Hello everyone,

By way of introduction, my name is Irv and I thought I was very familiar with the MMO landscape. Then I read an article at Massively about a game I had never heard of: Perpetuum.  I was bored in Landmark, so I decided to give this game a try (and I was especially attracted to the one-time purchase cost of $28.95). The following is a brief journal of what the beginning of this game has been like for me:

Day One: The Tutorial

Admittedly, I started playing late in the evening. I got through the excellent tutorial in about 60-90 minutes.  I was placed in New Virginia in a Truhold-Markson Alpha terminal.  I was tired, confused by what to do next, so I logged-out.

Day Two: Totally Lost

I got almost nothing accomplished in day two.  I was lost on what I was supposed to be doing.  Having not played a true sandbox in a long time, I was unaccustomed to the game giving me no direction as a new player. I asked a question in the Help! channel and was given excellent answers.  One very nice player sent me 1,000,000 NIC to get started with. But again, the biggest struggle I had was I didn't know what to do; I didn't know what to be working towards.

Fun newbie mistake:  I took a mission to gather some ore.  I used the directional geoscanner, and was frustrated by how far away the ore seemed to be.  Again, other MMOs conditioned me to think that newbie missions would be "walk 10 paces, kill 10 rats, return" instead of this, which was "walk really far for a newbie who doesn't even know where home base is".  Anyways, I made it to the ore field, and was all ready to mine.  Except I didn't have any tile scanning modules with me, so I had no way to figure out what tile to mine.

I understood my mistake; I remembered what was in the tutorial.  But all I did was turn back to get to the terminal, then I logged in frustration and said to myself that I'd get this right tomorrow.

Day Three: A Little Progress

I figured out in my head that I wanted to be an industrialist.  I wanted to learn the game by becoming an expert miner and harvester, then refine my product into something useful to the market.

I started out spending an hour mining Titan Ore.  I then refined that ore into Titanium, and sold to the highest-priced buyer in the Truhold-Markson Alpha terminal.  I made something like 80,000 credits, which I was proud of.

After thinking about it a little longer, I looked through the market adverts, and decided that I would try and gather the raw materials needed for a refined component that had a much higher unit price. I figured out that Alligior was an in-demand product at 175 NIC per unit, so I wrote down that I needed Titan Ore, HDT, and Epriton.

First up was HDT, so I carefully worked through my bot equipment slots, figuring out exactly what I needed bought some HDT modules from the market (thankfully very cheaply) and went off in search of HDT. Before I got started, RL interrupted and I logged for the night.