Questing in Wyvern

Contents

Overview

One of the many things you can do in Wyvern is solve quests. Questing is a time-consuming activity, but can be highly rewarding. It's fun when you finally solve a quest, and you get a ton of experience for doing it.

Wyvern has several major quests, shown here, and also many mini-quests that involve running an errand of some sort for an NPC. Sometimes mini-quests will be strung together to form a larger quest.

Questing gives you two benefits:

  • Some quests give you treasure or special items that you can't find anywhere else in the game.

  • Your Quest Points are used as part of the calculation for your position on the Wyvern High Score List.

Solving Quests

How do you solve a quest? Every quest is different, but they usually have some mix of the following:

  • talking to non-player characters (e.g. bartenders) to get quest hints
  • searching for hidden items and areas
  • killing monsters
  • exploring areas that aren't normally accessible in the game

Most quests are located within a single "area", such as a town, a castle or a dungeon. The quest will usually have some secret areas that you can only find using persistent searching. Most quests have plenty of clues, so you'll be able to figure it out by being patient and exploring a lot.

Starting Out

If you're a brand-new player, your first quest should be the Garignor's Amulet quest. It's located entirely in a mansion in the village where you start, and it's fairly easy. Just talk to Garignor and he'll tell you what to do.

After that, you should fight monsters to get up to 2nd level so you can leave the village (via the north gatehouse). You then have three more quests available that are all achievable by a 2nd- or 3rd-level character:

  • The Tower of Sokoban in Alaria — no monster killing, just puzzles to solve. This one is nice because you get quest points and money or prizes for every level you solve.

  • Kiz's Side-Scroller — a "platform" game that has no monster killing. It's 5 levels of tricky jumps, puzzles, and careful timing. Just be careful not to fall in the lava. This quest is located just south of the newbie village.

  • The Moon Quest — also in Alaria, this quest involves talking to NPCs in town to get hints on how to solve the quest. This quest has a little bit of monster-killing, usually not too hard for a level-3 player.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while! When you're 4th or 5th level, you may want to try the Zoo Quest. It doesn't have a lot of fighting, but it's a good way to explore the lands of Wyvern.

Quest Actions

Some of the things you need to do to solve a quest are "normal" game actions, like talking to NPCs, fighting monsters, exploring areas and so on. However, many quests have "secret" actions that you can't normally do. Examples:

  • You might be able to enter an object that you wouldn't normally be able to enter, like a fountain, a clock, a crate, or just about anything else. You can try applying it to see if it's an entrance of some sort.

  • You might be able to climb a certain tree. Normally you can't climb trees in the game, but it's possible to design a tree (or anything else) that lets you climb it to get into another area.

Quest designers try to provide hints for where to look, but not everything you can do necessarily has a hint, and sometimes you have to just try different things and see if they work.

Common things to look for when you're questing include:

  • illusionary walls that you can walk through
  • objects that you can search to uncover a hidden item
  • secret levers or buttons you can activate
  • invisible teleporters that whisk you away to hidden maps (usually this will happen automatically — it would be pretty mean to make you 'apply' every square of every map in the quest area to see if there's an invisible teleporter there.)

If you get completely stumped, keep trying. It may help to take time off from trying to solve the quest, and come back to it with a fresh view. And remember some of the quests can be pretty tricky (given the insidious imaginations of some of the Wizards), but all the quests are solvable.

Questing Gear

When you're questing, you'll want to make sure you're properly prepared:

  1. Make sure you're high enough level to solve the quest. The quest description will tell you what level you should be. If you're not high enough level, the monsters and traps will kill you pretty quickly.

  2. Make sure you're well equipped with the best armor and weapons you can find — there may be lots of fighting.

  3. Bring healing potions or spells with you if possible — when you get into certain quest areas, you won't be able to leave and come back, because the quest item that you used to get in disappeared when you used it.

  4. Bring a light source — many quest areas are dark, and you need a torch or lantern to find your way around.

Questing is hard work, but don't make it harder on yourself than it needs to be.

Quest Dangers

Questing, like the rest of the game, is inherently dangerous. Your character might die or lose precious items during the course of solving the quest. We review all quests to make sure they're fair — you don't have to worry about stepping into an area and having all your items simply taken away from you. But you may find yourself up against a tougher monster than you expected, and it's possible that you might die. More than once.

Keep in mind that it's usually worth it to keep trying to solve the quest, even if you die a bunch of times. Experience is pretty easy to recover, and you never lose levels when you die. Solving the quest usually gives you a lot of experience as well, and you also get the quest points so you can advance to higher levels.

Quest Items

A Quest Item is a special item used as part of a quest. For instance, you may need a special key to get into a certain area, and sometimes this key will be a Quest Item.

Quest Items cannot be dropped, thrown, given away, put in bags, stolen, or removed from your inventory in any way. If you try, they will twinkle and disappear, and you'll have to wait until the maps reset (an hour or so) before you can try to get the item again.

Sometimes when you use a quest item, it will disappear after you use it.

One exception to this rule: when you're finally solving the quest, you will be able to use the quest item normally. For example, in the Moon Quest, you have to give a crystal to someone to solve the quest (the crystal is a quest item). If you give it to the correct person, the quest item will transfer to the other person successfully. In some quests you might need to put a quest item in a certain container, throw the quest item, or do something with it that would normally cause it to disappear. Rest assured that if you're solving the quest correctly, the item won't disappear.

You cannot save your character with a quest item — you must solve the entire quest in a single sitting. This means that as you work on the quest over a period of days or weeks, you'll find yourself doing certain parts of it over. Usually this is not difficult — the challenge of most quests is trying to figure out what to do. Occasionally it will be difficult to redo, and as a result it can take weeks or even months to solve some of the harder quests.

Quest Collaboration

Players are allowed to collaborate on quests, but ONLY with explicit, written (e.g. emailed) permission from a Senior Wizard or higher. Only two players at a time may collaborate — you can't have groups of three or more working on a quest together.

When you're collaborating with a partner, you can share information you've found with each other, work on the quest together, kill the monsters together, and so on. When you've figured out enough info to be able to solve the quest, one of you will have to go first.

After the first player solves the quest, don't be surprised if the quest changes — some quests are designed to change each time someone solves them to help discourage cheating. This means if you're working with someone, you may have more questing to do before the second person is able to solve the quest.

It's OK to ask other players to help you kill monsters while you're questing, as long as you don't give them any information about how to solve the quest. That means you'll usually have to teleport the player to you when it comes time to kill the monster, and then teleport them out again. If you're caught showing a someone a quest area that they hadn't found already, it's considered cheating and you both may be punished.

Quest Bugs

Quests usually have a lot of custom code that doesn't get exercised frequently. There might be areas that people can't normally get to without a lot of work, or items that are only used as part of the quest. As a result, quests typically get less testing than other game code, and might have some bugs.

If you think you've found a bug in a quest, don't hesitate to let your game administrator know. Any Wizard online should be able to help you figure out if it's a real bug, or at least get you out of trouble and forward your bug report to the quest owner.

Examples of bugs you might find:

  • an item that you think should work, doesn't.
  • you get "stuck" in an area and can't get out of it.
  • when you do a certain action, it always seems to crash the game (unlikely, but it can happen).
  • you receive a strange error message when you try to do something

Even if you know someone has solved a particular quest, it may still have bugs in it. The Wyvern code base is always changing, and occasionally we'll make enhancements that break existing code.

Anything that seems unusual or incorrect should be reported. If a quest has a bug, it may mean that you can't solve it until the bug has been fixed, so report it as soon as you can, with as much detail as possible.

See the Quest List for details on the currently open quests.

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