Celestia Housing goes live!

That's right, go log in and start your downloads, kids!


Celestia housing is now out of the test realm and into the live game, along with all the other goodies that are a part of the patch message.

Enjoy those hand of doom packs! :)

Happy Dueling!

Celestia Housing Test Realm Redux

YO,

So there has been a lot of information sharing going on across the Wizard101 information super-highway, and I just want to point out a few of those and maybe discuss them a smidge.

First up is Kevin Battleblood's well written blog post. Kevin talks about the changes in the test realm that he finds pertinent: Floating pots and plants, petnomes, stun block, and gardening towers.

In particular I feel for Kevin (and all of us) in regards to the bugged petnome numbers. It's confusing enough to try and analyze pet abilities through a community site like Petnome, but a broken (or bugged) counting system really messes up trying to track these things . . . especially when already dealing with different generations of pets. I really hope that gets fixed.

Although I really liked the idea of gardening towers and getting more bang for your energy globe out of building your garden up instead of out, I personally never had a garden tower, so I won't miss this. *comfort* to those who will. :/

I liked Pyromancer Jonathon's review of the new Celestia crafted house. Although Jonathan mentions this is now the second house to have a dueling circle, he doesn't mention that this is the first house to have a dueling circle that doesn't require the purchase of crowns! Uber wife tells me that one of our characters already has everything she needs to craft one! Awesome.


If you're looking for a good list of ingredients that you'll need for this, I again refer you over to Battleblood's place. (Uber wife was all psyched that she could help Kevin out with a small error on the list. *giggle*)

For me, I just can't get over how much I really REALLY wanted an underwater house for Celestia ala Calypso's sunken ship. It's what I was hoping for. Dangit.

Of additional note: Stellarium got dumbed down. My video here, is no longer applicable, and I may take it down soon. Don't worry, all the other cheating bosses in the game are still there and cheating.

There have been a number of interesting posts over on Wizard101 Central about the new changes.

- Fierce Hounds have different appearances. (click!)
- Polar Cat gift card only gives one dragonblade now. (click!)
- Efreet is now a charm-class debuff instead of a damage-class debuff. (click!)
- Guide to the bosses in the Hand of Doom pack. (click!)
- Orthrus animation has changed. (click!)
- Can't use Gargantuan on Efreet. (click!)
- The let down on the new side quest in Grizzleheim. (click!)

For me, it's all about the Hand of Doom pack this time around. I love the new boss minions. It's just SUCH a cool new addition to be able to summon up one of these to help you out. I'm not all together thrilled that I get five or six junk cards with each pack I buy, but I do like where these minion cards are headed.

You know what I liked about casting the Lord Nightshade minion? He started with three power pips and crit on his vampire spell. A minion with a chance to crit is awesome.


Thumbs up KI for this addition! Just . . . PLEASE, I don't want any more junk cards. If you lowered the cost and gave me one minion card and no junk cards, I'd be happy. If you upped the cost and give me seven minion cards and no junk cards, I'd be happy. I just think this current method of giving me one or two good cards and junk that I have to sell off feels . . . old school . . . and if you're going old school, then I need a stick of gum with each purchase. ;-)

AND FINALLY, one last note before I let you go . . . the Indiana-Jones-esque Boulder rolling trick with the new small Celestia house? Epic! Just make the boulder roll more often or upon cue! (Like when I trip a switch or something) :-)


Happy Dueling!

Where are Some Celestia Furniture Drops?

Alexander Battleflame has a question:

Hey Friendly I have a question where are some Celestia frontature drops?

Heya! Well the best list I've found is over at Central on William Ghostrider's thread.

It doesn't seem complete just yet, but I think it's a great thread to watch and participate on!

Personally, I really want to farm me up one of those Shark Huts from Calypso. Yeah! YEAH! We'll make that housing item of the day . . . maybe that will inspire me to go farm Calypso a few times. ;-)


What furniture item from Celestia are you most interested in farming?

Happy Dueling!

Boosts and Resists against Astral School?

Another question from Destiny Dawnriver:

Hi Friendly! I have a question that will be interesting to budding wizards in Celestia.
What schools do the Star and Moon creatures resist? I'm Fire, and they resist that. What other schools do they resist?

Heya! I wasn't sure on the answer to this so I logged in and tried out different types of attacks on different Star and moon creatures. What I found out was that the resistances were exactly the same: Ice and storm attacks are boosted, Fire attacks are resisted (as you suggest). It also appears that the other schools of magic are neither resisted or boosted.

It seems like the Fire school got the short end of the stick, but luckily a boost is just a prism away for the fire school. (too bad a lot of their damage is done in DoT spells . . . that's just really difficult to prism)

In general though, resistances seem strange in Celestia. Sometimes you can be fighting a boss and they'll surprise you. A good example of this is Unimatus in the Stellarium. He's flagged as a Myth boss, yet Death boosts against him.

/shrug

So, Your mileage may vary, and I am interested in hearing from readers' experiences with resistances in Celestia.

Good question.

Happy Dueling!

Where do I get the ingrediants for "The Special" quest? (p.s. Feint necklace?!)

Taylor ThunderDust has two questions:

1) I have this side quest, called "The Special" that I got, from a tutorial tip, when I dinged 52 and its from a guy in the CL Base Camp, named Ogden Peake. And the quest is about how he has work to do but can't continue without a sandwitch..no joke. And he sends you to MarleyBone to talk to the snack vendor in Regent's Square. Then the snack vendor tells you to go around the worlds of the Spiral, looking for the snacks, and you, apparently, need: Nettle Root, which is located in various locations in KT, Medium Fish, various locations in MB, Stinky Cheese, various locations in MB, and Golden Squash, various locations in MS. I can't find them, and there's no quest helper allowed. It acts somewhat like a Zeke quest, because it gives a training point. Help, if possible? (screenshots attached, I hope..)




2) I saw someone with a Feint necklace! a LEGIT Feint necklace! I just didn't screenshot it..but it was different from the actual Feint, with +75% to enemies and 20%+ to you. Just thought you should know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

These are actually Bazaar questions . . . not bizarre, but bazaar! :-)

1- All the items needed for "The Special" quest are located in the Bazaar! I just price checked these a couple minutes ago.


So if you don't want to take the time to farm all those up, just take around 3k gold to the bazaar and finish it the easy way! :-)

2- I know, right!? These are super awesome necklaces. Both of these can also be found in the bazaar. Chickachickacheck em out!



Thanks for the questions and screenies!

Happy Dueling!

Housing Item of the Day -- Brain Coral and Solar Icon

Uber wife made a cool discovery last night in the test realm. She was offing some bosses in in the Lunarium and got a drop of Brain Coral off of Selenor.


Oh yeah, that big lump of coral is definitely worthy of housing item of the day!


Also, Bailey's buddy, Seth Hunter, got a Solar Icon from Mithraya! Check this out:


So there you go! Not only are Otto and Gearwise selling Celestia housing items, but also housing items have been added to the loot tables on the test realm!

Happy Dueling!

Translating the Tunnel (Part 1)

This morning I was going through some screenshots in an attempt to answer this question from Willzahk:

One request. What is Axenos' little speech and translations into normal?

I was looking for maybe a screenshot of the text because apparently Axenos doesn't repeat his speech when you return to visit him. (if anyone has a screenshot of that text, please send it my way).

What I found instead was this great picture I had taken of the massive tunnel with all the Celestian text.


This tunnel was made for me.

So I got to work and translated the first two panels before running out of time (you may want to click on that to make it bigger).


I need to head to work now, but your secrets will be mine, tunnel! Mark my words!

Happy Dueling!

When will Celestia Furniture be out? Should I wait?

hey all! I've got an interesting question here from Whitestorm:

I'm getting close to finishing Dragonspyre, and I can't wait to start questing in Celestia. However, I've noticed that there is no Celestia furniture, and I'm wary of doing the Celestia quests before the furniture update comes out. Do you know when the furniture will be added to Celestia? Could you find out? Thanks

Well, I asked Professor Greyrose for you, and she didn't have any idea on a date when this stuff would be put in the game. She did make mention to the fact that there was a lag between putting in Grizzleheim and the Grizzleheim houses.

I mentioned back to Professor Greyrose that Grizzleheim at least had some Grizzleheim-style furniture in the game when it was released . . . and then e-mail traffic went silent. This could be because she was still gathering information or because she's busy or maybe because there's really no good answer right now.

So, let's see, the question at this point then is really, "Should I play through Celestia even though there aren't housing items instituted in the game?"

For me, it's a resounding yes. Yes, you should play through Celestia. The benefits of earning all those levels, spells, and new fun far outweigh the furniture items. Yes, unfortunately, at some point they may load up Celestia with furniture laden quests after we've all gone through that content, and we'll all miss out on that furniture. Meh. It's a little bit of a bummer, and it happened back when furniture was first instituted into the game. But, now I can find a lot of those furniture items for quests for sale in the bazaar. In fact, I just covered a room in my new Massive Fantasy Palace with Grandpa Froggy pictures, which comes from a side quest in Marleybone. Check it out:


Who would have thought I could pick up 24 of those in the bazaar now? Not me!

If you're looking for a time line, then the best I can give you is based off of Professor Greyrose's response . . . let's look to the past for clues of the future. Furniture and housing was instituted in the game after Dragonspyre was released. It was May 6, 2009 to be exact, which was only a month before Grizzleheim was released on the test realm. A year later (late June 2010), Grizzleheim houses were released.

We could be in for a long wait. I'm not really sure, but I say, go have fun in Celestia anyway! I'll let you all know when I get more information.

Happy Dueling!

More Celestia Pet Questions

Here's a few more pet related questions that cropped up in that last post.

~~~~~~~~

Anon asks:

"you can dye the fierce hound different colors?"

Yes, Yes you can! there are four different colors you can dye your hound!



~~~~~~~~

Trevor Mythstone asks:

Hey Friendly,
This has really been bothering me and I'd like to know if you know anything about this. There is no new Celestia pets, excluding starfish, spinyfish, sea dragon and sea turtle. It seems weird no one found a new pet yet, not even the shark pet said in the that leaked shark poster, one side enemy, one side pet, the other mount. This is just really bugging me. What do you got to say about it.

Interesting point. I think a lot of it has to do with the new complexities of the game vs. the effort of building a new world. Let me explain a bit.

Kingisle has been adding complexity to their game from day 1. When this game started, it was a much simpler beast. We had our 101 spells, we had our zones up to Mooshu, we had our cool gear, we had a few pets, and that was it.

Over the years, new things have been put into the game to make it more fun. New things like these:

- Housing + furniture.
- Crafting + regeants.
- Advanced pets + pet food
- Pet mixing
- Pet racing
- Ranked PvP
- Mounts
- New spells

All of those things have been added to the world since its inception. Now every time they add a new world, we naturally expect all of those new complexities to be added alongside it. In fact, it doesn't seem complete without that stuff, does it? Not for me.

So let's see how they did with all these new complexities:

- Celestia housing + Celestia furniture
- Celestia crafting + Celestia reagents
- Celestia advanced pets + Celestia pet food
- Celestia Pet Mixing
- Celestia pet racing tracks
- Celestia PVP arenas
- Celestia mounts
- Celestia spells

Here's how I'd grade them. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Celestia housing + Celestia furniture = F. Nope. Just like Grizzleheim, I think we won't see the release of Celestia housing for a little bit. Obviously there was a complete lack of new furniture added alongside Celestia. I think you'll probably find a lot of upset levelers who will have missed out on furniture items when KI adds them to side quests that they've already completed. I'm positive furniture and housing will come at a later date. You'll probably still be able to purchase all those items at the bazaar though.

Celestia crafting + reagents = A. Yes, they added this with Celestia. Awesome.

Celestia advanced pets + Celestia pet food = C. I think you're right. It was implemented, and there are new pets, but I'm a little disappointed by the lack of new pets. Of course, there are well over 200 pets in the game. I probably wouldn't have been disappointed at all if the advanced pets release had come after Celestia. Then again, I couldn't really imagine doing Celestia without a cool advanced pet now.

Celestia Pet Mixing = ??. I don't know if anyone has tried combining all the new Celestia pets together to see if they could get something new. I'd like to see some more information on that. Perhaps all our pets are hiding within rare combinations. I have no idea. It's still too new.

Celestia pet racing tracks = F. They were totally left out. I have no idea if they have plans to build a new Celestia track. I'd be interested in a swimming race or a race inside a dome.

Celestia PVP arenas = ??. I haven't seen one. Have you guys seen one? I'm assuming they get an F here, but I might be wrong.

Celestia mounts = A. They really excelled here. There are a ton of new mounts to choose from. Great job!

Celestia spells = A+. Without a doubt, Celestia is all about the new spells of the game. They took names and kicked butt with this release as far as spells go. Definitely no room for criticism here at all.

So there were some successes and some failures, but with every new feature KingIsle adds to the game, it's clear they also add more complexity to the release of each new world. Failure to release some of these with th new world makes it feel . . . incomplete (especially the furniture and housing). Then again, it is super nice to have a world to run around in and who cares about all the fluff, right? right!

~~~~~~~~

Anon x2 asks

Okay, well when the Death Scarab's were up for grabs last year for the contest, was there a limit? Because I have two for some reason, please help.?

Um, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but the Death Scarab is in fact a very rare pet. There was a contest more than a year ago where the first 101 people to enter the code "seveneleven" into the KI website at a certain time got the pet. That's an extremely limited amount of pets and makes it very rare. The contest was done heavily over twitter and it was basically to celebrate KI's new release of gift cards.

If you have two death scarabs, consider yourself lucky! Was there another contest I was unaware of?

**update!** yup, Robert reminded me of the Pokemon promotion. Everyone got a death scarab for that too ... I guess it's a lot more common than I was thinking. Cool.

~~~~~~~~

RoyalWizard asks:

hey friendly i have a question
how come all pets that you buy on wizard101 take 5 minutes to hatch? and why do some of the new Celestia bought pets take longer to hatch like the starfish and sea dragon? I am very puzzled by this and i already asked all my friends on the game and they were puzzled too

I'm not sure why that is, but I imagine some of the pets have been sitting under the heat lamp longer than others. ;-)

It sure helps with trying to identify if you have a hybrid or not when you look at the hatch time of your egg.

When I was at GDC, I sat around in a circle chatting with some KI employees and they said at one time they considered having an equippable egg bounce around behind you while you waited for your egg to hatch. haha! I'd love to see that happen. :-)

~~~~~~~~~

Happy Dueling!

Final Celestia Wallpaper Reveal!

Whew . . .



Can you believe we finally made it to the end? Any surprises for you at who the final characters are in this wallpaper?

Thanks for the fun KingsIsle! Glad I can finally have a complete picture for my desktop. :-)

Happy Dueling!

Wednesday, 27 October 2010

That's the day Celestia will be released "if all goes well." Read about it in the October Update Notes.

You can also go read about that on The Sea Cucumber.



Hiiiiiii Kevin!

Oh yeah, and a bunch of other places too:
Ambrose2Zeke
Deathly Diviner
Diary of a Wizard
The Pyromancer's Digest
Fin and Quinn
The Two-Headed Wizard

. . . and I'm sure many more that I missed. :-)

Celestia is finally on its way! Almost seven months ago to the day we first learned that Celestia would be the next world. Remember how much fun we had dissecting this picture to try to get clues?



It was shortly after that, that I became aware of Kevin.



Hiiiiiii Kevin!

And then a month later we got our very first glimpse at the shadows of the Celestia Wallpaper.



Haha, so I'm thinking we'll finally get to see the rest of those characters here in the next couple of days. Here's what we have of the wallpaper currently:



The timing of those being revealed didn't quite work out how we thought it would be, did we? Pfffft, leave us fans to try and rely on such wacky things as math. No the date didn't turn out to be August 14th. It was a valiant effort though!

Remember when we first got a glimpse of this guy right here?



Yup, that prequest had us all spinning our heads for a while. Remember when Kevin beat the Warehouse on his first try?



Hiiiiiii Kevin!

That prequest had me singing too. It was awesome when the prequest finally went live three and a half months ago. It wasn't too much longer after that when the Ravenwood Radio Death Team had their fun with the warehouse.

I think one of my favorite theorycrafting posts to write up while waiting for Celestia to be released was this one involving theories about new Astral Magic spells. I got close on a couple of those! Especially Morph!

And at the end of it all, Celestia was on the test realm for 19 days! Dragonspyre spent only nine days on the test realm in total. Grizzleheim spent 13 days on the test realm.

Why did Celestia take so much longer? Well, this was a huge update as we all know ... Three new spell classes PLUS level 58 spells AS WELL AS a brand new world. Level 48 spells didn't go live with Dragonspyre. Could you imagine if level 58 spells weren't going live with Celestia? *shivers*

Well, that's enough looking back for me. What can I say, as a fan of the game, it's been a long time coming, and I'm super excited to see it released. It makes me wonder what world we'll see next. Any guesses? (sign me up for Shadow Weaver hive! Although I bet you we get a more 1-50 level world like Grizzleheim . . . Candyland anyone?)

Happy Dueling!

Level 55 Celestia School Wands on Test

Well, even though I'm having a hard time finding play time, my friends aren't! I was able to snag Blaze Mistshard, Destiny Mistshard, and their friend Wolf Anvilbreaker to show me all of the level 55 Celestia School Wands from the Test Realm.

As always with the test realm, things are subject to change, and apparently these wands used to give players two power pips and now are back to giving us one. Aww! How about a power pip and one regular pip, KI? We'll split you the difference!

Check 'em out!









I love the look on the death staff! I can't wait to have one of those! Thanks for sharing Blaze, Destiny, and Wolf!

Happy Dueling!

Head Nod to DDO in Celestia

Heh. I ran into this puzzle on the Test Realm today:


Which instantly reminded me of the floor puzzles in Dungeons and Dragons Online:


haha! You find these floor puzzles scattered throughout the dungeons of DDO all the time. Last night my static DDO group encountered a very complex one where if the puzzle connected with certain points on the ground, monsters would jump us. Good times!

Nice head nod to DDO, KingsIsle!

Happy Dueling!

Translations for Pictures in The District of Stars

I was running around a bit on the test realm the other day and captured screenshots of all the giant pictures on the walls in The District of Stars. I know that translating these little celestian words is kind of my deal the past couple of months, so I thought, "Why stop now?"

I don't think there's anything too mysterious about these translations at this point. But I am finding they kind of work in to the lore of Celestia, which I'm slowly (very slowly) unraveling.

Here you go! (Click to make those bigger.)














Hope that sparks some interest!

Happy Dueling!

Busy Morning

Just a quick note this morning to let you all know that I'm hard at work on an article for Beckett's MOG concerning my recent trip to Austin.

I hope you're all enjoying Celestia.

Part of my trip was spent huddled in an office with some of the lead people involved with making Celestia, and I've been reviewing my iphone recording of our half hour long conversation for some good soundbytes. What I want to tell you is that they are very concerned about "you." They were excited to see "you" in Celestia, and they went to a lot of work to make it a great experience . . . for YOU.

They also want to hear your feedback about Celestia, so make sure you're not holding back. If you have something to say about your experience there, let loose.

I gotta get back to writing this article, but I just wanted to say GOOD MORNING, and happy dueling!

Wallpaper 14 Revealed!

Here it is! (click to make bigger)



The mighty fishbot is revealed! At least that's what I'm calling him: FISHBOT! If you rewatch the spells video, at the very end there are a truckload of these guys wandering around after the final Medusa is cast.

We're getting closer to the live realm! Just a few more shadows to reveal!

Happy Dueling

New spells video from IGN (and WTG fans!)

Hey all!

Well, here's the new spells video (the one I saw at Kingsisle) over at IGN:

More Wizard101 Videos

This is a much higher quality video than the "over-the-shoulder" video I shot when I was there. I'm happy that all of the spells were found before this hit the streets. GO FAST LEVELERS ON THE TEST REALM!

The fans totally pulled their weight over on Youtube to get these out and published. This is one from PrestonW101, who pulled all the videos together into one:



Haha! Nice song on the end of that one. ;-)

Gratz IGN for the exclusive!

Happy Dueling!

Where do you advance your crafting in Celestia?

Here's a question from matthew stormshade I got a couple days ago, which I'm sure has been answered now, but we found out the answer yesterday while playing:

hey friendly, i was just wondering if you could ask around where the grandmaster craft person is, because nobody on central knows and i would really like to progress my crafting studies.

Uber wife stumbled into this fine fella while she was out goofing around in Celestia with some friends who are a little ahead of me in progression.


Pierce Stanson! (He's on the floating island apparently . . . I haven't got there yet.)

Pierce wants you to craft up a seal of the seven seas amulet in order to obtain your grandmaster status.


Take a look at that badboy! That's a freaking awesome healer necklace.


All the crafted gear is looking very "worth it" at this point.



Of course, I don't think we've seen much in the way of top end gear yet. I really need to drop by Central and see what people have been saying.

Happy Dueling!