I suppose one of the benefits these days of missing out on day one of a game launch or even an event is the cluster mess everything has become. It was shocking to no one that the Halloween event started with issues. It’s expected to happen and why I never attempt to be on right away at the start of these things.

The forums were filled with outrage as expected, yet again there were issues. While usually, I feel game developers should do better. The fact of the matter is Entropia Universe is quite an old game. It’s so old they are reworking the entire thing in Unreal Engine 5 and giving it quite a boost from graphics to programming improvements.

As a result, I fully expect every resource they can muster is going behind the development of the new engine. Who knows even how many people remain that can even understand how to use the software the game was originally written in the last time they reworked the entire thing.

This in a way reminds me a bit of Entropia Universe pulling an Eve Online. Eve Online has over the years rewritten the entire thing from the ground up. As one should expect when that is going on there be a growing number of issues not being resolved in the old soon-to-be obsolete code.

I ended up jumping in well after everything for the most part had been resolved. One thing that has been bugging me is since I've got a new graphics card the sky for whatever reason is always messed up.

I’ve attempted reinstalling the entire game, changing all settings, and even messing with AMD’s software. I still can’t resolve the sky flashing all over the place with black boxes. These black boxes appear right after a star flickers off in the sky. I can only hope when the Unreal Engine 5 version gets released this issue goes away. As I've run out of ways to try and resolve this issue on my own.

I suppose this is the cost of having one of the newer graphic cards at the time on the market. Along with Entropia Universe being quite an older game. So old most people would be shocked to learn this thing came out in 2003. Let alone that it’s an MMO that people are still playing. To think it was originally made on CryEngine 2 is just mind-blowing.

I also double-checked what gear I owned to ensure I was wearing the best I had for this event. While there is quite a benefit of running this on a lower category and having a lot lower repair and healing decay costs. I wanted to just sit in category 5 this time around.

As far as the event itself is concerned I loaded up on a couple of guns outside of a shop and headed into the instance. In the past, I would always run back to where I liked to camp out in the game. I was, however, feeling quite lazy. Perhaps one day I'll splurge on buying an apartment; however, since this is a real cash economy game it’s hard to quantify spending money on such a thing since I'd need to spend even more money to deck it out with stuff.

I ended up doing some quick screen grabs of all my top skills. While it’s kind of a pain to manually keep track of skill gains in terms of total value gained. I thought if I was feeling up for the challenge at the end of the event to work that out. I might as well spend a short moment getting some screenshots.

I also took this opportunity to fill out some data into a spreadsheet. Yes, I’m that old school. While sure there are several programs out there that keep track of all kinds of stats for you in this game. I’d rather just do it myself manually. There is just something fun and nostalgic about doing so.

As always, as soon as I got in, I went in and pulled up the codex and all the missions I had for this event. As always, I had forgotten to reset the daily, and since it was quite far away from the next level, I was unsure how long I'd be around. I dropped it and exited out of the instance. Once I jumped into a fresh instance, I got the daily. This was at least a good reminder to go and clear out the other Mayhem dailies while I was at it.

This, however, is not that important. The daily just rewards some extra Mayhem Tokens. Since I'm not a high-end hunter it’s not like I'm going to be gaining a lot of tokens from the daily. It is, however, yet another thing to be doing to get stuff. So, I might as well be doing so.

It was not long before my first stage in the daily was finished. A single Mayhem Token for my effort. The further along in stages, it went the more I'd get and the longer it took to progress. A short time later I'd have the second stage and soon enough the first stage for the day finished as well.

So far everything had been going decent. I was taking the expected a lot more damage than perhaps I would have liked. However, my death count was still at zero at that time. I was killing things at about the rate I prefer to regarding the distance I pulled each creature and how much health they had left when they hit me.

The real test, however, was going to be when the mini-boss would show up every so often in the instance. If I was killing at the right rate, I'd get it once every 30 minutes. As there is both a time minimum and kill count required for it to spawn.

![The boss.png](]

Admittedly I was a bit behind the desired pace even having used a consumable that had reload speed and some critical damage on it. This, however, was not unexpected. By the time the boss rolled around I was ready for it.

I did end up having to stop and heal sometimes twice before I'd have it taken down. I always did my best to try and pull it at max range. This would give me the most amount of damage I could get down on it before even having to think about healing during combat.

I still need to make a decent investment into something better to heal myself with. I always keep thinking the next time I get some massive loot that more than covers a new healing device that I want I'll go for it. That, however, has yet to happen. Perhaps if things go well with the tokens, I'll gain from this will end up helping me afford that upgrade in the future.

As always when kill something like Kal-Rahm The Cannibal you are hoping for a decent point gain. That ended up not being the case this time around I got zero points. The loot as well was nothing amazing. Just what you expect to get as a standard from him.

My first hunting round ended up being a bit of a loss before you considered any markup. I did not get any global during that time so that was expected. I repaired my armor and reloaded up on some ammo.

I then decided I wanted to move around the fighting arena a little bit. I had mostly been staying in one location being lazy. There was something out there that kept giving perception gains and I was hoping to find it.

Not that long after I got my first global kill for this event. Nothing crazy but I'll take the 76 PED of shrapnel. It was quite needed at the time.

The loot was not the only thing lacking so far either. I was only up to 148 points. Since this was a higher-level instance, I was hoping for a lot bigger point gain. This entire session ended up being a rather large disappointment in point gains. I’m going to need 17k points to finish off the Silver Mission and at this rate, it was going to take forever to get there.

At least the loot was starting to pick up. I ended up getting myself a 75 PED kill about ten minutes later. I even got both a Mayhem and TWEN token in the same kill as well. I have noticed you sometimes get both tokens in the same kill. That was rather nice. Still no sign of a rare token but it’s not like I ever expected to get any of those anyway.

One of the nice things about Entropia and an Event like this is if I need to AFK to do other stuff that is going on I can. I ended up sitting near the revival location AFK for some time. I am not like other people. I do not fire and kill creatures while I am away. That for me would take all the fun out of this game. I’m just glad they don’t kick you from the server for quite some time. I prefer to stay in the same instance if I can help it and just come back a little later and go back to hunting.

At one point when I did have time to do some further hunting, I ended up getting level 28 in the Mutant Looter profession. While my highest for hunting is for animals this event tends to be on mutants. It’s at least nice to see that one slowly increases over time. Nothing to a noticeable degree with the way it affects loot. It’s however quite a long-term goal of mine to increase my looter professions and tends to be how I pick my rewards from completing a codex level.

Final Thoughts

I did end up getting one more global for the night before calling it. It ended up being an 84 PED looter. Between that global and the last couple, I had gotten. It made my last hunting cycles profit before taking into consideration markup. That I'm always happy to see. This event could end up being quite a good thing overall for me depending on how it all ends up going.

Other Content

• Entropia Universe | Halloween Mayhem 2023

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.