moves in their arsenal.

  That being said, I’m not a big fan of deeply washing characters; I need my characters to be fully functional (or almost fully functional) starting at level 1 onwards, because the low levels are the best part of the game! So I’ve decided on simply 40 base INT, to be washed out down to 4 base INT whenever I feel like it (currently, the level that I would theoretically expect to wash out at is ≈120 or so — we’ll see if I even get that far!).

  Due to the whole washing thing, I have to put INT pyjamas on every time I level, which generally means equipping a weapon! >w< So what I’ve been doing is putting on my washing sticc and simply Three Snailsing my way to victory, instead of trying to SSK or anything like that. :P

  Honestly, my end goal would really just be the ability to — at max HP — touch Zakum’s third body and (consistently!) live to tell the tale. Anything beyond that is “just gravy”!

• I made sure to plan tara’s build — particularly SP build — entirely in advance, before even creating the character. This was an issue with rangifer, as I had issues with SP allocation that couldn’t be reversed by SP resets (as SP resets allow you to reset SP from a lower job to a higher job, but not vice versa — yes, you read that correctly…).

• tara’s “route” (i.e. way of levelling up and playing the game, which stuff in the game you do, & all that) is, in many ways, drastically different from that of rangifer. Whereas on rangifer, I did lots and lots of juicy PQs, tara is much less PQ-focused. Instead, tara is on a mission to do quests. All of the quests. Well, almost. I’m not a quest completionist, as quest completion counts really mean nothing to me. However, if I can finish a quest, and I don’t already know that the quest is a pain in the ass that I don’t wanna do, then I do it. That’s it; those are the criteria. As a result, this means that I will be skipping very few quests, relatively speaking. I have already skipped at least some: I left Maple Island at level 7 (with several unfinished quests) for washing purposes. I already know that I will almost certainly be skipping The Record of Goddess Minerva. I absolutely love OPQ, but god damn that quest…

  So far, all of tara’s EXP has been from questing. I even skipped over my beloved KPQ entirely!! I intend on persisting with this path of quests-only until it becomes prohibitive. Or until I feel like it. You don’t know me. I can do whatever I want.

• I made a new outfit for tara, based on rangifer’s old outfit. I’ve retained the hairstyle and face, but changed the hair colour and eye colour, changed the colour of the touque, and changed the rest of the outfit to match. I decided to go with bare feet for tara (unlike rangifer, who wore military boots), so that all of my limbs are fleshy weapons of mass destruction!!

Anyways, here’s a little résumé of what tara has been up to so far!:

Given how much I adore KPQ, you might reasonably wonder if my experience has suffered as a result of skipping it. In this case, I actually enjoyed skipping KPQ very much! It allowed me to continue questing, and thus to do a lot more quests than I normally (“normally” meaning: still sating my PQ appetite) would be able to at lower levels.

As part of my questing journey, I’m doing all of the Coke™ Town quests.

Before making tara, I had never done any of these quests, so I figured that I owe it to myself to at least explore this isolated region of the MapleLegends world (as Coke™ Town is not an event map in MapleLegends, it’s a permanent addition). Unfortunately, Coke™ Town kinda sux. There’s no better way to say it; everyone who I’ve asked about it who has actually done the quests says it kinda sux too. The quest rewards are modest at best, and the actual end reward (kinda the “whole point” of doing the Coke™ Town questline) — the Cokeplay™ Shield — is completely broken, and thus unattainable in-game.

But that’s not the only broken part of Coke™ Town! Most of the maps have broken monster spawns :)

These quests take a long time not because they are “difficult” per se, but moreso because you have to wait three weeks for a single Coke Snail to respawn.

I’ve done about half a dozen of the quests now, including Polar Bear Lolo’s ladder to the sky 1, which requires collecting ETC items from the Coketump Lites™ that you see below:

…And from ordinary Coketumps™ as well. These are both found in the bizarrely-named Coke™ Ski Camp B1648, which thankfully appears to have spawns that aren’t buggy.

One case of buggy spawns that is really more humorous than anything is Small Alley, which has almost all of its spawns concentrated on a single small floating platform that takes up probably like ≈3% or so of the map’s total surface area:

I fell off of this tiny-ass platform countless times trying to kill these damn seals… In any case, we should see more of tara doing Coke™ Town quests in the next installation of Questing With tara™!

tara is level >35 now, so she could LPQ. However, LPQ has no quest tie-ins, and I don’t really need the glasses (I prefer a nice pair of specs myself!), so it’s actually rather unlikely that I will do any LPQ.

If you’re curious about the planned-out SP build that I mentioned above, I’ve copy & pasted it here:

rusa, the darksterity knight

During a Zak run that I did with xBowtjuhNL, Harlez (VigiI), LunaS2, and others, we got on the topic of drawing MapleStory characters:

Indeed, Ramon had never showed me the drawing of my darksterity knight rusa before! As it happened, Ramon and Harley asked an artist to make a portrait of rusa for her level 120 party, to which they agreed. Unfortunately, the artist mysteriously disappeared before actually producing any such portrait, so Harley and Ramon were left on their own. As a result, Ramon gave it an attempt himself. Lemme see it!!

That’s definitely my girl rusa! Her weapon may be missing, but perhaps she can use her cranial pool noodle to bludgeon her enemies.

I was inspired by this portrait to try my hand at my own portrait of rusa. You may remember that I have done a different MapleStory portrait before, in pt. xxxi of this diary — particularly, a portrait of my pure STR bishop cervid (you can find the full portrait here). So I fired up Krita once again, and started hackin’ away at it.

One of the things that I focused on when drawing is emphasising the hand-drawn. Although I am using Krita — a piece of digital art software — for drawing, essentially everything that you see is the direct result of hand-drawn brush strokes. Of course, I use a lot of smoothing to iron out the really shitty inputs. You have to realise that I am inputting my brush strokes by operating a crappy bargain-bin computer mouse with my hooves, so input smoothing is a must. At least in Krita, with the default settings, this smoothing doesn’t just work “magically”. It actually affects how your cursor moves on-screen, in real time, as the inputs come in. So I got really used to having my cursor feel like it’s stuck in a pool of molasses. Nevertheless, not absolutely everything is the result of hand-drawn brush strokes. In particular, the glowy effect on the Beholder and on the rawr are done by copying the brush strokes to a new layer, and then applying Gaussian blur, keeping the blurred version behind (i.e. on a lower layer than) the hand-drawn version.

One change that I made during the drawing process was related to rusa’s facial expression. I wanted to make her irises (and pupils) into flames, to match the general “flaming bird lady” theme that she has due to the flaming cape, the flaming eye accessory, and her generally fiery-orange colour scheme. I was a little afraid that doing this might make her look evil (LOL), and my fear was somewhat vindicated at first. I tried changing her right eyebrow and mouth shape to look friendlier, which helped only a little bit. Then Lv1Crook suggested that her eyes are just too big for her irises, making her gaze look cold and distant. So I set out to lower the amount of visible sclera by simply inflating the iris/pupil region. At first, I upscaled the irises and painstakingly redrew all of the brush strokes by hand (including the outer round part, and all of the flame layers!). Then I realised that I had gone too far in the other direction, and now her irises were too large. Thankfully, my poor aching wrists were spared by the magical Hermite interpolation downscaling filter that Krita provides. By using this filter to downscale the iris somewhat, the brush strokes didn’t lose any quality nor did they accrue any noticeable artefacts. Hooray!

I drew rusa’s birb (her weapon) based on a reference image of rusa walking forwards (as that is what she is doing in the portrait). For some reason, the animation of this NX weapon when its user walks forwards is missing legs. My poor birby guy has no leg. I felt bad for my legless friend, so I decided to draw legs for my guy anyways. Because the flying animation of the actual NX weapon has no legs, I needed actual reference images of real birbs IRL. After I finished drawing everything except for the legs, I posted the sketch in the Suboptimal Discord™ server and asked if any expert ornithologists could identify my birby guy for me, because I actually had no idea what species they might be. jung1e/Plucks offered an image of an owl that looked kind of like my guy. This owl was an eastern screech owl (Megascops asio). These true owls (Strigidae) are members of the genus of screech owls, and are common throughout a large swathe of North America, particularly the eastern half of the U.S., the northeastern reaches of Mexico, and the southeastern reaches of Canada. Never mind the fact that the NX weapon is actually called “Hunting Hawk”… Unlike the closely-related western screech owl — which occupies most of the regions of North America that its eastern portion does not — the western screech owl comes in multiple distinct morphs. The main two morphs are the red (or rufous) morph, and the grey morph. Although the two morphs are just morphs of the same exact species, they can look considerably different to the eye. But they are both adorable. My guy looks more like the red morph, so I used the red eastern screech owl as my owl of choice. Reference images were actually a bit difficult to find, as most photographs of owls depict owls at rest, meaning that you typically cannot see their legs. Searching for terms like “eastern screech owl flying” yielded some decent (albeit disappointingly low-resolution) results that I used to get a basic idea of the leg/foot anatomy. My first draft has some not-so-well-defined noodle knees, and LawdHeComin/AppleBasket suggested that I make the knees more sharply angled and well-defined, which helped.

The colouration of the Beholder is a bit… interesting, in the original in-game sprites. The colouration of the original makes use of actual shades of grey (where all three colour components are exactly equal), including black (#000000) and dark grey (#333333), but also dark shades of indigo & purple, and light shades of blue. I tried to remain faithful to the original design for the most part, which gives it kind of a unique look that mashes together the high-resolution & relatively high colour depth of the portrait’s medium, with the distinct low-colour-depth & pixel art aesthetic of MapleStory.

Also keep in mind that the final product has transparency. Some of the pixels are fully transparent (#00000000), while some others have alpha values strictly between 0 and 1, making them partially (but not fully) transparent. This is intentional, as I want the subject of the portrait to stand on its own, and I also want to leave open the possibility of any number of different backgrounds. The only real downside is that the image may look significantly different depending on what colour of background you happen to be viewing it on.

As always, the three images below (including the animated one) are licenced to anyone under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence, or any higher version of the same licence (CC-BY-SA-4.0-or-later).

For reasons that are yet unknown to me, I could not resist moshing* this portrait to create a “glitch art”-style version. In the past, I’ve done a bit of imagebending myself, mostly by opening JPEG files in a hex editor (like e.g. Okteta) and simply going wild. Although this does sometimes break the JPEG (as you’d expect), JPEGs seem to be surprisingly resilient to bit-flips & the like (unlike PNGs which, in my experience, break nearly instantly if you start flipping bits).

I considered doing something similar here, but I wanted to try my hand at moshing a lossless image format. The obvious choice is just BMP or something similarly simple, where the actual image data is stored naïvely: raw, uncompressed, pixel data — in our case, RGBA data with one byte per channel.

Then, I just needed a way to mosh the data! Now that the data is uncompressed, I can’t just flip a few bits and expect interesting-looking cascading visual effects to pop out of it. So I tried my hand at writing a very simple and very naïve computer program that rearranges the data in the file at random. After a just few iterations of the code, I ended up with a pretty compact little command that is nearly useless in general, but good enough for the exact purpose that I had in mind. I tried running it a few times to get some results to look at, and in the end, I chose this one as “the coolest”:

You can find the source code of the program in src/main.rs, but it’s so short that I can just copy & paste it here:

use rand::Rng;
use std::{
    env,
    error::Error,
    fs::{self, File},
    io::Write,
};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let filename = env::args()
        .nth(1)
        .ok_or("need input filename as first argument")?;
    let output_filename = env::args()
        .nth(2)
        .ok_or("need output filename as second argument")?;
    let mut bytes = fs::read(&filename)?;
    let mut rng = rand::thread_rng();

    for _ in 0..4 {
        let start_pos = rng.gen_range(0..bytes.len());
        let region_size = rng.gen_range(1..bytes.len() / 137);

        let region: Vec<_> = bytes
            .drain(start_pos..(start_pos + region_size).min(bytes.len()))
            .collect();
        let new_start_pos = rng.gen_range(0..bytes.len());
        bytes.splice(new_start_pos..new_start_pos, region);
    }

    let mut output_file = File::create(&output_filename)?;
    output_file.write_all(&bytes)?;

    Ok(())
}

I also put together a little animated GIF — actually, not an animated GIF at all, but rather an animated WebP! — to show the progression of rusa’s portrait as I was drawing it. The frames here are just bitmaps that I saved at no particular interval while in the process of drawing; basically, any time it occurred to me to save my progress separately as a bitmap, I did so. So there’s not a straightforward sense of time (it’s not a true time-lapse), but still it might be neat to look at:

Footnotes for “rusa, the darksterity knight”

*This use of mosh is distinct from the use meaning “dancing violently to music in a tightly-packed group of people”, although its etymology is probably the same. Both uses are (again, probably) simple alterations of mash “to reduce to a soft pulpy state by beating or pressure”. Compare the similarly obscure etymology of munge (also sometimes mung) “to transform data in an undefined or unexplained manner; to make repeated changes to a file or data which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original data; to data-wrangle”, which ostensibly arose in the 1970s or 1980s among computer groups at MIT, but which has no satisfactory etymology. The use of mosh here is from datamosh (often found in its nominal form datamoshing), which is typically used to apply specifically to moshing video data to produce glitchy video.

(…cnvpstdf…)