From: Falenti, God of Secrets, Dust, Power Gaming
([email protected])
To: [email protected]1 – [email protected]1 – [email protected] – [email protected]
CC: [email protected] – [email protected] – [email protected]
It's come to my attention that your people are crying out for information on the universe that TARGET is in. Namely, how the invasive system meshing works, how to abuse it, if we can use pacts there, ect. Maybe some moaning and groaning about being liquefied in rifts to obtain an Alienist class because we were finalizing our strategy.
Please edit and distribute to your agents.
The native systems for this universe are known, though I think the 'Job System' including subjobs is invasive, it shows up everywhere and it was brought into our home universe during FAILED INTEGRATION.
I think it's overwriting a pilgrimage system based on what I've gathered from my agents. The before times in this system seem to have been produced to facilitate contact to their version of the OCCULUS, interchangeably called towers/dungeons based on up and down orientation as well as the markedly hostile nature of dungeon spaces.
We will need contact with MOUSE to determine if there's a point where we can replace 'Jobs' with 'Pilgrimage' and if that is desirable to what drove MOUSE to act as she did. I know that some of you have less faith in MOUSE but I have faith that someday she will return to us as an equal.
There's also Artifacts and Domain. Domain is base-building related, and usually the least used and understood, likely a malnourished system with poor returns - with of course one notable exception (which we all have discussed to death being WIZARD1). We would trigger an invasion immune system response plugging into that system. I'm going to recommend we do not use Domain. We must not cause NEMESIS, MASK, EXILE, FLOWERY, PALS, EVOLVER, BIRD, EXPLODE, UNCLE to notice our actions before we decide if we want to intervene and how we are going to go forward with them.
If need be, I would put forth our resident citrusmancer as a good 'face' for our invasion if we do trigger a full INVADER response.
Artifacts is basically a bloodline but enshrines a physical object as inheritable then has a variable dungeon drop that buffs it. You can pick up more, but there's inheritable. There is evidence of a target forming an off-brand backup to DS WEAPON.
I'll get into opportunities later.
Jobs – Invasive. Has a tier system that functions as unlocks, advance classes, or class refinement/evolution.
I've worked with Gygax on this one, the secret sauce is that jobs have usually ten or more requirements that as you meet them eases evolution. Evolution is almost always a completely better package, or it sheds what are vestigial abilities to change course.
Powers - There's a nascent power system that's supposed to be class-linked but can be broken easily with a Mindscape. Everyone should be using Mindscapes anyway so no surprises. It may be worth getting a mortal agent from THE SEEKERS who has my bloodline to attempt to get Int+ and Dust Clones. That and look at giving an alienist full leveled 'compass' which is absurdly broken and would let an agent reach TARGET within 10 months estimated time.
Trials - We have some information that there's traces of a system that seems to be debuffs that turn into buffs. Locals call them Curses, but there's likely a better system-only term. Once we can connect with the mouse, she might have more insight.
The information relates that it's commonly used as a debuff by MASK, which is baffling. Any sane person would make hitting an enemy with a potential buff part of a final blow or desperation attack and exclusively use the system for training and buffing allies. It's like shooting yourself in the foot as you make enemies, and you make them both strong and remind them that their suffering is because of you. (Mother: please don't compare it to the bad guy from that annoying wizard school book you grew up with.)
Astrid, during operations RETURNING THUNDER please return any useful trials and clear conditions that are well documented. We suspect TARGET is under these effects.
Cultivation: System that has some stats and power options, but has been glued into the job system. I suspect they breached this universe at the same time and got tangled up. It seems like it lets people vastly reduce the needed reqs to tier up. We are aware of UNCLE as the vector. We have not normalized relation with UNCLE-verse yet as we do not know if NEMESIS exists and has subverted them.
Pacts/Adept/Power: Our systems breached at the same time TARGET did. Current explorers are working on trying to take our PACT benefits through the rift during BREACH. Results have been... sour so far. We are going to try another BREACH to recreate The Seekers or see if CHAINS has done so.
New pacts work, and we are interested in asking CONTACT to try reaching out to others and planting allied pacts. If we can contact MOUSE it may help our attempt to BREACH by creating Breach or Alienist pacts, recruiting natives, and having them spread domain without triggering invasion status.
Let me move to individual and eventually group strategy.
(I will not include anything that requires a full reading of 'The Mind Path' or a 'Mindflipper', we don't need to flood a new universe with a bunch of Tempest clones.) I still recommend that any mortals cc'd on this message chain please learn to the basics like Talent Tree/Achievement/True Calling if TARGET(A) (and hopefully TARGET) is pulled to Job Restrictive side universe during EXTRACTION ACTION(A). I have noted my reservations on EA(A) in the previous email.
Please just purchase my book! You can almost always find used copies wherever powerful HOF forces are in stasis.
(MOM, RAXEN: Please review all sixteen .1 and higher flux paths so you can identify all 64 universes we might have to BREACH to extract either TARGET (A) or TARGET or the entire alphabet of sub targets we are trying to rescue after we strand them and need to start a whole new BREACH.)
Floor 0 focus stratagem:
Overview: Avoid entering the Occulus (at all or stay low level) but gain power in either job levels or Mindscape/Pacts on 'Floor 0' or the real layer.
Methods: All system quests relating to floor 0 societies, dungeon break quests, pk invaders, 'babysitter' economics, trade with elemental towers/dungeons or floors that have a lacking modifier in the dungeon.
Advantages: Floor 0 has a lot of maintenance quests and very low risks especially as user reaches Adept baseline.
Quests can be done by Lv0 10stats if they studied the infrastructure of the area they are in, and have basic tools and technical know-how, as well as how to BLUESCREEN themselves without injecting the system.
Exp rate after five level ups and getting relevant skills can crush just about any killing strat that is not fed gear and does not have a specialized AOE farming build.
Dungeon breaks can be solved with diligent organization and auto-turrets for 99%. The other 1% is easily handled with purify wards.
Do not need to infect yourself with the job system if you do not want to use it. Can also avoid Occulus based seekers such as STABBY, NAMESNIFFER, BARTENDER adding your name. Also seems to make essence funneling more efficient to evolve everything else.
Disadvantages: Needs enough people in a group to eventually do space travel to keep gains reasonable.
Some limit to resources – places eventually run out of buildings that can be built or maintained.
Worse gear – Floor 0 you need to craft everything magical or trade.
Floor 0 attracts worst type of criminals looking for mortals.
Limit to inherited powers: Occulus floors have a freebie slot.
Suggestions: Good for engineers, omnicrafters, easier to get alienist levels in space.
Floor 1-5: Adventurer
Quest focus – Single or group with high shared mobility and some sort of safe-zone or town finding ability aims for a floor they can move extremely quickly through and complete Occuloid* quests.
*we are trying to find a better term that's not NPC.
It is estimated that a level 5 can complete three quests a day with a mobility item or talent on floor 1. This means every other day there's potentially 3 long-term benefits to a build they can earn. Most quests are very, very simple for trained HOF operatives.
One in every five towns has some sort of relevant-forever boost on floor 1, known as 'capstones'. These include stats, combat and non combat secondary stat buffs, item rarity and modifier boosts, access to additional 5x rooms such as HMP crafter, Dragon Stone Morpher, Hardtooth, ect.
On floor five there's evidence that every twenty quests completed raises the 'effective floor' of the reward chest after a boss by ~.6 levels.
Advantages: Creates an extremely strong base for an agent to pursue any sort of class.
Quests reward pure essence, many times can get key low level versions of build-relevant gear that will eventually pick up 'Growth' from capstone.
Floor modifer to Occuloid reactions can sometimes yield aid such as help evading PK, locations of chests up to low ruby rarity, locations of monsters up to (((NAMED))), Occuliod followers whom have a high rate of awakening, land, titles, system boosted reproduction (97% success rate).
Low risk: Floor 1 monsters rarely can keep up with a mobility build after 25 kills. Floor 5 Bosses are trivial after completing the expected 1000 quests to force a level 600 chest.
Can veer into every other strategy here.
Disadvantages: Requires extreme patience.
Low level versions of gear might not be obvious. Such as 'grape producing cape' being the low magic version of the supreme artifact 'Hivemind shawl'.
Redundant rewards in a town may trigger domain, which may trigger invader status. Agents need to track rewards and not end up with too much real estate.
Build often spends a lot of time just getting the right level of speed/endurance to outpace other methods in raw power.
Pkers prowl the low level floors looking for 'fat chickens'.
Does not generate much money outside of LV600 drops. Some do not have an appreciable market on floor 5's inn.
Agents sometimes get 'Halfhill' syndrome and settle down on a farm with their attractive Occuloid husband/wife/werewolf.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Level 600 chests need to be ID'd to check for traps. Items from them need to be ID'd. Trapped chests are wasted. Do not open a trapped level 600 chest.
Floor 1-20: Slaughter Floors
Opposite to the above - Some floors have bugged modifiers for creating monsters. These often have walls of flesh mashed against the floor filter.
Any AOE build with self-sustain, especially Vamperic/Mana Steal/'Sweat Suit' modifiers can kill thousands and thousands of monsters every hour.
Advantages: With all three modifers and something simple like an aura or quick cast PBAOE an agent can quickly reach several hundred levels and certain tier 4 or 5 classes.
Might be the best way to 'power level' a pact horse without a high level merc.
Extremely good increases for offensive linked skills.
Disadvantages: Very dangerous at the start.
Very little material gain unless you have auto-looting rings.
Even with the above, essence is linked to the modifiers and gear that directly acts with the AOE. Can be very difficult for certain growth items to advance.
Requires high mental fortitude to wade/swim through lakes of blood.
Requires items with all three siphons, or extremely rare 'off stat' siphons to line up (Warmage/Blood Mage, Mana Muscle/Lifetap, Bloodsweat / Arcaneworkout)
Mind numbing after a few hours.
All Floors:
Explorer focus. System has classes that reward really exploring, trying to find hard to get sights and document and link objects in the DEEP STRATA such as 'Weeping Lady' 'Lake of Bones' 'Endless Ladder' 'Vault Door' and 'Piano of the End'.
The system rewards finding dungeons, towns, raids, and Gold+ chests with non-trivial experience. There are also 'secrets' on each floor. There is a theory at best information node these secrets are a way to get the system's attention. This could be important for objective MOUSE.
Explorer focused agents can be given tools for navigating 'impossible' objects and long term goals to add to our network of 'travel totems'.
Advantages: Having a proper teleport network will benefit us a whole.
We need to have a route to TARGET.
Explorers sometimes get unique benefits, see 'Timmy Steel'.
May relate to Pilgrimage.
Fun.
Disadvantages:
Unfocused: Other activities do not aid our goal of developing our network enough to push our other strategies forward.
Unreliable: We only have a small corner of the Deep tower that gives us excellent explorer benefits.
Floor 10: Marketplace crafter/merchant.
Any person who has a crafting skill and has taken the steps to gain 'Market Third Eye' as a skill or 'Invisible Hand of the Market' as a power. (See my book for details and titles that can help force the skill.)
Abusing the titles 'Wasteful apprentice' and 'Thrifty Crafter' is important to doing this strategy.
Train their skill or power to focus on the craft they have.
Pools resources from either one of the above or another agent, and uses an 'easy' floor 10 to switch between Inn, Market, Crafters Workshop. Include the posting board and check to make sure any requests are above market rate.
KEEP A LOG OF ALL CUSTOMERS and ALL MERCHANTS USED.
They keep market sense on, check people looking to buy at the Inn, go to the market and buy materials for that item above rate, craft at the workshop for maximum benefits, come back and sell. The crafter must sell everything they make at market price or above.
The first 100+ hours of making requests is a huge financial loss for anyone that is not an omnicrafter. Several million blue crystals depending on profession.
Once they waste enough money and once they've sold 100 items in a row at or above market price, that gives them both titles. They combine to basically gain near 100 percent essence returns on money spent buying crafting mats.
Repeat for five crafts. The titles stack. The sixth class generally takes three finished items. Pay a Merc to clear a floor 10 boss. (Or use your own combat class from the above).
Mindscape the crafting classes together and the titles together.
Advantages: Creates a world-class production specialist.
Overpaying for materials and filling quest requests creates a network of merchants and adventurers.
Can complete builds with relevant items.
Can obtain extremely high base level to use for combat strategies.
Disadvantages: Very expensive.
First steps are repetitive. Can be a lot of walking and waiting for demand to go back up if supply gets too high.
A level 1000 Tier 7 or 8 crafter is the perfect target for high level groups to rob or kidnap.
Floors 1-100: Chest Farming
Involves finding remote tower floors and creating a loop of about a month between known chests.
Advantages: Quick non-crafting based way to gather lots of items to use or sell.
Great for Gambling addicts.
Traveller classes get Essence from plotting these courses out. A LOT of essence.
Disadvantages: On higher level floors, can be difficult to create a good route. Often requires a party to be safe.
Set up for finding a route is long.
Diminishing returns on useful gear as the same chests often produce similar items.
Floors 1: Power hunting.
Uses travel skills and a set of catch-all environmental gear (examples: 'All Terrain, Breath All, Temperate, Elemental Adaptation + Ring of Habitate, Lantern of Darkness + Rings of Shadow Breathing. Scarf of elemental adaptation, Myrnid's 60 minute stopwatch, rings of water breathing + the Fishbowl).
Requires Tower 10 pact to sniff out modifiers.
Aims to get a broken life saving utility by hitting floor 5 bosses that may grant 'Phoenix' 'Time Loop' 'Chrono-naught' 'BubbleHearth' 'Auto-rewind'.
Aims to get a powerful rare passive in the next slot. (Examples: Compounding Damage, Kinetic Absorption, Afterimage, Multicast, Nullify Magic, Gelatinous Body, Shimmering retort, Quickcast, Blood Kindred, Psudolich)
Finally, aims to get powerful actives. (Blink, Gravity control, Time Stop, Triple Air Slash, Auras, Light Strike, Any Clone ability, Meteor, Giga Impact, Absorb Attribute, Giga Bash, Disjoint, Combine Ability, True Teleport, Titanbuster, Shadow Jaunt, Astral Stream, Plasma Breath, Rust Blast, Glass Bubble, Compass, Identify, Alliance, Implode, Black Hole, Form Shift, Furious Regeneration... ect)
Advantages: Sets our agents up for safe execution of dungeons or 'killing our way to the top' by having a life-saving ability.
Can be somewhat executed while doing quest strategy.
Disadvantages: Requires a method of finding doors.
Guesswork is just a guess. Same tower floor with modifiers can award 100s of unique specific skills.
May be more work than just careful casual delving.
Floor 5-30: Boss Mercenaries.
Post at the inn, and repeatedly run bosses and five-floors with rich clients.
Advantages: Good way to use our many single ladies to gain contacts with rich scions.
Boss runs on floor very good way to roll skills.
Good for our supply of consumables.
Disadvantage: Crowded market. Everyone wants to do this.
Our female agents sometimes have to educate rich clients and their guards about respect and boundaries.
Agents complain they are sick of hanging out in bars.
Same bosses over and over tends to produce redundant skills and treasure.
Floor 1-100: Bounty hunting, PK, Duels, Arena Fights, Robbery, Banditry.
We are going to recommend all agents avoid these activities mostly for fear of triggering Invader status and because killing should be a scalpel, not a hammer. If we need to go to war, we will wage war and win.
On a provisional basis, we will use STABBY bounties to collect certain achievements, titles, and class requirements while disposing of 'trash' on our floors after we have our current or a future 'Karmic Guide' look at the request and assess the blowback.
Floors 1-20: Rift and Raid hunting.
There's Subdungeons in the dungeon. These are areas under the influence of a Dungeon Core or Dungeon Cluster and appear as any form of door or doorway on a floor, though something is 'off'. Explorers on low floors can see clearly the level and intended group size to relatively safely clear an instance.
Using a group that's used some combination of the above methods, start using the Inn to complete quest chains and get dungeon locations linked to System requests. These requests are extremely lucrative.
Dungeons have hotspots around powerful foes, but also 'cold spots' away from the high intensity fights. These cold spots have less chests but are still often multiple times as valued as other chests.
Large enough dungeons can be 'skimmed' for chests that are much much higher level than the challenge of the enemies.
Raids are much like 'the monster belt' or Wall Diving in our universe.
Right now we recommend swinging low, as even a floor 20 Raid can include targets that are far above their expected threat level, and anything that requests fifty level 20s is likely dangerous for a lone level 300.
Advantages: Incredible gains both essence and material.
Disadvantage: It's dangerous.
Floor 1-100: Hyper Specialization.
Based on cultivators - Basically, aim to understand the 'Dao' of something. Go all in on a skill. Become the greatest Banana Mage. Focus on ability and hone it into one solution for everything.
Advantages: This can work. Evolving race and gaining level and stats but funneling growth and attention to one spell, ability, weapon skill, or crafting hyper specialization works with the system.
Disadvantages: Hyper Specialization is not great for soloing.
Examples: One of our agents is all-in on tea and tea ceremony. They can produce astounding buffs with week long duration from an hour of pouring tea in the right setting.
There is a painter who can influence growth and breakthroughs of subjects he paints if he is given pigments by his partner who explores to seek out the purest colors.
A non agent whom fought bandits for 50,000 years with their level effectively stalled out is nearly impossible to hit at mere level 30 by combatants quadruple his speed.
Floor 1-100: Just Go Up, Stupid!
Essentially climb up a tower, only stopping to assess the route and prepare gear to handle the route. Eschews most other activities, relying on incidental gains to keep going.
Advantages: Fun.
May produce a living god.
Disadvantages: Higher Floors are much, much meaner. Monsters, Floor Layouts and Hazards, reduction of power for movement options, and rival climbers all scale with floors.
We know there's bottlenecks above floor 80, where floors tend to be similar across towers. Our current scouting team has reported that floor 90s have Galaxy sized 'portions'. Many floor 92s are giant open skies that reduce the power of flight requiring multiple artifacts or the development of aircraft, which then need to be armored against flying monsters AND able to land on small platforms with stairs on them.
Floor 94 supposedly has no exit.
Looking at rival groups, it is a mistake to try to rush to 100. Evidence suggests that organizations that cannot effectively act as an elevator are doomed to find a bottleneck they cannot pass.
However... we know one solo climber succeeded for sure. I suspect MOUSE is what she is now because she also did so.
Floor 1-100 – Macro approach – Some of the above with pacts.
This is my plan for the HOF.
We have processes for creating new alienists who can BREACH near the rifts. We also have higher level alienists in place including our high level Occulus scouts. Three compass users. Several agents are all ready to start as level 1 alienists and DEEP BREACH.
Deep Breach starts off with quest basis for 6 weeks.
We will have 10 percent personnel perform a LOW BREACH and move to an empty system to begin lv0 preparation and create Occulus spaces, as well as prepare a rapid developing urban area to possibly enable INSTANT FULL BREACH in as little as 15 minutes, with an expected time-frame of 20 years if everything else in this document fails.
If our plans meet or exceed our marks: we will complete FULL BREACH in 5 or less years.
If we contact MOUSE, WIZARD ect... we may be able to FULL BREACH in 1 year.
We secure 10 sites on floors 1-20 and 60 sets of three drain gear for AOE Slaughter and use this to develop classes with a single AOE skill into travel skills, then take a hybrid explorer approach.
Our commander for the mission is ready to BREACH and will start The Seekers in this universe, hit AUGURY 25 to communicate with me and Lythandies, then aim for GROWTH, UNITY, UNDERSTANDING to 90, hitting WIDESPREAD 10, TOWER 25, DUNGEON 25, INVESTIGATION 25, EXPLORATION 25, and 5 or 10s in MODERATION, CONTROL, JUDGEMENT. We may add SUBTLE up to 50 depending on evidence of NEMESIS.
Time frame for the above pacts is five years, with 90% target hit around year 1 at minimum success.
If appropriate floor 21-30 area is found for Slaughter, we will use that to reduce the above time.
We have 10 crafters set up market abuse, and most of our other units will be focused on quests to develop their baseline.
We will have groups of 210 hand-picked elites from the AOE squads who will develop 30 parties once growth entangles two extra spots. Ranged/Melee/Mage + Support/Healer/Tank and one commander who will handle face/support/trade and keep exploration powers outside of those three sub specializations.
Their goal will be to reach level 800 and act as protectors, heavies, and scouts for high floor activities.
Every other alienist is going to be trained on a questing tangent for 6 months after AOE boot camp, then most will switch to full explorer outfit.
We will reserve some units who excel in Questing as 'long term' projects.
Our top explorers will shift to finding paths to key passives. Namely, death resetting powers.
With that, we can wind down 1-30 AOE operations and begin phase 2, power leveling all our explorers in a large scale dungeon suited for slaughter tactics, dominating the marketplace, and buying out floor 30 and 40 factions who have information networks.
GROWTH 100. EXPLORATION will increase to 90. We expect once phase 2 starts this process will take 2 weeks of power leveling via our level 800 elites.
We will take 3 weeks of vacation. See HOF HR for details on moral. We may put 5 levels in VACATION. Work hard, play hard.
Week 5, we will start a second Pact group and ally with unity. SHADOW. SPY. SUBVERT. ALLIANCE. UNITY. CONSPIRACY. SUBTLE. All 50. The subcommander will be 'Squidhead'. They will apply non-conventional force to high floor (50+) groups whom organize against us. This process with the changes above will take 2 months before we deploy.
Our goal for the remainder of the phase is GROWTH 119, balanced with SMOL 25 before 110. The point is to reach multi-thousand levels ahead of current residents using Pacts, then create a full control area on floor 90.
Phase 3: Assess floor 90. Create a small sub pact and ally with our other pact. UNITY. HUNTER. SHADOW. ASSASSIN. We will use this group to remove any groups that are NEMESIS related.
We will aim to have our main pact holder 119 UNITY and UNDERSTANDING. Before this, they will take CAREFREE 25 and INDEPENDENT 25 to ensure we don't hivemind on accident.
At this point, I expect to have a marker on floor 100 and we will level FINDING pact until TARGET is home. The outer bound of this plan is 5 years. We also will breach floor 100 and reach MOUSE.
We will be able to have a level 800 summoner and attain FULL BREACH.
Our main goal: Find TARGET. Secure TARGET. Determine what factors are causing TARGET to persist. Recall TARGET and all sub-targets.
Sub Objective: Determine why there are OFF-TARGETs. Including a BESTGIRL whom died at wrong date, TAINTED SAVIOR from a suspected Occulus(A) timeline, two versions of Carrot, and so on.
This is essential to making sure TARGET is our TARGET.
TARGET(A) counter-summoning may get TARGET in the same way subtargets were hit. I advise we do NOT proceed with this plan however until we have a summoner on site. MASK complicates this process.
Secondary Goal: Find evidence of NEMESIS. Remove NEMESIS's influence after getting as much information as possible. MASK is, via [[Understanding]] 119, has elements in his history that suggest NEMESIS is real. MOUSE may have evidence. We may create a new subgoal of a team to go to dungeon -100.
Third Goal: FULL BREACH. Create a suitable area to inject Babel loaded up with HOF elites. Actions of MASK suggest he understands criteria for reverse summoning Babel and is trying to prevent FULL BREACH. It is important we not near FULL BREACH until we can go from 5% to 100% and complete FULL BREACH in the 5 seconds that MASK takes to raze a planet.
To be safe, we will aim for 600% in .5 seconds with seeded nanomatter and omnicrafters with a summoning time of 1 second.
Once FULL BREACH occurs, we will deploy 90% of our sleepers who specified they would like to be woken up to wage inter-universal war on the system.
Fourth Goal: Total Control of subject universe.
Estimated completion time after FULL BREACH: 15 days.