| |
|
|
Return to Index
Searching for items.
Buying and selling items.
Learn about items you can equip on horses.
Learn how to craft items.
Searching for Items
When you search for items, you begin by choosing whether the search will be for your items only, or for items in the marketplace. The checkbox in the upper right corner of the search window lets you specify this.
Next, you must specify what kinds of items you wish to search for. This can either be all items, or a specific kind. Then, you can specify searching for items made by a particular player (but note that if you enter the name of the player, it must be an exact match). Then, you can specify the minimum and maximum ends of the quality range you want to search. Since qualities will probably never go above 100, the default 0-999 range means search for all items.
Finally, there are three windows that let you specify the material quality you wish to search for. Note that the windows only appear when they are applicable, and they also allow you to search for any quality of material or a specific quality. The materials are listed in increasing order of quality (and therefore price per unit) and the Q: and C: after the material name give the quality of the material and the cost per unit.
Once you've searched for the items you want, they will appear in a column and you can manipulate them using the buying and selling interface.
Return to Top
Buying and Selling Items
After you've searched for items either in the marketplace or in your own inventory, you will be shown a list of items and they will be in one of four different states.
If you own the item and it is not on the market and not on a horse, then you are given several options for what to do with this item. You may delete the item, or you may attempt to donate it to a club if you belong to any clubs that allow you to donate items. You may also set a minimum bid and a buyout price for the item and then place it on the market. Note: Clicking the "Sell" button doesn't actually sell the item. It merely places it on the market at the minimum bid and buyout price that you specified. Note, there is a fee for placing an item on the market. This fee is currently 5 percent of the buyout price, so if you set that price too high, you may not get bidders and you will lose the auction fee.
The second possible state for the item is that you own it and it's on a horse. In this case, you will be given the option of looking at the horse that it's currently on, and also the option of removing the item. Note that if a horse is entered in an event that hasn't completed yet, you will not be able to remove the item. This is because events are judged instantly as horses are entered, but the results aren't know until 24 hours after the event was created. If players could remove tack from horses between judging and completion time, they would be able to have just one set of equipment to pass around among all of their horses entering events. This also means that you cannot sell, donate or lease out a horse that's been entered in an event that hasn't completed.
The third state an item can be in is that it's your item, but it's on the market. In this case, you will be given the option to end the auction. You will also be shown the current bid and the buyout price for the auction so you can decide if it's worth it to keep going or if it's better to stop it.
The fourth and final state is for the item is that this is not your item, but it is on the market. In this case, you will be given the option of bidding on the item, or buying out the auction by paying the buyout price. Note that you can't just bid any old amount on an item. You must bid at least the amount of the next bid. That is the amount found in the window already set for you, so if you want to place a minimum bid, just click "bid". Note that if you choose to buyout the item, the auction ends right then and you get the item and the money is transferred to the former owner. The minimum bids increment by larger and larger increments as the value of the auction goes up to prevent people from incrementing their bids by a small number over and over.
As with horse bidding, when you place a bid, the cash is deducted from your account right away so you don't try to bid on things you can't afford. Since the last bidder in the auction is stored, she will receive her bid back if she wasn't the one who eventually bought out the auction. Similarly, if the owner decides to end the auction, the last bidder gets her money back, as she would if she were overbid. It is possible to overbid yourself, but you still have to go up to the next minimum bid.
Return to Top
Tack (Equipping your horses)
Tack plays a small role in event judging now. There aren't special pieces of equipment for different events (yet), but the quality of the items your horse is wearing will matter in events. As such, tack will be an important part of the game for people looking for every edge they can get in events. There are two basic ways to get tack: you can either buy it off the item marketplace, or you can craft it.
Once you've gotten the tack into your ranch inventory, you can put it on horses you have on your ranch. To get to the horse tack interface, look at your horse's data and click the button labelled "Tack" that's in the upper right corner of the block of buttons. That will bring up the tack interface.
Working with tack can be easy if you just want to equip the best stuff you have on a horse. There are two buttons at the top of the tack interface that let you equip the best items you have for each equipment slot or remove all of the tack on the horse. If you want a more fine-grained approach, then click on the buttons representing the individual types of tack. If the horse has a piece of equipment in that location, you must remove it before you can place something else there. If the horse is wearing nothing there, then clicking the "Equip Itemname" button will cause a list of items of the corresponding type to be downloaded from the server. The items will be sorted in descending order of quality, and the first one will be highlighted, so equipping it will give you the best equipment of that type on your horse.
The current list of tack is:
- Horseshoes made of metal.
- Spurs made of metal.
- A Bit made of metal.
- A Bridle made of leather.
- Reins made of leather.
- A Saddlepad made of cloth.
- A Blanket made of cloth.
- A Girth made of leather and cloth.
- A Saddle made of cloth, leather and metal.
Return to Top
Item Crafting
VHR has item crafting code that lets you make tack for your horses. This equipment plays a small part in the judging of events. The crafting menu can be reached by going to the item search window,then clicking on the "Crafting" button in the upper right corner.
The interface for crafting is similar to that of searching for items. At the top, there's a row of text describing the current item being crafted, along with its cost and quality. Items costing 0 dollars cannot be crafted, since they don't have any gameplay value. This item description is updated from the server every time you select a new piece of data in one of the scrolling windows. This is so that you know exactly how much each item will cost, and what quality the final item(s) will be.
Below the item name and description, you can set the number of items you wish to craft. If you pick more items than you can afford to craft, the game will craft as many items as it can before stopping. This amount is capped at 20, and you have a 600 item limit overall.
Then, the next scroll window is the one where you pick the item type you want to craft. The data has a form similar to the following:
Bit (2-metal)
Girth (2-cloth, 4-leather)
What the window displays is the name of the item followed by a series of one or more material types needed to make the item. The number is the number of that material that is needed, then the name is given. Note that you need the appropriate crafting skill(s) to create items. You will need th Cloth Crafting skill to craft cloth items, and so forth. This means that saddle can only be made by people with all 3 crafting skills. As you select different possible items to create, the material selection windows will appear and disappear below the item type selector, so you will always know which materials are needed for which item. Pick the material type(s) you want to use, then click Craft Item(s) to craft the items.
The Q: and C: to the right of the material name are the quality and cost of the material. The overall cost of the material is the individual costs of each material times the number of pieces of that material you need. So, for example if a girth is: Girth (2-cloth, 4-leather), then if you use cloth costing 50 per unit and leather costing 200 per unit, the overall cost for the girth will be 2*50 + 4*200 = 900.
The quality of the item is the average quality of each of the different components needed to make the object. So, using the example of the girth again: Girth (2-cloth, 4-leather), if the quality of the cloth is 5, and the quality of the leather is 11, then the overall quality is (2*5+4*11)/(2+4) = 54/6 = 9.
Tack helps a bit in event judging and the way it's calculated is to start with the premise that the horse is wearing different pieces of tack with different average qualities. Each piece of tack requires a different number of material pieces to make it. The way the average quality of tack is calculated is by taking a weighted average over all pieces of tack the horse is wearing.
For example, it takes 42 material pieces to make enough equipment to fully equip a horse. If a horse only has a bridle of quality 20, and a girth of quality 15, then since bridles take 2 leather to create and a girth takes 2 cloth and 4 leather to create, the average quality of the tack the horse is wearing is (2*20+4*15)/42 = 100/42 which is a bit more than 2. So, if a horse isn't wearing tack, it counts against the horse in the averaging.
|
Return to Top
Return to Index
|
|
|
|
