Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This FAQ has been compiled in the Newbie Question Forum (threadID: 469580.1) by Richard Hamster and Chandler Hudson with the help of others.

• Go Shopping. This works only if you have cash on you. Shopping without cash decreases mood. Money is withdrawn automatically from your cash.
• Party All Night. This can be done even without money, but it could decrease your health.
• Composing Music will keep your mood from dropping.

• Certain foods and beverages like chocolate, whipped cream and fancy meals. These can decrease your health and you may need more to gain effect when you use them often.
• Alcohol boosts mood but effects both mood and health badly afterwards.
• Zombie parts: Brain, Dust, Tooth.

• Recieving a Heart Shaped Box of Chocolates on Valentine's Day (Day 10). Maximum one box and one mood boost.
• Killing zombies on the Day of the Dead (Day 28). It's only for VIPs though.
• Wearing a Halloween Monster Mask on Halloween (Day 48) and scarrying people off with it. It raises your mood by 8-12% with each use, 1 hour limits.
• Setting off a Small Set of Fireworks on New Years Eve (Day 56). Can be used only once.

You might wanna perform some mood bumping activities a few days before the holidays like jamming, releasing pets etc

• Having a pet. Regardless of its kind, size and cost, it can give a small chance of 1% mood boost for each pet, which comes at random times of the week. Be careful and always keep cash on you to feed them or they might die! That would cause a dangerous mood loss. Apart from that pets can really get on your nerves sometimes, therefore it is actually an ambiguous question if pets actually help your mood.

• Talk to Media for too long.
• Improving skills
• Exercising at the gym for too long.
• Busking
• Shopping without money
• It's also not too good to focus on the same career missions for too long. You'll get a message that it's boring. Switch to a mood increasing priority for a while. If you'll ignore it, it may be gone, but it'll come back with a larger mood drop each time.
• Being in jail/prison.
• Long Distance travelling (2nd class normal speed is very bad, flying 1st class and supersonic is worth the extra cash!)

• Interact! Lack of human touch and not having any friends will hurt your mood.
• Hangovers
• Fighting
• Being unemployed/homeless
• Having a pet die. always keep feeding money on you! If you own a whole zoo, you might even DIE.
• Jam sessions. Try to book at better quality jam places as soon as you got more money to spare. Higher quality means better jam result means less jam sessions required.

• Rest. Optimum locals: Home, Hotel, Parks. When you're bellow 80%
• Exercise at the Gym. Make sure you have cash on you. When you're above 80%

• Milk. Improves health by 1% and can be use every 6 hours, as long as your health is below 70%. Rare, therefore expensive. You can milk it yourselves from the Nashville Cow.
• Zombie parts: Eyeballs, Dust, Tooth.

• Exercizing while your health is really bad.
• Partying all night.
• Busking.

• Using aphrodisiacs
• As said : Long Distance Travelling
• Overexcessive touring in general (playing too many gigs wears you out. Playing on high ambition wears you out more.)
• Using drugs. remember kids - it doesn't make you cool!
• Being eaten by alligators, so stay away from those.. (If you got an alligator and let it sniff at someone it will bite YOU!)
• Smoking is so expensive (A couple of million $), so why don't you just quit? (this means cigarettes and peace pipes)
• Being unemployed and homeless.
• Getting shot, if you like to play cops and thieves.

• Drinking alcohol.
• Certain foods like chocolates, oysters, greasy lunches.

Huh? You're suddenly affected by something? In most cases this means, that someone passed on some kind of illness to you. In other cases it's something quite different. Read on to find out more.

A sexually transmitted disease. You can get this from groupies or other players. A player controlled doctor can help you with this.

You get this from being at a show where the volume was cranked. You'll get over it in a few days, unfortunately nothing can be done about it other than waiting. Basically your ears are ringing. To prevent getting it in the future, wear ear plugs. They can be purchased at many places.

Just your ordinary run of the mill disease. You can wait it out, take an herbal remedy for a shorter waiting period, or seek a doctor for help. (Find the Paging all doctors thread in the English General forum or the local doctor thread in the city you're currently in. Do not start a new thread about it.)

No, you won't die just from getting this. No, you won't turn into a zombie. Once a popoyear, zombies emerge and VIPs shoot them. If one bites you, you get this. It acts much like a cold.
Don't get healed as soon as possible. Wait till the Day of the Dead is over, because once healed you can get it again right away.

Women ovulate, it's just one of the things they do. If you're VIP and want to have children, this would be a good time to snuggle.

This is sometimes a result of snuggling with no protection while ovulating. In six weeks, you'll give birth to a child, congrats.

When young boys and girls reach a certain age…

You naughty person you. Your behavior has left something to be desired, and so you've been given this. It will wear off in time. Now would be a good time to contemplate your actions, and review the rules if need be.

This has got to be, by far, the most fun one in the list, at least for those around you. There's no health/mood affect, but your forum posts will certainly be more interesting. Try it.

Had a horoscope recently? Did it tell you not to snuggle and you did anyway? Perhaps you should have listened. This will drop your looks by 2%.

You've been partying on the road haven't you? You should know better than to drink and drive. You'll just have to wait it out.

Finding a teacher is a cheap way to learn new skills, because the only thing it costs you is time (and career mission updates). Some teachers even pay you to teach you.
To find out how it all works read the Master and Apprentice part in the official help. (click ? icon –> Your Character –> Skills)

Check in your city's forum. Most cities also have a link to the relevant thread at their local schools.

Schools are located under the city services section. If the gibberish confuses you, mouseover the links and you'll see the locale type in the mouseover box.
The Popmundo School Directory is at message 254403.1 in the Forum.

Abbreviation: XP. They are what makes your talents better.

Variety, much like the spice of life. If you just do one thing over and over again, you're not guaranteed to get 3XP.

Things known to contribute to exp gain include, but are not limited to:

• Jam sessions
• Playing shows (especially doing a stage event, which you havn't mastered completely yet)
• Finishing a song that turned out well.
• Taking pictures of people on the paparazzi list.
• Healing people
• Putting out a fire.
• As a police or SWAT officer: arrest people
• If you are a mayor: holding a speech on TV.
• If you are a judge: judging.
• (criminal activities (e.g. spraying a tag or stealing))

Unfortunately, your newbie points do run out. I wish I still had mine too. From now on you'll get between 1 and 3 exp once a week, on sunday. You got to work for getting them (read above).

Go to your city hall (It's called the House of Parliament in London!) and speak with the people there. There will be a one time fee of $700, and weekly rent of $55-$275 after that.

Many players suggest not taking on a housing contract in the city you start in as it will cause the loss of the free place at mom's house.

There's actually already a great thread about this located at threadID= 87226.2

Set yourself to hitchhiking in your priorities, and move to the travel route of your choice. You may not be picked up immediately, it may even take a while, but someone will take you sooner or later.

• A photo can be taken of anyone, but if they're not on the paparazzi list, it's just for fun/rp.

• If your photo of someone on the paparazzi list gets published, (best of the day, and better than previous days) then you'll get paid for said photo.

To take a photo of someone, go to interact, and use item: camera

(A tip: if you're taking paparazzi photos, don't do other interactions, the people on the list hate that)

The best camera, as expected, is the most expensive camera, but any one will do.

If you want to take better pictures, get and skill the basic photography skill, you may not tend to notice a difference in photos as you advance, but it's there.

Photos have rankings like everything else, abysmal, sweet, perfect, etc., however they get compressed into stars for paparazzi shots, so one three star photo may be better than another three star photo, or it may be worse.

• First, go to songs, on the right side of your character sheet. There you will have an option to start a new song. You get to name it, etc.

• Also, make sure you set your career mission in your priorities to “compose music”. Now wait.

• Check on it occasionally by going to songs, and see the progress, when one of either the melody or lyrics bars gets to full, click on the other to switch to it. When both are full, you've written the whole thing.

With nothing played, you're going to have a rather silent song, so go into your songs, and click on the name of the one you're working on. There, you'll have the option to add whatever instruments you like. It's best to only add the ones your band plays, however.

Once you've done everything you need to/want to, Click finish next to the name of your song. Once you do, however, it's done, no going back and changing anything.

• Unfortunately for some of you, this is a VIP only feature. It doesn't add anything to the song really though, just something VIPs can do to fill their time. If you are VIP, before you finish the song, click on the name of it. There will be a large text box to add your lyrics to.

• Do NOT copy lyrics from anywhere, only use ones you have written. Copying lyrics from elsewhere is a big no-no and will get you in trouble.

• If you are not VIP, you will still want to get and improve the basic lyrics skill, and you will still want to fill the lyrics bar while composing the song.

• The lyrics progress bar affects the quality of the song, not written lyrics.

I was tempted to write a list of euphemisms here, I did not. Snuggling is the polite way of referring to the action that can cause VIPs to make children.

If you are not skilled in the act, you can not preform it. If you do already have the skill, you'll know it if you have it, either find someone who will teach you, or pick up a copy of Basic Kama Sutra at your local store. But really, which one sounds like more fun?

Are you in a Home/Hotel/Park? If not, you've got to find somewhere a little more conducive to the actions you wish to take.

Check a few other things. Are your relationship bars of a level to do so? Have either/both of you snuggled recently (or used any sexual interactions)? Are either/both of you set to an attitude that impedes snuggling?

You'll need the image to place hosted (put online) somewhere such as photobucket, imageshack, etc.. Then you simply need to add [image=“http://www.yoursite.com/example.jpg”] You can find the Popmundo version of HTML at the HTML page in the official help.

• Does the bank have any money in it at all? Was the bank confiscated?
• There are a number of reasons why this happens. It is usually after the end of year interest is due and the bank runs out of money.
• Try taking it out in smaller amounts. Sometimes that works. I know one instance where the guy had to take the money out in $5 increments.
• Just for future reference, there are city run banks around the Popverse. These banks don't usually offer interest on the accounts and don't do loans so the money is usually safe.
• If you don't want to put your money into city owned banks, make sure that the owner of the bank is a respectable member of the community or ask experienced people where they store their money. Some city forums got threads about banks that can be trusted.
• Don't fall for banks that offer high interest. They often do this to attract account takers, so they can loan high amounts of money.

• Many locales hire way too many workers and waste money that way. Depending on wether the locale is in the company's home city or not or is benefitting from a head office more or less workers are needed.

• Don't hire all employees, that are needed once the locale's perfect, at once.
  • To figure out how many employees you really need, I advise to build up the employee base slowly. Get a few employees and watch the building quality rise. When it rises slowlier, get some more. Don't overdo it!

Quality rises even slowlier once it reaches great, so there's some patience and not tons of workers needed.

• If you want to got the fast and expensive way, compare the workforces of perfect locales in town, that don't profit from a head office. Use the locale as a model, that employs the fewest people (note that there might have quit people when you were comparing).

• The employees page in the help files. Read it, learn it, love it.
  • You find it here: Help > Companies > Employees

Pay attention to the weight and cumulativity of employees. e.g. if you got a restaurant, you only need one bartender, etc.

• Set salaries, don't just offer maximum salaries.
  • If an employee category got declining cumulativity pay the salary according to skill or talent level.

That's because the employee that gets most salary of their category is the one, who's on top of the cumulativity tree. You want that one to be the best of his/her job category in the locale.

• Skilled workers vs day workers (Does)
  • If you got an out of town worker, check on the talent or skill level of the person. If it's beyond the minimum needed to get the job, don't fire them, they are more useful than an unskilled day worker.