Dodo Bird and General Store

There are two new clues about the upcoming island in Poptropica. This isn’t about Great Pumpkin Island, the special Halloween mini-quest that’s coming for the holidays, but for a new main island quest that the Creators have been talking about for a few weeks. We’ve code-named it Dinosaur Island until we learn more. Poptropica hasn’t said it will feature dinosaurs, but we’re really hoping it will.

The outside of a General Store in Poptropica's upcoming island.

This week the Creators gave us two new screenshots. One is of the exterior of a General Store and the second is the interior of a mansion. Inside the mansion is an ornate round window with a stuffed Dodo bird sitting on the window sill. At least it sure looks like a Dodo. The creators don’t say for sure, instead asking the question, “What kind of bird is that, anyway?”

If you’re not familiar with the Dodo, it was a small flightless bird that went extinct in the mid-1600s. It was a very tasty bird to eat and since it couldn’t fly, it was easy to catch. It’s one of the first known examples of humans causing another species to go extinct.

I think this is also a clue for the island. The person living in the mansion must definitely be concerned with extinct animals. Hmmm, what other kinds of species are extinct? Oh, I don’t know…maybe dinosaurs?

Poptropica 3rd Birthday Balloons

Poptropica is celebrating its 3rd birthday this month and to mark the occasion, they’ve put lots of balloons in all of the common rooms. That includes the common areas found on all the Main Street zones in the Poptropica islands and in all the player multiverse rooms. Whenever you enter one, you’ll see a lot of balloons. Click on them to pop each one if you like.

Party time in Poptropica

Better yet, if you spot a balloon with a big number 3 on it, you can pop it to get an ultra-rare prize. The prize is a 3rd birthday costume that features a huge hat with the number 3 coming out of it. You also get a little party noisemaker. The trick to finding the balloon is patience. Just pick a multi-player room and keep entering and exiting until the balloon appears. You can’t miss it: it’s big and blue and has the number 3 on it. My favorite room to use is the Soda Pop place in Early Poptropica because it’s smaller than others and you don’t have to walk around to find the balloon. It’ll either be right there when you enter or you can exit and try again. Keep trying: it took me at least 30 or 40 attempts before it was there.

I found you!

There’s a new page on the main Poptropica site that explains the celebration. Look a the bottom of the page and you’ll see that the “message has been approved by Balloon Boy.” LOL. Maybe the Creators will save him now.

Balloon Boy approves...as long as you don't pop his green balloon.

Inside Steamworks – The Old Vine

I’m continuing this series of shorter walkthrough posts for Potropica Steamworks Island. After reading through the comments on my Poptropica Cheats for Steamworks Island Post and on the Youtube video, a lot of people are saying that they’re having problems finding the old vine in Steamworks. You’ll need the old vine to defeat the plant monster hiding in the sewers beneath the hatch. And of course you’ll need to defeat him to get down to the elevator engine so that you can power it back up.

Finding the old vine is very easy and it’s one of the first things you can do on this quest. You’ll find it in Gear Alley, which is the zone just to the left of the Main Street area where you start. Run left past the Living Quarters building until you see a green steam vent right above street level. Jump up on this to ride it to the roof of this building.

You're going to ride this steam vent to get to the roof.

Once you land on the roof, there’s the old vine sitting on top of it just waiting for you to pick it up and place it in your backpack.

The old vine is up here on the roof.

Once you’ve found Sprocket the robot and obtained the Robot Crab, you’ll enter the hatch and descend into the sewers below. Here’s where you’ll use the old vine to grab the steam pipe and defeat the plant monster blocking your path.

Eat steam, Plant Monster!

First Ten Finishers of Steamworks Announced

The official Poptropica blog revealed the first ten finishers of steamworks island on their blog today. They used to announce them on the official Facebook page but then they closed that page down. I’m glad they started showing the list on the blog! Unfortunately my name’s not up there because like a lot of you I got stuck in some places.

Congratulations to Bronze Monster for finishing Steamworks Island before anyone else! This was a tough island. By the way, the official blog claims that Astro-Knights was the hardest island to beat, but then again that might be because it was written by the Binary Bard (a.k.a. Mordred the villain.) I think he has a point: Astro-Knights was tough to beat and to this day has I think the hardest boss fight of all. But the puzzles and challenges in Steamworks were harder I think.

If you need help, please check out the walkthrough I created yesterday. There are now both video and written versions available. Having trouble? Leave a question in the comments and you’ll get help pretty quickly.

New Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Coming

This week, Greg Heffley, the lead character from Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, has been hanging out on Main Street on all of the islands. Earlier this week if you clicked on him, he would tell you to come back on Thursday to see the cover of the new book. Well it’s Thursday and now you can see it.

Find Greg on Main Street on any of the islands and click on him. A few seconds later, the book cover will appear. It looks like the latest book will be called, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth. Greg also tells you that the book comes out on November 9.

I like the book series but I was hoping that Poptropica would have done something a little more exciting than just have Greg standing around and showing off a book cover.

Greg shows off the cover of his new book in Poptropica.

Greg Heffley on Main Street

There’s a familiar face walking around on Main Street on all the poptropica islands. It’s Greg Heffley, the main character from the Diary of a Wimpy kids books. One of the Poptropica Creators, Jeff Kinney, is also the author of this really popular book series, which was also made into a popular movie earlier this year.

There’s a new book in the series coming out soon and Greg is wandering around in Poptropica to promote it. When you click on him, he tells you to come back on Thursday to see the front cover of the new book. If you haven’t read the series yet, it’s really funny!

Poptropica Pest Control

The Poptropica Creators revealed a few hidden cheats and secrets in their latest blog post on the offfical Poptropica blog this week. They showed how there are some hidden clickable objects in the world that do funny things. We’ve seen a few hidden things before, like when they released the Hypnotic Costume and hid it on one of the buildings in Early Poptropica.

In this post, they show you how you can click on some bugs and stuff in different parts of the game. One example they give is the crab at the very beginning of Time-Tangled Island. When you click on him, he hides in his shell. If you click on him several times, he explodes into tiny pieces. Gross! But he re-appears shortly, so no crabs were harmed in the making of this game.

In Reality TV Island, when you go into Bucky’s room or into the Motel Office, you’ll see tiny cockroaches darting around on the walls. If you click on them, they will get smushed. Yuck.

It's kind of gross, but when you click on the cockroaches in the Reality TV Island motel, they get smushed.

Steamworks Promo Page

The Poptropica Creators posted the official Steamworks Island promotional page, and you can find it here:

http://www.poptropica.com/steamworks_island.html

The only things noteworthy about the page for now are that members will get early access soon and it will become available for everyone to play later this summer. There’s also a short plot teaser, which reads like this:

The silence of empty streets welcomes you. Metal and machines fill the lonely halls, and a growing mystery lurks behind a shroud of steam. Can you uncover what happened to the inhabitants of this ancient island? Gear up for a steam-powered adventure you will never forget!

The look of the images in the promo show vine-covered buildings from ancient times, probably Mayan or Aztec. And the clues in the teaser promo along with the screenshots that the creators have posted show that part of the mystery involves a giant plant monster and that there will be lots of steam-powered machinery involved. And it appears we might even get the chance to pilot a steam-powered mech.

Poptropica Steamworks Mech Pilot Costume

Poptropica Members can get a special new costume when they log in. To get it, you have to log in before July 30 and it will be added automatically to your backpack. It’s a Steamworks Mech Pilot Costume and it is of course here to celebrate the upcoming launch of Poptropica Steamworks Island (the launch date still hasn’t been officially announced yet!) Still, if you’re a paid member, hurry up and visit the came to get this special limited edition costume while it lasts.

The new mech pilot costume features a very cool helmet, goggles, jacket and backpack. If you press the spacebar while wearing the outfit, your goggles will flip up to reveal your eyes.

New Island Sneak Peek

The Poptropica Creators posted another screenshot for an upcoming island on the official poptropica blog this week. They mention that in the new “mysterious mechanical” island we’ll need to use a few gadgets to get past tricky puzzles and wild, wacky monsters. The image name for this screenshot is multiTool.png, so it sounds like we’ll get a cool tool that we can use during the quest.

The Creators also promised that they’ll reveal the name of the island this Friday after several more sneak peeks are revealed throughout the week. CoderKid over at the Poptropica Help Blogpredicts the name is going to be Steamworks Island. That would be a pretty cool name. Unfortunately, CoderKid’s track record of name predictions isn’t perfect: he originally claimed that Skullduggery Island would be called Pirate Trade Island. We’ll have to wait and see this Friday what the name really turns out to be.

The one thing we do know for sure is that the new island will have lots of gadgets, gizmos, and robots. And there will be more screenshots and sneak peeks posted over the next few days, so stay tuned!

Poptropica Cheats for Steamworks Island

The fourteenth island on poptropica will be called Steamworks Island. The Poptropica Creators have dropped a few hints about the new island and the official name of the island was revealed on Friday, July 2. However, they did not reveal the launch dates for the early access or public release of the new island yet.

As with many other island releases on Poptropica, the Creators have been posting some sneak peeks and screenshots on the official Poptropica Blog. So far, we don’t know too much about the new island, except that it will involve lots of machinery. There’s a rusty robot, some kind of giant plant monster and special tools that you’ll use in your inventory.

What do you think? Does this new island look pretty cool? Will it be as big as Skullduggery Island or Astro-Knights Island? Or will it be a simpler one this time around? Jump in to the discussion and leave a comment! Once the island is released, we’ll posts all the cheats and secrets as well as a complete walkthrough and tips for how to beat steamworks island

Here are a few screenshots from the island:

Rusty Robot in Poptropica

The multi-tool for Steamworks Island

The Multi Tool is a collection of Gizmos that you'll use on the new island.

Poptropica Party Favors In Store

There are two brand-new items available in the Poptropica Store for everyone. They are two gold card “powers” that you can use to help celebrate the Fourth of July holiday here in the United States. Both of them have very special animations.

Atom Power

The first one is Atom Power. It makes you glow green and yellow with an atomic look. Little green electrons and protons circle around you. The best part is that when you activate the special power for the card with the space bar, your green glow expands to cover the whole screen and any Poptropicans nearby also turn green and glow. You can get everyone you meet radiated!

Radiate everyone with the Atomic Power in Poptropica

Fireworks

It’s not the Fourth of July without Fireworks and now you can buy this special power in the store. When you put the Fireworks on, your Poptropica character will hold a firecracker in his or her hand. Press the space bar to place it on the ground and set it off. It will shoot into the air and then explode into several different fireworks displays. They look best against a dark night-time background, like on Spy Island or the Pirate Outpost on Skullduggery.

Killer Tips for Trading in Poptropica Skullduggery Island

Once you get your map pieces in Poptropica Skullduggery Island, your next major goal is to earn the mighty warship and assemble your crew so that you can fight Captain Crawfish and then go on to find the secret buried treasure. But getting your warship isn’t easy and it’s very expensive. You’ll need a lot of doubloons to upgrade your ship and hire all of your crewmembers. Fortunately, it won’t take very long at all to earn enough doubloons through trade. I explained this briefly in my Skullduggery Island walkthrough video, but since a lot of people are asking questions in the comments about how to earn doubloons quickly, I thought I’d explain it in a lot more detail here.

The Basics

To earn money through trade, just remember one thing: buy low, sell high. You want to purchase goods from the ports at their lowest possible price and then sell them at different ports at their highest possible price. This gives you the most profit and seriously speeds up the process. Fortunately, the different ports have pretty stable prices and each port has a specific good that you can buy at a very low price and another good that you can sell at a very high price. Even better, the ports line up in a nice circular pattern. Here’s how it works:

Port	Sell this Item	Buy this Item
Bouffant Bay	Silk	Medicine
Parrot Port	Medicine	Spice or Silk
Golden Harbor	Spice or Silk	Grain
Pirate Outpost	Grain	Spice
Dragon Cove	Spice	Silk

So you can start in Bouffant Bay and just keep sailing clockwise in a big circle from port to port. Always buy the maximum amount of the low priced cargo you can at each port and then sell the maximum at the next port. That’s really all there is to it! Here’s a simple diagram that shows the pattern:

Trade in the ports in this order in Poptropica Skullduggery Island to get the highest profits.

Upgrade Your Ship

You’ll start off your trading on your rinky dink raft that the returning villager from Fort Ridley gives to you. You’ll want to trade up to the next ship as soon as you can because this tiny little boat doesn’t carry much cargo. If you’ve got the Cargo Master, then you’ll probably be able to earn enough profits each loop around the ports that you make. Sometimes you’ll need to do two loops. But each time you have enough money for a new ship, stop inside the ship builder’s shopin Dragon Cove and upgrade. The difference in cargo capacity between the different ships is huge, and always sailing the biggest ship you can will lead to the most profits. Here’s what each of the ships cost. Note that the actual cost is a little bit lower because you can trade in your existing ship for a small discount each time.

Ship	Cost	Cargo Space
Jimmy Rigger	3,000	60
Carabelle	9,000	200
Sea Sultan	30,000	600
The Koi	90,000	1,800
Steaming Fury	300,000	5,000
Phoenix Warbird	1,000,000	6,000

Get the Cargo Master Soon

One of the crew members is the Cargo Master. When he’s on board your ship, you can carry 50% more cargo than before and that means much faster profits. You can find him inside Willard’s Warehouse in Bouffant Bay. It only costs 15,000 doubloons to hire him, so hire him early on. It makes sense to hire him right after you upgrade to the Carabelle or Sea Sultan ship.

The Cargo Master is in Willard's Warehouse in Bouffant Bay.