Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-33763020-20180101200418/@comment-33763020-20180111173517

Glflegolas wrote:

Barangolo wrote:

Glflegolas wrote: I personally play in Gondor mostly, but I have a forward base in the Grey Mountains. The views there are great, and there's not much to think about most of the time.

However, if you want more looting and adventure, maybe the Trollshaws would be a better bet. Try to settle in a clearing or on top of a mountain if you can, as that will make it easier to see visiting traders. There's lots of invasions and structures to loot in the nearby Lone-lands (but even the Rhudaur Castles in the Trollshaws have some good stuff), and you can always head down to The Angle if you need a village. Weather should also be OK, and you should be able to farm at the lower elevations.

Glflegolas (admin) Send a Messenger  12:51, January 2, 2018 (UTC) Will have a look at the Trollshaws as well, thanks. Trolls have more interesting loot than regular orcs I guess, though I wonder if any NPC drops beat the mystery webs regarding loot content. If I want to accumulate as much mithril as possible, what would you recommend in terms of enemy NPC's?

Barrow-wights would be the ones to kill if you want Mithril, you can also loot the barrows. Trolls drop all kinds of loot from animals, i.e. venison, leather, porkchops, etc. You might also want to check out Troll Hoards, found in caves throughout the Trollshaws, as they have some pretty good stuff.

Glflegolas (admin) Send a Messenger  12:16, January 3, 2018 (UTC)

To recap on this topic, I meanwhile set up camps in the Trollshaws, Anduin/Mirkwood border (at the Forest Gate) and in the Morgul Vale and tested the Dead Marshes for loot (as an alternative to the Barrow-downs).

1. Trollshaws: pretty place to set up camp and the trollhoards bring a lot of gold/silver through the stacks. The Trolls themselves however did not drop the expected quality or quantity of loot and are more rare than I thought. Still, can be useful to set up camp and roam around. No Athelas found either, which is supposed to grow there.

2. Mirkwood: spiders means mystery webs and this was the purpose, quite useful for that. With a group of Elven archers it's easy looting and the mystery webs make it worthwhile. Progress is slow though due to the stubborn webs (which can be easily removed with water, but the water immediately becomes heavily poisoned so heed is advised not to touch it, especially with troops).

3. Morgul Vale: cleaned out a tower and put troops in, but the Orcs are not approaching, meh.. So raiding out is the way to go with avoiding holes, poisonous flowers and bombardiers, but Orc loot is quite poor in comparison to the risk taken, so not a place worth having a base, except having a custom waypoint for a mine for durnaur gems to make fire-pots.

4. Dead Marshes: Now that's an eye-opener! The easiest and most risk-free loot so far for three reasons: no enemies around (just don't fall in the water or step in quagmire..), the ancient weapons/arms that can be dug up (had over a hundred of both within 2 hours and once repaired at low cost by the Oddment Collector, the ingots they drop at unsmelting keep my supplies high) and the amount of nuggets (something like 50 ingots worth of silver/gold nuggets in 1-2 hours of digging) and 9 mithril nuggets in this time. I always wondered what use the Blessed modifier would have on a shovel, well, here it clearly shows how much more loot can be dug up :). I think the amount of metals and precious metals I can collect here in a certain amount of time is much higher in comparison to other biomes through mobs kills or looting. It simply goes very fast and may not be very lore-friendly but this is Minecraft after all :). The way I dig without waking any wraiths is by dirt blocks above/around the block that holds remains, then removing the dirt directly above the block, thus removing the water. Once laid bare, mining is easy and fast. True enough, it is only mithril nuggets and not the occasional mithril armour like in the Barrows, but with a fairly consistent yield and risk-free. In the Barrows the wights are strong opponents and the distance between the barrows requires map planning on the route to take to avoid repeat areas, etc. I haven't used the optimized Wraith-slayer weapons on the wraiths themselves yet, but I suppose they will have plenty of loot as well and it saves further exploration of the Marshes.

All in all, in terms of loot I currently vote for the Dead Marshes (gold/silver/mithril and all iron ingots from the weapon loot) with a close second for the Barrow-downs (mithril), followed by Mirkwood (mystery webs) which is much more effort.

In terms of views I really like the Trollshaws, loot is less attractive though and roaming out through the hills with trees is tricky. The Woodland Realm is my favourite biome, but I realized that being on the edge of Northern Mirkwood gives poor loot in comparison to Mirkwood proper and invasions are rare (none seen so far). So I might expand the base at Mirkwood edge in Anduin which has a nice biome and plenty of potential victims around.

One thing that bothers me though is lack of (enemy) NPC aggression against a (permanent) base.. Due to the "sensory" distance, even within the Morgul Vale I am left totally in peace, no Orc seems interested in attacking my building! In addition, as there are no invasions by Orcs in the Morgul Vale, ironically it is more peaceful than in Friendly areas! I am trying to figure out how to be attacked more often, but have the feeling that except for invasions, game mechanics simply do not attract enemies that attack my base, even when I have them in sight. Is there a way to configure how far an NPC can see or is that a fixed setting? I read that it greatly increases for invaders, but it would be great if I could increase it for regular spawns as well!