Lighthalzen

Lighthalzen sits among canyons and mountains on rough, rocky ground, yet the Rekenber Corporation spent huge sums to build it, and today it is the commercial center of the Republic of Schwarzwald. Teleporting and Fly Wings are banned in town. Besides a Priest's warp memo, you can come by Airship or use the Kafra employee in Juno.

Five hundred years ago the scientist Zenit Zerter Lighthal founded the Lighthal Laboratory in a remote valley. When the Rekenber Corporation took over the lab, it bought every village nearby and built the city of Lighthalzen around it.

• South: the residential district, centered on the famous Rekenber Hotel.
• North: the commercial district, with the airship landing strip, Lighthalzen Bank, trading posts, the Alchemist Guild House and the Rekenber Corporation Headquarters.
• Outskirts: the slums, which grew out of the villages Rekenber bought. Citizens of Lighthalzen are forbidden to go there.

Rekenber is the largest company in Schwarzwald and almost everyone in the city works for it. It developed the Strahlenstein steam engine and the Airship, but its most controversial work is its research into the secrets of life, which created the Guardians, Midgard's first artificial life forms. For security, the company tightly controls movement in the city, and visitors without proper papers are turned away.

Under the city lies the Somatology Laboratory, where Rekenber ran its life experiments. Many players call it the toughest dungeon in the game. Floor 1 was the main research facility with living quarters for scientists; floor 2 was a restricted zone for secret experiments, with cells for test subjects. After an accident the lab seems abandoned and its subjects roam free.

The monsters are copies of player jobs, such as First Class look-alikes on floors 1 and 2. They give a lot of Experience and drop strong gear for their jobs. Floor 2 also holds the MVP Egnigem Cenia, which returns every 2 hours. Entry is unlocked with the Biolabs Entrance Quest.

The third floor was the lab's dump for hazardous waste and the bodies of experiment victims, and their angry spirits are said to haunt it. The monsters mirror six Transcendent classes. They use player skills, but at levels far beyond what players can reach: High Wizard Kathryne's Jupitel Thunder hits 30 times, while a player's hits 12 times.

Each regular monster (for example Cecil Damon) has a mini-boss version named after its class (Sniper Cecil). On top of that, one random MVP version is on the map at any time; it calls in the mini-boss versions of its colleagues and appears again 95 to 150 minutes after it dies. Beating them takes a high-level party.

Floor 4 is the hidden lab of Wolchev, the mad Rekenber scientist behind the human experiments, who had to flee when his creations turned on him. Its monsters mirror the other seven Transcendent classes, such as Stalker Gertie, Champion Chen Lio and Paladin Randel Lawrence. A portal in the bottom-right corner of floor 3 leads here at any time; a shortcut opens after the Biolabs Entrance Quest, the Cursed Spirit Quest, a rumor quest from the NPC by the sewer pipe in the slums, and a private meeting with Wolchev.

Floor 5, also called Nightmare Biolabs or the Tomb of Honor, is a crevice in the slums found by Ohno Tohiro. Its monsters copy the Third Class versions of the Biolab characters, from Rune Knight Seyren Windsor to Sura Chen Lio. Reach the slums through the guard on the east side of town.