The hunt

Roughly every two to three hours of actual playing, something rare turns up near you. It looks like an ordinary mob with a name and a glow, and it is considerably tougher than the thing it resembles. Kill it and that species is recorded in your collection permanently — /trophies.

The clock runs on time spent playing and moving, not time logged in. Standing at a mob farm earns you nothing at all; that is deliberate, and it is why encounters cannot be farmed.

You will be warned

A sound and a line of chat when one appears, then a boss bar once it is close enough to matter. You should never be ambushed by one — but you can absolutely be killed by one if you pick the fight in iron with half a heart.

The trophy is yours to sell

Your collection is written when you make the kill, so selling the trophy afterwards costs you nothing. Sell it, keep it, give it away — the entry stays.

Each one is named <Creature> Trophy and glints, so you can tell it from ordinary loot at a glance. They cannot be placed as blocks. Several are heads, and placing a head would strip everything that makes it a trophy — you would break it back as a plain vanilla one, worth nothing to the dealer. Your collection entry would survive; the item would not.

The black market

/blackmarket, or right-click the dealer at spawn — the wandering trader standing under the Black Market sign. Prices fall as the server sells and recover while nobody does, so the first of a species is worth a great deal and the tenth is worth very little. Hoarding gains you nothing — a stack is priced one at a time against rising supply, exactly as if you had sold them one by one.

There is a daily limit on what the dealer will pay any one person. He is not a bank.

Undiscovered

Species you have never met show only a hint. Nobody will tell you what it is or where it lives — and the first player on the server to bring one down is announced to everyone.