User:Sefet/Aug2009 - Revision history

Sefet at 12:47, 2 September 2009

2009-09-02T12:47:29Z

Sefet at 12:41, 27 August 2009

2009-08-27T12:41:10Z

Sefet at 12:40, 27 August 2009

2009-08-27T12:40:12Z

Sefet at 12:38, 27 August 2009

2009-08-27T12:38:48Z

Sefet at 11:26, 24 August 2009

2009-08-24T11:26:27Z

Sefet at 19:07, 19 August 2009

2009-08-19T19:07:40Z

Sefet at 18:56, 19 August 2009

2009-08-19T18:56:01Z

Sefet at 18:55, 19 August 2009

2009-08-19T18:55:16Z

Sefet: New page: '''08/03/09 Fleece is the word (is the place, is the time, etc...)''' Unsuccessfully tried to grow more thistles using the current void set—maybe in a couple of days. Completed all of ...

2009-08-19T18:54:07Z

New page: '''08/03/09 Fleece is the word (is the place, is the time, etc...)''' Unsuccessfully tried to grow more thistles using the current void set—maybe in a couple of days. Completed all of ...

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← Older revision		Revision as of 12:47, 2 September 2009
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	Once the beacon appears, you’ve got three minutes to get three people (including yourself) to meditate at it to ‘anchor’ it to the physical world for thirty minutes. Each priest who meditated will receive part of a vision of a ritual to perform at the altar, but not the sequence in which it should be performed. Once the three guys figure out what to do and in what order to appease the gods, they perform it and get 1/7th of the way closer to passing the Test. The ritual always involves medium gems and that’s about all I know.		Once the beacon appears, you’ve got three minutes to get three people (including yourself) to meditate at it to ‘anchor’ it to the physical world for thirty minutes. Each priest who meditated will receive part of a vision of a ritual to perform at the altar, but not the sequence in which it should be performed. Once the three guys figure out what to do and in what order to appease the gods, they perform it and get 1/7th of the way closer to passing the Test. The ritual always involves medium gems and that’s about all I know.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/28/09'''
		+
		+	Abbreviated session last night, as I was bone tired and wanted to catch up on some sleep. Dug up a few slabs of OSM and got together a nice trade at the Goods prepared. Unfortunately, there weren’t any Tellers available, so things are tucked away for now for hopefully a trade tonight. If it goes as expected, I should net hundreds of salts and saltpeter, saving me gobs of time to manufacture them.
		+
		+	I ran down to Queen’s Retreat and picked up a new star recipe: Trail of Love. It’s a pretty red, tight comet with a longish tail that isn’t terribly pricey. Translation: nearly everything I’m looking for in a star. We could really use a better diversity in our star selection. By the end of Tale 3, they had 46 stars to pick from in their designs. We have thirteen.
		+
		+	Otherwise I knocked out more saltpeter and stars and threw a few thousand straw at the camels.
		+
		+	Continued my quest for the perfect firework. I now have a few mortars lying around that have nifty ‘effects’ designed in them...swirls, colored explosions, and what have you. Because the materials are interchangeable and not expended until you fire the ‘real deal’, as long as I have an ample supply of gunpowder and stars, I can tinker endlessly and save designs for the cost of ten measly firebricks each.
		+
		+	The real trick is pulling off the “wow” effect. Be it complexity or the volume of stars or something completely unexpected, when the firework goes off and you stare at the screen and say ‘wow’, that’s a good thing. There’s definitely a fine line between “neat!” and “WOW”. I’m still looking for it. I caught a glimpse of it with an explosion I designed to satiate my wife’s desire for ‘more color’ and I think I know now how I can use it to win.
		+
		+	I’ll save that as a surprise for now. :-)



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@@ Line 59: / Line 59: @@
 In time I had accumulated 13 kiloperch and I left an order with Kyline to spend 8kp of it.  I wish I could’ve seen the look on her face when she saw:
-''Sefet: 560 of the following:  Deep Sky Blue''
+:''Sefet: 560 of the following:  Deep Sky Blue''
-''Sefet: 700 of the following:  Feldspar, Lime Green, Sandy Brown, Forest Green, Crimson, carrot, Aquamarine, Dark Red, Blue Violet, Tomato''
+:''Sefet: 700 of the following:  Feldspar, Lime Green, Sandy Brown, Forest Green, Crimson, carrot, Aquamarine, Dark Red, Blue Violet, Tomato''
-''Sefet: 840 of the following: Peru, Light Sky Blue, Light Green, Light Cyan, Dark Turquoise, Pale Green''
+:''Sefet: 840 of the following: Peru, Light Sky Blue, Light Green, Light Cyan, Dark Turquoise, Pale Green''
-''Sefet: If any are out of stock, please apply any overage to bundles of Violet and/or Azure''
+:''Sefet: If any are out of stock, please apply any overage to bundles of Violet and/or Azure''
-''Sefet: Payment will be 8330 perch''
+:''Sefet: Payment will be 8330 perch''
-''Sefet: Thanks :)''
+:''Sefet: Thanks :)''

@@ Line 337: / Line 337: @@
 Made the auto-mining kit for the aluminum mine and installed it.  I’ll check on it this weekend sometime; I’ve got plenty of metals to dissolve in the meantime.
-After meeting up with lilac as planned, I had a variety of wines to try in the alembic.  I popped the first bottle in and, to my surprise, it wouldn’t generate any worm spirits.  I played around with the temperature gauge and discovered it would only make vegetable spirits.  Nuts.  I bottled 40 vegetable spirits of fire, which might be good for something later.  Rather than waste the rest of the wine, which produced gods-knew-what spirits, I trucked over to my winery for some old reliable vap-o-rub.
+After meeting up with lilac as planned, I had a variety of wines to try in the alembic.  I popped the first bottle in and, to my surprise, it wouldn’t generate any worm spirits.  I played around with the temperature gauge and discovered it would only make vegetable spirits.  Nuts.  I bottled 40 vegetable spirits of fire, which might be good for something later.  Rather than waste the rest of the wine, which produced gods-knew-what spirits, I trucked over to my winery for some old reliable Vap-o-rub.
-I had about 10 bottle’s worth of wine in the appropriately-named ‘Alembic Bait’ barrel, so I bottled it and went over to see.  First bottle in, worm spirits.  Ok, I had a starting point.  I blew the test of greed and ruined the purity of the concoction, so I started over.  Twice.  Finally, I discovered I could dump in more booze while it was working and that increased the ‘potency’, which I think is tied into how many spirits you can make at once and may be related to how slowly the temperature fluctuates.  Pouring in three bottles, I was able to obtain a further 10 worm spirits of fire.  Seconds later, I was the proud owner of a ‘’’fully’’’ upgraded acoustics lab.  Muahahaha!
+I had about 10 bottle’s worth of wine in the appropriately-named ‘Alembic Bait’ barrel, so I bottled it and went over to see.  First bottle in, worm spirits.  Ok, I had a starting point.  I blew the test of greed and ruined the purity of the concoction, so I started over.  Twice.  Finally, I discovered I could dump in more booze while it was working and that increased the ‘potency’, which I think is tied into how many spirits you can make at once and may be related to how slowly the temperature fluctuates.  Pouring in three bottles, I was able to obtain a further 10 worm spirits of fire.  Seconds later, I was the proud owner of a '''fully''' upgraded acoustics lab.  Muahahaha!
 In other news, The Test of Beacons was released and it looks like a Test that many will pass eventually.  It works like this:  every Egyptian week the gods seek to grant favors to people who do certain mundane tasks.  This week it could be killing a camel, next week it could be growing flax, etc.  If you perform this task, there’s a chance you might trigger a beacon in the form of a glowing altar nearby within an hour.  Here’s some catches:  you have to be around at least one other person and not near your camp (read: buildings you own) to trigger the beacon.

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:38, 27 August 2009
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	Oh, and I passed the Test of the Retired Pirates—Sefet is the Pirate King!		Oh, and I passed the Test of the Retired Pirates—Sefet is the Pirate King!
		+
		+
		+
		+	'''08/25/09'''
		+
		+	Began my evening journeys visiting the UArts of far and distant Adn, Sinai, and Pyramid Lake to learn new stars for the next firework. Mandisa’s chief complaint with my fireworks is that they need more color diversity. Hopefully, these will add to my options nicely. Once I get a few stars of each made, I’ll play with them to see what they look like. These should include a ‘popper’ (a little cotton ball of a flash. No trail or tail), a white cone, and some type of red, blue, and a yellow. Many take odd metals (magnesium and tungsten?), so it might be a couple of weeks before I have any to fire. I desperately need more acid baths.
		+
		+	Traded at the Goods and got the last gems I needed for my monumental tower of rich soil. I’ll put that up at some point when I feel like enduring a bricking bonanza. Don’t get me wrong—bricks go quick enough, but when you’re making 7k of them? Yeesh. I also bought the last rabbit pelt I needed for the acoustics lab upgrade, as well as a chunk of metals, salts, and glass pipes.
		+
		+	Met with lilac after encouraging her to throw her hat into the ring for a tower hour and gave her a few miscellaneous supplies to let her compete in that evening’s Hour. We enjoyed her Very First Wine (a menthol-banana concoction that makes me wince to think about too much) and bitched about Teppy. Good times.
		+
		+	When Alexis got on, we all discussed the Rabble situation and everyone has reached the ‘acceptance’ stage. We decided to leave things the way they were with the buildings, since we all use the equipment to some degree and almost all of the cornerstones are mine anyway and it doesn’t bother me to repair my own buildings to keep Camp Rabble in a functioning state. The warehouse stuff we’ve opted to treat as a Home Depot with unlimited credit. So if we need something, we’ll yoink it.
		+
		+	I took advantage of that by checking out the quarry options. One OSM quarry was fitted with two winches, so Mandisa and I could effectively hoist some marble. I cooked up some food (my first Masterpiece!) and settled in front of the quarry. We lifted out one piece of marble and the quarry broke. Each quarry has a hidden pre-set random number of pulls that can be made and it looks like we got unlucky. Ah well. Took a little metal home with me and set up one more acid bath to fizz away. They really need to soak a few days to get the best return on the metal over time, so salt generation can be a slow process.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/26/09'''
		+
		+	Engaged myself in the dubiously fun task of building my own OSM quarry, as I wanted to expand the number of acid baths in the ‘Plex from three to six. My wife logged on Mandisa and I ran around her, breaking slate and occassionally asking her to stand in a different spot. It went extremely well and in short order I divined the location of the marble and was the proud owner of a quarry.
		+
		+	Next, the quarry needed gearboxes so I fired up the casting benches and made gears while I worked out the design on the assembly table. All total, the gearboxes cost 6 medium gears and 18 small gears, which I reckon is pretty cheap. Once they were in, it was just a matter of enlisting Mandisa’s aid in working the quarry. When all was said and done, we hauled out four pieces: enough for my acid baths and one to trade to lilac, who will give me wines in return. The wines will be used to fuel the alembic.
		+
		+	My own wines are coming along and the production is increasing. Barreled the last of the Plex grapes (some 533 grapes or so), so everything there is on ‘cruise control’ until I build more vineyards and barrels.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/27/09 We like the stars that go boom!'''
		+
		+	Pyro production is now in high gear. Changed out a couple of the acid baths and made some white comets after gathering a ton of cactus sap. Played around a bit with the design tool for an exceptionally long time and I think I’ve got an interesting start. This one –has- to win the contest so I’m going all out: I figure 600-700 stars and about 20k gunpowder ought to do it. Either that or leave a giant smoking crater where the Sefetplex used to be.
		+
		+	Kept the marble tubs full of dung and by the end of the night I was able to make another 800 or so gunpowder. I’ve even started feeding the camels more than a handful of straw again to get more output from them.
		+
		+	Made the auto-mining kit for the aluminum mine and installed it. I’ll check on it this weekend sometime; I’ve got plenty of metals to dissolve in the meantime.
		+
		+	After meeting up with lilac as planned, I had a variety of wines to try in the alembic. I popped the first bottle in and, to my surprise, it wouldn’t generate any worm spirits. I played around with the temperature gauge and discovered it would only make vegetable spirits. Nuts. I bottled 40 vegetable spirits of fire, which might be good for something later. Rather than waste the rest of the wine, which produced gods-knew-what spirits, I trucked over to my winery for some old reliable vap-o-rub.
		+
		+	I had about 10 bottle’s worth of wine in the appropriately-named ‘Alembic Bait’ barrel, so I bottled it and went over to see. First bottle in, worm spirits. Ok, I had a starting point. I blew the test of greed and ruined the purity of the concoction, so I started over. Twice. Finally, I discovered I could dump in more booze while it was working and that increased the ‘potency’, which I think is tied into how many spirits you can make at once and may be related to how slowly the temperature fluctuates. Pouring in three bottles, I was able to obtain a further 10 worm spirits of fire. Seconds later, I was the proud owner of a ‘’’fully’’’ upgraded acoustics lab. Muahahaha!
		+
		+	In other news, The Test of Beacons was released and it looks like a Test that many will pass eventually. It works like this: every Egyptian week the gods seek to grant favors to people who do certain mundane tasks. This week it could be killing a camel, next week it could be growing flax, etc. If you perform this task, there’s a chance you might trigger a beacon in the form of a glowing altar nearby within an hour. Here’s some catches: you have to be around at least one other person and not near your camp (read: buildings you own) to trigger the beacon.
		+
		+	Once the beacon appears, you’ve got three minutes to get three people (including yourself) to meditate at it to ‘anchor’ it to the physical world for thirty minutes. Each priest who meditated will receive part of a vision of a ritual to perform at the altar, but not the sequence in which it should be performed. Once the three guys figure out what to do and in what order to appease the gods, they perform it and get 1/7th of the way closer to passing the Test. The ritual always involves medium gems and that’s about all I know.



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← Older revision		Revision as of 11:26, 24 August 2009
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	Visited my aluminum mine I bought from Taffer months ago for the first time. This is a mine that would benefit from an auto-winch and I may add that to my ‘to do’ list. For now, I went ahead and fired off a macro that got me much more ore than I would have on my own. I’ll need to run it again tonight for enough ore to rationalize the charcoal spent refining it.		Visited my aluminum mine I bought from Taffer months ago for the first time. This is a mine that would benefit from an auto-winch and I may add that to my ‘to do’ list. For now, I went ahead and fired off a macro that got me much more ore than I would have on my own. I’ll need to run it again tonight for enough ore to rationalize the charcoal spent refining it.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/20/09 Bill me up, Buttercup!'''
		+
		+	Rather horrific night. Log in, staring at the aluminum mine. Despite several attempts to get the macro hitting the right colors, I was unable to get it going well. I’m definitely going to need to come back with a winch kit. I go to warp home and can’t. Mandisa’s account has expired!
		+
		+	A week ago, my debit card info was stolen and had to be cancelled. The new one was to arrive ‘in a week or two’. My one credit card expired at the end of July and I never received a replacement. I ordered a replacement, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Net result? One expired Mandisa. Running back from eastern Meroe is an inconvenience, losing her cornerstones would be bad.
		+
		+	Franticly, I look over the billing options in the game. There’s a spot for credit card information, or you can otherwise select “PayByCash”. Excellent! I input ‘paybycash’ in the credit info and the game tells me I need to go to www.paybycash.com to remit payment. Ok. If PayByCash.com actually had eGenesis as a merchant, that would be the end of the story, but oh, no—things are never that easy. PayByCash didn’t include ATitD or eGenesis in its list of valid payees, so I checked out the eGenesis’ corporate (I use the term loosely) website. Everything there says PayByCash.com or credit card.
		+
		+	Hmm. Maybe I could get a disposable credit card number? Yeah...turns out Paypal only does that with Debit balances you have, but has a ‘credit card MasterCard offering’ that ‘lets you start shopping immediately’. 30 seconds later, I’m approved for an obscene amount of credit I don’t actually need and I find out that they ‘tie the charges to your Paypal account’ until the plastic arrives in the mail. Terrific. So, seeing as how I have a shiny new Mastercard without any numbers (which means I can only make Paypal payments with it—which I don’t need as my bank account ties into it), I can’t do squat. I take the time to remove the old invalid debit card from my paypal account—to have it cancel my ongoing webhosting subscription. This was becoming nightmarish.
		+
		+	Annoyed beyond reproach, I place an in-game billing call, explaining my failure to pass the Test of Figuring Out How to Give Teppy Fifteen Freakin’ Dollars. Some hours later while offline, I receive word back from Teppy that he takes Paypal. Brilliant.
		+
		+	I make the payment and hopefully Mandisa’s account will be reactivated this morning. I’ll straighten out all of the billing info once my replacement cards arrive and cancel the Paypal card as soon as it arrives. I do it sooner, but you apparently can’t register for account information without the numbers on the card itself. Again, brilliant.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/21/09 Thistle while you work'''
		+
		+	Not very much going on in an abbreviated session. Mostly I wanted to verify Mandisa’s account was straightened out (it was) and her cornerstones were still in place (they were). Celebrated by growing flax and starting a fully loaded gin.
		+
		+	I played around with the thistle spreadsheets now that I had the new voids, but couldn’t make anything useful. Instead I wound up growing thistles for the sheepies.
		+
		+	The sheep reproduce amazingly fast in the modern sheep pen. Since it holds up to 50 sheep before they stop breeding, I prune them down to 15 pair and the next day they are back to around maximum capacity again. Although I still have some 33k onions or so, I figured I might as well take advantage of the other prime benefit of the spiffy pens: sheep will also eat thistle bits. Sure they require specific nutrients as well, but they are nowhere near as fussy as silkworms, only requiring two randomly-selected nutrients of average or positive quality. That’s easy!
		+
		+	Shortly, I returned to the camp with 75 thistles and load up the pen. Turns out each thistle becomes 1k ‘bits’ in the pen and you can fill up the entire feed trough with just 50 thistles. I’ll see tonight how quickly the sheep devour them, but it should be ‘cheaper’ than onions.
		+
		+	In other news, this weekend there will be another cooking contest: this one for +10 dexterity recipes made with camel meat. The top prize for chefs is 49 silk cloth, the top eater prize is a light box (a very pretty camp ornament). Amusingly enough, the prize you get for participating is a handful of leather. I don’t stand a chance in hell on this one, but the top 21 in either category gets a new veggie seed: eggplants! This means that by Monday people will have Cooking 6 and 7 (6 requires eggplant and 7 is just burnt barley, malt, and wheat).
		+
		+	If I can figure out a recipe, I may just give it a go—it isn’t like I’m using camel meat for anything anyway.
		+
		+
		+	'''08/24/09 Camel, camel, camel, camel, camel chameleon...'''
		+
		+	Quite a bit of a weekend, so I'll begin a bit beforehand. As noted, Thursday we found out that Saturday would be a Festival Day, honoring the 'camelus dromedarius', aka the common housecamel. Participants were asked to either cook grand camel meat dishes that provided a significant dexterity boost or to wander around sampling the meals cooked by others. Grand prizes would be awarded to the top chefs and gourmands, but it was the third prize that held my interest: eggplant seeds. A new veggie and finally we would be able to attain higher levels of cooking. Not that I really ''got'' cooking, but now was my time to learn how to use the skill. I read the wiki and Arame had posted a MUCH better explanation of how the mechanics behind the skill works and in short order, I learned why I sucked at cooking.
		+
		+	I had gone in assuming that certain foods 'gave' certain bonuses and you could mix and match between existing recipes to come up with new things. Yeah, not so much. Basically, cooking is based on pairing bases with additives that are ‘close’ to the base on a (x,y) chart. Your cooking level determines how many of these 'pairs' you can use in a dish. That's a little over-simplified, but conveys the gist. In no time at all, I was able to work out a recipe that in my test kitchen yielded 6 points over the minimum required for the Festival.
		+
		+	As usual, I took a theme and ran with it. My meal contained everything camel-related I could find: meat, milk, oil, camel's mane mushrooms, and toe. Wait-- scratch the last one. The only thing I was running low on was the mushrooms. AlexisBelle came to the rescue and provided me with enough to make a few more servings. The more servings you make, the more 'diluted' it becomes, lower effects and duration, but the more people you can feed. I hoped that 79 servings would be enough to place in the contest without ruining the meal.
		+
		+	I built a kitchen in my trade hut by the Chariot, rationalizing that people will go a few steps for food, but not five minutes up the road. When the time came, I mixed up my meal and was pleased that it still gave enough of a bump to count towards the Festival! All that remained was heavy promoting and sampling meals around Egypt myself. This I did with enthusiasm, inviting people to celebrate Camel Day in Shabbat Ab. Other people had wines, beers, and rare herbs to lure people in. I relied on showmanship. I also ran around sampling where I could, earning my 49th beer tasting point, courtesy of Yerbouti, granting another permanent perception point.
		+
		+	My participation in the Festival was a stunning success-- I placed in the 'top 21' on both ladders and won a total of six seeds. I gave a couple to Alexis in gratitude and she shortly generated enough eggplants to bury the TikiGuild in a purple pile. I made a few myself, cracked a hundred coconuts, and rummaged up all that I needed for Cooking level 6. Now that I had tasted how cooking works, I wanted it all. Cooking 7 didn't require that much more, just a little cooked barley, wheat, and malt. I had barley and a little wheat. I just needed a bit more wheat. I'd never grown any before-- how bad could it really be?
		+
		+	The answer I found was 'nightmarish'. Wheat plots can be home to up to seven different types of weeds and the only thing you can do is water the bejeezus out of it. Every four seconds a weed will either appear or disappear. You can only harvest when there are no weeds at all present and you must be fast, because once that 4 second window is up, you've got weeds again. In 45 minutes of watering, I successfully harvested 3 beds. I eventually gave up on the other beds. Fortunately, those three I did harvest gave me all of the wheat I needed, about a hundred or so.
		+
		+	After building a grain oven and a malting tray in Fort KbtS, I was in business, happily toasting away the fruits of my labors. A few minutes later, I had achieved Cooking level 7. At some point, I'll see what fantastic dishes I can prepare!
		+
		+	Saturday was busy, aside from the Festival-- a Tower hour came that afternoon and a single Racing Mind tower put Mandisa over the top, earning me a few dozen more marriage points.
		+
		+	Also that day, a new pirate group formed, just a day later than expected. This time I was the captain and it was time to play dirty. Noticing there was only one other pirate online, I build the ceremonial ship and wandered away to refill our aqueduct. By the time it was done, we had four players online. I presented the group with statement that everyone was wanting to advance Principles, but I wanted to give people options to sell their shares for a little silk and gold. No one took the offer, so I divided things up 'evenly'. 111 for each online pirate, nothing for the poor offline people and the lion's share for myself. It was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off and the on-liners approved the split. Unfortunately, even though I had 777 doubloons, the Test was bugged and I didn't get Principles advancement. There was also another interesting bug that lets you assign a negative amount to a pirate as part of the split, but there was no way I was going to 'finalize' a split like that. I reported both to Teppy. We'll see how it goes.
		+
		+	Pilgrims visited my glass shrine for the first time in months, contributing a massive 35 sheet glass. I was stunned, but pleased. Minutes later, disaster befell the group in downtown Shabbat Ab. Apparently one of their group, a newer player, noticed our clinker shrine could be torn down and did so, leaving 435,000 debens of the pollution causing waste on the ground. Hilarious. There was a bit of a hurried, harried effort to rebuild the shrine. Then the long process of reloading the clinker began. I couldn't help as people who have passed Pilgrimage can't tithe, but Mandisa could!
		+
		+	Finished off Saturday night failing to develop a good-looking firework for a pyro contest on Sunday. Instead, I decided to fine-tune my 'Birth of the Tadpoles' pyro, adding another hundred stars I made. It drained all of my explosive resources, including some 2,500 gunpowder but looked half-way decent.
		+
		+	When Sunday came around, I meandered over to the pyro stadium and setup (read: picked a spot to stand on and waited). I really enjoy the little nervousness right before the show. All of the hours of preparation distilled down to a few minutes of fly or die. It was a very heavily attended show, with a dozen participants and over twenty judges. I waited until 7th or so to fire off mine and received a score that was well above the ones to that point. Several entries were disqualified by the judges as frauds and one guy fired too late to count. When all was said and done, I placed third in the contest, putting me in the top 1/3rd of the participants and earning another notch in my belt. All I need now is to place in the 'top 1/4th' (read: win first place) in a contest and I'll have passed Pyro! Time to start building back up the reserves.
		+
		+	Sunday passes came and went. Our Aqueduct passed its third batch of people—everyone who was in ‘my’ group have now passed and I’ll likely be retiring from the guild soon to free up the slot.
		+
		+	Oh, and I passed the Test of the Retired Pirates—Sefet is the Pirate King!
		+


	Back to [[User:Sefet/abitd \| A Blog in the Desert]]		Back to [[User:Sefet/abitd \| A Blog in the Desert]]

@@ Line 142: / Line 142: @@
 Well, first things first.  I needed cable, so I popped open a chest that was housing components for another raeli, now unneeded, and extracted a pinch roller.  After installing it in one of the large distaffs, I could now make cable out of steel wire.  I noted with some dismay that my massive charcoal stockpile has dwindled greatly and I’d need to make a batch before the night was over.  A lot would be required for alloy making and forging.
-It was about this time that I looked at the Goods to see if the had an of the marble in stock and they did.  A single piece costing an obscene 10k ‘points’.  Scrolling through the inventory, I searched for something that could get me that many without draining reserves too badly when I noticed they were now trading in raw silk.  I didn’t have very much left after the raeli tile trading bonanza, but the 57 threads I had left was good for nearly 37k in store credit.  Silk is that expensive.
+It was about this time that I looked at the Goods to see if they had any of the marble in stock and they did.  A single piece costing an obscene 10k ‘points’.  Scrolling through the inventory, I searched for something that could get me that many without draining reserves too badly when I noticed they were now trading in raw silk.  I didn’t have very much left after the raeli tile trading bonanza, but the 57 threads I had left was good for nearly 37k in store credit.  Silk is that expensive.
-Not believing my good fortune, I chatted up Robare and arranged a trade for a couple dozen cuttable gems and the marble and still had 20k left over in credit.  Yeehaw!
+Not believing my good fortune, I chatted up Robare and arranged a trade for a couple dozen cuttable gems and the marble and ''still'' had 20k left over in credit.  Yeehaw!
 I hit the gem cutting table and carved up all the gems I needed with little waste.  I’m pretty good at a few of the basic cuts and the ones I needed looked like 14-sided dice (a tetradecagon!) and were not overly difficult.
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 Ran into Alexis down at Rabble’s camp and gifted hear with enough raw silk to pay for her navigation 5 tuition.  Once I returned to Shabbat Ab, I set aside a like amount for lilac.  Still had some 400-and-change left over.  When the other tank produces, I’ll have enough silk to upgrade the acoustics lab.  More on that some other time.
-Dug around in another iron mine for vast quantities of ore, made a ton of charcoal (all my local sellers are offline or have quit), and fired up the MCB to start manufacturing gears.  I built a small construction site off to the side of Fort KbtS and started loading in the raw materials for an automated sawmill.  The first thing I noticed was that I had forgotten about the pinch rollers.  The project called for four of them, I only had one left on hand and each took a solid chunk of time and iron.  Ah, well.  Fired up the forges and was glad of the extra charcoal.
+Dug around in another iron mine for vast quantities of ore, made a ton of charcoal (all my local sellers are off-line or have quit), and fired up the MCB to start manufacturing gears.  I built a small construction site off to the side of Fort KbtS and started loading in the raw materials for an automated sawmill.  The first thing I noticed was that I had forgotten about the pinch rollers.  The project called for four of them, I only had one left on hand and each took a solid chunk of time and iron.  Ah, well.  Fired up the forges and was glad of the extra charcoal.
-During all of this, a fellow I’d seen around named OZtwo showed up.  (As a side note, I never did ask what happened to OZone.  Wait.  Ozone?  Oztwo could qualify as being an exceptionally clever name.)  He was hanging around Sekhar’s never-used compound by Ft. KbtS for an exceptionally long time, when a nasty suspicion arose in my mind.  I checked Sekhar’s expiration date and my fears were confirmed:  I misremembered the ‘expired’ date for the account and his stuff was available for claiming as of a couple of hours previous.  Confirmed by checking the building and seeing it had a new owner.  Damn it!  I seriously doubted there was anything of value to me in either of the two small chests that comprised the entirity of the compound’s contents, but I wanted that eyesore torn down.
+During all of this, a fellow I’d seen around named OZtwo showed up.  (As a side note, I never did ask what happened to OZone.  Wait.  Ozone?  Oztwo could qualify as being an exceptionally clever name.)  He was hanging around Sekhar’s never-used compound by Ft. KbtS for an exceptionally long time, when a nasty suspicion arose in my mind.  I checked Sekhar’s expiration date and my fears were confirmed:  I misremembered the ‘expired’ date for the account and his stuff was available for claiming as of a couple of hours previous.  Confirmed by checking the building and seeing it had a new owner.  Damn it!  I seriously doubted there was anything of value to me in either of the two small chests that comprised the entirety of the compound’s contents, but I wanted that eyesore torn down.
 I jogged up to OZtwo and requested that, if he wasn’t going to use the structure, to please tear it down.  He confided that it was his plan to and offered it to me.  I politely declined and a moment later, the worthless building that had graced the edge of my camp since December was gone.  Huzzah!
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 The mid-game is finally on me.  With temple done, I feel as though I can truly chillax and do all of the things I wanted to do for the past couple of months.  As usual one thing led to another.
-The silk worms paid off nicely and I gave silk to Alexis and lilac so they could get navigation 5.  With the bulk of the remainder, I upgraded the acoustics lab.  It now only needs 20 rabbit pelts and ‘Worm Spirits of Fire or better’ to be fully upgraded.  I wasn’t going to mess with ‘Worm Spirits’ just yet, but decide to start playing with the acoustics lab anyway.  Fired up a glazier’s bench and made a few fine glass rods that would later become chimes.  I was now ready to play.
+The silk worms paid off nicely and I gave silk to Alexis and lilac as planned.  With the bulk of the remainder, I upgraded the acoustics lab.  It now only needs 20 rabbit pelts and ‘Worm Spirits of Fire or better’ to be fully upgraded.  I wasn’t going to mess with ‘Worm Spirits’ just yet, but decide to start playing with the acoustics lab anyway.  Fired up a glazier’s bench and made a few fine glass rods that would later become chimes.  I was now ready to play.
 Bear in mind, I didn’t bother reading the wiki articles on the lab in advance.  Resultantly, it came as a bit of a surprise when I received not a single note, but a little snippet of a melody, called ‘gliding condor’.  The lab listed the 14 or so upgrades I had already given it as options to mess with the chime.  I poked a couple and random and could hear the melody change, mixing in what seemed like another melody.  After a minute of picking random things (it seems you can tune a chime indefinitely), it gave me a new melody: Gliding Owl, or something like that.  That’s when I decided to look it up.
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 Turns out there’s 99 ‘verbing bird’ combinations (Hovering Finch, Soaring Eagle, etc.) arranged on an 11x9 grid.  As you tune, each tuning option moves you in a certain direction along the grid.  Simple enough right?  Well, each lab’s upgrades is a different ‘direction’ than another, so you have to figure out how your own lab works.  As an added bonus, it isn’t an ‘open’ 11x9 grid:  it’s a maze.  Tune until you  have your desired melody, remove chime.  When you assemble the chime tower, you string melodies together and can even have multiple playing simultaneously.  This will be a challenge.
-After a long while, I determined a few vague directions for some of the upgrades and wanted to get the rest of the upgrades done.  I chatted with a couple of bunny merchants, one of whom was offline, the other out-of-stock.  The going rate for bunnies is 20-25 carrots per, so I went and grew carrots.  3k of them.  This didn’t take as long as it sounds, as I grew at an aqueduct in Stillwater that granted a bonus to carrots and lucked out by growing over the peak of a ‘carrot wave’.  Growing 7 carrot patches at a time, yielding 66-69 carrots per patch made for a happy Sefet.
+After a long while, I determined a few vague directions for some of the upgrades and wanted to get the rest of the upgrades done.  I chatted with a couple of bunny merchants, one of whom was off-line, the other out-of-stock.  The going rate for bunnies is 20-25 carrots per, so I went and grew carrots.  3k of them.  This didn’t take as long as it sounds, as I grew at an aqueduct in Stillwater that granted a bonus to carrots and lucked out by growing over the peak of a ‘carrot wave’.  Growing 7 carrot patches at a time, yielding 66-69 carrots per patch made for a happy Sefet.
 Well, I decided I’d have to try out the alembic at some point and now was as good as any.  Taking the last bottle of my first wine experiments (which I knew was a weak wine of lower quality), I popped it into the alembic after skimming over the wiki article on it.
-The alembic only has a few controls:  more heat, less heat, and a few radio buttons to control the amount of the flow.  Depending on how hot it is when you pop your alcohol in is the type of sprit you get (Worm Spirit of..., Fish Spirit of..., Vegetable Spirit of..., etc)  Once the booze is in, you have do fiddle with the control a little to keep the temperature near a dot on the line to keep the mixture ‘pure’.  This is where the second part of the spirit’s name comes into play.  “...of Fire” is purer than “...of Water” and “...of Gray” is utter sewage.  The longer you keep the temperature where it needs to be, the more quantity sprits you get, up to the maximum allowable by your booze.  Alcohol percentage may have something to do with that.
+The alembic only has a few controls:  more heat, less heat, and a few radio buttons to control the amount of the flow.  Depending on how hot it is when you pop your alcohol in is the type of spirit you get (Worm Spirit of..., Fish Spirit of..., Vegetable Spirit of..., etc)  Once the booze is in, you have do fiddle with the control a little to keep the temperature near a dot on the line to keep the mixture ‘pure’.  This is where the second part of the spirit’s name comes into play.  “...of Fire” is purer than “...of Water” and “...of Gray” is utter sewage.  The longer you keep the temperature where it needs to be, the more quantity spirits you get, up to the maximum allowable by your booze.  Alcohol percentage may have something to do with that.
 My first attempt gave me a handful of Vegetable Spirits of Water.  The acoustics lab rebuffed me, noting it wanted Worm Spirits.  Fine.  I was out of alcohol, but I had some mid-range quality stuff soaking in a barrel I could try!  I bottled it up and threw more grapes of nearly double the quality into a barrel to make up for it and trotted back to the alembic.
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 As anticipated, I grew thistles!  Lots and lots of tasty thistles.  Well, tasty if you’re a silkworm or Eyeore.  There’s a harsh diminishing returns after 1k thistles go into the tank, but I went ahead and grew 1100 anyway and popped them in just hours before the worms hatch.  They’ll still need to mature and take time to spin, so I likely won’t have silk tonight, but by tomorrow I’m hoping for enough for 22 silk cloth and another easy-to-make thistle request.
-Met up with JulianJaynes, seller of things what hop, and aquired a few dozen rabbits.  With some luck and a dexterity bonus, I hope to nail the pelts I need for the acoustics lab.
+Met up with JulianJaynes, seller of things what hop, and acquired a few dozen rabbits.  With some luck and a dexterity bonus, I hope to nail the pelts I need for the acoustics lab.
 Otherwise, a short quiet night, tending the grapes, killing sheep, and refilling the sawmill.

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 It WILL be glorious.
 '''08/04/09  Dream weaver'''
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 Oh—the loom frames I mentioned earlier?  I decided to upgrade my tech a little and add an automatic loom to the ‘Plex.  The requirements weren’t too bad—a few cut gems and a bunch of gears along with the loom frames, some boards, and a few other bits.  In short order, I had another machine humming away happily, cranking out a linen every five minutes.  It’ll do linen and it’ll do canvas, just not both at the same time.  It’s slow, but more effective than relying on me to weave when I remember to.
 '''08/05/09  The powder of love'''
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 Gathered a few hundred clay, but otherwise a quiet night of fishing.
 '''08/06/09  Binging and perching  (Not a song title pun, but I couldn’t resist it)'''
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 Also placed an order with the Shabbaticals for ‘only’ 3k tiles.  Those will cost me a chunk of my remaining silk, but soon I’ll start working out new thistle recipes (or pay Ajars to research them for a % of the silk grown).
 '''08/07/09'''
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 I’ve had a LOT of people play my venery lately and it has received a number of complements.  Makes me somewhat reluctant to tear it down at the end of the month to build Mandisa’s.  I’d leave it up, but I’m ‘’not’’ going to cut another 2 dozen gems for lockboxes when I’ve got a number of perfectly good ones just sitting there.
 '''08/10/09 Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999 (BC)'''
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 Lilac and Alexis, may your temples be glorious.
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 Time to start working on Pyro, I think.
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 Seeing that felt good.
 '''08/13/09'''
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 Once the pinch rollers were done, I quenched the forge and loaded the last of the materials into the construction site.  The sawmill was a beauty to behold and I was glad I had made a couple of extra blades the night before.  Apparently it didn’t come ready to go ‘out of the box’.  I loaded up the hopper after failing to tune it and kicked it into high gear.  When it stops (whenever that is), it’ll break the steel blades, so I’ll try to remember to ask the wife to pop some wood in sometime this morning.  I have no idea how quickly it is processing the wood.  This may be a weekend-only thing.
 '''08/17/09 A-lem-bic, just a little bit.....'''
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 As a final note, when Sunday passes came, I took notice of the Temple winner.  For the first time in seven weeks or so, the score dropped.  It was down to under 57k.  To have passed last week, I didn’t have to add a single tile during the week leading up to it.  No regrets though, not a one.  I got shot down after coming so very close too many times for that.
 '''08/18/09'''
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 Otherwise, a short quiet night, tending the grapes, killing sheep, and refilling the sawmill.
 '''08/19/09'''