On 3/30/2007 7:54 AM, Peter James went clickity clack on the keyboard
and produced this interesting bit of text:

A mule is simply a character whose only function is to hold items that
you want to keep but don't have room for in your playing character.
There's nothing special about it.  You just don't go around playing it.
 However, it is often advantageous to rush a mule through so that it
can gain some of the quests that are nice for other items, such as the
hellforge and the sockets quest from Larzuk.

In single player mode mules require a bit of trickery to get this to
work.  There are some programs out there that allow you to do this in SP
mode.  The most popular seems to be ATMA.  You can get it here:
http://atma.diabloii.net/  ATMA is a pretty nice program for single
player characters.  It does not work with Battle.net characters as the
characters are stored on the bnet servers and not on your hard drive.

If you play in single player mode you can hit Enter while in a game and
type in "/players x" (no quotes) where x is a number from 1 to 8.  This
makes the game think that there are x number of players playing in the
game.  This makes the monsters that much harder to kill, but you get
more experience.  This does not work on bnet; I don't know if it works
in multiplayer modes outside of bnet.  Yes, it is available on the Mac
version as well.

Hi Peter,

The most popular 'muling' program for single player Diablo is ATMA.
Unfortunately, I don't believe it's available for the Mac (there was
apparently a project started a few years back to port ATMA to the Mac,
but I don't think they ever released a program). It's a shame, because
it's hard to imagine playing single player without a way to store up
the good stuff you find, but don't need on the character that finds
it. The only substitute that I'm aware of is to play two computers
networked to transfer to mules you create on the second computer. I've
done this, but it is a pain. ATMA on the PC is much, much better.

Given the situation, I find it much more convenient to play on
BattleNet (not to mention the fun of playing with fellow agd'ers on US
West). The only time I play single player anymore is on long flights
to/from Asia.

Bruce

Thanks for the replies.  It's a pain that there is no Mule for the Mac.  I
don't suppose one will be ported across now that the new Macs come with the
facility to run Windows.  Never mind, maybe I'll win the lottery and then buy
a new Mac.