After crawling the forums off and on (mostly on) all morning, I've only come across one topic
here that relates to my problem, but doesn't solve it. Thus far, I've managed to find all the answers I've needed, but now I'm baffled, so here goes:
After tinkering with the emulator and database for about a week, I decided to fire up GeorgeS' item editor and change around some of the newbie equipment. One of the big things that displeased me about EQ was how poorly new characters started out, and I was hoping to revamp it a little. For example, I wanted to add a bow and arrows to a ranger's starting equipment. Anyway, most of the changes I made went smoothly, until I realized I was running out of inventory space. I figured pre-equipping items was the way to go, so...
I consulted the various wiki entries
here about which slots had which 'code' (if you will) and placed the items accordingly in the DB (namely, newbie weapons in the primary hand, food/drink/bandages in the backpack, etc). After committing the changes I fired up my server and logged on. Created a ranger to test things out, and bam... nothing I had placed in the backpack or pre-equipped was there. <It seems that items set to be pre-equipped or in backpacks don't work, at least in my experience thus far.>
I'm curious to know whether this is a known issue, or if I did something wrong along the way... I'm reasonably sure I got the DB entries right, but I'm open to any and all words of wisdom at this point.
(If it helps, I'm running PEQ from CVS (about a week old now), the 992 build of EQEmu, and MySQL 5.0.37.)