Minoseeks

Minoseeks is a sixth mercenary contract and the only one that does not fight. He follows you, picks loot up off bodies you leave behind, and gives it all back when you dismiss him — which kills him, which is the entire point, and which he is thrilled about.

He exists to replace a specific ritual: rolling a minotaur on a second account, parking it with the group, and alt-tabbing over to loot everything. He has to be less fiddly than alt-tabbing or he is not worth having.

Getting one

Contract of Binding: Beast of Burden, from the same place every other mercenary contract comes from: world mobs, 1% of a loot roll and 2% in a hotzone. He is one of six archetypes sharing that band, so roughly one contract in six is a porter. Everything on mercenary contracts about how contracts drop, how mob level caps rank, and how the item behaves in your bags applies to him unchanged.

Double-click to summon. No cooldown — for a porter the summon-and-dismiss cycle is the feature, so the 60-second wait the fighting mercenaries have does not apply.

What he does

• Walks to bodies and empties them. He reaches about 60 units from where you are standing, which is roughly "the fight you are in" — not across a clearing into somebody else's.
• Picks up everything. There is no price filter and there is not going to be one; that would be one more thing to fiddle with. What limits him is how much he can carry.
• Carries your gold too, handed back as a single pile rather than one per body.
• Cannot be hurt by anything. Monsters never choose him as a target. Players cannot injure him — swings land and are absorbed, and you will see the blow reported as a block. Your own area spells cannot catch him either.
• Never fights. He has no attacks and no spells, and he will not defend himself or you.

Getting your loot back

Dismiss him. He dies, and everything he carried is on the ground where he stood.

Use the contract a second time, or dismiss from the pet bar. The contract is not consumed, so summon him again immediately and carry on. Carrying nothing, he leaves no corpse.

The pile lasts an hour — four times a normal death corpse, because a porter's haul can be a whole evening's run and the bad case is dying deep and needing to walk back.

Anyone can loot that pile. Dismissing a full mule in a crowd is a real decision. The single exception: if you disconnect, his haul is held for you alone for ten minutes. Dismissing him deliberately is open to everyone at once, and so is dying with him out — killing you is supposed to be how someone takes your loot.

Capacity, and why it is also a risk

How much he hauls is his strength times three plus his rank — 300 at rank 1, 750 at rank 7. Rank 1 is exactly a 100-strength player, so the worst porter you can find already matches a dedicated mule character, and a better contract is worth farming for the same reason every other contract is.

His own armour and weapon do not count against it. Only the haul does.

Bigger is not strictly better. Capacity is also how much hits the floor when you die, and you should treat a rank 7 porter as a choice rather than an upgrade.

He tells you when he is nearly full, and again when he is full. A full porter simply stops picking things up — he will never destroy or swap out something to make room. He does not chatter otherwise, on purpose.

One per player

Summoning a second porter dismisses the first, which hands back its load. This is deliberate: two mules would let you stage loot indefinitely, and more of him is, in his own words, a disaster.

Rough edges

• His haul does not survive a shard restart. Nothing about a summoned porter is written to the database, so a restart clears his corpse and everything on it. Cash out before you log off for the night.
• His icon and tooltip are an ordinary scroll. Same client limitation as every other custom item — see client changes.
• If you die somewhere he cannot follow, where the haul lands has not been pinned down.
• He does not vendor anything for you, and there is no in-group roll on what he finds. Both were considered and both are waiting on other work.

More on known issues.