Apparently the wolf card is now dropping!

Helping Hearts Charity Guild Event!

While hanging out in the Harbor, I noticed some frequently asked questions regarding pets, so I figured I’d try to put together some sort of “pet guide”. Hopefully you’ll find some useful information to help you get more enjoyment from you pet, and understand what role he (or she!) plays.

Here are some of the questions I’ve seen asked most often:

• “how do I get a pet?”
• “how do I feed my pet?”
• “how can my pet attack?”
• “how do I use my pet?”
• “does my pet really need to go to the bathroom?”

Pet cards are random monster drops. They’ll look like cards in your regular inventory. To equip a pet card, right-click it, and it will disappear from your inventory.

You need to keep your pet happy by feeding it. Right now, the best thing to do is run to Florapolis and purchase some pet food, and try feeding it, and looking at the pet status screen to see what effects feeding (and not feeding) has.

Pets are passive in nature, and their current role is stats and inventory bonus. Pet stats are added to your current stats. So if you have an base 200 health, and your pet has 20 health, when you summon your pet, you will now have 220 health (as well as the other status). This is nice for being out in the wild. Pets may also have bonus inventory space, but much smaller, which you can use use like normal inventory slots.

When you equip your pet, as above, you can use it by opening up the pet status screen, by pressing the E key (for pEt). Look at the image below, which is a pet status screen where I have added some text labels, which I will discuss further on.

For starters, you can have only three pets. If you want to equip another pet, but have no free slots, you will need to drop one. There is a small doghouse icon below the pet slot that says “drop pet”. This will ask for confirmation, because once you drop your pet, you cannot get it back unless you find and equip another card.

When your pet is equipped, you can summon and dismiss it through the pet interface screen (press E). At the bottom of the pet status are the three pet slots. If a slot is occupied, it will have a card, and you right-click on the card to summon or dismiss the pet. The currently summoned pet is surrounded by a dashed circle.

Pets like to chatter and complain about various things. One thing they mention is that they need to go potty. This is just “ambiance” chatter, so you can safely ignore most of their comments. And only you, the pet owner, can see the pets comments. Nobody else on-screen will see them asking about poopoo.

Your pet name can be changed at anytime by pressing the Rename button, to the right of the current pet name. By default, your pet will be named after its species. So if you have a crab, it’ll just be named Crab. Be creative.

You can see an image of your pet, and to the right of the image are general stats:

• level is the current level of your pet. Pets used to be maxxed at level 6, but that cap appears to have been increased. Levels are just like player levels, the higher the level, the higher its stats.
• training points are currently unused. The GMs hint at future plans, so for now, just ignore this.
• inventory space is just like your player inventory space, and is accessed by pressing the same button, I, which will open both yours and your pets inventory. Pets have a smaller inventory, but even an additional five slots is a bonus.

This is what my dino’s inventory looks like. When I press the I (inventory hotkey), it opens my Pet Inventory as a separate window next to my own inventory.

Underneath these basic stats are the bonus stats. These stats increase by levelling up your pet. All these stats are added to your current player stats. So if you have an HP bonus of 45, and a player HP of 200, when your pet is summoned, you will now have 245 HP.

• HP bonus
• Stamina bonus
• Attack bonus
• Defense bonus
• Critical hit bonus
• Dodge bonus

Below the bonus stats are information bars on the state of your pet:

• Experience to the next level. Just like the player experience level indicator. This bar grows from left to right, filling in with pink. As you feed your pet, there is a possibility that it will gain experience. When it levels up, the bar will reset back.
• Comfort. This is important to the overall comfort level of your pet. An uncomfortable pet will run away, or become unmanagable. The higher your pets comfort level, the more the bar will be filled with pink. If you neglect to feed your pet, the comfort level will drop by one tick for each feeding cycle. When you feed your pet, the comfort level will increase by an amount determined by the food you have feed.
• Hunger timer. This is a timer that displays the time until you can feed your pet again. If you try to feed your pet before it is hungry, nothing will happen and the food will not be consumed. The feeding cycle is 134 seconds. When you feed your pet, the bar will clear and then it will steadily rise during the feeding cycle. After the feeding cycle, if you do not feed your pet, the pet will begin to devour the comfort level, as mentioned above.

I do not know how many ticks are on the comfort level. I assume 100 ticks, and if each feeding cycle is 134 seconds, you have 134*100, or 134,000 seconds to address the issue. That is 223 minutes or just under four hours. This here is just assumption on my part, I’ve never actually empirically tested how long it takes before my pet becomes indignant.

A guild mate was performing hideous animal experiments on her boar, trying to see how long it will take to starve. Here is what the boar looks like when he was angry.

I’m going to make an assumption that the other pets will have some sort of visual indication as well. The boar would routinely disappear, apparently unsummoning itself, so she needed to keep calling it out. I couldn’t take the pain of watching this poor innocent beast suffer, so I don’t know what the outcome was.

While your pet is dismissed, these indicators will not change. So if you are just sitting around chatting and you don’t need the various bonuses, it might be better to just dismiss it.

As for pet food, all pet food is identified by [PET FOOD], with a few basic stats:

• Hunger: this determines how much comfort your pet gains when you feed it.
• Chance to gain experience is the odds the pet will get XP when you feed it.
• Exp gain is how much experience your pet gains, based on the odds just above.

Whoa!

Hello Kitty Online will remain open 5 more days! Mystery Charity Event!

I think I’ve collected all the available cards:

With some caveats, of course. We know that the wolf card is in our encyclopedia, but the actual pet card is missing. Many Founder’s will also have received the cur card, from the quest out of London, and may not have that actual card either; but it’ll still appear in the encyclopedia. The hermit crab is not available. I did not try to hunt any of the boss monsters (fierce crab, leopard leader, etc), so I don’t know if those have cards. They just take too long to come out of stun, and are often camped anyways.

So there are a total of 25 entries in the ‘pedia:

Tigerlyly recently posted some good ideas on how to expand the encyclopedia. Which got me thinking (and apparently several others, as they have the same ideas, as seen in the comments). There is so much you can do: add general stats, locations, levels, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Oh, also, you need to collect these yourself for them to properly appear in your encyclopedia. If someone gives you a card which you do not have, it will only appear while you are actively holding the card. If you stick the card in your warehouse or something, it will no longer appear.

So the Happy Hearts quest chain is over. The last of the five were finished and the winners were selected, but not yet announced. I know I did not come close to being one of the winners, but I still sent in my screenie, Just In Case. There was no special prize for the final quest, unless you count a reward of 15k gold special (and the opportunity to win one of those collectible plushies).

However, the earlier quest did have a special prize. You needed to make a bouquet of flowers, a plushie toy, and a Valentine’s Day card, and give them to Cupid. He was so happy that he allows us to keep these items. The bouquet of flowers and the plushie are handheld cosmetic items (which cover up the wand), and the Valentine’s Day card is just a special card. I stuck the bouquet in my warehouse, but carry the plushie.

Several people have commented on the interesting dichotomy presented by this image.

Second day of the public stress test, which is Sunday for me, so I spent a lot of time just hanging out at the Harbor:

Still just as busy. Many of the players from the first day have “graduated” on to environs beyond the Harbor, so it is a constantly changing group of new players. But there are a few players from those first hours who felt like sticking around the Harbor, passing along their newly earned knowledge to those just waking up on the dock, and simply enjoying a very congenial atmosphere.

And this day is also the final day for the Happy Hearts quest chain, and the opportunity to win real-world prizes, so a lot of  people were excited over that. Hanging out at the Harbor, probably just after Midnight (my local time, Eastern), myself and a few friends found ourselves surrounded by an auspicious group:

Around 12:30am, I made my way to Paris, and we all awaited the next quest. I actually didn’t finish it. Around 1:30am, my eyes were closing of their own choice, so I needed to call it a day and logoff, regardless of the chances for winning prizes. Monday is a federal holiday for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have made it so late in the first place! So congratulations to those who won! pfft!

Today “the doors” opened for the public stress test:

It was fun, seeing a lot of new people, (hopefully) helping them along their way. I also wanted to give my public support to the GM team: Miyaw, AVA, Neverender and Abby of course, and a whole bunch of GMs I only briefly saw.  I have an odd sense of humor; sometimes things I say may sound funny to me, but may not be, so I hope I haven’t said anything that offended.

The “beast encyclopedia” is a new addition; most critters drop pet cards, and when you get a new card, it’ll appear in the beast encyclopedia:

When you hover over the cards, it’ll give you an image of what the pet is. Here is an adorable little crab having a very happy day.

I guess one of the new fads is “collect them all”. Many people in various chats are talking about what cards they’ve found or need. Cards are able to be traded, and are non-unique so you can have several of the same cards. You can only have three active pets, and must drop one before you can activate another one, that is a good thing.

Not all beasts drop cards, tho. I ran into Tigerlyly a few times while we were both trying to get a hermit crab. After a couple of hours, we each seperately gave up and asked the GMs about this particular one.

I wonder what, if anything, happens if you get all the available cards?

I decided to spend a little bit of time earning money to upgrade to the Relax Range. This is a level four farm, one of the more expensive farms at 20k. The cheapest are 5k, and I did not really pay attention to the intermediate prices.

After that, I basically blew my life savings, so I couldn’t actually farm, because I couldn’t afford the materials! So I decided to see what the “day cycle” was about.

In the image below, there are five slices to the “pie”, but it is never totally dark, so there are only four time periods. Notice the color of the “active” time, and the other slices. As time elapses, the next slice will appear, and it will be a darker color.  When it is “late evening”, it’ll immediately flip to “dawn” (there is no “midnight”, when all the slices are inactive).

I have not timed the time phases, but they feel like about 5 minutes each. I also didn’t notice if time elapses when we are away from our farms. As others have pointed out, there is no longer a “pause” button, so I suspect that time does not elapse while we are away.

Next, I’ll have to go earn some more money to actually buy seeds, fertilizer and water, and try my hand at farming.

Well, now that I am done with my depressing real-world responsibilities, I see a new post:

Farming Guide: The Basics

Looks like some interesting new changes. Haven’t had a chance to get my hands dirty. I did look real quick at the available farms. I want to buy the “relax” version.

Walking to my farm in London, I see…

What trickster could be beind this?

I didn’t get to play for very long yet. Last night, I played until just after midnight eastern time, about two hours. The insurance man is coming today at 8:30am, but I’m still stressed over the car incident, so I wasn’t able to fall asleep until after 2am anyways.

Today is a holiday, so I am home. It is insanely windy here, they’re estimating 50mph winds, and stronger winds as the day goes on. Around 12pm, I heard a “noise” and when I looked out the back window, this is what greeted me:

Big tree falls down onto…

Yargh.

I can’t tell what other damage occured. Called my insurance company, and they’re going to send someone out. In the meanwhile, I can’t let the car sit like that, and I had to chop the tree up as best as I could. Three hours later…

The other car is my mother’s car. She was at work when this happened, which is a good thing. Otherwise the entire tree would have fallen right on top of her car, and would have done a whole lot more damage. Luckily, my Mustang was not hit by the tree.

edit: I had forgotten about this, I was amazed by the change in the weather, so I took a picture about 9am this morning. I guess you could call this “before the storm”. If you look for the birdfeeder, on the left edge, in the corner, see the tree directly behind it? that is the tree that fell.

I also just looked at the news, apparently a few people have died, due to trees falling on them, so I’m feeling bad about complaining about the broken windshield.

With just under 12 hours to go, this is kind of important:

Hello Kitty Online Client Shortcut Hotfix

So after you install the game, make sure that the shortcut works!

Beware, long and potentially boring material ahead. Feel free to close this window, I won’t even know! Of course, in just over 24 hours, Happy Hearts will begin, and I’m sure I’ll be distracted by that, which means a brief respite in my inane postings; aren’t you glad? And the way I’ve been behaving lately, I’ll probably get disciplined by the GMs. They’ll turn me into a frog or something.

Today, the Hello Kitty guitar picks I recently ordered arrived. And wouldn’t you know it, about two hours after I placed this order, I found one of my other picks. That’s my kind of luck. Well, I know there are others floating around, and you really need more than one, so it wasn’t an unnecessary purchase.

I’ve placed my other pick in perspective, which is just a standard medium gauge tortoise-shell pick. The HK picks are of the same size and gauge. Six of white, six of pink, and the back is the same on all. If you look closely at the pink one here, you might think that it is blurry. It is actually that rippled finish that changes the image depending on the angle.

They are fairly nice, almost too cute to actually use. And they’re medium gauge, so they have a nice firm bend. They feel like a different material, or may it is just that finish, so I don’t know how they’ll hold up to heavy picking.

But the saga will continue. When I was noodling with my bass, I was having a horrific time with the intonation. I tuned it, using both the 5th fret and open string method, and the 5th harmonic and 7th harmonic. But when I was playing, it sounded horribly out of tune. At that point, you have to look at the neck. And BOY was it seriously bowed. I’m ashamed that I didn’t notice the horrible bow.

Most guitars have a truss rod inside the neck, which adjusts the bend of neck, to make it flat. So you just crank it up or down. Not too much, because it’s possible to snap the rod, and then you’re looking at buying a new neck. The instrument needs to be stringed and relatively tuned, otherwise the neck won’t have the proper tension to adjust.

Once the neck is re-tensioned, you’ve really changed the the performance  of the bass, and now you have to adjust the bridge. You need to bring the strings up or down so they’re parallel with the fretboard. No hard rules of thumb, just no buzzing and a comfortable fretting. You shouldn’t need to muscle the string to fret it.

After the string heights are adjusted, THEN you need to adjust the intonation, by shortening or lengthening the string. The 12th fret, the 12th harmonic and the open string should be exactly in tune (give or take the octave).

Two hex screws on top to adjust the height, one screw on the rear to make it longer or shorter.

Once I get it all tuned and adjusted, then maybe I’ll amaze you with my mad skillz at playing.

Well, that was all very interesting, wasn’t it? Say yes. Please? Thank you.