Taking matters into her own hands: How a fan became a dev and went on a quest for missing EverQuest 2 furniture

GamesMMOEverQuest 2Taking matters into her own hands: How a fan became a dev and went on a quest for missing EverQuest 2 furnitureWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Daybreak/EQ2 Traders Corner)

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When most people think of EverQuest 2, one of the world’s longest running MMOs, they probably imagine battling dragons and grinding experience. But the game also hosts a group of dedicated builders who use EQ2’s complex, sometimes neglected, crafting systems to construct and decorate gnomish tinkering workshops and whimsicalcabins in snowglobes. For these players, a champion has emerged. Christy ‘Denmum’ Bell, an EverQuest fan turned designer, made it her mission to solve one of the game’s great mysteries: The Unobtainable List.

Back in the late ’90s, Bell and her husband got into the phase 4 beta test for what would become the world’s biggest MMO, EverQuest. As a former 4-H club member and cooking enthusiast, she was excited to try out the game’s crafting system. A self-described “pretty organized” person, Bell started taking notes and posting them to her AOL Hometown website, but there was a problem. You just couldn’t make a sandwich.

“The recipe for sandwiches was bugged,” she told me atFippy Fest, a recent EverQuest 25th anniversary event that took place in San Diego. “It all started with a broken recipe book. The book in game had the recipe wrong, but after some expensive experimentation, I found out that the recipe worked if you put in some spices. That was how the recipe side of the website started—I was finding a couple things in the published recipe books in the game that weren’t right.”

She got to know other crafting enthusiasts—a diverse group of players who preferred tinkering with arrangements to battling monsters—through a gamewide chat channel called Homeshow, where they would share their creations and their lives, transcending their shared interest in EQ2’s crafting to become a true community.

(Image credit: Daybreak Game Company)

Bell’s work put her on the radar of EverQuest 2’s dev team. They approached her through her work at the website for feedback about new crafting ideas and content for expansions. She was active on the test servers, and her character Niami Denmother was a fixture of the community—always ready to help, but just as ready to bop you on the head with a rolling pin if you got feisty. They even approached her to join the team, but due to health concerns she couldn’t make a traditional office job work out.

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Then came the pandemic, and everything changed. With everyone locked down, Daybreak Studios changed their work from home policy. They posted a temporary position working on EverQuest 2, and Bell decided to apply, feeling like the position was made just for her. She got it.

Using her community connections, Bell reached out to the owner ofEQ2furniture.comand put together the master list. “It was a massive housekeeping job to even find them all. We found this list of things that had been created and never put in the game, and I sat there with a guild hall and I summoned every single one of them.”

Some spooky examples of “forgotten furniture” viaEQ2 Traders Corner.(Image credit: Daybreak/EQ2 Traders Corner)

Some spooky examples of “forgotten furniture” via EQ2 Traders Corner.

Some of them were great, some were junk, and some were artifacts of artists new to the process who simply hadn’t deleted their early drafts. The cream of the crop became the Forgotten Furniture series, placed onto the marketplace in-game and finally made available to EverQuest 2’s crafting community. “I got it to the players and that was just a wonderful feeling, to be able to give them something that they’d been asking about for years but the team just didn’t have the time to take care of.”

Some highlights include:

As a full-fledged designer now, Bell continues to advocate for the community that gave her so much support in her time of need. So if you’re ever wandering around in EverQuest 2, munching on some Niami’s Trail Mix and listening to the Homeshow chat channel talk about their latest home decorating extravaganza, know that there’s a friendly halfling with a rolling pin waiting in the wings, thinking of ways to continue making your time in Norrath just that little bit more cozy.

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