Jewels, Wings and the Chaos Machine

Every MU Online veteran has a few private rituals. A jewel glinting on the ground in the Dungeon. A held breath over the Chaos Machine. The first time a pair of wings unfolded behind your character. Talk to anyone who played in the 2000s and sooner or later the conversation turns to jewels, because in MU Online they were never just loot. They were stakes. This page looks back at those rituals and sets out, plainly, how the same things work on UnrealMu, a server that recreates the Season 6 Episode 3 feel on the open-source OpenMU software.

UnrealMu is an unofficial, fan-run server and is not affiliated with Webzen. MU Online is a trademark of Webzen. Everything below about our server comes from reading its actual game data and source code. Where we could not check something, we say so.

Why the jewels meant so much

Many veterans remember the sound first: a small bright chime as a jewel hit the ground, and the dash to pick it up before anyone else did. Zen came and went, but a Jewel of Bless or a Jewel of Soul was something you could hold, trade, or save for a gamble you had been working towards for days.

The ritual had a shape. You collected slowly, argued with yourself about whether to spend now or wait, and finally stood in a safe town with a favourite weapon in the window and a jewel in your hand. If you want to stand in that first town again, see remembering Lorencia.

The jewels, and what they do on UnrealMu

We checked the jewel items in our item data and read the code that handles each one. We also compared the live configuration on all three realms (Hard 5x, Classic 100x, Fast 1000x); the numbers below are the same on each.

Jewel of Bless

The gentle one. Applied to an item, it raises the upgrade level by one and always succeeds, up to +6. It will not take an item past +6.

Jewel of Soul

The one with a pulse. It continues the climb one step at a time, up to +9. Each attempt has a 50 per cent chance, and if the item has the Luck option the chance rises by 25 percentage points. What failure costs depends on how high you are: below +7 a failed attempt takes one level off, while from +7 upwards it sends the item all the way back to +0.

Many veterans remember the stretch between +7 and +9 with something close to dread. That feeling is built into the numbers here: the nearer you get, the more there is to lose.

Jewel of Chaos

You do not use this one on an item directly. It is an ingredient for the Chaos Machine, below.

Jewel of Life

The Jewel of Life works on the additional option, the extra bonus some items can carry. In our source code it can add the option or raise it, and a failed attempt removes the option. We give no percentage for it, because the live database stores none; it falls back to a default in the code that we have not tested in play.

Jewels of Creation, Guardian and Harmony also exist in the item data, but the four above are the ones that built the memories.

The Chaos Machine

For many players the Chaos Machine is the most memorable object in the game. You laid items in a grid, pressed the button and waited, and nothing on screen hinted at what it was thinking. On UnrealMu the Chaos Goblin who runs it stands in Noria, at around (180, 103) in our spawn data.

Our database lists each combination: what has to go in, the base success chance, and what happens to every ingredient on success or failure. These are the ones we checked.

The +10 to +15 mixes

These are the famous upgrade combinations, and the part most people remember with a wince.

Mix	What goes in	Base success chance
+10	An item at +9, with 1 Jewel of Chaos, 1 of Bless, 1 of Soul	60 per cent
+11	An item at +10, with 1 Jewel of Chaos, 2 of Bless, 2 of Soul	60 per cent
+12	An item at +11, with 1 Jewel of Chaos, 3 of Bless, 3 of Soul	55 per cent
+13	An item at +12 (recipe checked only for the success chance)	55 per cent
+14 and +15	The next step up each time (recipe checked only for the success chance)	50 per cent

Two further details from the data. The base chance for each of these mixes rises by 25 percentage points if the item carries the Luck option, and the +10 and +11 mixes cost 2,000,000 zen. Most important of all: on failure, the data marks every ingredient as destroyed, including the item you were trying to improve. The original game differed in places, so read this as the rules of UnrealMu, not a claim about any other server.

That is the gamble many veterans remember. A +9 weapon that took a week to earn went into the machine, and you came out with a +10 or with nothing.

Chaos weapons and first wings

Two linked entries sit together in the data. One takes a suitable item of +4 or higher that has an additional option, plus a Jewel of Chaos, and makes a Chaos Dragon Axe, Chaos Nature Bow or Chaos Lightning Staff. The other takes one of those chaos weapons at +4 or higher with its option, plus a Jewel of Chaos, and produces first-level wings: Wings of Elf, Heaven, Satan or Curse.

Their success chance is not a single stored number. The base is zero and the code works the final rate out from what you put in, with a price that scales with it. So we publish no figure for these. We can say that a failed attempt does not simply delete the weapon: the failure rule downgrades it to a random lower level, and it may lose its skill or have its option reduced.

Chasing wings

If the jewels were the heartbeat, the wings were the finish line. Many veterans remember a first pair as the end of one chapter and the start of another: the plain early gear behind you and a visible sign that you had put in real time.

The stages we found in our data:

• First wings: made from a chaos weapon, as above.
• Second wings: a first-level wing (Elf, Heaven, Satan or Curse), one Jewel of Chaos and one Loch's Feather. The success chance is capped at 90 per cent and the mix costs 5,000,000 zen. The capes for Dark Lord and Rage Fighter use a matching entry. The code can add an additional option to the result, which means each pair can come out a little different.
• Third wings: two further stages, each with a lower success cap (60 and 40 per cent) recorded in our data.

Which classes wear which wings is covered in the classes guide.

Upgrade levels: +9, +11 and the long climb

"What are you on?" was a normal question between strangers. A +9 weapon marked you as patient. A +11 meant you had either been lucky or been willing to lose several. On UnrealMu most item definitions allow up to +15, and the whole path looks like this:

1. Jewel of Bless takes an item from +0 to +6, with no risk.
2. Jewel of Soul continues to +9 at 50 per cent a step, sending the item back to +0 if an attempt fails at +7 or above.
3. The Chaos Machine takes over from +9, with the mixes in the table.

Excellent and ancient items

At some point most players stopped looking at the plus sign and started reading the item name. Excellent items, with their extra option lines, and ancient set pieces, whose bonuses grew as you collected more of them, were what many veterans remember wanting most. Our item data includes ancient set definitions. We have not catalogued every set or drop source, so we will not list them here. The monsters and events that feed the item economy are covered in the events guide.

What stays the same on every realm

The three realms change the pace of levelling, not the ritual. Hard 5x is the slow, deliberate one; Classic 100x and Fast 1000x are fresh starts at higher rates. The jewel and Chaos Machine settings above matched on all three when we compared them. The realms and resets guide explains how they differ.

Everything that touches your character is free. Resets, unsticking, clearing PK, allocating or refunding points and resetting the master tree cost nothing, and there is no cash shop. For this page that matters: nobody can buy the +11 sword or the wings you are about to risk. If you have one, you earned it, or you were lucky. When you are ready to try, register once and the same login works in all three realms. You can play in the browser with no download.