The appearance stat is not just the least useful but the hardest to raise. Unlike many other stats it’s not possible to raise it through repeated use. Want more strength? Then lift heavy things every day for training. But higher appearance does not raise regardless of how much one smiles. Combined with all classes’ growth rate F, or 10 percent per level, and an oddity in its coding meant it tended to stay at the same value set on character creation.

That’s why even with the dark elf race bonus to all other stats it was far less useful than the early bonus would seem. It was a one-time bonus that won’t grow like the others will as Sophitia levels up.

 At least that was the case normally. There was a way to grow the appearance stat, but it was not as easy to train as the others. Unlike most games, FIO38 didn’t just have a simple usage counter to keep track of training. Instead its growth is based on how much one overburdened themselves.

This was easiest to see with physical stats. Each time the stamina bar was exhausted this caused a temporary reduction in endurance, or overburdened. Try to pick up something too heavy? Strength would be overburdened and temporarily reduced. And so on. After a good night’s rest these temporary reductions would go away.

All these temporary reductions would be added up and tracked. Once a player leveled up a class the classes’ growth rate would allow up to a percentage of the base stat to be added each level. If little training had been done this could mean no additional stats on level up.

Of course, this was never mentioned anywhere in game so players at first thought it was bugs or cheaters which caused the wildly different stats in the same class. But eventually it came out that one had to train in order to reach their maximum class determined growth rates.

Combined with no way to track how much one overburdened each of the nine stats and no one knowing how much one had to train to maximize their growth this still was a major issue in making strong characters. This led to a lot of character recreation in order to make stronger characters as the game didn’t allow for re-rolling of stats or resets of any type to keep to its ‘realistic’ hardcore setting.

What was known was that it become increasingly difficult to reach the maximum growth rate at higher levels and higher growth rate percentages. But all of this is for future Sophitia to deal with. Right now she needed to focus on getting the most out of her appearance at early levels.

The problem with appearance is what would happen when it was overburdened. It caused a permanent, not temporary reduction. At level one this required a player to permanently lose five appearance just to get a gain of one. And at higher levels this require much more to be permanently lost before an increase would happen. Obviously not a good way to raise it.

Even after players complained about this the FIO38 developers simply stated it was not a bug and was an intended feature. Why it was intended no one knew and the developers never said why.

People guessed it was either they couldn’t figure out a way to graphically allow players to improve their looks after character creation so as a last-minute fix made it that way or that they wanted higher level players to develop scars as many mid-to-late game effects caused appearance overburdening which, after sleeping, would cause scars to appear on the character models.

However, this was counter balanced by appearance being the easiest stat to gain equipment bonuses for. Apply some makeup, put on some jewelry, wear fancy clothes and all of this would greatly raise appearance. At level one the other stats would be lucky to find equipment that could raise it by even a single point. But with enough money it was possible to gain over a hundred points to appearance at any level easily.

 Well at least in theory. All equipment bonuses were capped to double the current stat. Since most had a 5 appearance to start with, they could at most double it to 10 with temporary bonuses from equipment.

With Sophitia’s starting 50 in appearance she plans to gain the full 50 extra equipment bonus and the additional 5 to all her stats from her race ability. Making her first few levels easy mode gaming. The hard part will be improving her appearance permanently, but she has a plan for that too.

But enough planning her future character growth it’s time to go shopping. She exits the small room being used as a bathroom with a confident sexy walk. It’s important for her to remain in control and the best way to do that is by projecting confident, sexy and mysterious aura she thinks.

She keeps this up almost three steps before she smells breakfast being cooked. Her stomach lets out a very unladylike growl of hunger letting her know she hasn’t eaten anything since she was resurrected three days ago. She’ll start her new persona after breakfast.

“I’ll get us breakfast mistress,” Skye says before running over to a serving girl in the kitchen.

Sophitia walks out to the common room and wonders what she will be served. Would it be medieval gruel? Or a more modern fare? Perhaps some futuristic cube like food. She’s relieved to see there is no one in the common room currently and takes a seat at one of the tables.

She doesn’t wait long before Skye comes out of the kitchen with two plates of food. Setting a plate full of fruit in front of Sophitia and putting down a plate with bacon, eggs and ham in front of herself.

Is this some kind of passive aggressive cat thing? Or do elves really only eat rabbit food? Nothing wrong with a healthy fruit breakfast but bacon makes everything tastier. So, she reaches over to Skye’s plate and takes a couple of pieces of bacon to munch on.

“Mistress, are you sure you’ll be fine eating those?” Skye asks.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Elves don’t eat meat.”

“Not an elf.” Sophitia says. She does remember Invidia saying something about a remodeled digestive system. Although what that means for her diet, she has no idea, but it better allow her to eat bacon.

Skye seems at a loss of what to say next and just watches Sophitia eat the bacon. Sophitia briefly considers explaining her race but decides it’s too much effort and goes with her mysterious persona anyway. Instead she says, “Your breakfast is getting cold, you should eat it.”

Glad that the fruit only food wasn’t Skye being mad at her she decides to not explain her reaction in the bathroom. Because trying to explain personal issues of having a new female body and not knowing what to do the first time someone calls her beautiful is not something she wants to do either.

Being somewhat curious at Skye’s all meat diet and wanting to change the subject Sophitia asks, “Is meat only breakfast normal for cats?”

Looking like she was just caught doing something wrong, Skye replies. “No… beastkin diets are like humans in we can eat everything, but we also do take after our animals too. Rabbits get more from leafy greens and some herbivore beastkin can even live on hay only if they have too.”

Skye pauses her explanation, but Sophitia doesn’t say anything and just waits for Skye to continue. After a few nervous adjustments in her chair Skye continues, “And cats like to eat more meat but we don’t have too… But I haven’t had meat in a really long time and the kitchen staff was offering and well I took all they would give me and I didn’t think you’d mind being an elf and all. But you’re not an elf.”

Seeing Skye starting to work herself up, Sophitia interrupts her before she can do that emotion reset then happy creepy thing she does. “I’m not mad at you, just trying to understand my new pet and making sure your fed well. Just give me a few pieces of bacon next time, okay?”

At being called a pet, Skye starts purring again. Looking at Skye closely, Sophitia notices she does look kind of skinny and malnourished. With her poor reputation and being a flat stat it’s likely she hasn’t been able to do many quests or have steady work.

They finish their breakfast mostly in silence. The fruit is good and surprisingly Sophitia can even identify most of it without the systems help. Ten thousand years is a long time for farmers to mess with breeding new things. But for the most part the fruit is the same, although there are certainly some differences. Apples, grapes and bananas are almost the same. But oranges are very different. Now they have a thin skin like an apple and almost white in color but tastes as she remembers. And amusingly enough is still called orange by the system identification even with the change in color.

The watermelon is identical to its past self but now there are fruits for each of the elements. Fire and nature melons are the orange and green melons she never knew the names of but always came in fruit blends. The earth melon is some kind of brown root like thing that tastes kind of like very mild bitter ginseng.

Which goes well with the air and spirit melons which are almost like whip cream with air being slightly sweet and spirit being slightly sour. The really different one is the metal melon, which looks like a silver painted avocado. As for the flavor she doesn’t like it much. Sort of a cross in texture and flavor of an avocado with liver paste blend. It might be okay spread on crackers but by itself, bleck.

After eating she notices she now has a daylong buff, seven elements fruit medley, which gives a bonus 10% to all elemental damage. Which might be useful if she had any magic to cast or had the stats to actually cast it effectively.

After buying decent adventuring clothes she’ll see what trainers are about to get combat skills, magic and a profession.

Troglodytarum

Short chapter this week due to my idiocy. I wrote the entire chapter using my original stat leveling mechanic. Only problem was after I wrote it, I calculated it would require 5000 combats to train appearance as a level 1 character... and it would get exponential worse each level... Oops, so I had to completely rewrite the chapter after coming up with a new stat training mechanic. 

Also trying to adjust my schedule to have more than 1 chapter a week reliably. Eventually going to try for 3 if I can but not sure if I'll be able to do it. Here's hoping.