Crime & Punishment

About

This page contains some basic information about crime and criminal acts, which should be useful to both new players who want to stay out of trouble, and players thinking of trying PvP.

Crime, Scents and Evidence

There are two ways to commit crimes: Duel another player, or attack someone's town or personal claim.

You can't commit crimes against a claim or town unless you have Crimes turned on. This can be done with a toggle in the Adventure menu.

You can commit the crime of attacking another player anywhere in the world except the Providence claim itself. Even on the Providence claim you can still Larceny if someone has been KOed.

The different types of crimes are defined on the Crime page.

There is a big difference between 'Scents' and 'Evidence' though many people call pieces of Evidence 'scents'. Scents are little pink exclamation points floating above the ground at the scene of a crime which can be seen by anyone who toggles 'Tracking'. Evidence is the item placed in your inventory when you pick up a scent off the ground.

To see a Scent, turn on Tracking in the Adventure menu. A Scent is left anywhere someone commits any crime. Gathering these scents by Right Clicking on them and choosing to Collect will pick up a piece of Evidence and add a 180 minute tracking timer. If there is more than one scent by the same person, you can charge up the timer by 180 more minutes for every crime. Once the timer is charged, you can follow it and attempt to find the culprit. Scents disappear from the world within a short time. Trespassing only lasts a few hours, while Murder lasts longest at about 16 days. See Crime.

The Evidence picked up into inventory can be stored for up to 90 days and used to get revenge. If you can find the homestead of a criminal and access it, you can use a piece of Evidence to summon their character online and kill it, which will leave scents. Alternatively, you can destroy their homestead if it is a Leanto and summon them anywhere. Summoning someone who doesn't have a homestead results in their instant death with no scents left. This works for any Evidence except Trespassing and Assault Evidence, which are not summonable.

Claim Defenses

See the pages on Stake Claim, Town Bell, Blazing Braziers, Torchposts, Makeshift Fences, Split-rail Fences, Stone Hedges, Plank Fences, Brick Walls, and Locksmithing for details about the various defenses and how they work.

There are many tips and tricks regarding how to not let someone destroy your base; some of them include:

• Build a wall, build a Brazier. It's shocking how many people don't do one or both of these things and lose everything because of it.
• Always pay the upkeep on your Claim. The claim will still be there if it runs out, but it won't protect you any longer.
• Always Lock your gates and always Close them immediately after walking through them. Don't wait until you log off to go through and close them all; you'll surely forget. Don't like the hassle? Buy Springs.
• Don't give claim permissions to White listed players. The default color when memorizing or kinning someone is White, so if you give permissions to that color, you will give permissions to every random person you have on your Buddy List.
• Don't use a Claim Stone as your homestead if you have a Kin Secret set. It's okay to set one temporarily so a friend can use it to teleport to your claim, but if you have an easy secret or have published it on the forum for the purpose of trade, people can use it to port to your Homesteaded Claim Stone and destroy it.
• A stolen item will carry a scent for three days and can be tracked for that time and used to find your base. Be aware of that when buying from unknown traders. Of course, keeping your base hidden isn't really a valid defense strategy, you'll always be found eventually no matter how hard you try.
• Don't hoard. The nicer your base looks from the outside, the more likely it is that someone will decide it's worth the effort to break in. Make and farm what you need, and if you find yourself with row and rows of chests and sheds of items you probably won't need for months, throw some stuff away or find someone who might want to buy it.

Crime Dos and Dont's

At this time, basically don't do it. If you don't have the support of a group to help you raid and a good place to keep your raider out of harm's way, you are just asking to be killed off. Braziers are also very overpowered until the new developers can make a new raiding system.

Killing someone via combat is somewhat less risky, but you still better have a good, defended place to keep your combat character.

Do carry a Tiny Pocketwatch in a Pocket everywhere you go. If someone attacks you, you can use it to run away very quickly. There's even a chance that you can outrun them and drop combat.

Do defend yourself if someone attacks you. If you get attacked, and you want to take your chances with combat rather than trying to run away, you can both fight and KO them without leaving scents. It is not a crime to defend yourself. However, if you choose to loot them or murder them, that is considered a crime.

PvP

Currently, raiding is very difficult, almost impossible. That should change to some extent when the Raiding patch is put in; an event projected to occur in November.

If you commit a crime against another citizen; attacking, KOing or Murdering, you will not receive a Crime Debuff.

If you commit a crime against property; trespassing, peeking into containers, stealing, or vandalism, you will receive a Crime Debuff. You can have up to five stacks of crimes at a time, and each stack will apply to a single claim. So, if you trespass, break in to, and steal from one claim, you will receive one crime debuff stack, and each crime will go into that stack.

A stack can take up to 2 weeks to wear off, and during that time you cannot change your homestead, so the person you committed the crimes against has up to 2 weeks to find your homestead and kill you before you can move away.

When stacking up crimes on a claim, you will receive Black Bile penalties for each crime you commit. The larger the number of crimes you have stacked up, the larger each penalty will be so that eventually, even with entering the claim with full Black Bile, you will be KOed with a single crime. Other crime stacks do not count towards the penalty, only the stack that applies to the claim you are on. Additionally, you will be drained slowly of Black Bile just for standing on a claim that you are trespassing on.

Braziers will shoot at you if you are in range of them if you commit a Waste crime on a claim; Waste includes both destruction and attempts to build. They will also shoot if you do more than 3-4 lesser crimes such as Trespassing or Larceny. Braziers do very high damage of 50 Black Bile per hit every few seconds. They can critical hit for 400% of Total Black Bile (this is true no matter what your Black Bile is) which means instant KO, and they periodically do permanent Humor damage equal to 2 Points to a random Humor, not just Black Bile.

There is not much to be said about combat between players as it varies by player style, and the fact that small changes to combat seem to be happening with most patches.

In Boston, there is an arena called Dock Club, which is a relatively safe place to combat other players. Scents for Battery and Assault don't drop, Larceny is still possible so there is risk of losing your clothing or weapons, but Murder is not allowed in Dock Club.

Mr. Puggles

Mr. Puggles is the town Executioner and he will reward you if you bring him the Scalp of a murderer or a very valuable scalp.

Mr. Puggles loves visitors. You should go visit his page.