Meanwhile back at the Tribble ranch many of the rustlers who where angry and said they weren’t going to play star trek online any more have actually “not played star trek online” any more. Of course there is also the possiblity that they decided to let Klingons be Klingons and let the rest of enjoy our game in peace.  However it works out, the den of inquity that is normally a hive of scum and villany has actually been an interesting place to go for information, especially if you take a gander at the Star Fleet Academy sub-forum here.

The most interesting revelation of late is that it is actually possible to be a Tribble Rancher in the game. All you need is a tribble to start with (the common ones drop at random…I get mine from dead Klingons).  Drop the tribble in your bank vault, leave a little food for them to eat (you can buy it on your ship with your replicator – the button is on your inventory screen).  When you come back a short while later (in my case about an hour) and you have more and varied Tribbles.  Now if the cute little gits had a market value I would be all set.  What I have done with  my Tribbles is give them to members of my away team.  The result is that when the shooting stops, the Tribble cooing starts.

There is a wonderful guide to Tribbles on the forums created by Miuramir and is available  here. In an effort to preserve said information I will also include a copy after the break.  The Star Fleet Academy forums also include links to Suircata’s Ship charts and Suircata’s Star Charts.

I have also found a little gem describing just how to create a Cardassian, in a little guide that was not, saddly,  “Stickied” at the top of the forums. I will include this little gem after the break as well.

But all is not fun and games in Tribble Town…

I am happy to report that in Tier two several times this morning the team I was on where beaten soundly by the Klingons.   Why happy you might ask?  Because that means either 1.) The Klingons are much better at fighting now or more likely 2.) The  Star Trek Online team over at Cryptic has been working at balancing pvp.  And as anyone who enjoys good pvp knows, pvp that isn’t a bit of a challenge isn’t fun pvp.

But there is a dark shadow on the horizon and that belongs to power levelers – team set your phasers on aggravation.  There is a pathetic trend I have encountered more often, and that are teams of suicide intent power levelers.  Since you get some experience for losing as well, teams of Federation players go out to battlegrounds intent on losing as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately, once you are in the same battleground with  said cretins you can’t join another if you leave.  So your options is to put up with it, try and fight the battle on your own (five against one odds) or quit the game and log back on to reset everything.

The sad fruit of the power leveler’s efforts were apparent when a group of us where waiting for an instance to restart so we could fight the “Crytaline Entity”.  Before the instance reset, a rear admiral drops out of warp and makes the instance his home…Killing the Crystaline Entity repeatedly before anyone can get in a shot.  This seems to be little more than a player, having reached the upper levels found himself or herself in need of people to impress by their virtual prowess, or should I say stupidity, at having managed to buypass most of the game. Now I could care less how fast players level up, I only begin to care when they begin to ruin the game for other players, myself included, in the process. After all, this may be Star Trek, but there are still plenty of banks to sit in front of – all of which seems nearly as foolish as the spammers who ofter to play the game for me if I will pay them. 

Amazing.

I bought a lifetime subscription because I enjoy the game so much and said spammer thinks I should pay him to play the game on myaccount? Still, given enough time I am sure that the good folks at Cryptic will get the gold spammers/power leveling service spammers to crawl back under the rock they crawled out from under in the first place.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Tribble FAQ – Tribble Breeding for Fun and, well, Loss

By Miuramir

 

Introduction

Tribbles are an iconic part of the Star Trek franchise, first introduced in the famous 1967 episode The Trouble with Tribbles, set in 2268. Subsequent references occur throughout the franchise, as both incidental background props and entire episodes revolving around the creatures.

Tribbles are formally Polygeminus grex, with a variety of sub-species, breeds, and colors. They are originally from Iota Geminorum IV, and under optimal conditions can breed astoundingly rapidly, with doubling times normally associated with microscopic organisms. Please see the Memory Alpha entry for a variety of other details.

Due to the forum limitation of 11,000 characters, this FAQ has to be split up into multiple posts. This post or its successor will remain the general intro and source of miscellaneous info, with other sections split out as the information available expands. Sub-posts are all linked here for quick reference, as well in their appropriate sections:

Primary FAQ (you are here)
Tribble Powers
Tribble Breeds

Game Representation

In STO, the differing types of tribbles represented are described as “sub-species”, which have a one-to-one correspondence to colors or patterns. Tribbles are activatable equipment, and can be placed in your character’s hot bar, your bridge officer’s hot bar, your inventory, your personal bank, or a fleet bank. Activating a tribble provides a small bonus of some sort, and is represented in game by an animation of the character taking out the tribble and petting it, with appropriate cooing sounds. Tribbles have an official NPC sale or replicator value of 0 (zero); since breeding one requires consuming a food item with non-zero value, you are guaranteed to loose money breeding tribbles unless you can manage to sell a rare one to a fellow player.

Tribble Powers

Detailed info on Tribble Powers

Known base tribble powers include Healing (the most common), Resistance Buff, Damage Buff, Regeneration Buff, and Combat Skill Buff. Some tribbles have powers that combine multiple effects. See Detailed info on Tribble Powers for additional info.

Types

Detailed info on Tribble Breeds

A wide variety of tribble sub-species (or breeds) are known; as of this writing 14, with more reported daily. The solid-color tribbles are generally common, and include susilo (white), stahl (cream), sparkes (tan), dotson (brown), thompson (black), and vitales (gray). See Detailed info on Tribble Breeds for further info and the more exotic types.

Obtaining Tribbles

The primary way one gets tribbles is by breeding tribbles, and some types may only be available through breeding. See the following section for details. However, there are a few other ways to get a tribble:

* As a drop: Some NPC Klingon (and allies) ground enemies that you fight as a Federation character have a chance to drop a tribble as their loot. This is a bit odd, see some thoughts in the Notes section below. Details are currently unknown, but there are cases of them dropping in ground missions as early as level 4. At low levels, these are usually, if not always, single-color tribbles with the Healing activation. Most reports are of drops from actual Klingons, but Orions and Gorn have also been reported.

* As a pre-order bonus: A tribble pet is available as a pre-order bonus from several retailers. Currently known: Best Buy (US), Game AU (AU), Gross Electronic Silver Edition (DE), HMV Gold Edition (UK), Micromania Silver Edition and Micromania Gold Edition (FR). The subspecies is reported to be Polygeminus grex rivera, unusual in both color and powers (see sub-species FAQ for details); it is unknown whether it breeds true or enables other rare breeds.

Tribble Breeding

Tribble breeding can occur in your active power bar, in your inventory, or in your Bank (Fleet Bank testing still pending). You only need a single tribble to start, although some breeds may require multiple tribbles present. They will consume any “food item” in the same location category, replacing it with the new tribble.

Items considered “food items” seem to include all of the consumable out-of-combat regeneration items, including beverages in glass bottles and whatever 25th Century Field Rations are packaged in. It does not include “Provisions”, the non-consumable trade item (or at least the chance is very low). Details are still scarce, but it appears that uncommon food items (gotten from drops, not available from the replicator) are required or at least improve the chances of getting the less common tribble breeds.

The timing and odds of tribble breeding is still being researched. At the moment, it appears that a check is made when you change maps or zones, and at unknown times while on ground missions. Tribbles placed in your bank with food seem to breed very quickly compared to tribbles in your inventory; this might be because Space Dock is actually multiple zone maps, and you are changing back and forth as you run errands, or to represent the “tribbles eat everything in storage” effect, or due to a bug.

Stopping Tribble Breeding

Historically, one of the first questions people ask about tribbles is “How do I breed them?”. Shortly thereafter, many people come to the follow-up question “OK, now how do I STOP them from breeding?”, quite possibly followed by “Hey, that was my booze!”

While data is inconclusive, at this point it appears that tribbles only breed when there is a “food item” (see above under Tribble Breeding) in the same location category as an existing tribble. For instance, if you have a tribble equipped in your Bridge Officer’s item bar, it will not consume food in your own item bar. In general, having equipped (usable) tribbles and equipped (usable) food is not long-term compatible. However, you can have an equipped tribble in your item bar, and as long as you are careful to not have any in inventory, you can store food in your inventory. You’ll just have to equip the food and use it promptly when needed.

Notes

Trivia: the names of the breeds (officially sub-species) seem to be the last names of Cryptic developers in at least some cases.

Trivia: It is rumored that the public test server for STO will be called “tribble”.

Hypothesized missing breeds: From symmetry, it may be that there is a second Resistance Buff tribble not yet listed; a guess might put it at Brown with an equatorial Tan stripe.

Why do they drop from Klingons?: Based on what we know about tribbles in the franchise, it seems unlikely that a Klingon would be carrying them for buffs or cuddle factor. There have been a few suggestions made as to why Klingons drop tribbles as loot:

* Their ship or base has an infestation; the Klingon thought they were carrying some food, but it had been eaten by a tribble when they weren’t looking.

* Despite the noise and dislike, it might be a cheap way to tell a real Klingon from an Undine who is shapeshifted into a Klingon appearance; in effect the reverse of the incident from the original episode.

How to make the “ASCII tribble” as seen on the forums, (¯) : This is actually 3 characters with some vBcode, optionally colored:
([u]¯[/u])
That’s an open parenthesis, an underlined overbar (Unicode U+00AF (175)), and a close parenthesis. To color it, you can add [color=value]([u]¯[/u])[/color], where “value” is a vB recognized color. These are believed to match or be similar to HTML colors. See the listing above for some examples.

If anyone has detailed breeding tests, please post as much info as possible.

Last updated 2010-02-03, with info from Live (Holodeck)

How to: make a Cardassian.

By Jaime

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I don’t know how you ended up in the Federation, or even stranger, the Klingon Defense Force. But you did, and now you’re trying to brush up and make something of yourself. Or perhaps yourself, period!

So let’s do this thing.

Head:

Category – Humanoid.

Head Type – Humanoid 1. (Or the rare, Humanoid 2 Asian Cardassian. O_O)

Skin Type – Access your color palette. Move your cursor to the bottom left corner (16 rows down). From here to the bottom center, there are 13 color squares. Personally, I would only use 7-11. Use these colors for the remainder of your Cardassian.

Re: Row 16, palettes 7-11 counting from the left.

Overall Pattern – Solid Color.

Base Complexion – Neck Scales.

Forehead Detail - Scaled Spoon. Full effect for starters so you can see your Cardassian coming together.

Nose Detail – Scaled Length. Full effect for starters.

Tattoo/Scars – Whatever you want.

Eyes – Humanoid. I would stick to white corneas and black-grey irises.

Ears – Long Scales.

Hairstyle – Try to stick to receding hairstyles. Darker colors, most often black. This isn’t because all Cardassians age quickly, it’s because of their ridges.

Shininess – I went with none, but it’s preference.

Eyebrow – None.

Mouth Accessory – I would say none, but it’s w/e.

Eye Attach – Whatever you want.

Head Attach Organic – None.

Body:

Pay special attention to your Cardassian’s neck. You want to bulk it up a bit to simulate their stretchy neck. Try 4ish or so bars. (4/5).

For length, stick to 3 bars. (3/5)

Cardassians are normally pretty tall. Try for 6’2″+.

http://i46.tinypic.com/xlmtg8.jpg

Compare.

http://en.academic.ru/pictures/enwiki/68/Damar.jpg

Female Cardassians:

Follow the male Cardassian guide and I’ll quickly go over the differences here.

First of all, their Scaled Spoon forehead detail is usually a blue hue as opposed to the grey shade males have. Still, I would keep it light and inconspicuous. A bright, baby blue hue detail won’t really cut it.

A suggestion:

Quote:

Their hair color can range anywhere from the usual black to brown.

Hairstyles should still include a high hair line. I don’t believe the female hairstyles are as accommodating, so just try to keep their hair out of their faces.

(In-game screenshot coming soon. Cryptic’s hamster passed out again.)

Originally Posted by Kinthok

Male:
Zax Narale
Almor Karn
Koman Waka
Drokkan Sarat

Female:
Faasha Risot
Gikera Lom
Jil Ala Ledrig
Inaji Tarek

Here is an example the the original poster gives to go by.

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