We Brake for Shinies

Beatriza, dark elf defiler, pausing to gather a Shiny for her Collections.

Anyone who playes EQ2 knows about Shinies - enticing, sparkly little beacons of ... Shininess! For those of you who are not familiar with them, Shinies can be gathered - you will receive a Collection item, such as .

Collections are yet another fun feature of EQ2. As shown above, Shinies are found on the ground. Once you have gathered all the items of a Collection, you turn the Collection in for a reward - often a decent piece of armour, sometimes house items.

(This image is an in-game screenshot from within EverQuest II.
Copyright is held by Sony Online Entertainment and is used here under Fair Use. Commercial use of this image is forbidden. Thank you, EQ2 wiki)

June City Festival - New Halas EQ2

Norrathian Express Box, New Halas Branch  is the reward for the Halas Postage Collection. This item is for your home, and it is a working mailbox. I love them. It is nice to be able to read one's mail in the privacy of one's own home. You collect purple Shinies around the festival area until you have a completed collection.

The items are of this collection are:

• Halas letterhead
• Halas stamp
• Halas envelope
• Halas notepaper
• Halas postmark
• Halas sealing wax

All the New Halas City Festival items are pictured very nicely on everseek.com. This is an excellent website, which features all the housing items. There are other great sites for this, too, which I'll mention in other posts, as well as putting up a link list of EQ2 housing info sites, one of these days soon.

Wending my way back to EQ2

I've not been playing EQ2 much, hadn't touched my old subscription accounts in two years. Now that EQ2 has gone free to play, well, it has been for a while now, I thought I'd take a look. I'd been playing Lord of the Rings Online, I love my friends there, and I love crafting and outfits. It is great to have housing, and in LoTRO I had my first virtual house - a cottage, really. I remember it well. The thing is, LotRO housing is quite limited. I grew frustrated at the housing item placement system, it is a "hook" system, whereby you can only place certain types of items in certain places. When you have never had housing, it is Heaven ... but once you've experienced open placement housing, you'll forever be disappointed by the hook system.

My gaming system is down, has been for a while, so it has limited my game time greatly. I also deal with certain physical conditions, which at times keep me from gaming at all. I was experiencing terrible lag ingame, due to having to play on a system with lesser capabilites, so getting into LotRO, crawling and jumping and lagging into things, on top of not feeling well, I almost stopped getting into the game. I would get into the game, look at my lovely home, and sigh at my full bags, full house chests and full bank, as well as all my alts being full to the gills. I'd chat with a few friends and then log off. I'd force myself through the festivals, though. -grin- Thus my overflowing bags.

So ... all this chatter leads to the fact that I tried EQ2 free to play, to see if I could still have housing, and what that housing involved. Since I knew no one in EQ2, it was easier to play, since I could come and go as I wanted, and as my health permitted. As with any game, free to play is not ultimately free to play, but hey, it gets a lot of people into a game who might not otherwise try it. It is essential to upgrade to a Silver account, which is a one time $5 fee. The next step up is Gold, which is $14.99 a month if you pay monthly, with discounts if you pay for 3 months or more at a time - pretty standard fee.

Even without a Silver upgrade, you can own a starter home. It is two rooms, and quite sufficient for satisfying my decorating and collecting penchants. I started crafting basic furniture - and then I found out about City Festivals and Moonlight Enchantments! Both occur once a month, and both have plentiful housing items that can be gotten through bartered tokens which are obtained through the events' quests. If you happen to hit a holiday or festival period, there is often a crafting component to it, where festival themed recipes are offered. These contain many housing item recipes. What more could I ask for?

I was able to do Moonlight Enchantments in May, and I look forward to the next City Festival in June ... and I am going to get my little carpenter busy furnishing my homes, as well as getting my tailor working on some lovely rugs and pretty outfits.

Zam.com City Festival Guide
Zam.com Moonlight Enchantments Guide

Merry gaming, wherever your bliss leads you!

EQ2 Marketplace - Amazing Rebate Sale

Oh, I have to get there this weekend! For this great Marketplace sale, and for a little bit of double XP!

From the EQ II Community News:

Memorial Day 50% Rebate Sale and Double XP weekend!

From Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:01 pm (noon) Pacific* through Monday, May 28, 2012 at 11:59 pm Pacific you'll get an instant rebate for half your Station Cash back when you purchase almost anything** in the EverQuest II Marketplace! Everyone likes having more to spend, and now's the time to grab that item you've had your eye on. As soon as you do, you'll find 50% of the cost of the item (clearly displayed to you in game) immediately refunded to you… maybe you should look at another item on your wish list!

Jump in game and explore the Marketplace. Whether it's an Experience Potion or the latest Heritage Armor, it's now twice the deal it used to be!

** Recurring subscriptions are not eligible for the 50% rebate.

Half Elf's Cottage, Fae Inspired, Qeynos Home, eq2

This quaint little room is in the Baubbleshire, one of the basic two room starter homes.

The rug and crates are quest rewards from some of the early Kelethin quests. The barrels and wash basin on the left are purchased from a housing merchant, found in any city. The plants and the acorn chairs are either from one of the monthly City Festivals, or from a Moonlight Enchantments vendor. On the left you can see a room divider, which can be crafted very early in crafting. These are great to use for decorating, especially in a two room starter home because you can easily divide the rooms up into smaller rooms, where you can create a theme in each area. On the other side of this divider are an office and a meditation space.

Goddess Shrine, Qeynos Home, eq2

Using items from the Moonlight Enchantments rewards - the tree and the grassy patches, and many items from the yearly Valentine's themed event, Erollisi Day, I created this Goddess shrine in a starter Qeynos home. Some of the Erollisi items are bartered for, some are crafted, while some are won according to how well one did in finding essences in a timed event, Hearts 'a Flutter. This home is in the Baubbleshire, has two rooms and costs a mere 5 silver a week to upkeep.

Fungus Among Us

Merriment to be had! Finding an extremely rare house item that drops from the Spicebracket Fungus that is harvested for a quest in the Enchanted Brownie Grotto in Darklight Woods during the monthly Moonlight Enchantments event in Everquest 2.

I had no idea that one might actually get a real live Spicebracket Fungus of their very own to take home, but there it is, in the picture below. Shown on the right is one of Maybelle's bags with the rare Treasured Fungus in it. It took almost 200 fungus gathers for it to show up, and I wasn't even looking for it. Imagine my delight!

The quest description, Strong Brew Root Beer, states:

Note: Harvesting the fungus has a slight chance of yielding a house item version of the fungus instead of the component.