AKA, “I wish I knew this before I bashed my head into my desk”. Also, like 90% of this applies to campaigns as well, so think of this as a supplemental to the Campaign Guide.

Intro

So, imagine this. You’re brand new to the world of Aardwolf and, with a twinkle-sparkle in your eye, you keep seeing these messages roll past your chat window:

Global Quest: Global Quest # 1234 has been won by Player1 - 999th win.

And you, in your naivete think to yourself, “Oh maaan, global quests?” Those must be sooo coool!” And then, the moment happens:

Global Quest: Global quest # 1235 has been declared for levels 10 to 30 - less than 25 wins only.
The quest will start in 4 ticks and will last for xx ticks.

“Oh boy! I’m between levels 10 and 30! And I don’t have any wins! A global quest made just for me? This must be my lucky day!”

So you, again in your naivete, type gq join 1235 and sit patiently waiting for the starting gun. Now little padawan, let me tell you what’s about to happen.

“Hrm, let’s see… The first one is in Nalondir. Well, I’ve never been there before, but let’s go check it out! Okay, I need to kill… a sewer rat. Hrm, I don’t know where that is but let’s runto nalondir and just have a look around… Well, I found some sewers… Ahah! Sewer rat is dead! Awesome! Next is… The Fire Swamp. Cool, I’ll just runto fire, and look for An osprey… Found it! Next is…”

Global Quest: Global quest #1235 canceled due to inactivity.

“What. What? NANI~!? But I was…!!!”

This was the point in my Aard career where I proceeded to write a 30 page manifesto about how Global Quests were absolute BS, not newbie friendly, bad UX, and so on. But what really happened was that you were too slow, too inexperienced, and not equipped with the proper tools. Allow me to show you the way.

Before you start

Before you even start thinking about taking your first, precious little baby steps into the world of Global Questing, please, please, heed these tips:

1. Don’t. If you are very new to your Aard adventure, just… Don’t. Seriously, the amount of time allotted to low-level GQuests is tiny, and you will fail. Your time will be much better spent:
2. Explore. You want to see as much of the world as possible. Doing regular quests, and especially doing campaigns, will more or less force you to explore the world and the areas within it. Seriously, you want to get your explore count as high as you can.
3. Use the official Aard/MUSH client. I know, I know, you really really like using telnet inside of your tty. And, if you don’t know what either of those words mean, you should DEFINITELY be using the official client. It runs perfectly under WINE, so “Waaa, I use a Mac” isn’t a valid reason not to. “I am blind and play with text to speech,” IS a valid reason and… I… I don’t know how to help you. Sorry.
4. Have this site open in a browser window. We’ll get to that later.

Mapper is your friend—AKA, the Aard Konami code

If you are using the official client, then it not only includes mapper functionality, but it is preconfigured to mostly work out-of-the-box. What it does is, every time you enter a room for the first time, mapper is recording the room name, connections to other rooms, and building a run path to that room.

Now, that run path may or may not be the most optimal path, but it will try to get you there. Also, mapper doesn’t really take into account closed doors, locked doors, portals, that one weird room where you have to do the chicken dance to get ported… But it will still get you most of the way there.

And even then, it is possible to manually configure mapper to handle some of those edge cases but, that’s a topic for a different day.

Actually doing Global Quests

If you tl;dr-ed from the start, welcome.

If you are using the Aard/MUSH client, and have been exploring like you should have been, then, when you take on a GQuest (or a campaign—like I said, most of this applies to both), then when you bring up gq check, you might see something like:

You still have to kill * a dwarven officer (A Dwarven Garrison)

Now, if you have 30,000 hours logged into the game—why are you reading this?—you probably know exactly where that is and are speedwalking there already. For the rest of us going “where the hell is that?”, allow me to introduce, mapper find.

> mapper find garrison
Found 2 targets matching '%garrison%'.
+------------------------------ START OF SEARCH -------------------------------+
[1] Remains of a ruined garrison (The Shadows of Minos) (20474)
[2] A Dwarven Garrison (Swordbreaker's Hoard) (1697)
+-------------------------------- END OF SEARCH -------------------------------+

If, in your earlier exploration, you happened upon a room called A Dwarven Garrison, then that is the result that you would see from running the command mapper find garrison. Since we were specifically told it was A Dwarven Garrison, we want the second one. So, you will follow that with:

> mapper goto 1697
Going to: A Dwarven Garrison
run 6sununw11s13wen2eu2wueunds2ednwn

And you’re there! Just type mapper find xxxx, where ‘xxxx’ is whatever number shows up to the right of the room name in search. Note that, your number will almost certainly NOT be 1697, so be sure to use whatever mapper find tells you. Here’s some more tips about using mapper:

• Manually typing mapper goto isn’t strictly required. With Aard/MUSH client, you can actually click on the room name in the search results, and mapper will start speedwalking for you.
• If you know for a fact that you’re already in the right area, for example: Swordbreaker's Hoard, then you can use mapper area to just search your current area.
• mapper goto doesn’t require you to start from recall. It will attempt to route you to your destination from wherever you currently are. Maybe that’s bad if you’re on a different continent, but it’s great if:
• mapper will get interrupted if you get into combat, encounter a closed or locked door, need to enter a portal or use a pass phrase, etc. In these cases you can manually deal with whatever the interruption is, use mapper goto xxxx again, and it will start continue routing you from wherever you are.

Having the passdoor effect active negates a lot of issues with doors and mapper goto. Thieves get it at 48, Psionicists get it at 50, and the Seekers clan sells a passdoor potion at 48 as well.

Found 0 targets – AKA, I’ve been slacking on my homework

If however, the mob is in an area that you have NEVER been to before (or just never found that room), then mapper find will probably turn up 0 results. In this case, it’s time for your backup weapon. Remember that link I told you to have open?

https://rooms.gaardian.com/

On that page, you can enter the name of the mob you’re looking for. Using the previous example, a dwarven officer:

This tells you that the mob you’re looking for is located in the zone, Swordbreaker's Hoard. With this you can, at the very least, runto hoard, and start looking for the room you need with Gaardian map. Since we already know the room name A Dwarven Garrison, and the Gaardian maps are text searchable, you can use CTRL+F and get something like this:

As a side bonus, you might look at that map and recognize some room that you have been to before like, “Oh yeah, I remember Nanna from that one absolutely horrible, vile, disgusting area goal…” So…

> mapper find nanna
Found 1 target matching '%nanna%'.
+------------------------------ START OF SEARCH -------------------------------+
[1] The Home of Nanna Dwarf (Swordbreaker's Hoard) (1710)
+-------------------------------- END OF SEARCH -------------------------------+
> mapper goto 1710
Going to: The Home of Nanna Dwarf
run en2eu2wueunds2edne

And that’s all I can teach you about questing. Beyond that, you’ll need to ask Mr. Owl.