Movin' on to day three

I'm really starting to get the hang of this site. There's a lot less "What the heck does this button do?" and "Where am I supposed to get this?" and more direct working towards immediate goals. My current goals for Sno are to take up a job as a model and join the Olympics as a cyclist. The model job really jives with the whole Sno Abyss personality, since the character was originally a succubus in the novel I wrote. Right now she needs one more point in both sports and language to qualify, so on day four Sno will have her first jobby job!

As for the Olympics... wow. Well, I think the requirements for even the basic stuff will take a few weeks. It's something to work towards at least!

One of the things I'm still having trouble with is knowing what random items are for. The descriptions can be pretty vague and I'm just left thinking "Should I keep this for something important...?" Like right now I have two HP magnets in my inventory. What is an HP magnet? The description doesn't really say. Google doesn't really say. No friggin clue. Google has been thoroughly unhelpful in looking up a lot of specific items from this site. There's a MaraPets wiki but it's super temperamental and doesn't seem to want to give you any useful results for item searches. My goal for tomorrow is to find out what an HP magnet is, I guess.

An interesting thing I noticed - giving your pet an instrument puts it in your pet's collection at a grade level. So I give Sno a cello and instead of just a list of instruments in her collection, it says "Cello grade 1". I'm assuming that means I can give her five hundred cellos and she'll grade up so far she'll transform into Yo-Yo Ma or something.

Anyway. After getting a ton of chocolate items from quests and missions, it seems reasonable that the theme for my gallery should just be "chocolate stuff". So it is. Just random chocolate stuff. I might go for a different theme later, but right now it feels like it's easiest to collect chocolate at these lower levels so I'm going to take advantage of that and make a nice gallery out of it.

Most of my day in the Maralands was spent trying out new games and saying "Wow, this reminds me of (game this game was based off of)!" My highlights are the Subway Surfer clone with the hamster eating cookies, and the Bubble Pop clone that gives you gumballs. I think I've explored a good 20 or so games at this point? My favorite is still the first one I played - Triple Pyramid Solitaire. I'll always gravitate towards those awesome pyramids of cards on any gaming site! I find it very relaxing, I guess.

The biggest news of the day happened at the end of the day. The HUGE NEWS. At least, huge for me... I made a second pet! She's a blue cat named Nifti. She was kinda thrust on me because the Get Started challenge required me to make a pet trade, only to tell me that I'm not allowed to make a pet trade with my only pet, so... yeah. Apparently you must have a second pet to level up to ten. It's all right though, when I first made a pet I was torn between the foxwolf thing and the fluffy kitty thing, so might as well have both. She's an extroverted sweetie pie with a pet jellyfish named Lil Jel.

Tomorrow I explore the Maralands with two pets by my side and hopefully figure out what HP magnets are for!

My first day in Maraland

I am Barrel O'Nukes here with my pet Sno Abyss, and today's my first day trying out Marapets. I thought I'd keep a blog exploring what I discover on the site as I go along. (No clue if this is the sort of thing people usually do with blogs or not, but it's here and so am I, so why not?)

Back in the olden days when Neopets dominated the virtualonline pet world (Tamagotchi ran the virtual pet world, don't know what I was thinking using virtual instead of online...) most of my time was spent tending to my three Neopets - playing games, yelling at myself when they looked sad and told me they were dying, etc etc. Recently I went back to Neopets only to find the site was a LOT more confusing and many of the games were completely broken - whether on their end or mine - so I started shopping around for a new site to scratch my mid-life crisis itch.

...and yes, I did also buy a bunch of new Tamagotchis.

Anyway. Day one! After mulling over a name for my little fox-wolf guy whose species name I can't quite remember yet, I finally landed on Sno Abyss, which is the name of a character in a paranormal novel I wrote ages ago. Everything else I tried was taken (Mouka was taken! Who took Mouka?!) and it was the first thing that said available.

The first thing I did was change my avatar from a male to female, because apparently it just defaults to male body if you don't feel like choosing either gender. Or maybe it's random, who knows? After messing around with colors and hairstyles, I was very disappointed to realize you needed something called tickets to change pretty much anything about your features. Including skin color. Kinda strange about the skin color one, but okay I sorta understood the reasoning behind the rest of the stuff. After messing around with the various rewards I saw I could get the tanning ticket very early on and aimed for that, then changed some of the default colors of my clothes for 100MP. A nice reasonable fee for someone with a beginner's bankroll!

The second thing I did was check out the Get Started challenges at the top of the screen and blazed through the first two tiers. Checking out the games was a lot of fun, and there were many classics like triple pyramid and mahjong. Both of which I played all three of my free plays for the day. Suddenly I had more MP! And also a few mummy plushies from the pyramid game to raise Sno's happiness with. Score!

I used my new MP to buy some food and drink for Sno, because I wasn't sure how quickly their hunger/thirst depletes in this game so having some ready to go was a smart idea. Some of the MP went to buying some blue hair dye for my avatar after exploring the dress up interface a little more. With still a good amount of MP left (a good amount for a beginner anyway) I went to check out the quests. My question was would these be like Neopets quests, where you needed some ridiculously expensive item to complete? At first... yes... it seemed so. I accepted many quests that asked for things over 50,000MP. WAAAAY out of my price range, ouch. After a bit of creative googling, which said to try the snowman, I was finally able to complete some quests. Yay!

On to stats... boy. I STILL can't quite figure out the raising stats easily thing. It seems like you need those ridiculously high priced items for some of those quests. I tried the haunted house quest, which is supposed to give whatever item is needed for the gym, and was able to stretch my budget a bit to get one done. Success! An energy crystal!

...however when I accepted the gym training, it now wanted a specific type of crystal. Digital crystal. Ooooh boo... feeling a bit discouraged, I left a post on the newbie forums asking how to raise stats and got a lot of great responses. Apparently certain games can raise stats, and some dailies. The dailies, I did not know existed and wound up spending a good hour or so exploring all of them. Some were very familiar from Neopets, like the tombala and the fruit machine, and some were new. There were a LOT of tombala dailies?! Not a bad thing, more like a pleasant surprise! But the dailies left me with a lot more MP than I thought I'd have gained otherwise. Never neglect your dailies! ...except that headless daily... really REALLY don't want a headless pet, even if it does kinda jive with Sno's whole schtick in my story. There was also a glowing egg that dropped from a rubber duckie game. It's supposed to hatch and give me clothes colors, but it's kind of confusing describing how to hatch the egg? Maybe soon!

With my newfound "fortune", I did a few more haunted house quests and got the digital crystal on the third try. After that, Sno went back to school to learn some art - training that is fortunately very cheap and only requires some random school supplies from the school shop. University... a bit more expensive. The MP for the diploma thing was still out of my budget.

Tomorrow my pet should have +1 strength and maaaaybe I'll be able to hatch some eggs. Maybe have a battle?! Find out next time, on Dragon Ball Z! Looking forward to exploring a bit more tomorrow, and trying out the suggestions on stat-raising games that people gave to me in the forums.