Here are those well-dressed guys in their snazzy hats. Those hats rule. I seriously wish they were available in the game.

There are a few new types of shops here: a hairdresser, where you can change your hairstyle; a seed shop to buy seed and fertilizer; and other types of shops with level-appropriate equipment.

One of the first things you might want to do, when you get to London, is to visit your farm. Everyone automatically has a farm given to them, for free, but you need to be able to survive the trip to London. From what I can gather about prior beta tests, your house is located on the farm.

Even if you don’t intend to start farming right away, the warehouse is located on your farm. This is a storage space with four pages of 50 slots, 200 slots in total. Normal player inventory is limited to 25 slots (and 25 are currently locked), so you want to put important items here: equipment, crops, gathered materials and so on.

Here are some strawberries growing.

Everyone’s farm looks the same, and there are a number of settings you can make. You can allow people to visit, but even then, they can’t DO anything. So if you’re growing crops, they can’t mess you up. I imagine that those settings are ultimately more useful when housing is enabled.

Farming is an interesting skill, and takes a bit getting used to. The actual “farm skill” does not skill up unless you actively plant seeds. Other skills are used when you want to gather crops or chop down dead crops. There is a “farm tool” slot, but unimplemented.

The workable area is a 9×9 square, which you need to fertilize to ensure that crops will grow. You can plant without fertilizing, but you’ll have very slow progress, and your crops will be poor.

London is a big city, the third such place you’ll work up to, after the Harbour and Floraplois. An important town in real life as well as in HKO, right now (in Founders Beta) most commerce and socialization occurs here. There are a full compliment of shops, more than previously available. Even more importantly, your farm is located here. Eventually your house will be on your farmland, but houses are not in the game right now.

This is also the last town you’ll need to visit in FB, because the other towns are either inaccessable (Bejing) or empty (Paris). In London, you’ll continue to work on the main quest line, and “finish” your character.

It’s a big town, so here’s a map of the zone.

There’s a lot of interesting place to visit: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, London Bridge, the ferris wheel known as either the Millienum Wheel or the London Eye, a wax museum, and other places. So many places, but I won’t post them all at once.

When you venture outside of Florapolis, but before you get to London, you’ll see some interesting sights along the way. I like these little touches:

Looks like someone didn’t tighten the spigot very well! They’re going to have a big water bill next month.

Many of the tree stumps apparently have some sort of anti-social occupant.

Florapolis is the next zone players visit when they outgrow the Harbour, usually around level 5 or 6. You’ll also really start to get involved in the “main quest line” here.

It’s not a very big city, but it has more amenities than the Harbour: clothing, tools and a wand shop.The guys with the stylin’ hats are vendors, and it appears their appearance is standardized. Too bad their hats aren’t items, I’d spend cash for one of them.

There are a few other interesting sights to see… like the stage:

And Purin’s Coffee shop:

You’ll need to visit this shop several times, but it’s a nice place.

Here is where players enter into HKO. There is actually a tutorial before this, where you learn movement, interaction, and that kind of stuff. When you finish the tutorial, you’re brought to the main game world, and the first place you land is Sanrio Harbour at the docks.

This is what the zone map looks like

And it’s a pretty busy zone. Of course, this is nothing like it was on the first day of beta, but there are still a lot of people here.

I know everyone who’s playing Hello Kitty Online (HKO) will be doing the same as I am, but here’s a sort of travel guide. I didn’t take many screenshots while I was leveling up, so after I reached level 20, I went back and took a few different shots of places. It would have been hard, if not impossible, to reach some of these at lower levels, anyways.

Level 20 is the functional max. There are no quests, no equipment beyond level 20. You can actually get to level 30, but that’s purely grinding. Once you hit 20, you generally spend your time farming (literally on your farm), grinding for cash or materials , chatting, or helping out people. If you haven’t upgraded your equipment by then, now is the time. You can easily spend a few hours grinding big boars and selling the vendor trash to purchase the highest level equipment.

You’ll also see my guild tag, the Misfits :) We’re a good bunch, so if you want a nice casual and helpful guild, mature players, feel free to ask anyone in the guild to join. We don’t actively seek recruits, but we don’t really turn anyone down. All that’s asked is don’t be a jerk. Don’t kill-steal or ninja resources.

Spawn camping is a bit different in this game, some of the maps are smaller, and everyone is at the same basic level. It’s not unusual to find someone camping a node. Even if they’re not actively gathering, but close enough to a node, try not to interfere. There ARE other nodes available. There’s  no real end-game, no raids and the party system is currently disabled, so once you finish all the quests, you’ll just end up maxxing your character, and if you have to walk a few extra minutes to find a less densely populated area, is that really a hardship?

Anyway, enough preaching on game etiquitte!

Well, I’m not really sure what to post, but I figured I’d post something. Since the HKO Founders Beta is going to start in just over 24 hours from now, and they’re tied into the blogging system, it only makes sense.

Other than that, hope to see you in the game!