Unfortunately, it's not that easy to make an
effective mule on TC, for a couple of reasons:
- It's almost impossible to do any kind of real crafting out of a bankbox on TC just because of the multitude of items you get to begin with and that you then increase by using any of the commands to acquire resources, arties, tokens, etc. When you first arrive on TC, you need to place and build a house to work from. Then you need to move any stuff your character came over with that you want to keep to work with later to your new house, before your bankbox becomes completely overwhelmed by what you're getting ready to do to it, i.e., stuff it to overflowing. This includes taking all those magery items that get jammed into your bankbox by default when you copy a character to TC or make a new one there, combine the duplicative magery items into stacks and then deed them all up and get the deeds out of your bankbox. Take items out of bags and boxes and consolidate them in others so you get rid of as many bags and boxes as you can and still stay organized. Get rid of any of the items you know you will never use. Take the bag of t-maps , MIBs, lockpicks and shovels and either pitch them or keep them. (I always try to at least keep the shovel, since stone isn't something you get as a resource on TC and you're going to need to go mining to get it.) Take the potions and bottles to your house if you think they'll be useful later (hopefully you have room to move them to the top of your bankbox and deed them because they're too heavy to move in one shot).
- If you are using a copied character, pray that it has a bonded pack animal or two in the stable. If you made a character from scratch, buy pack animals or, better yet, turn yourself into a tamer and go run and tame a blue beetle so you can sit on it and recall and don't have to mess with pulling it through a moongate, especially if you had to put your house in Fel or someplace infested with pesky monsters. You won't be able to bond anything if the devs didn't put up a pet bonding gate.
- Once you have your bankbox is empty as you can possibly make it and your backpack as empty as possible, you use "give resources" to get resources. Now you found the bag of recipes (95 of them!) and put it in your backpack or on the ground and hope no one grabs it. Then you start changing skills around and clicking on all those recipe scrolls to learn them, as you never know which ones you might decide you need to learn later and "give resources" only works once per character. Now you focus on cleaning up the mess in your bankbox. Find the tool bags and move them to the house. Hopefully you are once again under the maximum and can shift stuff around in your bankbox to get it to the top level. You buy some commodity deeds (hopefully they aren't all bought out at the bank where you're standing). Then you start combining duplicative resources in the elven and imbuing bags and deeding up EVERYTHING. Take all those deeds to your house. Oh, did I mention you'd better have had the foresight to COPY a commodity deed box to TC? If you didn't, go back to square one and find one of your characters somewhere else that has the ability to empty a commodity deed box and put it in his/her pack and copy that character to TC pronto and then lock it down in your house so you can use it! Now you move on to using the "give arties" command and do something similar with culling what you don't want and taking the rest to your house. Same with the "give armor" command. "Give tokens" puts the tokens in your backpack.
- Now repeat the parts of the whole process above (minus setting up a house) with another character on the same account or a different one, or maybe a couple of them so you can get more resources if you think you didn't get enough of them with just one character.
- Okay, so you got through all that rigamarole of moving resources, armor, suit sets to your house. You still need to make yourself a soul forge and anvil and forge if you want to do any kind of serious crafting, unless you had the foresight to undeed those elsewhere and copy them over to TC with the commodity deed box. (There is a one-tile soul forge at the Hammer and Anvil shop in Britain and the two public ones in Ter Mur and someone has a public one at the house just east of the Luna stables.) You probably also want to make yourself some chests and engraving tools so you can label them. Or maybe don't, if you like looking at all kinds of colored bags and boxes stacked every which way in your house! I can't work like that.
- And now you start the tedious process of gathering OTHER materials supplied on Test Center. Armor refinement items are located in 3 different towns and there are so many of them, that it will take multiple trips to get them. You'll probably want duplicates of them, because you'll be going through them like water because the effect of applying plating, thread, and resin is RANDOM and you will probably not get the effect you want in the first 10 tries and will have to keep making more of it. The alloy and flasks come in deeds but the braid comes plain (and is really heavy too). So you either kick yourself that you're working out of your bankbox or you tote it home and use your commodity deed box to undeed it and work with it. And then it's back to the shop to apply it!
- Oh, you want to mess with imbuing? Guess what. That bag of imbuing ingredients that you tediously deeded up DOESN'T INCLUDE THE TOP-END INGREDIENTS! You need to go get them by killing stuff, lumberjacking, mining, etc. Or, hope you had enough foresight to copy them to TC in sufficient quantities to do all the testing you want to do.
Sorry for how long this is and how tedious this explanation is. However, if you read this far and are feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed, well that's about what you feel like on Test Center by the time you actually are ready to start making stuff and testing things with your "crafter." It's a painful, time-consuming process. And the whole time you're in the middle of it, you're wondering if the dev team is going to wipe the shard and make you start all over again.
Don't get me wrong...I kind of enjoy the challenge of it, especially after doing it so many times that I almost have the routine memorized. But I fully understand that this "process" to get a crafter going on TC is anything but simple and is a big reason why people do not mess with Test Center. It can take literally hours to get set up there before you can even think about diving into crafting anything and really doing any testing. For this publish, I grabbed a house spot within minutes of the publish going live and grabbed resources with 2-3 characters and moved them all to the house. I copied over one character that had a commodity deed box and dye tubs in case I wanted to mess with those later. I later copied over a miner with a bonded fire beetle to use for mining for stone to make gargoyle stone armor. Some kind people have set up public houses around Luna with dye tubs and public soul forges and selling imbuing ingredients until they run out of them.
I don't know if the dev team can do anything to make things easier other than add on to the ingredients provided by "give resources" and include a commodity deed box as one of the items every character gets when they arrive on TC. And put up pet bonding gates, please. I would imagine asking them to greatly enlarge the capacity of bankboxes on TC is something they just can't do.