Hugtopia Logs

When you awaken, you're in the last outfit you remember wearing, three of your belongings laid nearby or your animal friend curled up by you, waking as you do. It's not the most comfortable place to sleep, a stone slab, but once you're awake, a humanoid-looking robot comes in and explains you're in Havenwell and leads you out of the room and into the main portion of the temple where a welcoming committee of similarly humanoid-looking robots hand over a clear smartphone-sized tablet, some starting funds, and explain their dilemma. Then they release you into Havenwell to pick your new home from free housing in the city and give you the chance to settle. It might be a bit disorienting, but thankfully there seem to be a lot of robots and even some non-robots around. Maybe ask them for help?

Now that you've arrived in Havenwell and are getting to know your area, the city's council has created a new and exciting way to get to know your new home! Isn't that fun? This game is one best played with others as some of the challenges can be difficult for those just arriving in the world of Aellyn: a most glorious scavenger hunt! As you leave the temple, the priests explain to you to how to use the communication devices and point you toward the Scavenger Hunt's network page which is appropriately over-excited to see you here in Havenwell. The page lists several randomized clues to items and places within the city for you to explore and collect. Find a buddy, complete the list, and turn in your items to your temple priest in order to win a fabulous and mysterious prize. Clues to your items include, but are not limited to:

Take a picture with your buddy in front of where the offworlders saved our city. We would not be alive without you!

These temporary and delectable trees are hard to find hidden among their brethren, but in their branches edible gold awaits you! Bring one of these fruits to your priest.

Eight arms outstretched to protect our home, take a picture with you and a friend emulating their poses.

A magical helmet only the offworlders can use. Put it on and find yourself somewhere completely new! Bring the receipt of a game played to complete this item.

In these lofty towers, we learn about our world and yours. Pick up a memento from their gift stores!

Though they fly in the sky, they drop not feathers but scales. Take a picture with one to complete this quest!

Small but mighty, don't underestimate their strength in numbers. And they do have the greatest numbers. Take a picture with five or more of these cute little creatures to complete this quest!

Their piercing blue gaze can see the purity of your heart and their wings can help you reach the heights you deserve. Take a picture with one of these in order to complete this quest!

Languid though they may seem, these cunning beasts can become mighty hunters in an instant. But they seem rather weak to things that swish. Take a picture with two or more of these animals in order to complete this quest!

Feel free to make up your own zany prompts if you like. If you're stumped on the answers and want to know, check below. But more importantly, that mysterious prize the council teased.....?

It's a metal keychain of your god's patron animal! How cute! Isn't that just what you wanted after all that work?

The Great Havenwell Scavenger Hunt Answers

Go to the slightly off-colored section of the city wall toward the south where the breach from the October event happened.

In the conservatory's botanical garden are hidden plastic trees with gold-foiled covered chocolate coins hanging from them like fruit. Take one and turn it in to the temple priests.

Pose in front of the the main town square's statue fountain that depicts the four gods of Havenwell.

Go to any of the city's the VR cafes in the Entertainment Districts and play a game with a friend. They'll send an electronic receipt to your communicator to prove you participated. Find more information about the VR offerings here.

The city's multiple science towers will have a small gift store on the bottom floors selling many different kinds of nerdy goods from metal pens to pocket protectors to rulers and magnifying glasses and more. Buy something small and show it to the priests.

Go to Rawna's temple and take a picture with a dragonling.

Go to Ainea's temple and take a picture with five or more mice.

Go to Diacht's temple and take a picture with a white and red crow.

Go to Ohma's temple and take a picture with two or more of the cats. It cannot be the cats from Affurgato!

The daily soft earthquakes in effect since last month are still ongoing. As a reminder- a very gentle rumble has been occasionally reverberating throughout the city, an earthquake small enough to not cause any damage, but large enough to be felt. The timing of it is sporadic, but it happens once a day. The sensation will typically last for anywhere between 10-30 seconds before dissipating as if it never occurred at all.

Each time one of those tremors occur, many of the robotic residents in town will immediately stop, find a partner, and link arms while standing back to back with one another, clinking their heads together. They stand that way for a while, even after the tremors subside, until at last they say their farewells and move on. If asked, rather than alarmed, the town natives are tentatively optimistic, even excited in some cases: the quakes are a message, a gentle warning, but of what they don't yet know. It's been so long since a public declaration from their deities was made, due to their diminished presence in the world and the decline of the planet. The priests are especially eager, bustling about in their temples trying to prepare for whatever might happen, but no one seems to know exactly what, or when, the next step will occur. The doors exiting out of town are being reinforced, and the guards have doubled up their patrols and will be especially vigilant about explorers going too close to the walls around the city. Most people at least know this much: do as they do, when the tremors hit, and you'll understand a little better.

There are new messages that characters can receive:
1) "Change is coming." this message is passive, almost like a greeting.
2) "We thank you for all you have done." this message is softer, almost apologetic.
3) "We shall do all we can to keep you safe." this message is gentle, almost parental in its affection.
4) "Share your bounty and your joy." this message is kind and encouraging, tugging you toward people you may not have met yet.
5) "Remember to keep the balance." this message is plaintive, but without urgency.
6) "Do not approach the walls." this message is LOUD, insistent, and the most frequently transmitted.
7) "Soon, change." this message is a gentle reminder.
8) "We welcome you to our home." This message is sent most frequently to newcomers.
9) "Be not afraid. You are safe." this message is polite and reassuring.
10) "Keep your footing and watch your step." this message is cautious, a firm warning.

The voice that conveys these messages is a collective of multiple, speaking in synchronization but at inconsistent volumes. Multiple links (eg. different threads) can receive multiple messages, and characters do not have to hear the same message as their partner.

This occurrence is also ONGOING. The quakes will continue until it is announced in the near future when they end. Stay tuned!

When you awaken, you're in the last outfit you remember wearing, (up to) three of your belongings laid nearby or your animal friend curled up by you, waking as you do. A stone slab is not the most comfortable place to sleep, but once you're awake, a humanoid-looking robot comes into the room and explains that you're in Havenwell, then leads you out of the room and into the main portion of the temple where a welcoming committee of similarly humanoid-looking robots hand over a clear smartphone-sized tablet, some starting funds, and explain their dilemma. Then they release you into Havenwell to pick your new home from free housing in the city and give you the chance to settle. It might be a bit disorienting, but thankfully there seem to be a lot of robots and even some non-robots around. Maybe ask them for help? Strike up a friendly conversation, get to know your neighbours! It seems as if you may be here for the long haul.

With all the changes and the fear of a secondary attack lingering, the natives are a lot more protective of their newest arrivals. When new characters begin to appear at the temples, they receive the welcome speech, get their communicators and the simple map of the city, and a warning to stay away from the walls. Then they get taken to the front of the temple by a helpful robotic priest. Rather than turn the newcomers loose right away, they pull someone seemingly at random off the street and push the two people together with a cheerful, "It's dangerous to go alone, so please show our newest resident around. Please be buddies!" They wait until they're certain the pair is going to be moving off together before going back inside.

They try to place a new arrival with one of those who previously arrived, but who can keep track of all that, right? Characters may find themselves thrown together with an actual veteran or with another new arrival who only came here a day or even just an hour before them! Good luck helping each other out, offworlders, and don't lose your buddy!

After the attack, every part of the city is on repair duty and the means the Entertainment District as well. As new arrivals wander the city, they might be called into one of the numerous Virtual Reality cafes. These cafes vary in layout, but most have areas for the natives to plug directly into the machines and other areas which have older looking virtual reality helmets that allow flesh bodied people experience the games. For those who need assistance with their sensory inputs, basic options like audio descriptions of visual scenes, enhanced audio and descriptive speech, closed captions, and crude mobility chairs are available. A handful of cafes have other options like direct visual or audio cortex stimulation to simulate vision or hearing, or suspension tanks to allow simulated movement, but these are currently unavailable due to damage.

All of these facilities are, unfortunately, under repair. The direct plug-in systems are easier for the robot natives to fix because they can do the most important part of it - testing - by themselves. But for the helmets and other interface systems, they need your help. Naturally, they'll pay you for the work, but they need the offworlders to play the available games and record any areas where they find glitches. Playing with a partner increases your chances of finding and fixing any issues, so feel free to log in for free for once and test any of the following games:

• Big Bass Fishing
The beautiful lake has blue-green waters surrounded by forest and rocky, reedy shores. You and your companion are on a small single-motor fishing boat and you have fishing gear - two poles in the water. As the game starts up a read-out announces the objective: Catch the largest fish before the time limit ends. What's the time limit? ...Well, that's your first glitch because it reads as static. Might as well start fishing though, right? It doesn't take long to catch a few regular sized fish, nothing too exciting, and then? You get the big one - it bows your fishing rod nearly in half as you reel it up. The fish leaps into the air and you realize this is your next glitch because the fish hangs there - the size of a minivan - and yells, "BIG. BASS. FISHING. ATTACK." The fish slaps its fins and tails at the boat and now you and your fishing companion better fight this fish or you'll end up in the lake or worse.


• A (un)Familiar Experience
Jump into the life of the temple familiars and see life from their perspective! Choose the temple, any temple is fine, and be transformed into a fledgling rainbow dragon, a purple mouse, a white raven, or a blue feline. You're free to move about the virtual confines of the temples and, in fact, you can even interact with other familiars in their temples - who may be other players in this game. Play, climb, try to get your fledgling wings to fly, tumble about with the other mice, enjoy your simple life as an animal! --or you would if you weren't an insane size. Rather than being a small mouse, you're the size of a horse. That fledgling rainbow dragon? About the size of a fly. The building sizes are off, too - one might have door that's 30 feet tall, but a ceiling that's only 12. Everything else seems fine, but those sizes? Well, you better figure out how to get around that.


• Robot Crossing
Logging in with another character will net you a little farm and a variety of games to choose from:
1. Pick and harvest as many Aellyn vegetables and fruits as you can before the timer runs out! The more you pick, the better your score. Work together with your partner to clear the field in any way you can. Strangely, once you finish clearing a tree or a field row of their bounty, they seem to magically refill when you turn your back. Strangely, when the timer runs out? It flashes 00:00 and the game...doesn't? Stop? In fact, the fruits and vegetables just keep multiplying and multiplying and if you don't hurry up you might just get buried in them all!
   
2. With a partner, use the giant slingshot to launch comically large fruits into a garden patch of other colored fruits. Match a line of 3 or more similarly shaped fruits to clear it from the field. The more fruits you can clear, the higher your score - aka welcome to Fruit Crush. Stack lines of 6 or more to get shining clear diamond fruits that clear the entire row and snag yourself some bonus points. Or they should, but whenever you clear away a matching set, the fruits explode, sending fruit bits and juice everywhere - most notably on you and your partner. Still, the game is going on and it looks like it won't stop until you finish, so good thing it's all a computer game, right? Sure feels real though - reeeeeeally sticky.
   
3. You and your partner(s) are given a magical golden pumpkin and it's your job to grow it into the largest pumpkin possible. Why? There's a county fair of course and the largest pumpkin wins! But how do you grow this pumpkin? Well, for whatever reason? This pumpkin is already the size of a grizzly bear and it just won't stop growing! You and your partner better find a way to stop it from growing out of control or you might get (virtually) crushed! You could do a song and dance routine together to touch the pumpkin's soul to teach it moderation or calm its insane vegetable puberty. You could hold hands and share stories and entertain the pumpkin until it feels satisfied that it's grown enough. You could just hack and slash at it in an attempt to reduce its unwieldy bulk. The possibilities are endless and so is the pumpkin's growth, so you better hurry!