Slice of Chaotic Life

The daily life of a celibate middle-aged man.

Archive for November, 2013

Ingress journal: Feet and portals

Posted by Itlandm on November 3, 2013

After I got a “smartwatch”, it keeps me informed of how much I walk each day, among other things. It turns out that I need to walk upward of 15 kilometers a day from portal to portal in order to keep my green empire from decaying. The lowest amount of walking is when I am in Kristiansand, where there are a lot of portals in the Wergeland park, around the cathedral and the town plaza. If I traverse this cluster systematically, I get a truckload of XM, enough to recharge a good number of resonators. Unfortunately there are no other clusters nearby, although there is one in another part of downtown, so the optimal harvesting route includes visiting these two alternately. However, I must usually visit a number of other portals to redeploy, since I simply don’t have enough XM to recharge more than the highest level resonators. Otherwise I would have to walk something like 25 kilometers a day.

I did in fact walk 25 kilometers one day. The next day one of my toes was hurting. I don’t think that is a coincidence. It kept getting worse for a couple days. The first day I walked 10 km, the next 5, and then 15 as it started to improve. Today I’ve walked 18 km, and started feeling the pain after around 15. So I can probably not keep walking 25 km a day, fun as that might be. I am simply not that young anymore.

Make no mistake, the reason I preside over dozens and dozens of portals is not that I am high level – it actually gets harder to maintain portals the higher level they are, because higher level resonators take more XM to recharge – but rather, I can do this because of my dedication. You can get to some portals by car, sure, but most aren’t in a place where you can conveniently stop. So unless you’re dedicated enough to walk the distance, you’ll always be short on XM, and there’s not much you can do about it.

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