What Is Entropia Universe? A Player's Introduction

Entropia is a game first. Start there, even if the real-cash economy was what caught your attention.

When you're new, there's a lot to connect. You're learning the mechanics, getting to know your avatar and trying to see where equipment, PED and the economy fit into what you do. You may have been playing for a while and still be choosing your next activity without much of a plan. Either way, let's start with what you're looking for when you log in.

You can head out to explore a planet, follow a mission or get involved in something with other players. You might be curious about hunting, making things, fishing or finding resources. You don't need to know which of those will keep you interested before you try to find your way around.

There's plenty here to be curious about. With so much to try, you get to choose where to start.

You don't have to settle on one way to play

Hunting, Mining, Fishing, Gathering, Crafting and Trading all have their own appeal. You might enjoy the activity itself, the progression, the people you meet or the work of figuring it out. There's no need to arrive with a complete plan for your avatar.

Even Crafting covers a range of interests: weapons, components, clothes and other equipment. Appearance matters to players too, with coloring, textures and other ways to customize an avatar. Someone else may be far more interested in making what you want to use than in joining you on a hunt.

Then there's space, with ships, travel between planets and space mining to explore. PvP offers another way to play, alongside missions and the community activities you come across.

You don't have to try everything. If exploring is what makes you want to log in, spend an evening doing that. The other activities can wait until they interest you.

The economy gives you more to think about

PED is the in-game currency, tied to real money. Players trade items with one another, and something you collect may be useful to someone who's crafting, gearing up or gathering what they need for their next activity.

Look at an item in your inventory and ask what it's used for. Who wants it? You may have no interest in making the finished product yourself and still want to understand why someone buys the material. How far you take that interest is up to you.

You can set aside a budget for entertainment and enjoy what you do with it. If you spent some of that budget and had a good time, you may be perfectly happy with the evening. You don't have to make every hunt or trip pay for itself to have a reason to play.

Or the economy can become part of what you enjoy figuring out. You start looking at what you're spending, what you're getting and whether you can sell it. You want to know how long you can keep doing something with the PED available. Caring about that doesn't stop you from going exploring for the fun of it; those approaches can sit comfortably together.

Don't mistake a deposit for a way to guarantee you'll make money. Making money is possible, and more capital gives you more options to try, but you still have to learn what those options involve. There's a surprising amount to find out.

Some of the fun is finding the answer

In my experience, useful information often turns up in pieces. Someone mentions something in chat. A forum post gives you a lead, or a wiki fills in part of what you were missing. You follow it up, try it and begin to understand how it fits into what you're doing.

I like that moment when something finally makes sense. You know a little more about the game, even if nothing has changed on your avatar's skill screen. Getting there can also be frustrating when you just wanted a straightforward answer. With information scattered around, it's hard to tell whether you've found the whole explanation or whether it still applies.

Where the answer came from matters. An official explanation, another player's test and someone's impression of a hunt can each be useful, but they don't carry the same weight. A good lead can give you something to investigate without settling the question.

Knowledge can have value for other reasons too. Imagine a scarce material with buyers waiting for it. A player finds a way to collect it regularly. If that becomes widely known, more people may start supplying it and the price may change. That's a possible market situation, rather than a tip about a particular item.

It helps explain why someone might keep a useful discovery to themselves. Players can be generous with advice while also competing for buyers and resources.

That leaves you with more useful questions than simply whether an activity sounds promising. What would it take to do it, and what would you be learning or developing along the way? With a mob, knowing what it can drop gives you a reason to look at the hunt more closely. A markup figure doesn't tell you whether players actually want those items. Until you've looked into that, part of what you're basing the hunt on is still unknown. You don't need the full market analysis yet to see why those questions matter.

If you're going to spend PED hunting something, know what you're hunting for before you start.

Can you keep doing it?

Being able to finish a kill wasn't enough to decide what I should hunt. That's a distinction I had to learn, and it's one I want you to keep in mind when you're choosing a mob: can you keep hunting it and come back for another run?

The weapon is only part of that choice. Your setup has to make sense for the skills your avatar has now, and your defense and HP matter once you're taking hits. Even when you can handle the fight, you still need enough PED to keep going. That's the mob you're looking for: one that fits your avatar and that you can sustain.

If every kill turns into a struggle just to stay alive and you're constantly stopping to heal, drop down to something you can hunt steadily. One finished kill isn't a reason to keep forcing that mob. Nor does buying a bigger, more expensive weapon settle the question. Build the avatar and come back later; something it struggles with now may become more manageable as it develops.

There's also progress that won't show up just by looking at how much loot came back. You may have gained skills or moved a mission along. A loss is still a loss, but it doesn't mean you got nothing else from the session.

Taking some time to explore or try another activity doesn't mean you've abandoned that progress.

Your goals can reach beyond the next run

Take an item at 500% markup as an example. Before you choose an activity around that number, find out what you'd spend getting the item and whether you could sell what you collected. The percentage alone can't answer either question.

Some activities and missions have objectives or rewards that take weeks or months to work toward. A player doing them may be thinking well beyond today's result.

You can also start with more time than PED. Sweat, Baitfish and fruit gathering are the activities I have in mind when that question comes up. We'll return to those in the next chapter.

Your avatar progresses, and so do you

While you're working toward those goals, two things are developing: your avatar and your own understanding of Entropia. They don't necessarily keep pace.

Skills, professions and HP describe parts of your avatar's development. That development affects the equipment it can use and what it can handle. Those capabilities matter: they give you more things you can attempt.

Knowing what to attempt takes a different kind of progress. As you get to know locations, NPCs and missions, materials begin to mean something beyond their names. You learn what other players want to buy and how that relates to what you're doing. Things that once seemed unrelated start to help you choose.

You get better at noticing what you don't know, too. A missing piece of information gives you something to investigate before you commit to an activity. Over time you have a better idea of where to look, what to avoid and when something doesn't suit your plans.

A highly developed avatar may have access to equipment and activities that a smaller one can't handle. The person playing it can still know less about a particular market than someone with a much less developed avatar.

A strong avatar doesn't automatically make you an experienced Entropia player.

The avatar gives you capabilities. Your knowledge helps you decide what to do with them. There's room to improve both, and learning the game doesn't stop when you've built up your skills.

That understanding starts to show in the way you think about an activity. You're curious, but you also notice which parts you understand and which you still need to look into. When you do choose to try it, you're paying attention to what happens and measuring the result, because you want something you can learn from when you're deciding what to do next. That habit is useful long before you're making bigger plans.

Eventually, memory isn't enough

Over time, it gets harder to remember enough detail to do that well. You've had more sessions, used different equipment and worked toward different goals. You want to look back, but remembering how an activity felt doesn't give you everything you need to review it.

That's where EntropiaControl fits for me. It gives me a place to keep the hunting runs I've recorded, so I can go back and review what happened. I still have to make sense of what I'm looking at and decide what to do next. There's more to say about that later.

For now, remember why we started here. Entropia is still a game. A mission, a trip, a conversation or finally figuring something out can be a good reason to log in again.

If you're interested but still wondering where to begin, let's start there in the next chapter. You don't need to choose your whole future before taking the first step.

There's more for your avatar to take on as it develops, and more for you to discover as you learn the game. For me, that's what makes Entropia a game you can spend years getting to know.