July Recap

Now that July is over with, I figured I'd do a quick write up on what I've accomplished this month and maybe list some goals for August. Happy August!

I returned to Torn on July 1st. I logged in to see that I had earned Medals for Four Years of Service, Anniversaries for 550, 600, 650, and 700 days of marriage. I also had the Discovery Honor Bar which told me my faction had completed a Dirty Bomb before kicking me out for being inactive. Feels nice to log in to 6 merits.

Returning to the game and not being in a faction, I realized I had a rare opportunity to pursue the 500 Kill streak merit, something that would never happen in my faction as we were constantly in war and constantly getting hit.

I started a little late and relied mostly on sluts, but on July 18th I had made it to 500 kills without getting mugged or hospitalized. My previous kill streak was 71, so I earned 3 medals, Skirmish (100), Blitzkrieg (250) and Onslaught (500) the final medal with stars. This also came with 2 honor bars: Killstreaker 2 (100 - Uncommon) and Killstreaker 3 (500 - Rare) .

Since I was not in a faction with Hermetic X like I had been used to, I also figured I would spend some time doing other drugs. Once I logged back in all I took were shrooms. It took me 17 days to take the 50 that I had collecting dust in my bazaar, earning me one of the coolest honor bars IMO: I Think I See Dead People (Rare) . Afterwards I took some Ketamine, but then rejoined my faction and went back to training with Xanax. I'll probably pursue more drug merits. I've already purchased the remaining Ketamine and Opium required (15 and 27 respectively). Opium's funny because I know I started taking it years ago. I also need to purchase 49 Speed and 41 PCP. That's gonna run about 12.5 million, or the price of 1 FHC. Not bad at all!

Another pleasant development was that Foot Russian Roulette was up and running. Ironically, the only item I found in the city this month was an S & W pistol, which is no longer used for RR. There was also an update to the Medical Item system -- Morphine, First Aid Kids, and Small First Aid Kits now restored a percentage of life. This got me thinking: I can lose RR as an effectively free way to use more medical items. From the 16th until the 23rd I played RR until I maxed my medical cooldown (SFAKs have 15min cooldown, so you can take 96 daily) and after my 5000th medical itemearned the Medical Veins (Rare)honor bar . With all the Russian Roulette I played to use medical items, I happened to win 50 games and earned yet another Honor - One In Six (Rare) .

To end the month I earned my final Travel merit: 50 trips to Dubai, Land of Promise (Uncommon) which took incredibly long. As far back as my personal stats graph does, I was at 29 trips in December 2012.

So total merit count. Logging in to Torn I earned 6.
In the month of July I collected 9 more.

In August I know I can definitely collect Ketamine merits and maybe either PCP or Speed, not likely both, but could also probably get Opium if I play more RR. The next Medical item merit for me is using 25,000 items used. That alone will cost roughly 300 million in SFAKs and will take about 7 months to complete if I max my cooldown daily. I'm at 92 viruses coded and each takes 7 days, so that puts completion sometime in September. I can commit about 50 jacket thefts daily, so I expect 2 merits from 7500 Thefts to occur late in August. Crime merits take a crazy amount of time I'm realizing.

I remember this time last year, I was hunting several merits at once. I grinded out 50 LSD, got my Defense and Dex over 1 million, and received two merits for 5k thefts. All in a short period of time. Good times.