Daily Hunts (the city quest chains)

In short: Each major city has a giver with six hunting tasks that reset at midnight -- the fastest honest levelling in the game, if you are the level the city was written for.

What they are: a run of hunting tasks in every major city, each one longer and better paid than the last. Where: one giver per city, a few steps from where you arrive. Every task names where its prey roams -- a compass direction and a cell -- because a city map is large and the field you need may be five hundred paces from the gate. When: every day. The whole run starts over at midnight.

Each of the five hub cities keeps a hunter who sets you work: six tasks, in order. The first asks for ten kills; the last asks for a hundred. You cannot skip ahead — finish one and the next one opens, harder and worth more.

A giver will not set you tasks below their city's level. The work is written for the monsters that live there, and the pay is measured against them — collecting Bird Island's wages at level twenty would be worth more than everything else you did that month, which is why you cannot.

Every giver sets tasks against the monsters of their own city, and the ladder climbs as you go: the Twin City run starts you on Pheasants and finishes you on Poltergeists, by which point you are a different character than when you took the first task.

What it is worth

Quite a lot, and deliberately most at the start.

The Twin City run is worth a whole new character. Working through all six tasks — and killing what they ask for along the way — carries a fresh player well past level 30 in a single sitting. That is the point of it: your first skills should not be a grind you give up on.

The other cities pay well too, but their share shrinks as the levels get expensive. A whole day's run is worth, in the levels of its own band: Twin City about 25, Phoenix 15, Ape 8.5, Desert 4, and Bird Island 2.5. Nobody set those numbers by hand — each task pays a multiple of what killing its prey was worth, so the shape follows the world.

Done properly, the dailies are a real path: a character who runs everything their level allows ends the first day around level 62, and would reach level 120 in about a month. That is with no other hunting at all — and you will do other hunting, because most of the tasks send you out to kill things anyway.

The tasks pay silver as well, and the amount rises with the prey.

Doing them well

• They reset at midnight, all five at once, and the whole run starts from task one. There is no way to bank a half-finished run for tomorrow, so start a chain when you have time for it.
• Kills count while the task is active. Take the task first, then go hunting — anything you killed before speaking to the giver does not count.
• Anything else you earn still counts. The task reward comes on top of the experience from the killing itself, so a busy chain day is worth far more than the reward line alone.
• The evening double-exp hour stacks with them. Turn tasks in between 19:00 and 20:00 and the reward is doubled like everything else.
• You do not have to do them in one sitting. Progress is kept until midnight, so you can take a task, go about your day, and come back.

How our version differs

Classic Conquer Online had no daily chains of this kind — these are an Aurenfall design, built to answer a plain problem: the first thirty levels are the hardest place to be a new player, and a world with nobody in it is not a world. The rewards are computed from the strength of the prey each task names, so they stay honest at every level rather than being guessed at.

Where to find them