Boo's Solo Self-Found Challenge
Boo's Solo Self-Found Challenge
Context
As of recently, I've been longing the return to simpler times. I miss the old vibes UWO used to give me. And for that reason, I am starting a Solo Self-Found character. For those not aware of what this is, it's essentially playing a multiplayer game, but singleplayer.
Rules
To properly do this I gave myself a set of rules I need to abide by:
- No alts
- No fleeting
- No schools
- No trading (except a few UWC items you simply need at a certain point)*
- Allowed to join or create a company and use the shared storage, but only my own items
*List of purchasable items in docs added below
Feel free to copy this for your own use.
Footnote
As someone who always believed that the game is supposed to be played without alts (albeit, with help from other players) I want to give it a proper try. However it'll be difficult with the number of skills, therefore I will be mostly focussing on trade & adventure. Considering my main 'boo' which some might know is only maritime and can't do anything else.
I will keep this thread as my own documentary and see where the ship will sail, and eventually beach.
For now, bon voyage.
Comments
So first things first, I am 1/0/0 since I started with an adventure toon. Have 50k ducats and 0 fame. Where do I start, well first off I do some low-level quests. To slowly build up the character. You might wonder why I chose Venice? Well, easy. Venice is the best nation coughs. But it was mainly because of a certain pair of quests you can get here that I was aware of that can give me some PO4s. Although my first spice run is far into the future.
For now, I will be focussing on getting fame to get port permits.
The first day of moving up and down the Adriatic I ended up with 170k cash, 980 fame and 9/5/3 in levels. Essentially doing a mix of adventure/trading quests whilst buying and selling wares across ports.
Alright, day two!
Essentially back to the grind, doing Sufferings of the reagular shipment and Deliver Parsley. Hopefully, the quest shows up for a Merchant's Guild Card so I can get Accounts. After that I want to invest in a real battleship, a Battle Barca, maybe something flashier if the money allows me to.
With the Battle Barca I want to get battle up to level 7 so I can get Shipbuilding. Good thing ships can now be built from rank 1 😅
First big upgrade, replaced my Explorer Barca for a plain Caravel! As my tradition goes, shipname stays the same but I increase the digit behind it. So here is 'Natus II'
It's already significantly faster with 3 studding sails, albeit that it was quite expensive and I couldn't invest in proper sails so I took some cheap ones. It should also help me get through the battle levels, or so I hope.
Down to 41k cash 😢
Meanwhile, I've gotten back some money. Actually not too bad, the Caravel made me way more money. Back up to 650k as we speak! After doing a day of merchant quests without ever popping the merchant's guild card quest I suppose I am missing something. And 20 experience per quest ain't it either. Grabbed some additional skills to try and gather some rare trade goods which hopefully earns me some more experience per sell-off.
And well, to grind the skills I actually had to whip out the calculator to figure out what clerk vigour food is good money per vigour point 😅
Right, spending some time and money grinding collection for rare trade goods paid off straight away. Definitely the way to go. Even earned 754 trade experience without a trade job. Very, very nice.
The third day consisted of mostly doing battle-related stuff so I could get Shipbuilding.
One of the things was doing a Ganador match against Maymay, needless to say, I won 😎
However, this was absolutely worthless for battle experience so I switched to the good old battle reports. Sunk 50 Barca's outside Venice to try the formidable, but that was near impossible. The 50 Barca's gave more than enough experience to reach level 7 battle required for Shipbuilding. Besides it earned me around 550k so it's also a decent way of making money.
So for the next step of actually learning Shipbuilding I need to enter Tunis. Tunis requires 20 disguise since it's owned by the Ottoman. And frankly, it is really difficult to get disguise when you need disguise to enter the ports that sell the equipment. After some time wasted in the Balkans looking for enough disguise I decided to sail over to Palma to get a hat with 20 disguise.
For now, I'm going to increase my adventure levels some more till I can sail a Cruise Sloop, which I hopefully can make without the hull 🙏
So I changed the rules a little bit. I do allow the Beginner's ROLE Course Final Exam for the Guild Card to swap jobs. As you can't get guild cards for each role since they're locked out by each their own skill. In regards to trading that's Accounts. So basically I need that or else I'd get stuck really quickly.
I do however ditch the ship since that was the primary reason for not allowing schools to begin with.
Natus III has been launched!
The Small Carrack is a slight bit faster and has more cargo space. Besides, it looks better and I could make it myself. Nothing happened yesterday, had to work all day :)
For today I'm going to work on adventure some more and shipbuilding in the trips in between. Pretty sure I can't create a Cruise Sloop so the Cutter will have to do which has significantly higher requirements. I also registered the Company of my main, Everlast going to use the colony to build a schooner when I can.
Alright, been a bit since an update.
Got a bit bored of sailing and doing adventure so I decided to do another Battle Report. However once fighting the formidable I noticed his crew was awfully low, 35. Albeit he is an absolute tank, I bet I have a chance in melee. So I made a Galley with 66 crew and challenged the rank 1 formidable.
Turns out, he's buffed to smithereens and I have no melee skills, but were doing it anyway.
Heck. I forgot I have a bunch of items that act as melee skills though, so grabbing new crew and we go again!
Easy.
So I kept going till 200 ships, defeating the formidable each time, which honestly took forever. But the payoff is incredible. 6 million ducats, 26955 battle experience and 20965 fame!
Boosting me to lvl 13 battle, and I required 12 for the cutter. Very very nice.
I've got a new daily! A Small Galleon. It's decently fast and has a spacious hold of 290. Currently I'm fighting out which aides I will be taking, probably going to get Erda first. Considering the nice skillset with fire prevention and spice trading, I think it'll be a decent first aide. As my second aide I am considering Alejandro. He can help out with the adventuring but most importantly the +1 to shipbuilding.
This leads me on to the next point. Ships. Without shipbuilding, it's basically impossible to have a 'fun' ship progression. Considering all the good ships are locked behind hulls which require really high shipbuilding. For example, I would like a Cruise Light Clipper or a Trading Schooner (this one mostly because I did my first spice run on Gama with one). These ships require a Medium Flush Deck Style Hull. However, the hull requires rank 9 shipbuilding 😒 The rank 4 handicrafts ain't no big deal, but shipbuilding is just too expensive and time-consuming right now to grind. Besides, there are no low-level shipbuilding favoured jobs.
So right now the ship progression looks like the following: Small Galleon -> (Maybe a Schooner, since it looks adorable and it's a little faster. But the cargo hold will take a massive hit) -> Large Carrack -> Galleon -> (Maybe a Sha-Chuan, depending where I am with port permits) -> Large Galleon -> Clipper. After the Clipper I am forced to grind shipbuilding to improve to the next ships. By then I should have a fair amount of money from spice trading though. I still have to skip cool ships like the Large Schooner though because of the hulls 😢
In the near future, I will be making my first big trip from Italy to The Netherlands. This to unlock Oxford and sea charting from the Mercator since he's been spamming me.
Noticing your toon pic for boo_SSF...
Hi, little buddy.
Hey there @Spookles
Good thing you posted this and give updates. I will follow this thread. With my SA, I am good with playing solo too. Very good tips -thank you sooooooooooooooo much.
haha no problem, currently realllly busy on my main character so had no time to play this one :)
main character of the same game?
Yes!
Where does your sail ship by now? Are you now in Netherlands?