Michaleo
Creating a Storage Alt on a Free Account
Playing LOTRO, you will obtain many useful items. Not all of them are useful immediately. For players who hate to throw away something that might be useful to yourself or others, there are challenges to find the space to store them and subsequently to find the items you have saved.
Storage can be expensive. You can increase bag space by 5 slots for all your characters for 325 Turbine Points (TP). Vault storage (after you’ve bought all you can with game gold) is 895-995 TP for 15 slots for a single character. Shared storage is 595-695 TP for 10 slots. Housing storage (after you’ve bought all you can with game gold) is 100 Mithril Coins (MC) (which costs 850 TP) for 15 slots.
One way to get more storage “free” is to create a separate free-to-play account with a storage alt, a character that exists just to keep things for the characters that you play. It takes less than an hour to get a new character through the intro and to a vault in Bree, Thorin’s Hall, or Michel Delving. Once there, they pretty much stay at the vault. Your “real” characters supply the storage alt with some gold to buy 60 vault slots. It also gets 45 bag inventory slots. A free account gets to create two characters. So in a couple hours you could create a couple hundred slots of additional storage.
Transferring items to/from your Storage Alt
One way to transfer things to your storage alt requires you to run two copies of the LOTRO client at the same time. If you have two computers, it’s easy. Otherwise, if your computer is up to it, you can run two clients in separate windows, or use alt-tab to switch between full screen clients on Windows. When you try to start a second client, Windows may just switch to your existing client. If so, you will need to edit your documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/UserPreferences.ini file. At the beginning of the file, it should have:
[Launcher]
AllowMultipleInstances=true
Once you have that, exit the client and restart. You should be able to start a second client that can sign on to the free account.
You can have your regular characters meet your storage alt in-game and transfer items back and forth using Secure Transfer. Note that only items that are neither bound nor bound to your account will be able to be transferred.
Another way that is convenient, but will cost some silver is to mail items to/from your storage alt. If your regular account is VIP, this has the advantage that you can do it from anywhere. Your storage alts will always be near a vault and mailbox, so it’s not an issue for them. They will need to have some gold so they can afford to mail things to you. Note that you can send or give gold to the free account, but not get gold from it (there are ways to get around this with some loss).
One limitation of free accounts is each character is limited to a total of 2 gold. If it ever gets more than that, the excess is moved to an overflow that you won’t be able to get without spending TP on your “free” account, which you don’t want to do. That won’t be an issue unless you decide to get a house for your storage alt.
If you log on to the storage alt, you may get Hobbit presents. To avoid exceeding the gold cap, you can buy bags of coins from the vault keeper. Those don’t count against the cap, and can later be sold when you need to spend the gold.
Getting a House for a Storage Alt
It takes a little more effort to get a house for a storage alt. First, you will need to get to level 15 in order to buy a house. You can have only one house per account, so only one of the storage alts on the free account needs to get to level 15. A Standard House costs around 1g. A Deluxe House costs more than the gold cap for a free account, so that’s out of reach. However, the Standard House can have the same amount of chest storage as a Deluxe House. The only difference is in the number of decorating hooks.
The decorating hooks are one reason to buy a house. If you have extra housing items that are bound to a regular character, you can nonetheless place them at your storage alt’s house. They are still bound to your regular character, but they don’t take up space in a vault, housing chest, or your regular character’s house.
The chest at the storage alt’s house starts with 30 slots when you buy the house. With the gold cap, the storage alt won’t be able to upgrade it to the 60 slots available using game gold. However, you can give your regular characters access to the house and house chest, and your regular character can pay to add the storage! So by levelling one of your storage alts to 15, they can buy a house, providing storage for 27 housing decorations inside and out, plus 30 slots in the chest to start. Then one of your regular characters can buy 30 more slots for 9g + 27g.
Although housing storage is more expensive than your storage alt’s vault storage, it has the advantage that your regular characters can access it without signing on your storage alt. You’ll want to give all your regular characters access to the storage alt’s house, chest, and decorations so they can come and go as they please, storing and removing things from the house and house storage. Using the housing permissions panel, you can give them the ability to pay maintenance and give other characters access to that house as necessary. If your storage alt’s house is next door to your regular character’s house, it will be easy to get to.
Getting a Storage Alt to Level 15
It takes only a few hours of random questing in the low level areas to get to level 15. Another way that can be largely AFK is to make the storage alt be a Yeoman (a farmer and cook). Give it some cash for seeds. You only have to pay attention while it plants and harvests stacks of produce. After that, as a farmer you can process hundreds of the same item unattended (limited by when the tools need repair), and as a cook you can do the same.
However, there is another alternative that may be of interest. As long as you’re going to spend a few hours getting to level 15, why not do it in a way that generates a bunch of Turbine Points? A number of players have designed recipes for starting a new character and generating some number of TP through deeds and quests. Their goal is to maximize the TP in a given amount of time, since they delete the character when done, so they can do it again to get more TP. But those same recipes will generally get a character to level 15. Since you plan to keep the character, the TP is a bonus.
Double Your Vault Space
The typical scripts will net you 200-300 TP. Since you have two storage alts on the free account, you can do it twice. If you have over 395 TP, then you can remove the gold cap for the free account. This means each storage alt will be able to have 120 slots of vault storage (the higher increments cost 5g for 15 slots, so with the 2g gold cap you would not be able to buy them). You would also be able to buy a Deluxe House with more decorating hooks.
So create a storage alt and get it to level 15, grinding TP. Create a second alt, and grind at least until you have enough TP to remove the gold cap. Then you can transfer gold to them (but not back!) to allow them to buy a Deluxe House, 8g, upgrade its storage to 60 slots, 36g, and upgrade each of their vaults to 120 slots, 8g. This yields 45 (bags) + 120 (vault) + 60 (housing) = 225 slots for the first alt, and 45 (bags) + 120 (vault) = 165 slots for the second, for a total of 390 slots for 60g and a few hours grinding TP.
[Although you removed the gold cap, your free account is still unable to transfer gold to your regular account. If you accidentally send it too much gold, you can get it back less 5% by having your regular account sell something on the AH. The free account can buy it, transferring the gold minus the 5% commission to the regular account. You can freely transfer items (as long as they aren’t bound) back and forth between a storage alt and a regular character.]
Spending Real Money
If you are willing to spend real money, you can save time and effort and get more space. By purchasing the minimum number of TP (usually $8 for 700 TP), your “free” account will become Premium. This means you can create 5 storage alts on the account. The gold cap is raised to 5, which allows you to carefully give gold to each alt to reach the 5g cap and then buy the last personal vault storage increments for 5g. Or you can spend 395 of the TP you bought to permanently remove the gold cap. Then you can transfer as much gold to/from the storage alts as you like. Then they can buy a Deluxe House.
With this plan, get one alt to level 15, buy the TP, and use some of them to remove the gold cap. Then you can transfer gold to the storage alt, have it buy a Deluxe House, 8g, and upgrade the housing storage, 36g. Upgrade its personal vault to 120, 8g. So your first storage alt has 45 (bags) + 120 (vault) + 60 (housing) = 225 slots of storage, plus the decorating hooks on the house, for about 52g.
The other four storage alts on the account do not need to get to level 15. Once out of the intro, they can go to a vault and upgrade it, getting 45 (bags) + 120 (vault) = 165 slots of storage for about 8g each. For $8 in real money and 84g in game, you would have 885 slots of storage.
by Michaleo on 2015-10-16 12:56:45
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