Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

My journey as a chef in Free Realms began in the tutorial area known as Sacred Glade, and the passage my avatar, Ralsu, took from level one to twenty carried him all over the accessible globe and gave me a story with a little more depth than I had ever imagined I would find in a browser-based game aimed at teens. Instead of the usual, “Have fun grinding your trade skill to the level cap, chump!” that I am accustomed to in MMOs, Free Realms gave me a passable story to keep me motivated all the way to level twenty, the current cap. I’d like to share that story with other players to encourage more people to pursue the culinary arts. Feel free to reference the Free Realms map to see where I traveled along the way.

Learning to Cook at the Precious Party (Level 1)

When Ashley Lightwings asked for my help in dealing with the robgoblins that had invaded her birthday party, she listed two ways I could help. The first was the typical hero business of running in to bash heads and ask questions when the dust settled. Since his humble D&D beginnings, Ralsu has never been the straightforward fighter type, so Ashley’s proposal that he could help her get rid of the robgoblins without fighting was an appealing option. Ashley asked me to learn to make a stew for her so that she could grow big and strong and clobber the mischievous party crashers herself.

I went to meet Cookie, who taught me to harvest the ingredients I needed to make a dish. A fun minigame that is similar to Bejewled, harvesting involves connecting three or more adjacent items to get a match. Each match adds a bit of the harvested foodstuff into a basket. When the basket’s meter fills up, you’ve got a bundle (or bushel or whatever is appropriate). Harvesting in Free Realms is active, which beats the experience offered by most other MMOs: run back and forth between nodes mindless for hours on end. See my guide here.

Ingredients on hand, it was time for me to cook my first dish, the stew Ashley Brightwings requested. Cooking was a separate minigame that consisted of chopping plants crushing nuts, tenderizing and slicing meat, and adding components to broth or frying them in a pan. Each portion of the cooking experience worked a bit differently. Chopping required rapid mouse clicks to try to shave cooking time. Crushing entailed timing hammer strokes with a power meter to crack nuts efficiently. Tenderizing involved hitting a moving target. Slicing needed accurate mouse movements. Finally, adding and frying asked for mousing around and clicking the right items.

I delivered my fresh batch of stew to Ashley, who promptly devoured it and nearly doubled in size. She ran into the picnic area and swatted around the robgoblins like they were gnats.

Ralsu was the hero and he hadn’t even broken a sweat. This cooking thing was going to work out after all!