The Complete Trophy Hunter’s Guide for Beginners

Let’s start with the absolute basics; what is a trophy? A trophy is a graphic that gets awarded to you and is displayed on your User Lookup beneath your Neopets. These trophies, once earned, will never disappear from your account! Most trophies come in 3 different varieties: Champion!! (first place), Second Place, and Third Place. A couple games also have a Runner-up medal, but those are not very common.

The next step is receiving the trophy! There are generally three different ways in which trophies are awarded. The most common one is by appearing in the correct place on a High Score Table when trophies are awarded. Most recently, trophies were awarded around 5:15ish pm NST by a script that takes around 10 minutes or so to award them all. The second way is to be awarded trophies as soon as the specific requirements for that trophy are met. The final way is to win a site contest and the trophy is awarded once the winner is announced.

You may look at the high score tables and think to yourself, “Wow these game scores are all really high!” If it is towards the end of the month, they probably are! This is because all of the high score tables completely empty and reset on the first of every month. This means that on the 1st of every month and for a few days afterwards, the scores needed to achieve trophies in most games are significantly lower than they are for the rest of the month! This doesn’t mean the scores won’t require any effort, but it will make them more achievable.

To start your collection at the beginning, I suggest focusing on the second kind of trophies, the ones that are awarded immediately. These are mostly won through winning games, either luck based or against computers! Snow Wars, Go! Go! Go!, Cheat, and Cellblock are all games that award trophies as you progress through the levels. Beating Punchbag Bob is a trophy that is awarded just by defeating Punchbag Bob in the Battledome which is much easier said than done.

The two hardest games by this method are Neoquest I and Neoquest II. These are Neopet’s own RPGs, (role-playing games), and therefore can take a very long time to complete. There are numerous guides and walkthroughs available for both games. I suggest getting a snack and a beverage, popping in some good music or your favorite TV show, and grind away the levels for these awesome trophies! To reach the Champion level trophy for these games you must complete each game 3 times on the 3 different difficulty levels. This is no small or easy feat, so be forewarned!

Round Table Poker, Pyramids, and Sakhmet Solitaire are interesting because they are both instantly awarded and Top 17 trophies! Pyramids and Sakhmet Solitaire both award two different trophies. The trophy that is awarded immediately is won by winning 2 games total, 5 games total, and 2 games in a row. They are known as Pyramids Bonus and Sakhmet Solitaire Bonus respectively. Round Table Poker awards you a Runner-Up Medal for beating Tournament 5, while the higher level trophies are awarded through the usual high score table.

The final trophy that is awarded immediately is actually a trophy that goes in the Site Feature section of your User Lookup. If you are lucky enough to feed a Kadoatie at the Kadoatery, you will immediately receive a Kadoatie trophy! For your first feed you will receive the Bronze trophy. At 10 feeds your trophy will be upgraded to Silver, and at 25 it will be upgraded to Gold. It may be tempting to splurge and feed one of the unbuyable foods that typically congregate at the top of The Kadoatery. I do not suggest this! What I recommend is finding the Kad feeding board and pay attention to the pending times. You can keep some common Kad foods in your Inventory or buy them quickly when all of the Kadoaties become hungry again. This may prove frustrating at times, but it will save you a ton of neopoints in the long run!

The next type of way to win trophies is through site contests. These are typically divided in to two different kinds: Site Event trophies and Game Trophies. Site Event trophies appear under the Site Event header at the top of the Games and Trophies section of your user lookup. These are achieved by participating in site-wide events such as plots, Daily Dare, and the Altador Cup. Currently, the only trophy that can be received here that is open ended is the Altador Plot. There are plenty of step-by-step guides available for this plot, so I won’t describe it in detail here. The Royal Astronomer trophy for completing the Altador Plot is technically awarded as soon as you complete the plot, but I wanted to include it here with the other Site Event trophies.

The site contests that award trophies in the Game Trophies section are typically the weekly contests that are run by The Neopets Team! If you like writing, there’s the Storytelling Contest, Neopian Times, Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. If you like coding, you have the User Lookup Spotlight and Site Spotlights. You can show off your drawing skills in the Art Gallery. You can check the individual contest for rules and timing, but most follow a specific weekly schedule. Other contests you can win a trophy for are Mystery Pic, Kreludor Caves Spotlight, Better Than You, Gallery Spotlight, the Neopain Lottery, and Neohome Spotlight. You should note that some contests such as Pet Spotlight and Beauty Contest award you trophies on your pet’s lookup and not your user lookup.

One trophy I’m going to include here that may be surprising is the game Plushie Tycoon. This is not a site contest such as the other trophies listed, but this is a player versus computer game that lasts the entire month. The game begins sometime near the beginning of each month and your goal is to have made a profit in your plushie shop by the time the game ends. You are not competing against other Neopians but against yourself to try and make as much in-game profit as you can! The higher your final total, the better trophy you will receive. There are many different styles and suggestions to play this game, so I suggest reading through a couple guides, picking a month where you will be able to commit the entire month, and get to building some plushies!

The final and most common way to be awarded a trophy is by being in the correct placement on a game’s High Score Table at trophy time (the time the trophy script runs). For most games, this means being in the Top 17 places. Places 1-3 will be awarded the Gold or Champion!!! trophy, places 4-8 will be awarded the Silver or second place trophy, and places 9-17 will be awarded the Bronze or third place trophy. However, there are exceptions to this rule!!

The following games all have exceptions to this Top 17 rule: Grand Theft Ummagine, Faerie Caves II – Fyora’s Quest, Chia Bomber 2, Ruins Rampage, Bruno’s Backwoods Breakaway, Dungeon Dash, Clockwork Codebreaker, and Ugga Drop. What makes these games different is that they all have maximum high scores. At trophy time, everyone who is on the high score table in any position with the highest score possible will receive the Gold trophy!! For example, say you send the maximum score of 5,000 points in Dungeon Dash towards the end of the month and you enter the trophy table at position 57. Although for regular games you would be quite a few spots out of trophy contention, you will receive the Champion trophy when trophies are awarded! Also for these games only, tied score positions don’t take up multiple places on the table. Say you are one point shy of the maximum score of 1,687 in Chia Bomber 2. You are on the table at position 18 with all of the 17 scores above you being the maximum score. When trophies are awarded, you will actually receive a Silver trophy! For these special games, all of the maximum scores on the high score table take up only the gold position spot, and the next 5 scores afterward are awarded Silver no matter where on the table they occur, and same with Bronze after that.

Of course, there are exceptions to the exception that I have to mention! There are some games that have maximum scores that would appear to fit in with the games above and break the Top 17 rule. Unfortunately, the following games only award trophies to those people in the Top 17 at trophy time, despite having a maximum high score: Splat-A-Sloth, Dar-BLAT!!!, Jungle Raiders, and Neopian Battlefield Legends. For all of these games except Jungle Raiders, the high score table fills up fairly quickly with maximum scores. When you send a maximum score, you enter the high score table at the very bottom at position 100. The person at number 1 is bumped off of the table completely. These trophies then become about being lucky enough to have enough people push your score high enough to be in the Top 17 when trophies are awarded. Unfortunately, you can only enter the high score table in this way once per month. For Jungle Raiders, the best way to achieve a trophy is to send the maximum score as close to the time the high score tables reset on the 1st as possible.

The next style of Top 17 games I suggest attempting are a group of games that are known as Farming games. No, you won’t be creating your own farm for these trophies. What this term means is these games are played in a way so as not to progress the game but to keep it at a stable point and rack up points for as long as possible. With this method you can basically choose what score you want to achieve. The trophies for these games are best attempted near reset as well, as this will be when scores are lowest and you won’t spend hours and hours going for a single score.

I am going to mention some specific games with tips on how to farm them, and then give you a list of games that are known to be able to farmed which I will let you figure out. My favorite and I think the easiest farming game is Hannah and the Kreludor Caves. This game is very easy to farm because after every level you are given the option to go back and repeat a previous level. You can do this for as long as you like while gaining points. I would suggest repeating level 3, as it is a very easy level you can mindlessly complete for a very long time. Set a goal and don’t stop until you get there!

Berry Bash is another popular farming game. The way to do this is to balance the amount of customers you are feeding with customers you purposefully let leave so that you do not progress to higher levels, yet do not lose and continuously gain points. I personally managed to get a trophy in Shenkuu River Rapids by farming. I slowed down to as slow as possible and would jump and do the lowest trick point possible. Doing this through the whole game should get you high enough for a trophy. The Great Desert Race is also easily farmable thanks to the square that transports you back to an earlier point in the game board. Other well known farming games include Wrath of the Snowager, Wheelers Wild Ride, Legends of Pinball, Spinacles, Dueling Decks, Jolly Jugglers, Raiders of Maraqua, The Castle of Eliv Thade, and Dubloon Disaster.

There is another class of game trophies that are completely luck based. I typically only try for these on the first few days of the month when scores are low and any sort of win will get you close to a trophy score. Some of these games are Cheeseroller, Wise Old King, Grumpy Old King, Double or Nothing, Kiss the Mortog, Test Your Strength, Tyranu Evavu, Brain Tree Quest, and Gormball. If gambling is more your style, you can try Brucey B Slots, Black Pawkeet Slots, Scorchy Slots, and Slots Big Loser. If you are really unlucky, you could be visited by one of 3 different taxation random events that have a high score table. These are Sloth’s Invasion Tax, Tax Beast, and Angry Tax Beast. Each taxes a different percentage of your on hand neopoints, and your score is the number of neopoints you lose.

Next there are quite a few trophies I want to single out because either the trophy is fairly easy, or it has a unique or interesting way of obtaining the scores necessary to receive a trophy. The first two I want to point out are Jhudoras Bluff and Illusens Glade trophies. These are Top 17 trophies, but you receive your scores by completing either Jhudora’s or Illusen’s quests as quickly as possible. You can do their quests every 12 hours, which means you can do two quests a day. Even if you are not the quickest, if you start your quests on the first when scores reset and complete two quests every day you will eventually reach a trophy score. The Bilge Dice trophy is achievable in a similar manner by achieving the maximum score each day every day starting on the first of the month.

There are a couple games that typically have low scores throughout the month because the games themselves are difficult to load. If you manage to get the game to load and play through, trophy scores are not too difficult to obtain. These include old Shockwave games Frumball, Hannah and the Pirate Caves, Hannah and the Ice Caves, and Gourmet Club Bowls, and Shockwave 3D games Shenkuu River Rush, Terror Mountain Tilt, and The Last Blast. These games do require practice and skill to master, but with few players sending scores these trophies are fairly achievable.

Some wonderful Neopians have made step-by-step guides for quite a few games. If you follow these guides correctly and with a little bit of luck, you should have a trophy in no time. These games include Biscuit Brigade: Hagan’s Last Stand, Gwyl’s Great Escape, Dice Escape, Castle Battles, and Assignment 53.

The final two trophies I want to draw attention to are trophies where your account’s age plays a big factor. For Grarrl Keno and Food Club, you are able to gamble more neopoints for every day your account is old. This makes achieving the high scores easier as you don’t have to hit incredibly rare odds to make a large amount of neopoints in returns.

If you have made it this far, I hope you managed to pick up quite a few tips and tricks about gaining trophies! This is obviously nowhere near complete as I claimed it would be, but that’s because there are so many different games in Neopoia. I have laid out the basics for how trophies work; now you have the chance to go out and prove you are the best! I wish you the best of luck in your trophy hunting endeavors, and I hope to see you on the high score tables!