Deep Diving

     Today; Your Safety Deposit Box and Mass Collections

     Your Neopian Safety Deposit Box is the deepest ocean in Neopia. It's the best place to quick stock all your items and keep them out of the way while still keeping them close enough to jump in and fish them out whenever the urge takes you.

     Your SDB can hold all your hopes and dreams on Neopets, everything and anything can go in there and it's kept out of harm's way, untouchable by all except you the collector. Safe from the Pant Devil, safe from the more evil Grundo Leader, and safe from that angry guy that keeps collecting for the Altador Cup, taking whatever he wants right from your hands. You know the guy i mean.

     What can we do with our SDB, besides holding all our precious items until we decide to use them? We can get an avatar for having one thousand unique items, the Pack Rat avatar. We have a basic search function to trawl out a particular item. We can deposit and withdraw as many times as we like. And it's a private pool.

     One other thing some of us do is Mass Collect.

     Mass Collecting is when someone collects a single item in great quantity. The exact same item stockpiled over and over, same image, same name. Most of the time, the item that they choose to collect is an item with a low price and is easy to find.

     Many collections begin under the Money Tree where you can pick up ten free items a day. There you will find many items which other players don't want to keep around, and often those items are multiples of the same thing. If you use the Money Tree, you can easily find yourself with a mass collection without meaning to! Other collections can begin simply because someone has a liking for the item; the image, the name, or the description itself can all inspire collections.

     We all know that every item has a use, even if the only use is for it to be used as fodder for (hopefully one day! ) Charity Corner. These items tend to stay very low in price on the Shop Wizard or are given away by daily activities. Many items are used in the game for quests, and are handed out by the site regularly. A mass collector generally chooses an item with few uses, an item which they can get easily and cheaply. Old Boot for example. :-) Any item, really, can be mass collected, whatever you choose!

     In general, most Mass Collectors will begin by snapping up all the cheapest of their chosen item from the Shop Wizard and Super Shop Wizard. They make sure to do the game or activity that will give them their item as a prize, and check the Trading Post for deals where they can find trades with multiples of the item that they are seeking. I have seen trades on the TP where the wish list asks for ten of the item and it's almost always a good trade for both sides. Mass Collectors are usually willing to sacrifice a wee bit for their collections, so finding a trade like this, where the wish list is asking for ten junk items is often a profit for anyone willing to collect the item and offer it up for trade.

     Mass Collectors often show off their hoard by making a signature line in their font for the neoboards; the siggy will often be item listed and a quantity that has been collected to date, with a goal listed also on how many the collector is hoping to accumulate during their Neopian Career. ;-)

     There are dozens of us Mass Collectors on the site, steadily collecting these items by the hundreds and thousands and putting them deep into our bottomless SDB. Why do we do this? No one else can see the hoard, this is owners eyes only! I don't think there is one answer, but overall there may be some kind of satisfaction in having so many of one single thing. The satisfaction of hoarding a huge pile of junk in a virtual storage where it takes up no space, where we don't have to dust it, and even if we pack up our real life we can take this hoard with us without any effort at all. Maybe it speaks to us on the most primitive human level, we as the hunters and collectors we still seem to be today. Or probably we're just silly.

     There are pet pages created where players keep track of who collects what, with the owner of the pet page keeping track of which user is collecting, what that user is currently collecting. Often people will visit the page to see who is looking for which item, and send the item freely. This is more likely to happen if the collector chooses a very common, very inexpensive, and for the most part, useless item. The term Useless Item has an afterword to it; meaning, useless except for Charity Corner. I think many if not most of us are keeping a hoard or different items just for Charity Corner, but that is a different type of hoarding, different from collecting, because the Charity Corner hoarding is for the hoard to eventually be donated for Charity Corner points. Mass Collecting is not for this, Mass Collecting is for keeping. It's a labour of love, or something close to it, perhaps.

     Frequently many items are freely traded from one person to another. Many people enjoy watching a hoard grow and even if they are not a Mass Collector themselves they like to contribute and be a part of the whole ridiculous mess. :-) It's a fun activity, and since it's so useless we don't need to take it seriously. Its just fun, nothing else, isn't that what we are doing here, having fun? Cheers, happy collecting everyone! ~DT Xx0o