Entropia Universe : Sweating to the Oldies
Greetings Colonist! I'll be your instructor for today and will try to teach you a few things about gathering Vibrant sweat in Entropia Universe.
"Sweating" can be done by anyone and offers a chance to earn Project Entropia Dollars (PED's) without spending money. It also earns you skills, not only sweat skills, but combat skills like evading a creature's attacks too. Sweating may look easy but there are a few things to consider. First of all let me explain something about vibrant sweat.
Vibrant sweat is the life energy force of native Calypsian creatures neatly bottled up. It's an enMatter and forms one of the parts needed to create Mind Essence (The energy force needed to perform Mindforce powers). To create Mind Essence, you refine vibrant sweat together with Force nexus. Vibrant sweat can not be bought from trade terminals or auction and can only be acquired from other players. At the moment of this writing, the price for Vibrant sweat is about 0.5 Project Entropia Cents (PEC's ) per bottle, so 1000 bottles will earn you approx 5 PED's.
Speaking of Mindforce, there is a useful power for when you are gathering sweat. It's called focus and can be used by equipping a focus chip. Using a focus chip, you can accumulate what we call focus charges, either for yourself or someone else. Every person can hold up to 38 focus charges. I'll get back to these later. If you don't have a focus chip, someone else around might and offer his services if you ask nicely.
Enough theory, it's time for some practice. The first thing you'll need to do is find a creature to extract the sweat from. Almost any creature will do, except of course robots and a few kinds of mutants. Creatures generally won't like you stealing their life energy force and will probably sooner or later attack you for it, choosing lower level creatures like Snablesnots and Exarosaurs might be safer as they do less damage. Select a creature and start sweating by double clicking on it (make sure you have no weapon/tool equipped) or pressing the 'sweat' icon from your action library.
Don't worry, it's perfectly normal that you automatically start dancing and chanting, nobody will think any less of you. It is called the concentration period. This concentration period can be interrupted when you move, equip items or get wounded by a successful hit from a creature after which you'll have to start concentrating from the beginning again. There is one exception to this rule. Remember how I spoke of focus charges? When you have at least one focus charge, your concentration won't be broken by being hit. Instead, the focus charge will be used up and you can sweat normally. Once all your focus charges are gone, you will loose concentration again when hit. When you are finished concentrating on the creature a green glow will surround your hands. Double-click on the creature again and your hands will shoot out the green light toward the creature and you'll start gathering sweat. While you are doing this you won't disrupt the process by moving around or getting hit, go ahead and try it out. Only equipping items will make you fail.
How did it go? Either you ended up with a loot window showing up with any number of bottles between 2 and 22 depending on your skill, or you received a message saying you failed. In either case you can try again from the beginning. If you receive a message saying you can't acquire any more sweat from this creature, you should move on to the next.
When you are in a group sweating together, the ideal situation is surrounding the mob so it will bounce between hitting each of you. When you notice it is dry, you should shout out so someone can kill it or you can move on. Another tactic is taking a buddy and sweating the same mob. When the mob attacks one of you he/she should run in a circle around his/her buddy who can keep sweating, switch when the mob attacks the other one and neither of you should get hit too often.
A thing to keep in mind is that dying is free as long as you're not wearing armor (it will decay by being hit), so sweating can make you money but it can be tedious hard work. A way to spice things up a little is to buy an Opallo and some ammo from your sweating earnings and kill mobs that don't give sweat anymore yourself for the loot. Keep in mind that the returns on these mobs may not be very high.
That should be all there is to it...no...wait a minute, once you're done with the creature you should put it out of it's misery if you haven't done so already or it'll keep bugging you. If you don't have weapons of any sort or don't want to waste ammo, run toward a turret and it will dispose of the thing for you. Alternatively, you can run into water and hope the creature will drown. Unfortunately you can not loot creatures that die like that. When you have acquired enough sweat, you should head back to town to sell. Advertise on the trading channel, ask your society, ask your mentor and go to other towns to advertise there too. Selling is hard because of the supply and relative low demand, but it can be done.
There are a few locations most suitable for sweating, you'll find fellow sweat hunters there to exchange tactics or simply have a friendly chat with.
First there is Swamp Camp, near Port Atlantis on Eudoria. You'll find it by going north from PA until you reach the stables than turn west and you will reach a group of containers with a turret.
Second is a place called Anok Selims, you'll come very close to it if you're doing a teleporter run. From Atlas Haven go east and a little south to find the small campsite with a few terminals.
Third is Nea's Place on Amethera where a lot of group sweating is done on young Ambulimax with hunters and medics present but it's a little harder to reach. It's found a bit west from Palms corner which lies on the western shores of the small lake far to the south-west from Treasure island. There may be other places better suited for sweating, if you do come across such a place please share it with the rest of us. Good luck out there!