How To Do a Weapons/Armor/Magical Items List Ala Baal/Blix

 

Ahh the joys of the modern world, and it's extraordinary love of listing, catagorizing, and generally compartmentalizing existance. I'm into this trend; it makes life much easier. Of course i belive in making as many "real life" things help make NS much easier; it's just how i am. So i've gone to a considerable lengths to make listings (comprehensive ones, no less) of the Weapons and Magical Items of Natural selection.

It has come to my attention that others would like to do so as well; and hey i'm all for it, cause it's not only good for the game, but good for your spread sheet and office software skills. So, lets start at the top..with a list of things you need to get started (or that'd be damned handy to have).

1. A spreadsheet program. Spread sheets are superior (in this case) to databases, because the info is easily displayed in list format. You could have one of these already - MicroSoft Excell is a fine one, Lotus 1-2-3 is also very good. If you dont want to spend money, but have a bit of time, check out Star Office at StarDivision .

2. A text editor. One comes with windows; 2 acutally. One is "Notepad" which blows, the other is "WordPad" which is reasonable for our purposes. Thier both under "start" "program files" "Accessories"; pretty self evident from there. You can save it in whatever format - this is just a "holding cell" for the info before we put it into spreadsheet format.

3. Some reasonabile intelligence to figure out basic Spread sheet stuff. This sounds cocky, but it's true - you WILL encounter situations your not familiar with, and will have to dynamically figure it out.

4. An indentify skill. You COULD - in theory - ID weapons wholly with scrolls, but this would be expensive and tedious. Several - infact most - classes have some identification skill. Crusaders are probably best off, with ID weapon and ID armor; Armor sorely needs someone to list it. Necromancers have ID magic; this is useful both for magical items and for regular items "affects" - the only problem is getting the level of it. My advice is to specilize in whatever ID skill you have already.

Now that we know what we need to start, lets look at what you'll be acutally doing to make a list, in the way that i do.

Step 1: Decide what information you want in the "final product" - the spread sheet. Do you want an "exaustive" listing? Do you want to have the room name, mob name, and area name, or just the item name and level? this stuff's important to work out "ahead of time" - you dont want to have to go back and add things for 300 items (as i once did). I recommend that you list all available information - it comes in handy.

Step 2: Decide how you want to enter the data, in pieces, or in whole chunks. There's something to be said for piece-meal data entry; it lessens the "feeling" of work, and gives you a chance to remember what your entering better. Whole-chunk (over 20 entries at a time, as i do it) helps lessen over all work, but reminds you just how much your doing. Truly a tough choice.

Step 3: Aquire the items. My method entails JUST me killing the mobs for the Equipment i ID - it's the only way to be SURE there's not some kind of screwup - remember, people do make mistakes.

Step 4: Decide what you want to have this listing do - do you want it to be a refrence listing, a comparason, or a "best of" list? I use mine for recommending weapons, and for "rating" diffrent area's weapons. Of course, that's just me - yours could do a number of diffrent things. Once you decide what you want to do with your list (i advise you hold off on deciding till you get a few items in, to get a "feel" for it), figure out a way to impliment it - i can help you with this if you need it.

Step 5: Have fun. Remember - it's a game, and games are (generally) meant to be fun (although a few serve other purposes). If your not enjoying what your doing - don't do it. :)

 

I hope this is able to help someone, who might want to help catalog the (decidedly vast) realms of natural selection. I should stress again - no one's done an armor listing yet, so it's wide open; ditto with magical effects. Fun.