Severlin's Guide to the Quest Journal

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Severlin's Guide to the Quest Journal

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With the release of the 10th anniversary we have added an in-game journal for players to take notes and track timers as they complete quests. The quest journal is not an item in the normal sense; it does not have burden and will not take up pack space. The quest journal is basically a series of pages that hold information on quests and other notes.

There is a new button in the Asheron's Call toolbar for the quest journal. The icon looks like a writing quill. Clicking this button opens the journal in the pane above the toolbar. The pane with the quest journal has two tabs; the journal page tab and the page list tab.

The Journal Pages
The first tab of the Quest Journal shows the individual pages of the journal. Each page has a number of fields where you can enter notes about quests, game play, characters, or anything else you wish. The pages are design to support a wide variety of options. You can enter a single quest per page and record a location and a timer with that quest. A single quest can also span multiple pages. It is up to you to determine how you organize the pages of your quest journal.

Each page contains the following information:

Title
This field records a short title to help you identify the page. This field will appear as in the title column on your page list so you can sort pages based on this field.

Tag
This short field is left completely to the player to create tags and identifiers to help sort and search through journal pages. This field will appear as in the title column on your page list so you can sort pages based on this field.

Notes
This long field contains the main text for the page. Information on a quest or notes on some aspect of the game can be recorded here. Although this field will likely be too large for a sort column, you can use the search feature to search for text strings in this field.

Location
This field is designed to hold a location. Next to the field is a button that will record your current location as a text string. You can also edit the field yourself if you want to record a specific location but you don't happen to be at that place.

Timer
The timer actually has two sets of information. There is the length of the timer. You can set the length of the timer by entering a number of days, hours and minutes if no timer is running. This information is persistent. The journal will remember the timer information even after you have started the journal. There is also the current running timer. You can start a timer running by clicking the Start button. At that time the Start button changes to a reset button and you can see the countdown on the current running timer rather than the timer information. Once the timer is running it will show up in the Page List column so you can track the time until you can repeat a quest or task.

The journal pages also contain navigation buttons that appear as bright green text or arrows near the corners of the page. You can create a new page with the New button. You can move to the next or previous pages with the page arrows. You can also move directly to the first or last page with the First and Last buttons.

The Page List
In addition to the Journal tab, the quest journal has a Page List tab. What really sets apart the quest journal from a simple text record is the ability to sort pages by several criteria and search pages for text strings from the Page List tab. The Page List will list all pages you have entered into the journal with a title, a tag, and a timer. In addition to having a place to view all pages, this tab has three functions to make your time in the quest journal easier.

Sorting
When you click on the title on one of the columns in the Page List, that list is sorted based on that column. You can also reverse sort the list by clicking on that column a second time. This allows you to view pages sorted by title, tag, or timer. This means you can sort by timer to see all of your expired timers and upcoming timers in one handy list. You can also devise a sorting scheme of your own design by entering information into the tag field and sorting by that column.

Searching
When you enter text into the search field and click the Search button all pages with that text are added to the Page List and other pages are filtered out. This allows you to see only pages with the appropriate search string. At the bottom of the page list there is a search field with two buttons. The field is where you enter a search string. The Search button will start the search, filtering all pages from the list above it that do not contain the search string you are searching for. The Reset button will clear out the search and restore all pages to the list.

Navigation
When you double click on a specific page in the Page List you are moved over to the journal tab with the journal opened to the appropriate page.

Delete
You can select a page and delete it by clicking the delete button.

Behind the Scenes

The quest journal is not stored on the server so there is no limit to the number of pages you can enter. Instead the quest journal saves the information for each character locally in the same folder as your Asheron's Call preferences. This allows you to enter as many notes as you wish without affecting server performance. If you log into an alternate machine you will not see your notes. If you want to access the, from another machine you can move the journal quest file manually.