I'm really starting to get the hang of this site. There's a lot less "What the heck does this button do?" and "Where am I supposed to get this?" and more direct working towards immediate goals. My current goals for Sno are to take up a job as a model and join the Olympics as a cyclist. The model job really jives with the whole Sno Abyss personality, since the character was originally a succubus in the novel I wrote. Right now she needs one more point in both sports and language to qualify, so on day four Sno will have her first jobby job!

As for the Olympics... wow. Well, I think the requirements for even the basic stuff will take a few weeks. It's something to work towards at least!

One of the things I'm still having trouble with is knowing what random items are for. The descriptions can be pretty vague and I'm just left thinking "Should I keep this for something important...?" Like right now I have two HP magnets in my inventory. What is an HP magnet? The description doesn't really say. Google doesn't really say. No friggin clue. Google has been thoroughly unhelpful in looking up a lot of specific items from this site. There's a MaraPets wiki but it's super temperamental and doesn't seem to want to give you any useful results for item searches. My goal for tomorrow is to find out what an HP magnet is, I guess.

An interesting thing I noticed - giving your pet an instrument puts it in your pet's collection at a grade level. So I give Sno a cello and instead of just a list of instruments in her collection, it says "Cello grade 1". I'm assuming that means I can give her five hundred cellos and she'll grade up so far she'll transform into Yo-Yo Ma or something.

Anyway. After getting a ton of chocolate items from quests and missions, it seems reasonable that the theme for my gallery should just be "chocolate stuff". So it is. Just random chocolate stuff. I might go for a different theme later, but right now it feels like it's easiest to collect chocolate at these lower levels so I'm going to take advantage of that and make a nice gallery out of it.

Most of my day in the Maralands was spent trying out new games and saying "Wow, this reminds me of (game this game was based off of)!" My highlights are the Subway Surfer clone with the hamster eating cookies, and the Bubble Pop clone that gives you gumballs. I think I've explored a good 20 or so games at this point? My favorite is still the first one

My second day in Maraland was way more successful than my first! But I also discovered a lot of new features that helped me with things I wasn't able to figure out yesterday. After clicking around a bit under the game category, I found out that there are more rewarding dailies than are just listed under the dailies tab. Revelation! There's the chance category, with games that would look very familiar to anyone who used to play Neopets: pick three items out of ten items to click on for a chance to win a prize, etc. There's also another category just vaguely titled "Features" (what does that even mean?) that have click-and-get pages similar to Neopets' Giant Omelette and such. So yeah... I was able to get much MUCH more MP and items after discovering these two categories.

In fact, I was able to pass the 100,000MP mark! Woohoo go me!

Following along with the Get Started missions, I added a few unwanted items to my shop and customized my shop front. Increasing your shop size is incredibly cheap, at least at these lower levels, because I was able to move up a level for 100MP. ...not that I have enough items to need a shop upgrade, but it's nice to have!

Tombala blessed me with a salon coupon so I was finally able to give myself a cool haircut. Not that I hated the default one... a little... but the weird Rapunzel look wasn't really for me, you know? A graveyard feature unlocked a spooky themed "experience" for me, which is basically like a background for your avatar, so I went with gothic style hair and clothes to match the spooky background. OH! AND SPEAKING OF GOTHIC STUFF. I sent Sno through a daily operation machine and it turned her WHITE. Like, the cool kind of white where she looks like a ghost and has demonic red eyes. Aww yeah.

So now that I'm moving off my own crap and on to my actual pet Sno Abyss: the stats are a-growin'! Once I figured out you can get stats from games, there was no stopping me. Between the games, the school quests, and whatever crystals I acquired, Sno was able to level herself up quite well. She gained multiple speed and charisma points and is on her way to having enough points to qualify for jobs (hopefully tomorrow!) and possibly win some battles. We attempted a few battles today but got our butts thoroughly handed to us. SOON.

She also randomly got sick. Whether or not the sickness was related to getting her butt kicked is up for debate, but after ta

I am Barrel O'Nukes here with my pet Sno Abyss, and today's my first day trying out Marapets. I thought I'd keep a blog exploring what I discover on the site as I go along. (No clue if this is the sort of thing people usually do with blogs or not, but it's here and so am I, so why not?)

Back in the olden days when Neopets dominated the virtualonline pet world (Tamagotchi ran the virtual pet world, don't know what I was thinking using virtual instead of online...) most of my time was spent tending to my three Neopets - playing games, yelling at myself when they looked sad and told me they were dying, etc etc. Recently I went back to Neopets only to find the site was a LOT more confusing and many of the games were completely broken - whether on their end or mine - so I started shopping around for a new site to scratch my mid-life crisis itch.

...and yes, I did also buy a bunch of new Tamagotchis.

Anyway. Day one! After mulling over a name for my little fox-wolf guy whose species name I can't quite remember yet, I finally landed on Sno Abyss, which is the name of a character in a paranormal novel I wrote ages ago. Everything else I tried was taken (Mouka was taken! Who took Mouka?!) and it was the first thing that said available.

The first thing I did was change my avatar from a male to female, because apparently it just defaults to male body if you don't feel like choosing either gender. Or maybe it's random, who knows? After messing around with colors and hairstyles, I was very disappointed to realize you needed something called tickets to change pretty much anything about your features. Including skin color. Kinda strange about the skin color one, but okay I sorta understood the reasoning behind the rest of the stuff. After messing around with the various rewards I saw I could get the tanning ticket very early on and aimed for that, then changed some of the default colors of my clothes for 100MP. A nice reasonable fee for someone with a beginner's bankroll!

The second thing I did was check out the Get Started challenges at the top of the screen and blazed through the first two tiers. Checking out the games was a lot of fun, and there were many classics like triple pyramid and mahjong. Both of which I played all three of my free plays for the day. Suddenly I had more MP! And also a few mummy plushies from the pyramid game