Creaphis

Know what? I'm amazed, and a little bit touched, that people were still posting to this blog as late as last October. I feel a little bit guilty, too, for leaving Tuto Island's story unfinished. Now that my curiosity's led me back here, I may as well write a proper goodbye. There are lots of reasons why people spend their time in virtual worlds, but one big reason is that, in a game, it's easier to be the person that you want yourself to be. For some of you, that might mean being a powerful warrior that everyone respects, or a shrewd businessman that always gets the better end of a deal. For me, it meant being a friendly, adventurous storyteller - someone who could always take difficulties in stride, and then spin them into cheerful tales. In that summer of 2010, my real life self was a vastly different sort of person. I had just had a hard year away from home, going to school without knowing why, failing courses because I didn't want to do the work, and living with people who didn't want me around. I was feeling down. It was getting hard to be me, so I decided to be Tuto Island. To make a long and complicated story short, I slowly came to understand that I don't need Runescape to be the person that I want to be. I can be a friendly, fun-loving, determined sort of person in the real world. It's just a little bit harder sometimes. TL;DR: It's time for me to earn some quest points in real life. Take care! ~ Tuto

Someone asked me the other day if I was able to get into the "official" Tip.it clan chat, a clan chat you supposedly reach by typing in the account name "hyt." He told me that this cc was very exclusive - and sure enough, I wasn't able to enter; I was informed that my rank was not high enough. It didn't seem likely to me that Tip.it's official chat wouldn't be set up to prevent people from casually dropping in. Was this Tip.it's official chat? If it is, how can I get inside? If it isn't, is there an official cc? If there isn't, is there another cc where tip.iters gather?

That may not mean much to you, but my eyes see disaster. Tuto Island has gained 50 HP XP! "Gained" is the wrong word, however, because this is truly a loss - a loss of a perfect, unblemished count of one thousand experience points, and a loss of opportunity. Who knows what quests I could yet conquer if I had 50 more XP points worth of wiggle room? This may very well herald an earlier end to Tuto Island's adventures; the moment when she has truly beaten every quest that she can afford to may come that much sooner! Okay, that's enough melodrama for one post. Let me tell you what happened. It all started when the Dorgeshuun Council asked me to do them a favour. We're on pretty good terms, them and I, so I figured, sure, I can help out a cave goblin in need. The job was pretty easy anyways; all I had to do was babysit this Zanik girl and show her around. I figured I'd give her a tour of all the hottest, most happenin' night spots in Lumbridge, but it turned out that "day" was what she was more interested in. I can see how the sun would be a novel object if you'd never seen it before. Personally, though, I'm no fan of it. I'm a Runescape player, so obviously I try to avoid its nefarious rays as much as possible. Anyways, Runescape never stays peaceful for long, so pretty soon we found ourselves in some serious hijinks. Luckily though, Zanik can handle herself in a scrap. However, just a little bit later, her skills with that crossbow proved to be my undoing. We'd found out that this fellow named Sigmund was up to no good, and was starting trouble in Zanik's neighbourhood, so we grabbed our best weapons (a crossbow for her, rings of recoil for me) and confronted him. Zanik pulled out her bow and started mowing down his guards, while I provoked Sigmund into attacking me and let my passive-aggressive recoil strategy do its work. Things were going surprisingly well, until a question suddenly occurred to me: am I getting HP XP from this? I quickly moused over my HP icon to find out, and to my horror, I was! Every time that Zanik damaged an enemy, she gave me the experience for it. Needless to say, I was shocked that Zanik would betray our friendship in such a way. I immediately teleported away and left her to fend for herself. The next few days were rough. I felt disappointed that I might not be able to finish as many quests as I'd been hoping, because lots of quests force you to take some HP XP, and with level 10 HP looming so close, I don't have as many XP to spare anymore. I felt a little bit worried that there really weren't more quests for me to do, since I'd "used up" all of the easy ones in my first few weeks of adventuring. I even started to feel a little bit bad for ditching Zanik like I did. I thought, maybe it wasn't really her fault. Lots of people do silly things when under pressure, and maybe Zanik just gave me her XP by accident. Zanik definitely was under a lot of pressure; she had her entire home city to save, and she needed me to help her save it, and I let her down. So, all in all, this was a downer. To make things worse, it was only the start of a string of bad luck. For instance, I got sent to prison... Even worse is that Foofles II has entered his rebellious phase. He never listens to a word I tell him anymore. He even dyed his hair! They grow up so fast... :cry: I knew I couldn't mope around forever, so, eventually, I got back to work righting the world's wrongs. I fixed a cantankerous old gadget... ...with the help of a cantankerous old gnome. I can't say that anything about this quest was particularly inspiring, but, I guess that hearing the familiar "Quest Complete" music helped to restore my spirit of adventure. Or, maybe time had simply healed my wounds, as time is often said to do. In any case, I was feeling ready to tackle new challenges and to take big risks, despite the misfortunes I had suffered. The world is an ugly place after all, where bad things happen, but at least you can be the one causing bad things to happen to other people. So, I met back up with Zanik (who'd been holding Sigmund's guards at bay for an entire week), ready to deal with Sigmund, once and for all... Click this! \/ With Sigmund and his cronies dealt with, Zanik's home town was safe once again! I forgave Zanik for giving me HP XP (though trust me, it wasn't easy), and even told her she could come along with me when I'm questing, as long as she carries the supplies and leaves her crossbow at home. Zanik didn't seem all that impressed by that offer, but she knew that she owed me one, so she talked it over with the Dorgeshuun Council, and now I'm allowed to visit Dorgesh-Kaan any time I want! For the record, I've asked around, and it seems like Tuto Island is the first character with 9 HP - or even 10 HP - to ever enter Dorgesh-Kaan. I think that's pretty cool.

Wow, good luck. How are you planning to train summoning? Soul wars charm packages? Lootshare?

*clap* *clap*

This question bugs me every time I see it, so I just have to barge into Benjii's blog to answer it. The point of an account like this, for me, anyway, is to get enjoyment out of taking the tools that Jagex gives us and using them to make something interesting. A good pure is like a work of art - it takes creativity and perseverance to make, but the work pays itself off when you can step back and see that you're making something special. Also, while playing a pure, you're likely to face many unusual and difficult problems, but because the problems are unusual, they're interesting to work on, and because they're difficult, they're all the more satisfying when you beat them. Now, let me turn that question right around. What's the point of playing a "regular" account? Runescape is a very easy game to play. It's designed so that you can essentially just coast through nearly all of its content, without ever testing your control skills or your ability to solve problems. People who play regular accounts rarely face any real challenges, so they miss out on the satisfaction you get from achieving something difficult. Also, there's nothing distinctive about these accounts, so the people who play them miss out on the enjoyment that you can get from making something that's interesting and special. So again, what's the point of playing a "normal" account? Why bother? :mellow: (Before I get my own set of angry responses, let me just add that I don't believe that playing a "regular" account is pointless. I'm just saying: you can't argue that regular accounts somehow have more of a "point" than pures do.) Anyways, amazing work, Benjii. =D>

Okay I'm back! Vancouver was cool. I'll probably write something about that yet, and I'll definitely include a lot of screenshots - oops, I mean pictures - but right now I need to catch up on my Runescape blogging. Even though I haven't played Runescape for most of a week, there's a lot that I could write about. I've been saving some screenshots for rainy days like this. For instance, I might as well post these quest rewards... This was an easy quest to finish (you can kill the icelords with a cannon) but I'm a little confused about why my quest points were still 97 afterwards. (According to my screenshot collection, I already had 97 QP after finishing Lost City.) Like iMase guessed, I was able to finish this quest without too much difficulty. ;-) Truth be told, I became so good at prodding sheep that I managed to finish the quest by accident. I was trying to take a few extra screenshots with a sheep near the "goal" gate when it just hopped over the gate on its own, as if it was sick of being prodded across the globe and just wanted to be put out of its misery. I had already euthanized the other three sheep, so as soon as the fourth one jumped over the fence, the game no longer let me prod any sheep at all and the quest was essentially over. This disappointed me a little; I had still been hoping to prod a sheep down to Castle Wars eventually, to enjoy the thrilled reactions I'd definitely get. :-D Part of me was relieved, though - herding a sheep to somewhere farther than Catherby would take tons of effort, and now that I can't prod anymore, I can spend that effort elsewhere, on things that probably deserve it a little more. :???: Also, note that this quest gave me 5 QP instead of the listed 4. I guess that the missing QP from Cold War just took a while to find me. Oh yeah, I beat this one too, as PuppyKing somehow knew already. :blink: Watch this video: Pretty epic, right? Well, I'll be honest... Dragon Slayer is a joke amongst HP pures. Elvarg is an extremely easy beast to cannon. It actually took me longer to kill her than it should have. I'm told that sometimes she's dead before the cannon turns around twice. This quest brought my defense up to level 37, which still isn't quite enough to equip a rune platebody, which I'm supposedly allowed to wear at this point, but it's close. If I'm lucky, a few more quests will bring it up to 40. I actually enjoyed this quest, by the way. After solving about eight bajillion clue-scroll sliding-block puzzles, I have become a lean, mean, block-sliding machine. Hm, now what else do I have to show you... oh I know, look at this! That's Tuto Island in the adamant, hiding behind the Horn of Glory, as always. But... look by her feet. See the stars? Tuto is a level 5 attacker! :-o And, actually, she's been level 5 for ages. I just never got around to showing it off before. :^_^: Here's a much older picture, in which she's already tooting her own master penance horn... Also, I got level 50 leeching! And, actually, that also happened ages ago. :-) But, what's new is that I bought myself a longbow sight... I'll bet the longbow sight seems like an odd thing to buy for this character, or for any character really, but sighted longbows have an insanely high range bonus, which makes cannons more accurate. No, that doesn't make any sense. Yes, I'm going to take advantage of it anyway. Anyways, reaching all of these big goals has shot my confidence through the roof! I'm starting to take bigger risks... I'll give you one guess on how that last one ended.

Sorry guys, I don't have a proper post ready for you just yet. There won't be any updates for the next few days either, because I'm spending the weekend in Vancouver! :-o But, just to reassure you all that I'm still alive, I'll catch up on a few replies. I think that my cannon disappeared after the black demon's death because there are actually two identical Grand Tree dungeons. One exists simply as a battleground for this showdown with Glough and his little friend, and as soon as the demon dies, you get teleported to the other dungeon, which is the only one you're able to access forever afterward. Either that, or my cannon was sucked up into an errant wormhole created by an absent minded wizard, or a stealthy troupe of leprechauns hypnotized me and made off with my prized possession. Luckily for me, I bought the extended warranty, and am fully covered against all effects of geospatial anomalies and magical trickery. Nulodian gave me a new cannon, free of charge, and even a few extra cannonballs for my trouble. True, you can't. That's why I brought some steel bars and smithed my own. :wink: Catherby beach is about as far as I ever prodded that poor sheep, and it's also about as far as a sheep can go, in that direction, anyway. Getting a sheep across White Wolf Mountain isn't just difficult but well and truly impossible. (Just trust me on this - if anyone qualifies as an expert on virtual sheep prodding, I think I do. :grin:) To prod one further, you'd have to aim for Relekka, or the Piscatoris hunting area, or all the way south to the ogre city of Oo'glog. I believe that getting a sheep to each of these places should be possible, though challenging, to say the least. For anyone who still has the chance, I definitely recommend trying this. Sheep herding doesn't deserve its bad reputation. After practicing for a little bit, you'll get a feel for it. Or, at least, I did; my vast experience with a wide array of video games definitely helped. After all, successful sheep herding requires top-notch reflexes, an adaptive acumen for puzzle solving, and an inexhaustible tolerance for all those times when the blasted sheep just takes off on its own at the worst possible time and lodges itself in a corner, from which it will refuse to move until it inevitably resets to its spawn point. Okay, maybe I'm not making a strong case for sheep herding. But, well, I enjoy a good challenge, and the reactions you get from bystanders make it all worth it. :-)

Well, the good news is that these things get easier with practice. Thanks to the hundreds of these things I did in the old days, I was able to beat Elemental Workshop III without a guide, and even enjoyed it. The bad news, though, is that I can't imagine how I'd explain exactly how to solve a puzzle box. The bottom-right corner should be empty at the end. The square that you currently have in that position should be at the bottom center of the puzzle. Start by getting the leftmost squares of the bottom two rows into position first, and then work your way to the right. I hope that helps!

Haha wow, nice drop! I'm really impressed by how well you're picking yourself back up after getting keylogged. I think I'd be pretty bummed out for a while, especially if my HP level got vandalized. :sad:

I don't know how you f2p pures can do it. I ran out of stuff to do there in about two weeks. :???:

Hey, good start. By the way, if you're looking for a clan chat full of 10 hp pures, join "Clan of ten". :^_^:

I believe they'll eventually release a dragon kite, but I agree that it'll be far too late. Jagex has this silly idea that dragon equipment has a mystique about it that all other armour lacks, so it deserves to be released extremely gradually. This may have been true when dragon armour was actually the best stuff out there, but that hasn't been the case for ages, so Jagex should have just hurried up and gotten the rest of the set out of the door by now. Well... I guess that a dragon kite will still have some prestige about it when it's finally released. If it looks cool, it'll still be an attractive and valuable "costume" item. Personally, though, I can't stand how the dragon platebody and full helm look. Those items embody Jagex's illusion that dragon armour is still awesome - they made them bulky and spiky in an attempt to make them look powerful, but the result is that they just look ridiculous when worn with the relatively simple dragon items released earlier. If Jagex takes the opposite approach with the dragon kite, and makes it tasteful and elegant, then I'll be happy to see it. An elegant dragon kite would look great with dragon legs and a dragon chain. (The chainbody is still part of "full dragon" in my mind. :smile:)