Guide to Hard Tack: Assistant

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This is a guide to the Assistant role in the Hard Tack of Thorin's Hall Craft Event.

Introduction

The Hard Tack Event is currently scheduled to occur from the 1st to the 8th of each month. (That is, from 00:01 on the 1st, to 23:59 on the 7th.) The event itself occurs in Ukhbab-gairu, Vault of the Great Forge, the door to which is found just to the side (West) of the entrance to Thorin's Hall.

The event will broadcast in Thorin's Gate and Ered Luin:

  • Hard Tack of Thorin's Hall is now recruiting volunteers. 10 minutes before the hour
  • The Hard Tack of Thorin's Hall Event begins in five minutes. 5 minutes before the hour
  • The Hard Tack of Thorin's Hall Event has begun. at the top of the hour (the start of the event).

There are three roles in the event:

  • Prospector - available to anyone with the Prospecting skill at any level
  • Cook - available to anyone with the Cooking skill at any level
  • Assistant - available to everyone (even if they have one or both of the skills above).

The Assistant role

You participate in the event in the Assistant role by going to Velgerd Kilnwarden and accepting the quest Hard Tack Event: Assistant. You can accept this quest at any time after the 5 minute warning until the end of the event round.

Having accepted the quest, and once the event actually starts, you are offered a set of further quests:

Ingredient fetching quests

From Velgerd Kilnwarden

From Ingúl Ovestoke

Carrying quests

From Ingúl Ovestoke

From Skuld Scentlode

Carrying things

Carrying Ingredients

There are three ingredients you can carry: fish, mushrooms, and spice. If you accept a quest that would have you holding one of these ingredients (say, the spice in The Nice Spice), you cannot accept another quest that also needs you to pick up spice (say, Feeding Time).

Carrying these ingredients does not require an induction, nor will getting close to a sluggard miner or sneaky hobbit cause you to lose the ingredient.

See the notes under Strategies about where to get each of the ingredients.

Carrying Ale

The quest Served Cold has you go to the larder to pick up ale and deliver it to a sluggard miner. If you near a Sneaky Hobbit, they will take your ale, causing you to fail your quest. (So far as I know, there is no title for repeatedly giving hobbits ale.)

Carrying ore

All three of the Ore Delivery quests have you picking up ore from the ground and delivering it to an Ore Cart. Again, there is a progress time involved in picking up the ore.

  • Carrying ore is an induction: you cannot interact with quest items or NPCs while carrying ore.
  • While carrying the ore, you are slowed for a while, usually longer than the time it would take to get to the nearest ore cart. (But not always.)
  • While carrying ore, you are vulnerable to Sluggard Miners. Much like the Nosey Hobbit during the mail delivery quests in the Shire, getting too close to a Sluggard Miner will cause you to drop your ore, losing it.
  • How many ore you have to carry to complete the quest varies: one for the Large Ore, two for the Medium Ore, and three for the Small Ore. A node of the corresponding size will drop enough ore to complete at least one (and possibly several) quests for that size.

Strategies

Finding things

  • Fish - you can fish them up in the river down the East passage.
  • Mushrooms - can be found in the larder area (down the North passage, left side), or they can be found wild down the East passage.
  • Spice - can be found in the larder area (left side)
  • ale - again, in the larder area (right side)

Completing quests

Solo

The minimum you can do: Pick up both Mushroom Harvest and The Nice Spice, run to the larder pick them up, drop them off at the cooking station. Rinse and repeat.

Alternately, you could pick up Mushroom Harvest and Barrel of Fish, and go to the East passage, collecting wild mushrooms and fishing for the fish. I am told (but have not verified) Barrel of Fish returns credit for 2 quest turn-ins (for the various stages), due to how long it takes.

Cooperative: with Cook

A strategy which has worked out fairly well is to alternate:

  • one run of Mushroom Harvest and The Nice Spice
  • one run of Feeding Time to help the cook out.

Choosing useful hobbits to remove means the cook can lay out more food. And Brew and Snacks in combination are enough to ensure you will complete the wrapper quest!

Cooperative: with Prospector

I ... don't have terribly useful advice for this combination. Occasionally running for an ale (Served Cold or Perk Them Up) to rid the prospector of a bothersome sluggard might be helpful. But doing the ore loading quests means going from the center out, loading the cart for one quest, and coming back in to the center. Not exceptionally efficient. While I have not tried it (yet), I don't have high hopes for it. Also, you're competing with your host prospector for ore at times, unless you prearrange something.

Other Notes

Two assistant quests haven't gotten much time here: Served Cold and Perk Them Up. Both are induction quests, both can be interrupted by hobbits, and both end at a sluggard miner. Served Cold puts the miner to sleep; Perk Them Up has them drop ore (and then disappear). While one might make the miner go away for a longer time, neither is really great for completing the wrapper.

Additional Strategies

Help from Cooks

If there is a cook present during the event, or if you have saved cooked event food from a previous round, you can use it for a temporary (3-4 minute) bonus that will reduce time needed to complete quests. You would want/need to pick up more as they become available, as you use them.

  •  Thorin's Hall Brew
    • Everybody wants this: It reduces induction times by 2/3 for 3 minutes. You would drink this immediately before tapping that first node, and you'd keep tapping nodes until you've completed them all. (Those are the long inductions.) But also, this will help with the induction time to pick up ore, so it helps out there too. If you're swift and clever, you might get back to the center and out again to get some final use out of the brew before it expires.
  •  Thorin's Hall Mushroom Snack
    • This will help you get to the center and back out again more quickly. For an assistant, this is highly useful, possibly competitive with the Brew. It lasts 4 minutes.
  •  Thorin's Hall Hearty Meal
    • If you have chosen to shift ore as your focus, this might be useful to you. ... at least some. Not as useful as the Brew, but still good. It speeds you up while carrying ore, overcoming the speed penalty. It lasts 4 minutes, which is nice. It's still not as good as the Snack (a boost to speed at all times), but even so.

Helping Cooks

You are the best defense against Sneaky Hobbits! Every time you complete Feeding Time, you remove a hobbit from the board for a while. If there's a cook available, helping them avoid hobbit-plundering helps them put more food on the table, which helps you complete more quests.

Help from Prospectors

Prospectors are likely to leave ore laying around, as they will want to spend time knocking apart ore nodes (and occasionally taking some to a cart). You can get some ore by having sluggard miners drop it ("Perk Them Up"). But without a prospector playing, you're better off simply supplying the kitchen.

Helping Prospectors

Much like Cooks and Sneaky Hobbits, you can help by making Sluggard Miners disappear through Served Cold or Perk Them Up. This does not, though, help as hugely as helping cooks does, as the miners are not nearly as omnipresent as the hobbits.


Rewards

Each of these needs to be finished before the event round ends, for the reward to be given. Stages I to III auto-complete/auto-bestow. You need to talk to the event coordinator (and probably also, complete the quest, closing the dialog and accepting the reward) before the event concludes, or you do not get that final reward.

Stage Quests Total Quests Reward
Stage I 5 5 10 Participation Ribbon
Stage II 5 10 20 Participation Ribbon
Stage III 10 20 30 Participation Ribbon
Completion - - 40 Participation Ribbon

The rewards for completing this are less than that for the Prospector role. Note, though, that you have options that do not require competing for spawn points or risk losing what you are carrying to mobs.

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