Getting (Back) Into Clan Lord

So you want to get into or back into Clan Lord? This document covers what’s happening with Clan Lord lately, how to play on modern computers and pointers on where to learn more and get help.

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Out of Character Pitch

Clan Lord is one of the earliest and longest running MMORPGs - starting in ~1997 and running continuously to this day. Updates to the game are still happening monthly. The game has one of the friendliest communities, and despite its relatively simple graphics, it features unique and deep gameplay.

Partially due to the Coronavirus pandemic and partially due to a large amount of new content being added, 2020 has seen a significant increase in the playerbase. If you stopped playing years ago or never got into it, this is an excellent time to try Clan Lord!

In Character Pitch

Hundreds of years ago, a sleepy outpost in the Lok’Groton island chain experienced an influx of new settlers. Exiled by the Empire for crimes against the ascendancy, these people came to the island of Puddleby to start a new life. They came from all over the outside world, representing a variety of cultures and languages. By ones and twos, they trickled in. With no possessions but the clothes on their backs, they started over in this new land. Although they began as strangers, they began to forge friendships and explore the environment. Through the years Puddleby grew into a prosperous town, growing year by year. The people learned to work together for the good of the community. They began to move beyond mere survival needs into the realms of specialization, exploration, and the arts. They formed a society. They developed their own languages, their own social mores, and their own customs. They worshiped a pantheon of powerful gods who gave them favors and bedeviled them with mysteries. They celebrated annual holidays with ritual hunts to special hunting grounds, sacred for that particular holiday. They celebrated weddings and they mourned untimely deaths. They fought orgas, Darshak, and other dark forces, managing every time to repulse the invaders who would dare threaten their comfortable way of life. The citizens cared for each other, took care of newcomers, and protected the weaker members of society. Hundreds of years after the first settlers arrived, a great society still survived and thrived. Then, stagnation set in. People began to leave their beautiful island home, lured by the lush scenery and high adventure of new worlds. Many were drawn back to the outside world by families or business. A few hold-outs remained and kept up the old ways, but the town was a hollow shell of its old self. Town square sat empty save for the occasional wandering vermine. Previous inhabitants would come back for a visit only to find the drinking halls deserted, their voices echoing thinly in the empty halls. One would not have been wrong to think that the gods had deserted the little island. Many thought that it wouldn’t be long before the island would revert to wilderness with no sign of the thriving, vibrant society that had once graced its shores. Then, in the year 620, something unique happened. A great plague swept through the outside world, yet Puddleby remained unaffected. Isolated as it was, and set in the old ways, it became a haven for people fleeing the great plague. Every zodiac more and more people came back. Some just visited for nostalgia’s sake, but others stayed and began building their lives again. Once again, Town Center rang with the cries of adventurers preparing for adventure. Many were the joyful reunion of old hunting-mates who hadn’t seen each other for decades. Some of the returning settlers brought their children to live in Puddleby, bringing the adventure to the next generation. Somehow, even new settlers began to find their way to the sleepy town. They moved in and learned the old ways from the old-timers. They learned how to navigate the marsh, how to surround a green beetle, and how to get to Peaceton. This mixture of old and new inhabitants brought about the Renaissance of Lok’Groton. There was a sudden outpouring of new art, new lore, new maps, and new efforts to solve long-forgotten puzzles. The people elected a new Fen President for Life and anointed the Torjo King. The gods, perhaps also seeking a refuge from the horrors in the outside world, began granting boons and opening new realms for the islanders to explore. For so many, Puddleby was the home of their youth, the first world that they experienced – truly experienced – and it was with a sense of homecoming that they arrived once more on its shores. So I say to you, previous inhabitants of Puddleby, Come back! Return to the land of your youth! Your clan mates are waiting with a keg of ale to hear of your life over the sea. The bards have new songs to sing and the world has new enemies to defeat. If you come back for a day or forever, we will welcome you with open arms. For anyone reading this who has never been to Puddleby, it is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the birth of MMORPGs. It’s a small investment for a game these days, it doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth, and the game-play is top notch. Although the graphics are old, Clan Lord represents a 20-year-old sociological experiment. The community developed and grew organically, with the storyline being driven by the players, until the GM-created content and the content that has been made up players merged together into a loose cohesion. The experience sharing system and the karma mechanics developed by Delta Tao are the base from which all modern MMORPGs are designed. So, to the reader who would like to go back and experience things as they were when the world was young and innocent, I say to you, Come in! Experience a community that is truly a community, a group of people who have cared for each other for decades and who will welcome you as one of their own. Come home.

Getting Clan Lord running

Clan Lord is over 20 years old, so there are a few warts getting it to run on modern systems. The good news is you don’t need a beefy machine to play. The bad news is you generally can’t just click “install” on some machines. What computer(s) do you have available?

MacOS

What OS version does it run? MacOS 10.6 through 10.14: Download the official client MacOS 10.15, 11.0 or above: Official clients don’t support this OS. Try Clieunk or Java client Earlier than MacOS 10.6: This probably will not work.

MacOS client tricks and tips

Lag while on WiFi

If you’re seeing lots of choppiness while on wifi, you need to do something to keep wifi fully active. Open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and you’ll get a command prompt. This command will constantly ping your wifi router and keep things from going to sleep: route -n get server.deltatao.com | grep gateway | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n 1 ping -i 0.2

You should see results like this:

% route get server.deltatao.com | grep gateway | awk '{print $2}' | xargs ping -i 0.2

• PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
• 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.234 ms
• 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.335 ms
• 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.307 ms
• 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.277 ms
• 64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.185 ms

When you’re done playing CL, you can cancel the command by pressing Control-C, or quitting terminal.

Technical stuff for nerds: In the last ~10 years, Apple has introduced power saving on wifi chipsets. The idea being that putting the wifi network to sleep and polling for incoming packets less frequently will save on power drain (useful for laptops and such). This doesn’t affect typical web browsing enough to be noticeable, but CL’s packets arrive just slowly enough and over a protocol (UDP) that Apple isn’t considering important enough to keep wifi awake the entire game session. Thus it’ll keep putting it to sleep to try and save power, then immediately wake it back up, put it back to sleep, etc. This works around that by sending packets inside your local network fast enough that wifi never tries to go to sleep.

Making the game window bigger.

CL’s screen is kinda small. Some options: Lowering your resolution to something smaller (try 1280x800 and go up or down from there) Use the MacOS accessibility zoom feature In Clieunk only - you can use the “Zoom” feature (under the “View” menu) to increase the window size, or drag it to the size you want.

Windows

What OS version does it run? Windows 7, 8 or 10: Download the official client. Windows 7, 8: Install QuickTime as normal (installers should work).

†For Windows 10 install QuickTime as below - just running the installer doesn’t work!

Download QuickTime for Windows from Apple (it is marked unsupported, but does work, and is needed for sounds to work in CL)

1. Extract the installer to a directory
2. Run QuickTime and Apple Application Support installers as admin (right click -> run as administrator)
3. Reboot when both are done
4. Now run Clan Lord, and you should have working sound

Windows client tricks and tips

I don’t have sound!

See above† for installing QuickTime

Making the game window bigger

Lower your resolution to something smaller (try 1280x800 and go up or down from there) Tweak the “Change the size of text, apps and other themes” setting in Display. Under “Advanced Scaling Settings”, try “Let Windows try to fix apps so they’re not blurry” set to On.

I quit the game and now can’t reopen CL!

If you get an error message about the client already running, go to the task manager and kill the client dll process (should look like “client-v1210-2021-01-30” but with a different version number) and try launching the client again.

My Macros from my Mac don’t work!

Mac macros generally work if you still have them, just set the file extension to .mac. Note that “command” (⌘) doesn’t exist in windows, and you may need to change macros with triggers like “command-1” to “alt-1” to keep them working.

Lag while on WiFi

If you’re seeing lots of choppiness while on wifi, you need to do something to keep wifi fully active. One option is to stream a long running video (something with no scheduled end like a twitch stream works well for some folks). A lower bandwidth approach is to ping your router the whole time you’re playing. Start => Run “cmd” and you’ll get a command prompt. This command will constantly ping your wifi router and keep things from going to sleep: FOR /F "tokens=13" %x IN ('"ipconfig | findstr "Gateway""') DO ping -t %x

Linux

Java client should work on most modern Linux distros. You need Java 8 or higher installed.

I forgot my username/password

Try the account portal (https://deltatao.com/portal/) to login with your account username and password first (this may be different than your character username and password)

Forgot your account password?

Try the reset password form first, you might get lucky here

Don't remember/have access to your old email?

This is pretty common as many folks signed up using older email addresses they no longer have access to. Don’t worry! Email: eldongm AT gmail dot com (fix that into a real email address) with content like this:

Hi, I’m the player behind <player name(s)>. I haven’t played Clan Lord in a few years, but am trying to get back into it. I tried the account portal, but I can’t get in. I think my account was associated with email address myname@someold_email.com. My characters are:

Ali’ce

B’ob

I would really appreciate it if you can help me reset my password and associate it with this new email address: myname@new_email.com Thanks! -Me

I’m a new player and I’d like to get started

Try the demo if you’re unsure you want to play:

1. Download the correct client for your operating system. ( see above)
2. From the File menu, select “Character Manager.”
3. Click on the “Try the Demo!” button.
4. Select any of the characters listed and click the “Play” button.
5. Click and hold the mouse button in the direction that you would like to move.*You can change this to click toggles in preferences/settings for easier movement
6. Bump into the NPCs with blue name bars to learn navigation tips.
7. Walk through doors and talk to NPCs as they guide you through picking your appearance. They will also give you some navigation tips.
8. When you are ready to explore the game, go out the final set of doors east of the Helpful Sylvan and you will be in the temple in Town Center. Exit the temple to the south and start exploring!

You can speak to others just by typing in the text box.

Use the portal (https://deltatao.com/portal/) to make a new account if you want to play for keeps.

A new account costs $15 (one time fee) & $10 for additional character slots. [There are no monthly fees any longer, but if you want (and you can afford it) you can use the account portal to encourage DT to keep this game running into the 2050s! -- Admin]

Useful info

News about happenings in game: http://thoomcare.com/ Chat with other players about CL when you’re not playing on discord: https://discord.gg/DhmaymbJDb Clan Lord wiki has lots of useful info: https://clump.clanlord.net/library/

Exciting New Areas

Gho Wei Island: This exotic locale features rocky beaches, dark caverns, high bluffs, and a lush bamboo forest. Ghosts who have to be healed to death, coin-stealing raccoons and pushy goats make this a challenging area. There is rumored to be a haunted building somewhere in the depths of the island.

The Vale of the Giants is the newest area to be discovered. It seems to cover a very large area. There are numerous crumbling temples and citadels left over from some previous civilization. Ruins have been discovered here in the old-growth forest. Scholars have descended quickly on this area due to scraps of ancient text that have been found.

Exciting New Abilities

Healer pets had a major expansion! Search the lands for your desired companion. Dozens of new pets to be found. Healing a new pet no longer replaces your old pet, and you can have up to 5 pets.

Champions and Bloodmages have had serious tweaks recently, making them more effective and more fun to play.

If you’re a new player, Boostus will help you catch up to other players quickly. You can find him at the University in East Forest. The safest way to get there is to take the tunnel from east town - Immbe Ciley stands at its entrance.

Open Hunts

If you’d like to join an open hunt, there are several hunts happening every day that are open to any players. They generally meet in Town Center. An updated list is on Discord, but currently:

Day	Exile Time
Mondays	Leyenda’s Open Hunt 9:45am PST (2hrs)
	Lorikeets Open Hunt 5pm PST (2hrs)
	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
Tuesdays	FB/DM Open Hunt with Connie Crete 7pm PST (2hrs)
	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45am and 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
Wednesdays	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45am and 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
Thursdays	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45am and 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
	Lorikeets Open Hunt 5pm PST (2hrs)
Fridays	FB/DM Open Hunt with Connie Crete 7pm PST (2hrs)
	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45am and 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
Saturdays	Lorikeets Open Hunt 9:45am and 9:45pm PST (1.25hrs)
Sundays	FB/DM Open Hunt with Connie Crete 7pm PST (2hrs)