So you have opened a Neopets account, activated it, and created your first pet. You have 250 NP's to your name and it is a very big world. Now what?

It took me a while to find my way around Neopia. When I found out two weeks after starting my account that I could have fed my pets for free and acquired my first secret avatar, I ground my teeth in frustration at the missed opportunities.

I still to this day get embarrassed when I think back to my first effort at trading for items at the Island Trading Post—an attempt to trade a Rainbow Paint Brush for a Faerie Paint Brush that still sticks painfully with me. At least the person whose lot I had bid on was kind enough to send me a neomail explaining the difference in value.

I was new, a newbie, a tenderfoot, but still to this day it makes me wish that there had been a guidebook to help me before I had embarrassed myself and risked offending my new neo-neighbors. So I thought about where I would start if I had it to do all over again, the result is this guide. I hope it helps other newcomers shorten their learning curve.



Traveling Neopia

A New Citizen's Guide to Neopia





First Things First


If you didn't take the time to read the Terms & Conditions when you opened your account, this should be your starting point in your travels. There are sections that can be rather vague, but at least you will have seen the rudimentary rules for playing the game.

This could keep you from stumbling over issues like guild or shop contests, spamming, scams (like Neo-Sitting) and other things that could cause you to receive a warning or have your account frozen. No use getting in trouble when you can avoid it by simply reading the laws of citizenship.

Now that the legal stuff is out of the way: Where to next?




Newbie Pack


You have a few Neopoints or NP's (the Neopian currency), but now you need a few items. From Pet Central go to the icon marked "your items" this will carry you to your inventory. Refresh the page before you buy or pick-up anything. (If you did by chance pick up an item before now, stash it in your safe deposit box (SDB) which you can access from the main tool bar—it's to the right and looks like a safe.) You should now have four items in your inventory:

A Wooden Blocking Shield

A Chocolate Coated Mint Bar

A Blue Aisha Plushie

The Magic Paw

You have two choices-you can use these items or sell them. You should sell them. But where, you say? Why in your shop, of course! (The items in the newbie pack change every so often so you may not have the same items, just make sure to price them according to the guide on pricing.)




Your Neo-Shop


It will cost 150 NP's of the 250 you have to open your shop, which will initially hold five items. But this is one of the best investments you are ever going to make on Neopia. Most successful Neopians have a shop and many of those spend as much or more time maintaining their shops as they do actually playing games in the game room. (More on games later.) Neopia is a perfect model of a capitalist, free-market economy so the opportunity to make a profit from the buying and selling of items is tremendous.

To open your shop, go to the little yellow building icon second from the left on the main tool bar. Once there you will select "Create/Edit a Shop" and then agree to spend the 150 NP's to open your shop. Viola, you are now the proud owner of a small business. You can pick a shopkeeper, add a description, a background, music and many extras from the Create/Edit a Shop page by using HTML. (You cannot use CSS and position tags in shops since some unscrupulous people would use them to cheat their customers.)

You have space for five items and four items to sell, but how do you price them? Every item has an "estimated value" that is assigned to it. You can see the estimated value when you click on an item in your inventory. Let's do that now, so you know what you need to look for. Click on your Wooden Blocking Shield, now look at the bottom and you will see that the estimated value of the item is 172 NP's. This value is only for show and it does not, in most instances, reflect the actual market value of the item. To demonstrate this, let's go visit the Shop Wizard. Type Wooden Blocking Shield into the area that says, "What are you looking for?", then set the search for "identical to my phrase" and press "Search Shops." This should pull up one page of possible prices, but don't stop there. Refresh the page about five times so that you see the price range found in user shops. As you can see the Wooden Blocking Shield on average sells for between 1 – 10 NP's.

Sure you can set your price at any rate you wish, but do you want to move inventory and earn NP's or do you want to sit on it as it collects virtual dust?

You can use the "Quick Stock" option to place your items in your shop, then go back to your shop via the little yellow shop building on the left of the tool bar. Now search for the price of each item in your newbie pack and price them slightly below the average price. Why? Because your size one shop is so small that it is at a disadvantage and you need to move your items to the top of the shop listing. The only way to do that at this point is sell them for a little less. In other words, if you saw that the average price of an item was 100 NP's then you would want to sell your item for 98-99 NP's.

At the time of the writing of this guidebook, the four items in your newbie pack are worth an approximate market value of 230 NP's—not a bad profit for your first few minutes in Neopia and you haven't even played your first game yet. (Games? Yes, yes, we're getting to them just hold your uni's, eh?)

*Main Shops—We'll discuss the main shops in a bit and how to "restock" your shop while buying smart later. Don't rush into spending NP's in the main shops until we've done that, okay?


Now while we are waiting for those items to sell, let's take care of another piece of business that we need to cover.




The National Neopian Bank


Every citizen needs a place to protect and store his or her precious funds; the solution is to open an account at the National Neopian Bank.

There is a short form to fill out to open an account, but you'll get another 30 NP's for doing so and your "stash of cash" will be protected from random acts of thievery by any one of Neopia's infamous villains. The form is pretend so put in your username, make up an address, pick whichever employment title and annual salary floats your boat and select the "junior savings" plan. Enter your initial deposit and hit "Sign me up".

Most Neopians keep the largest portion of their neopoints in the bank since there are random events that can steal or tax any earnings you are carrying with you. The other advantage to this is that you can collect interest on your account each day. (This is a "daily"—more about them next.) As you increase the amount of savings in your account make sure to upgrade your account accordingly so that you collect more interest.



Neopian Charities


Starting out you may or may not have a lot of NP's to spend on feeding your pets; several "charities" are set up in Neopia to help you to support your pets. I'm going to cover them in this section one at a time.

The Soup Faerie

The Soup Faerie works tirelessly to feed the hungry pets of Neopia from her soup bowl located in the Neopian Marketplace. She will feed your pets for free until you have amassed a total of 2,000 NP's. I recommend using her services for the first bit that you are in Neopia for a few different reasons:

1) It will allow you to sell items that you collect from other places around the Neopia.

2) You can spend any NP's you win or earn on expanding your shop. This doesn't mean you can't play games and earn NP's, but go ahead and spend those points on expanding your shop and stocking it so that you keep less than the 2,000 NP's--at least until your shop will hold a minimum 50 items.

3) You want to collect her avatar so that you have a spiffy picture to display when you eventually visit the Neopian Message Boards. (Don't rush to visit the boards until you have absorbed some knowledge of Neopian culture, though.)

*Just a small aside on Avatar Collecting: Many avatars require you to own a certain pet, if you wish to collect avatars, do not create or adopt the four pets you are allowed—leave at least one space for adopting pets that will give you an avatar. (I say adopt because, why create a pet that you are going to have to dump into the pound to get the next pet for the next avatar?)

The Money Tree

Another source of food or shop stock is the items donated to the Money Tree by the more "well-to-do" Neopians. The Money Tree is sort of the Neopian equivalent to the Goodwill—one man's trash is another man's treasure. As you can well imagine it is a popular place that many people visit. It is often challenging to snag an item, but it can be worth the effort. Experienced visitors advise scrolling to the bottom of the page and refreshing there since most people will try to grab the items at the top. Don't be too greedy because the more you take, the harder it becomes to get items. Hopefully one day you'll be able to donate there as well.

The Giant Omelette

Located on the Tyrannian Plateau , this massive omelette feeds the majority of Neopia's pet population. You may visit once a day to receive a free helping of omelette. Commonly you will receive flavors like Sausage, Sausage and Pepperoni, Pea and C arrot, Green Pepper, or Bacon and Broccoli—these flavors sell for an average price of 15-20 NP's. Less commonly you may receive a Plain, Bacon, Cheese, Cheese and Onion or B-B-Q Sauce omelette—these flavors sell for between 20-145 NP's or more. (Always check the shop wiz for the market value.) Rarely, you may receive a flavor such as Tomato or Tomato and Pepper that could sell for several hundred NP's. (This is why you must always do what? Right, check the shop wiz.)

One omelette that I cannot fail to mention is the Rotten Omelette. It is not worth much and if you feed it to your pets it will make them sick. Sell it, donate it, discard it or stash it, but don't feed it to your pets.

I recommend selling your free omelettes until you have collected the Soup Faerie's avatar and expanded your shop a few times. (You want your shop to get bigger because it moves it up the shop listing in the Wizard's search and you can charge more for the items you sell.)

The Giant Jelly

Somewhere in Neopia there is a hidden world called JellyWorld. You can't see it or access it from the Neopian map; Neopian officials will deny its existence, but it is real and it is home to the wondrous giant jelly from which you can collect a free serving of jelly everyday or if you are really lucky you might get a trifle.

To visit this secret world type /jelly/link_not_found? after www.neopets.com in your browser address bar. Again, I recommend selling these at least for as long as it takes to get the Soup Faerie's avatar or until you have a shop that will hold at least 50 items. If you want to hang on to them, you can always stash them in your SDB.

There are a couple of jellies that you definitely do not want to feed to your pets and one that is questionable. They will or might make your pet sick. Those would be Poisonous Jelly (rather obvious), Dung Jelly (blech!) and Glowing Jelly. (I just don't trust it having lived close to Oak Ridge, Tennessee for most of my life.)

The Healing Springs

Located in Faerieland and operated by a beautiful water faerie, this magical spring may provide you with free items like snowballs or potions, feed your pets, restore hit points or heal any serious illnesses that your pets may come down with—such as Sneezles or Floppy Tongue.

The faerie's magic is restored every 30 minutes and I recommend visiting every chance you get even if your pet is not sick, but make sure to time your visits with other activities such as the Battledome, playing the "Wheels of Chance", or visiting the Snowager.

At the least the faerie will feed your pets, but if they are sick she may heal them completely. The free potions and snowballs can either be sold or stashed for use in the Battledome or for a quick healing fix in between the times you can visit the springs.

Still with me? Let's move on.




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