Exploring

Exploring is a daily event that allows you to collect cans, cash, and food items. If you are signed up for Side Wars, you can obtain unique food items, special equipment, and foodstamps if you are lucky enough to find them.

Gaining Access

In the City you will find a link to Explore the City. Exploring the city can be done immediately after purchasing a city map for $10, but you won't be able to get your full potential until you complete a couple of things. To obtain food items and cans, you need to obtain your Trolly from beating the Trolly Boy at WalMart.

Exploring Mechanics

Each reset you are given 100 turns to explore the city. For the purposes of exploring the city, a turn is one movement in any of the 8 available directions. Whether you are signed up for Side Wars or not, you will start inside your own sides territory of the city. If you are signed up for Side Wars, you cannot explore another sides territory without being alive, but if you are not signed up, you can explore another sides without problem. Once you have used up your explore turns, you hobo remains at this position for the next reset and you start exploring again from there. The only time your hobo is moved is during the side resets on Monday morning.

On HoboArena, turns are not given on a reset basis. This means you do not gain 100 turns a reset, but instead you gain 3 explore turns every 15 minutes. In addition, on HoboArena you can have a max of 300 explore turns.

Each time that you move into a new space, you will be shown what you find there. The options for what you can find are cash, cans, food, or nothing. You can also find unique equipment and food stamps if you have positive war points and signed up for Side Wars. The exploration area is 100 spaces by 100 spaces. This means that there are 10,000 spaces to explore, but you only have 100 moves to use, so you may not find these unique items very often.

Mini Hobot

The Mini Hobot is a usuable item that will explore the city for you. Its purchasable from the Pawn Shop or City Pawn (dependent on the hobowars version). You activate it from the Exploring page, but only if you have at least 100 explore turns left. When used, it is sent into the city to use 100 of your turns for you; if you have more than 100 turns, you'll have to explore the extras yourself. Mini Hobots ignore food, collect a random amount of cans and cash, and always bring back an Arena Pass. You can buy as many as you want.

Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is the predecessor to the Mini Hobot, as such they function similarly. Both items use exactly 100 explore turns to collect cans and cash for you, however the Nutcracker has the added benefit of improved finds when used with the Shoegazer & Green Noser effects or the Cantastic tattoo. The Nutcracker is limited in availability, only obtainable from White Christmas Presents.

Points for Explore Turns

If you feel you need more explore turns, you can always trade in points to obtain more explore turns. The trade value is 25 explore turns per point. You can do this 10 times a reset, except on HoboArena where the limit is reduced to 4 times a reset.

Cantastic Tattoo

The Cantastic tattoo will increase your can gains from exploring the city. The amount of extra gain you receive is dependent on the status of your tattoo.

Shoegazer Effect

The Shoegazer effect is another way to boost your exploring gains. The effect increases your range of can finding from 1 to 7 cans to a range of 2 to 8 cans.

Green Noser Effect

If you goal is to gain more money instead of cans, you will want the Green Noser effect instead of the Shoegazer effect. The Green Noser effect will increase the amount of money you gain from exploring the city.

Juggernutalicious Effect

Under normal circumstances, you cannot explore unless you have at least 1 explore turn left. The Juggernutalicious bypasses that restriction by letting you continue exploring until you you reach -50 explore turns. There are a few things to note about this effect:

• Having the Juggernutalicious effect multiple times, will not stack. It doesn't give you +50 turns, it just changes the requirement of needing more than 0 turns to move to needing more than -50 turns to move.
• Losing the effect before reaching -50 turns, means you also lose the ability explore with less than 1 explore turn.
• Gaining explore turns while in the negative, basically cancels out those gained turns unless you still have the effect.
  • Example: You reach -50 turns, lose the effect, then exchange a point to gain +25 turns. You will be at -25 turns and unable to explore. If you have the Juggernutalicious effect, then you can once again explore to -50, letting you use the gained +25 turns.

Cans

Cans can be sold for money at the Can Depot amongst other areas. Initially, the cans that you collect may not seem like they are worth much. In the early levels this is true, but if you are diligent about collecting cans and saving them until you absolutely have to sell them, they can be a very nice bonus. Since the price that you can sell your cans at the can depot increases with both your hobo's level and intelligence, the cans that you collect early on in the game are worth many times more later in the game. The only hard part is staying in the routine of collecting cans and only selling them when you must.

• You need a trolly to collect cans and food, but not money.
• There is no limit to the number of cans that you can have at any one time.

You may find 1 to 7 cans exploring normally at a time. Adding special effects such as the Shoegazer effect or Cantastic Tattoo can increase the maximum slightly.

To get a complete list of areas to gain and spend cans, check out the Cans wiki page.

Cash

The cash that you find can easily pay for a full set of KFC Meals early in the game. That is even if you do not find any KFC meals while exploring. This is why you should always go exploring before you buy your meals. Your hobo can find vast sums of money!

Food

There is a wide variety of food that can be found while exploring. When your hobo finds food, he or she immediately puts it into the trolly that is being pushed along. This is assuming that there is room in the trolly. When your trolly is full, you will see a warning about not having enough room to store the new item of food that you found. When this happens, empty out some of the junk in there to collect more food items.

The complete list of food items that can be found here. There is more to be found in the city than there is to be purchased at Walmart. However, not every food item can be found in the city. Typically, only food items of value 10T or less can be found unless it is a unique Side Wars food item. These are listed on the Side Wars wiki page.