User:Sefet/abitd

A Blog in the Desert

A little bit about me. I played Tale 1 from Beta to a few months in. Can't even remember what my character's name was those days. Eventually quit when it got boring as hell. Played Tale 2 only through the 24 hour trial halfway in-- not having access to metals was too much of a stumbling block. Tale 3, I played from startup for a few months in, when a bad marriage choice ended in my camp getting wiped. (And no, I'm not going further on that. What's past is past.) Anyway, back during Tale 3, I started a daily e-mail to a friend of mine who tried the game and liked it a little, just not enough to pay for it. Over time, these e-mails became known as 'The Daily Desert'. I retained the tradition once Tale 4 began. So a lot of the information and mis-information (see below) comes as no surprise to veteran players. Bear in mind my target audience does not actively play.

Anyway, I know a lot of the information in my blog is wrong...now. That's the benefit of hindsight. At the time, most of my choices make perfect mostly logical sense. Also, a disclaimer. I reserve the right to be wrong about people, too. So if you see your name here and it is in less than a positive light... well, don't be a public jackass next time.

I'm not a perfect person, nor do I claim to be. I know this and I will occasionally indulge in petty activities.

And finally, yeah...I know this is long. In June 2009 it was longer than Stephen King's The Shining. Deal with it.

For now I raise my glass to friends and enemies I have known, both present and absent. I could not have done it without you.

-- The Daily Desert – Heralding Sefet's Triumphant Return to Egypt!

12/06/08 - Beginning Anew

After some two and a half years, ATitD 3 is finally done. A new, yet familiar, Egypt beckons... and with that I gleefully started up a new account so I could dive into the Beta for the fourth Tale. The beta will run for a week and then next Saturday, everything gets destroyed and we start the 'live' game fresh. So, for the next week, I'm just going to piddle around and get a feel for things again.

Some things I've noticed: the graphics have improved a little. By that I mean “the game looks a little less like cat ass”. Chests look realistic, the water seems sparklier, the flax beds look very cool, and the graphics engine now supports White People(tm).

That said, I'm not going to list all of the little things I'm doing in game for the next week, because they are so temporary. Instead, consider this to be the “forward” to A Blog in the Desert Two, wherein my spouse tries to grasp my love of flax.

12/07/08 – The search for the perfect campsite.

For me and many others, it is vital to have a campsite that is convenient to schools and universities, have access within reasonable distance to most of the basic gathering stuffs: wood, water, slate, clay, limestone, sand, mud, grass, without being too convenient. By nature, I'm social when society is thrust upon me, but I appreciate a bit of space. In real life I like having a little land between myself and my neighbors and I could never envision living in an apartment building. That extends into the Desert, but in the desert there is nothing to stop a person from deciding to set up shop right next to you. When things start up, no matter where I've selected, unless it is in the middle of BFE (bum f**k Egypt, which now that I think about it, is scathingly apropos), I'm likely to have someone closer than I'd like. So, the Sefetplex is being built a slight clip and a half away from the hub of a particular zone.

I really, really enjoyed Lower Egypt in the last Tale, but was perpetually annoyed at how long it took to get down to central and southern zones for trading. Logically, the best point to set up camp is Karnak, as they will have most advanced technologies first and will be central to the map. The main problem with moving there is that I hate them...a lot for reasons I won't go into at this time, but if you've read my previous blog in the desert, you'll be somewhat sympathetic to my plight.

7 Lakes, now renamed Shabbat Ab, is a definite possibility, as is Upper Egypt (UE). I've marked what I think is a decent starting point in UE out-- it is beside a veritable forest of trees, right by the Nile, with some clay a short clip to the South. Silt patties litter the water's edge and papyrus will be found seconds from my front doorstep. It's far enough away from the Zone center to be viable, but given that I already have a few neighbors to the north, I'm curious to see how the region develops next week. In the meantime, I've run south to Shabbat Ab to see what potential real estate offerings are there. If nothing else, I'd be able to log on to scream, “HEY, SHAB-BAT!” Lou Costello would be proud.

My explorations in Shabbat Ab took me to a campsite superior to my last and it looks like I'll be setting up shop here. I'll finish the Beta in UE, but 7L/SA is where Fort Sefet-on-the-Nile will be constructed.

12/08/08 – The destruction of hated Karnak

Hated Karnak is no more. It should make me feel somewhat happy inside, but instead I just feel a certain hollowness, as I have been eternally denied my revenge. What? Oh, Karnak was renamed to Saqqarah. Saqqarah?! It boasts an entirely too large of a Scrabble score, has an extra Q, but at least it doesn't sound like the name of a third-rate magician.

I've decided to take this Tale at a more relaxed pace. The key to doing this is not following the Path of Architecture, I've decided. I'll still go through the Principles, as this Tale has the same crappy level scheme that they introduced last time 'round, but it's nice knowing I'm not going to drive myself mad trying to spend days gathering resources to build a tower at 3 am. So, this time around sleep and family take a larger part of my life. If I pass a few less Tests as a result, so be it.

Still wondering how the wife will take to it all. She hasn't downloaded the client yet and I'm certainly not going to press. If she chooses to play, I'll help her along with her goals-- she isn't hired labor for the Sefetplex, she's a partner. I just hope she doesn't find Architecture appealing.

I started up a secondary compound where I'm going to go once we start up on Saturday-- the lawn isn't quite as nice as one a short jog to the North, but the resources are better: a lot more clay and lumber within a half-minute's walk. The compound was thrown together just as a 'squatting point' and I've made all of the equipment public accessible for the duration of Beta, for what it's worth.

Interesting side story. Years ago when Tale 1 first came out, I found the game so fascinating, I bought a book on translating ancient Egyptian and discovered the heiros on the chests translate to "Give an offering unto the Stranger”. When I subscribed this time, I finally broke down and sent a message to the dev staff to find out if that was an Easter egg or an accident (most things in game didn't translate to anything at all-- the ideograms seemed to be picked for ascethic reasons). I heard back from the staff who confessed that Teppy, the head developer, was unaware of the translation and it was very likely an inside joke by the first artist they had.

The more you know!

12/15/08 – “3….2….1……GO!” (The first words I read upon logging in as the servers come online)

The tale started on the 13th at noon and was off to a breakneck start. Within an hour and a half, I had passed my citizenship test, the tutorial, and was on my way jogging to my chosen campsite. By 4:30pm, I had built my compound, expanded it to a size 16 and passed the Initiation into Architecture.

Later in the evening, I logged back in, built a few things for the compound to make it feel ‘homey’: a couple of distaffs, a flax combs, some kilns, and some chests. Very productive evening.

The following day was mostly spent working on Initiations: passed Body and Leadership as they became unlocked.

Art and Music was… much harder than it could’ve been, but only because of me not reading the instructions. The Art Init was changed to “Build a sculpture, add a few things to it and EITHER tear it down or have 21 people approve of it.” I totally missed the ‘tear it down’ part. So I ran to a popular spot and discovered to my horror I was 5 rope and 50 boards shy, ran back to the compound after doing the Body Init (since I was in the neighborhood), wove more rope, ran back to the center of our region, and spent the better part of an hour trying to make a grass guy lying on the ground, feet propped up, looking at the sky.

The original ‘concept’ for my piece was “Waiting for the grass to dry”. After screwing with it for a half hour, it became ‘Amateur Astronomer’ and another 15 minutes left me with a grass stick figure looking like he was laughing his butt off on the ground. I figured ‘What the Hell’, and left it like that, entitled the piece “ROFLMAO” and went on with my day. An hour after that, I noticed I could’ve just ripped the damn thing down and passed. My stubbornness kicked in and I decided after all that work, I –was- going to get 21 approvals. By the time I logged for the night, it had garnered 18 favorable votes.

The Body Init was scarily easy: click on 35 different plant types in 20 minutes and turn your ‘log’ in to the University/school you started from. I simply followed green areas on my map, running to lakes, encircling them and finished with 10 minutes to spare.

Leadership took even less time: once it was unlocked, a horde of people ran to the school to accept the test, then we all met up for a quick signature party. In short order, we had a mass of people passing in a veritable lightning storm at the University.

A couple of nice unexpected things: got a couple of papyrus from a kind soul planting by my house. Not that I really need any of it yet, but it’s nice to have options. The best surprise came from my first ‘let’s go Downtown’ run, when I stumbled over a group of people digging a hole for rocks. I borrowed a shovel and got to work. After a while, the resources were divvied up and I wound up with a couple of medium stones and 15 or so cuttable stones. These will come in handy later this week—stay tuned.

It will really help when I’m able to get friends into a Guild, so I don’t have to worry about setting very vulnerable items as ‘public use’, so I devoted my entire stock of canvas to taking us within two units of unlocking the Guild Construction technology. It’s been unlocked now, so tonight I shall get a guildhall built.

Current short term goals: Learn guildhall construction, build guild Claim my rights as an Initiate of Art and Music Finish my project boxes for a Dromedary Pen and Sheep Pen Make a lot of straw to lure the camels I’ll be competing for.

Week Goals: Get a camel or a pair of sheep Get a pottery wheel (or 5) Unlock offline onion harvesting (only 4 zillion more onions to grow manually!)

Ah—almost forgot: got to compete in a resource gathering contest: The Heptathlon. Basically, be among the top gatherers of slate, wood, veggies, grass, fish, silt, and flax in 30 minutes. Apparently my score was just beneath the cutoff for grand prize winners, (The cutoff was “190 or 193”, per the Pharaoh…my score was 190) but I did get a little extra canvas for my trouble, defraying (if you’ll pardon the expression) partially my contributions to unlock Guild Construction.

12/16/08 – I ran so far away….

With eager anticipation like a kid at Christmas, I logged in to receive confirmation that enough people had approved of my sculpture. Grabbing some travelling supplies from my chest, I began hiking south to the Town Square. I claimed my rights as an Initiate of Art and Music and set to exploring. Shabbat Ab is coming along nicely and I noted with a gleam in my eye there’s now a rock saw and a good half dozen pottery wheels for public use. This pleases Sefet. I made a mental note that I’d have to return with clay and rocks for processing.

Shabbat Ab still had not unlocked Animal Husbandry, so I decided to run down to our southern neighbor, Saqqarah (formerly hated Karnak). I’ve grown to really appreciate the run speed boost in this Telling. It was still a horribly long run, but about half as long as it could have been. Stopped by their University of Worship and was rewarded with a bit more than I expected: not only did I get Animal Husbandry, but I also learned Agriculture and was given 4 carrot seeds. (Carrots will eventually feed rabbits, which will feed snakes, which produce venom, which…). On the way back home, I picked up Dowsing from our own University of SomethingorAnother and learned Project Management from the School of Harmony just south of the Sefetplex. Project Management allows the construction of construction sites, needed for outdoor buildings like the animal pens.

Returning home, I noticed the time was (in-game) around 10:30. Camels come at midnight to the Pen to the one in the area with the most straw. In some warped fashion, this puts camels in the same league as The Great Pumpkin of Peanuts’ fame. Like a demon, I hastily constructed the dromedary pen. They require sand, so it got built on the only strip of sand in my immediate area… on the water’s edge. At least the camels will have a steady supply of fresh water. I began stuffing the pen with tasty straw as a smirk formed in my mind. Few people in my region possess the knowledge to create such a pen! Sefet shall soon have a camel!

By the toll of the witching hour, I had some 700+ straw tucked away. No camels. I checked the pen and they had been nibbling at the straw, but none came to stay. In annoyance, I ask the region how much the winner spent for his camel. “We just spent about 9000” was the answer. My jaw hit the ground so hard, it would’ve spooked the non-existent camels.

On to plan B: if I can’t have a camel….perhaps Sefet can have sheep? Worked the looms and flax fields to get more canvas for a sheep pen and built it behind the shade of trees. I like my virtual animals to live in virtual comfort.

I built the guild hall for “Flaxation Without Representation” beside the pens and was pleased with the appearance. It can hold three members presently and can be expanded in the unlikely event more friends join up and play.

With my buildings constructed, I craved sheep. Putting out a call to buy one, I had two respondents. A quick haggling session later, I settled on a male sheep hand-delivered from Saqqarah. The price the traveler asked was so low, I raised it just so I’d feel as though I wasn’t robbing him. So for Sefet, 2 canvas, 40 flax, 10 papyrus equaled 1 sheep. The sheep looked happy in the pen, so I dumped a handful of onions with him and jogged off to the School of Architecture and got a mate for him, as part of my pre-order reward.

It was about this time, the Developers chatted globally that they had received calls from stunned/confused/outraged players that “game mechanics had changed from the last Telling” and they wanted to set the record straight: animals will die if you don’t feed them. The last two Tales, they didn’t and that was a bug they fixed. Crap. Starving animals was part of my long-term strategy.

Ok—I had sheep, now I needed onions. A lot of them. To grow the onions, I needed water. To carry water I needed jugs— and ran to the public pottery wheels I spied earlier! In return for the use of the wheels and saw, I made a few dozen jugs for the public, found a free Dowsing Rod (more on this tomorrow), and made my way back to the camp.

I then grew 500 or so onions…enough to keep the sheep busy for a while and unlock ‘offline onion harvesting.’ As long as I keep the sheep to a reasonable number, I shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping them fed and happy.

I would call it a very good day in the desert.

12/17/08 – No onions for Sefet!

I log on in gleeful anticipation—any sheepies born yet? Answer: no. Ah, well….at least I’d have plenty of onions to top off the pens, I thought. It was then that I noticed no onions in my inventory and a proliferation of grass. Although I had unlocked offline onion harvesting the previous night, I had forgotten to enable it! The sheep were just going to have to make do with their current ton of onions.

I took a quick assessment of what was needed at the ‘Plex (nothing) and what was wanted (everything) and decided to meet in the middle. The only really useful things I can build right now requires precious, precious leather, so instead I set myself to gathering resources for some upcoming projects: the Obelisk, about 16 beehives (we may have apiary technology in a few days), and a fire pit. I figured additionally that since fire pits will be available the next day, some limestone would be a good investment. It will be processed into lime when it comes time to make glass, so a little bit now certainly wouldn’t hurt.

To get the limestone, I’d need a flint hammer and a few chisels. Chisels break after a random number of uses… the hammer is eternal. I sifted through a ton of clay and gathered enough flint for a half dozen chisels. Taking a few odds and ends with me, I meander down to the local limestone patch… a good ten minute run away. I figured 100 limestone should do it. The first chisel shattered on the first pull. The second lasted another three. I began to grow worried, as there didn’t seem to be a handy clay supply nearby. Fortunately, the next lasted 90-something pulls and I finished with three chisels to spare. Along the way I also picked up 28 soda (this will make soda glass later).

Gathering limestone is fairly unexciting. Click, wait a while, click again. There was a small pool of water nearby with tons of sand beside it. Since I was still carrying my onion seeds, I passed the time and grew a couple hundred more veggies for “the flock”.

Nearly full, I start loping back to camp… and come across a small random herd of male sheep! Picking one up left me seriously overburdened and left me with a very painful choice. In the end I wound up having to leave every onion (save four) I had grown on the ground to carry off my sheep at the limits of my encumbrance.

Returning to the pens, I dropped off the sheep and noted there were still no babies. I mourned the loss of the onions, but didn’t feel compelled to grow more as the pen was still well-stocked.

I was mildly surprised to find my camp was overrun by a number of fishermen, who spent a couple of hours gathering Tilapia on the banks of the Nile and Lake Sefet (the tiny pond by the Guild Hall).

The rest of the evening was spent gathering resources: slate, wood, firebricks, and bricks (I tried very hard not to tap the camel reserve). I built a large chest (holds 5k resources) I ended with enough for the firepot, a few hundred wood, 8 or so linen , and close to a thousand bricks in reserve.

And a bright spot: just before I called it a night, another female sheep was born, yielding two breeding pair.

12/18/08 – I didn’t start the fire

Controlled Burn came off timer, but I wasn’t in a rush to get it. I had a great deal of flaxxing to do at home first, because I’m going to need a lot linen soon. Beehives will need one piece each and the Obelisk, when I get to it, will require a great need, based on how large it will be. Last Tale, my Obelisk was 75 cubits tall and it ran up a cost of 71 linen.

Here’s the scaled costs, based on a calculator I found online for last Tale:

Size in Cubits 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Boards 240 400 600 840 1120 1440 1.8k Bricks 2.4k 4k 6k 8.4k 11.2k 14.4k 18k Ash 19 34 52 75 101 132 166 Linen 15 24 35 48 63 80 99 Beeswax 51 88 135 192 259 336 423 Cactus Sap 39 56 75 96 119 144 171 Small Sapphires 4 7 10 13 16 20 25

I’m preparing for a similar size this time and if it can be smaller, I’m very ok with spending less resources to pass a Test and linen stays useful regardless.

Flaxxing itself got easier, as I now have a ready supply of Nile Green seeds. They require a little water to grow in addition to the weeding, but they have double the yield of Old Egyptian. One seed = two flax. Yay! My production bottleneck comes in the flax combs, which are a bit of a nuisance with the constant breaking.

All total, I knocked out 25 linen last night, which will be more than enough for the Field of Bees (8 hives will really be enough for now. I’ll expand to 12 eventually, but there’s no rush…I tended to run into an overabundance of wax last time. The wax will mostly be used for casting projects later.

Urbi showed up unexpectedly to flax a little, so I gave her better seeds and about a dozen jugs to help her along. This cut back on my jug supply, plus I want to give more to Kotas, so I decided to take a little clay down to the public wheels, along with a couple of cuttable stones to make into pulleys at the rock saw.

Along the way I came across an amusing lolcat statue (“I can has Egyptian cat food?”) of a kitty in front of a tadpole ‘fish’ bowl and a couple of Empty Hand Puzzles. I’ll go into detail with the Puzzles later, but for now suffice it to say Initiation into Thought has been unlocked.

I made a few dozen jugs and a single pulley—it turns out pulleys take ten minutes each to cut and I didn’t want to hang out that long. I’m just going to have to build a rock saw once leather and oil start rolling in. The sheep are holding steady at 5 total. (I had started to wonder why there weren’t breeding as quickly as I hoped and then I realized they’re wearing sheepskins.)

I wanted to add something to the ‘Plex besides the third distaff so I went ahead and picked up Controlled Burn for the firepot and started the Inits to both Thought and Harmony.

Harmony requires meeting people-- not just any people, but people who have passed Tests in previous Tales and Initiations in the current one. It should be easy to pass the next time there’s a big dig or something. The only ‘hitch’ with it is that it requires level 4 to start, so I’ll have to likely wait until others have passed the other Inits.

Finally made my way back to the ‘Plex and discovered a new neighbor had built next to the bottle trees, near Ft. Kotas-by-the-Sea. He seems friendly enough, so we’ll see how that goes.

I keep forgetting to pick up fishing while I’m out and I also need to trade for leek seeds. I’ve got the firepot built, but nothing to burn on it for ash. It’ll need leeks, dried flax or dried papyrus. I’ll have to check the wiki for Tale 3 and see which gives the best return for time invested. It’s been too long since I stoked a pit myself. End result: I’ve got a fire pit, but I won’t light it for a day or two.

12/19/08 – Let’s Hear it for the Bees

Wasn’t honestly expecting to get very much accomplished, due to other commitments outside of Egypt, but providence smiled at Sefet, even if the camel gods do not.

A neighbor, Trillian, gifted me with thirty handfuls of papyrus seeds. I thanked her and blessed her house and sheep. I’ll grow some papy this weekend most likely—it makes for lovely ash and I could also really, really use a basket of woven papyrus for faster grass harvesting.

Mandisa, my wonderful wife IRL, has been diligently gathering basic resources and dumping them in a nearby chest as the minutes tick down on her trial account. She seems to like the gathering aspects (mmmmm….slate!) and is always happy to count sheep midday, but doesn’t think much of the Tests. I should know in another week or so if I’m going to be starting her up on a ‘full’ account. We shall see.

I noted with some pleasure a dig was underway very nearby…just a couple minutes from the ‘Plex, so I took the opportunity to join in and meet a few people

It turned out that it was a very good idea. In short order I met a couple of people who helped me along the Harmony Initiation. Aside from meeting initiates of 6 and Worship—neither of which are possible yet—all I needed to do is meet a Granddaughter of an Oracle, and I heard that near the Chariot Stop lived one named Shebi (not to be confused with a ‘sheepie’, which gives more leather) I’d go to visit later.

The dig continued and lessons began! Some who had travelled far to the south knew Beekeeping and were willing to share the knowledge. Four lessons and 15 minutes later, I could construct apiaries.

When the dig concluded, I was rewarded with ten cuttable stones and another medium stone. I now presumably have enough for a forge, once that technology is researched.

Back home, I grab nine linen and construct the Field of Bees. Well, placed nine apiaries in a 3x3 grid at any rate. They’ll need to be checked once a day and it’ll be likely three days or so before they start producing wax and honey.

Wove a few linen until I ran out of thread and flax. I’m going to seriously need to flax it up for the next few days to get the linen stock up. I want to be as prepared as possible once Obelisks come online, which I’ll predict will be next Friday. In theory, IF I’m one of the first two people in a zone that builds an obelisk, I can do it without the need for any sapphires, but that’s one hell of a long shot. It’d require being at the University as soon as it unlocks (wherever that is) and Expedition Travel somewhere two zones away. That’s…doable. It also assumes the materials required to construct an obelisk hasn’t changed since last time. That’s a lot of assumptions, really. Fortunately I should have a week to plan.

I decided for fun I’d show Mandisa what a firepit in action looks like: whittled up some pointy sticks for stoking and tinder, dumped my spare dried flax for some ash and a metric ton of wood on it, bent down, tinder in hand… and realized I didn’t know how to light it. Ironically, I managed to do THE SAME THING last Telling. I was going to need Firebuilding.

Checking the map, there was a School of Leadership I could learn the skill from to the north in Stillwater across the Nile from their Uworship (read: Seed Depot). As I ran, I wondered what exactly leadership has do to with setting things on fire. Aside from books and witches, I couldn’t really think of anything else leaders have tried to light up. Cities, maybe? Serendipitously, as I ran I passed a random person ran up while I had my map out. She introduced herself as a granddaughter of an Oracle, putting me that much closer to passing the Initiation into Harmony

Doused along the way, but still no traces of Iron or Copper. Got cabbage seeds from Stillwater’s Uworship, learned firebuilding, and headed back home. It was really too late to get a fire going, so I’ll put it off until tomorrow.

Given how slowly my sheep are reproducing, I’m going to need a second pen to keep the leather supplies steady once I start culling. I’ll make that my highest priority and then construct a charcoal oven. Historically, charcoal makes a damn fine currency for trading: everyone needs it, it’s very portable, and I’m good at making it.

I only hope we get tech for the ovens soon.

12/29/08 Christmas in Egypt or “‘Talkin’ ‘bout my Initiations’”

A bit of time since the last update, I’m afraid. Too busy playing in the Giant Sandbox to write about it. Quite a lot happened in the past ten days over my vacation, so I’ll kind of sum up and expound later on key interest points.

Technology

We had quite the industrial boom with a new tech being unlocked nearly every day: horticulture, basic charcoal production, mining, forging, blacksmithing, and possibly one other I’m forgetting. What this gives us are: mines and ore, charcoal, refinement of ore into metals, simple metal tools and beloved nails. Most importantly, possibly, Chariot Repair was made available and many of the Chariot routes have been repaired, allowing much fast travel between the regions!

Life around the ‘Plex: Mining

The ‘Plex has been buzzing with activity…and not just from the fully operational apiaries. With the advent of metal tech, leather from the three sheep pens first went to building mines.

I successfully found a couple of veins, but my first location was ‘jumped’ by Ovid. I wasn’t too resentful at the time, as he simply had the leather to build at the time and I did not. It was a tin mine, which is rarer than iron and copper, but he gave me some ore in return. (He also helped out with several other things, so I’m completely happy with the arrangement.) Over the course of several days, enough leather was generated and enough pulleys made to allow three mines to be built, fairly closely: two iron and one copper. As a bonus, one of the iron mines also produces rubies.

Life around the ‘Plex: Toys!

Fun new ‘toys’ have been built around the Compound, all of which have been ‘Guilded’, so you can play with them without having to worry about building your own:

Kitchen. Grind up cabbages and carrots (for juices) or seeds (for oil) Charcoal Oven: Convert large quantities of wood into charcoal, 100 at a go. Compression Furnace: 484 Ore + 20 charcoal + 20 minutes = 15 metal Bullet Furnace: 50 Ore + 5 charcoal + 5 minutes = 1 metal (not very practical now that we have the Compression one, but I just haven’t torn it down yet) Rocksaw: fashions cuttable stones into cut stones and pulleys. Mason’s Bench: Cuts medium stones into fly stones and crucibles. Tub: Although you –could- rot flax in it, it really is used for rotting dung into saltpeter, or evaporating sulphurous water into sulphur. Student’s Forge/Master’s Forge: allows various metals to be made into tools, make nails. Hackling Rake: Finally, a flax comb that lasts 90+ uses, instead of 5. Hand Loom: My crowning achievement. A loom that never wastes twine in ‘breakage’.

--I also have a scythe and papyrus basket to make grass picking more productive.

To accommodate some of the new structures, I’ve increased the size of the Compound to 30 squares. To my delight, I found we can change the floor color at no cost.

Tonight advanced brick rack technology comes off timer and hopefully soon, we’ll have casing technology. That will allow us to make anvils and the wonderful tools that make harvesting less of a pain: better axes, shovels, and scythes.

Obelisk Drama

Test of the Obelisk came online and we all queued up to build our obelisks…there was a major change this Tale. Previously, the Obelisk had to be the tallest in your region and stand for an hour unmolested. This time they upped the time factor to about two and a half days. This caused a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. When it came down to it, Shabbat Ab decided to form a queue starting at 8 cubits (the minimum) and people signed up in order 1 additional cubit at a time and we pretty much had to trust there’d be no asses.

Didn’t work out so good. Our ‘queue-jumper’ was a French girl named ‘chris35’. I have strikingly little love for people with numbers in their name to begin with, but the day after the test went online, she dropped down a 15 cubit obelisk and responded to critics by saying ‘no easy test passes’. According to the queue, the next person with resources available to place was me and by an amusing coincidence, my obelisk was slated to be a 16 cubit. The question then became: do I let chris’ work stand or top it and add fuel to the fire? I topped it with my 16 about 3 hours after she built hers. (The only bright spot was that my calculator was for a different kind of obelisk! This one required no gems or sap.)

This, of course, freaked out everyone. People logging on over the next day saw the queue had jumped from 8 to 16 and ran to see who had ‘broken the public trust’. In a proactive measure, I built a sign next to my obelisk to explain what had happened. The region accepted this…mostly. When my obelisk had three hours left to go, the nefarious chris35 again overbuilt…this time to 25 cubits. The public freaked and formed a lynch mob. I took matters in stride publicly, but was disheartened. Chris35, tore down her obelisk to appease the mob, but it was too late…the game demanded the next obelisk be 26 cubits high at the least.

The next few hours passed and no obelisk was constructed. The amount of linen required surpassed what anyone had stockpiled. I was able to disassemble my obelisk at no material loss, but it left me around 20 linen shy. Trillian, who was next in line after me, was also disillusioned and offered to lend me 15 she had stockpiled. I decided ‘to hell with it all’ and ground out the other linen and thousand bricks remaining. My 26 cubit obelisk went up by Lake Sefet-by-the-Nile and shadeking summed up the community’s sentiment as follows: “Sefet rebuilt? Good for him!”

On Christmas Day, just past noon, I became the first person to pass a Test in Shabbat Ab and was decreed a Student of Architecture. Yay!

‘Talkin’ ‘bout my Initiations’

Thought –

Thought’s Initiation can be passed one of two ways: beating three of the hardest Empty Hand Puzzles in Egypt OR by building one of your own and having 7 people beat it and judge it as ‘good’ or better. I originally wanted to take the easy way out and just play the games, but found out to my dismay only ONE puzzle was being ‘passed’ as worthy every week. So, I built my own and was rather glad I did. These can actually be fun little puzzles, if they are designed well. I built and designed what I thought was a fairly challenging puzzle away from town over by where we hold digs.

While I was down by the chariot stop, I played and very quickly beat a dozen or so puzzles that only took 3-5 moves to solve and weren’t challenging…at all. I then became worried that I made mine too hard. It won’t get votes if it can’t be beaten, so I built a sign by it, requesting players and referring them to the solution written on another sign by the Sefetplex, if they were curious. In the end, within 3 days I had achieved 6 votes and bribed the head of the local research guild with 1k firebricks to give me the last vote needed.

Over the days I’ve received a number of complements on the puzzle noting that it is challenging and ‘definitely not a beginner’s level puzzle’. I’m quite pleased. It will never pass as one of the best in Egypt, but it got me what I wanted.

Worship / Harmony-

Someone finally discovered diamonds up in Adn and gave a few to the people to share around to participate in Initiation into Worship. Once a few people passed Worship, it became easy to finish Harmony. I ran into an Initiate of Six at a Chariot Stop, then met an Initiate of Worship about a minute later. Zap!

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I was able to undertake the Worship Initiation myself and, as always, it was much more pain that I was expecting. My partner was the lovely Mandisa and both small diamond and camel milk was provided by Ovid, with the diamond promised to be returned that evening.

I got back to camp to check over the supplies I’d need…beetle…check. Milk, diamond…check. Tuition for a new skill to learn….check. Grilled fish….crap. I’d no fish left. Hastily threw together a fire in the pit and let it cook away while I checked online to see if I’d need flint or what to light the public ceremonial torch and discovered that torches burn away after one use this Tale and thus, there were no public torches.

I’d need Ritual Construction in order to build a torch…and that required…a couple hundred firebricks (of which I had none), a hundred oil (of which I had tons), and ten…linen. Crap. Spent the whole of the next hour flaxxing my heart out to get everything done by ‘go time’. Well, at least Ritual Item Construction would count as my ‘skill learned’. Ran Mandisa and myself down to the altar and waited til Marie was ready.

The Ritual itself went smooth as silk, with me running around like an idiot and Marie cutting and pasting the intonations to the seven gods and goddesses. With well over 15 minutes to spare, we both zapped. Mandisa is now an Initiate of Six, with Thought left to go. (She passed Art with a Christmas Tree sculpture that got its last vote on Christmas Day and Architecture with a compound I built as her a little north from the ‘Plex where the road turns to a T-Junction.)

Acrobatics –

Attended a couple of Acrobatic-oriented gatherings (including one very impressive Acroline®) Still haven’t gotten my second move yet, but with 88 facets taught and some parts of two dozen moves learned, I’m getting very close on several of them. Needless to say, I passed the Principles of the Acrobat quite readily.

Miscellaneous Fun!

I found a tar patch, so learned ferry construction and built a small light craft that glides across your inlet. Unfortunately, it won’t cross the Nile (cause walking a minute to the north is so burdensome…heh.), but is a fun little thing. When Test of the Singing Cicadas opens, I’ll be taking a ferry kit with me to cross lakes and what-have-you to get at those delightful little cages.

Christmas came to Egypt with freak snowstorms and piles of presents addressed to paid people who logged on during Christmas and Boxing Day. Mind you, they were dropped off in random sections of the map, so some running was involved, but the gifts included pepper seeds and chocolates.

It was a very nice holiday season in the desert.

12/30/08 – I want to a-cro every night (and party every day)…

Made my way down to Queens Retreat and picked up Improved Brick Rack technology, along with half of Egypt. Turns out there was quite the party going on with many dozens sticking around to form the Mother of All Acrolines®.

Ran the gamut and hung out for a while performing my one move: the coveted leg stretch. When all was said and done, no new moves for me, but I did get to 6/7 on 3 moves and 5/7 on 3 others, so it wasn’t a total wash. All total, I danced with 57 new partners and taught a couple dozen facets (112 total taught).

Got back to the homestead, fired up the forge and made enough nails to put together six public never-ever-fall-apart improved brick racks! Each will make 12 bricks at a time (takes double the resources of the old 6 brick models, of course) so given enough straw, many thousands can be knocked out quickly. This will cut my board expenses down greatly…which means less slate gathering and more happiness. I may build another sheepie pen to celebrate in the next day or two.

Finally, someone somewhere did something and triggered the unlocking of the Test of the Vigil. It’ll be a bit before we have the Test opened to start, so more on that camp-eating monster another day.

12/31/08 – Lookin’ for lead in all the wrong places

Received text from Marie mid-afternoon while at work advising me of a large acro party forming in Shabbat Ab. The message came from her AT UBody, waiting for it to start. This was somewhat amusing as she’s gone from “this game pisses me off” to “this game is ok, except when it pisses me off”... which I think is what everyone really thinks. One person once remarked it is a “frustration simulator” and there are times I agree.

Anyhow, I decided I wasn’t going to screw around with acro that evening and instead try out the brick racks and make that other sheep pen I’d been considering. Got home and did so, enjoyed dinner, check back in to Egypt to find the line is still going strong and is now so long it stretches from the University of Body all the way to the School of Body, some several minutes away.

That’s where they got me....I had to check it out and I’m glad I did. Mandisa and I ran through the line, which actually stretched as far as the chariot stop by that point, and I finally got my second move: lunge. Acro’d with a number of people I’d met before and several dozen people that were new to me.

After it was over, I went in search of a public lead mine I read about on the E! channel. Since the text is streamed to the wiki, I can read happily whenever the mood strikes me during the day. Lead’s only been found in one spot: Adn, the northernmost-central region (this was Lower Egypt and my home last Tale). Several long chariot trips later, I found myself in familiar settings. I debated on visiting my old campsite, but decided against it for bittersweet reasons. Instead, I trucked happily South of their UBody to find the precious lead mine. I’m not going to need very much lead—just enough to make a couple of limestone gathering tools.

The mine was collapsed and it looked like the entire vein was covered so new mines wouldn’t have yielded any lead.

This wasn’t that surprising, as lead is still rare and it’s the only public mine for that metal that I’m aware of. I note with some amusement the mine also produces sapphires! The mine has also been repaired eight times. With a hesitant finger, I clicked to see what it would cost to repair and stared in mute disbelief. 27 leather. 14 sheep would have to go to the sausage-grinder to cover the repairs for the one mine. The cost was just too high. I trudged back to the ‘Plex and decided that I’d just have to trade for the metal or the tools.

Now if only I had had the foresight to look at the owners’ names on the other lead mines!

01/02/09 – (It feels just like) I’m workin’ on makin’ glass

Spent a good chunk of time getting my glass station operational over the holiday. Now that the ‘Plex has expanded, I really didn’t like where the glazier’s bench was located and seeing as how I’m going to need two of them (one for soda glass, the other for normal glass), I went ahead and built a new one off to the side behind the mason’s bench and made a note to tear down the other at some point.

Soda glass requires lime (derived from cooking limestone in a fire pit), soda (an uncommon pull when harvesting limestone), and a lot of sand mixed at extremely high temperatures. Benches require a ‘reserve’ of 19 glass before you can make anything at all, so it’s easy to think of the first glass product as costing ’20 glass’ and never, never, never empty out the bench. That first glass was stupidly expensive, but the bench is now operational.

I celebrated by making a couple of glass rods and a few glass blades. In short order, I’m wielding a glass knife and a glass scythe and promptly begin cutting the lawn. It must’ve been somewhat unruly because I was able to process close to 2000 straw before becoming bored with it. Still haven’t gotten rhythmic strength to increase, but that’s ok. I’ve given up on camels: four sheep pens are very productive for leather generation and I’m now sitting on a stockpile. Thousands of straw for me are better served as bricks than camel feed.

Found a guy Zezima (Zima, zooma, Zuul...something like that) who wanted to trade lead for leather—we came to a mutually agreed price, but the deal never happened. He was in ‘the middle of a run’ and I asked him to let me know when a good time was, but he never did and several hours later, he closed the chat tab. Weird, but such is life. Maybe I’ll have better luck in a few more days. The lead isn’t ‘must have to live’, but it’ll make harvesting limestone more tolerable—particularly since I’ll be cranking out more glasswork soon and Mandisa will be building an Empty Hand puzzle at some point.

Visited another acroline or two, but still haven’t gotten beyond 2 moves yet. Marie was mystified at the number of people acroing, but it makes sense in a fashion. Technology is at pretty much a standstill as silver still hasn’t been discovered and Acrobat and Obelisk are the only two Tests that can really be worked on right now. The choice for many is to pursue Acro, dowse for silver, or stockpile resources.

Speaking of, I’ve begun processing the sheep poop into saltpeter, and in turn fertilizing date trees to gather dates. Dates are harvestable about an hour and a half real-time after a tree is fertilized and a random number are given—I think I’m up to 60-something. They will be useful in cooking or in Towers, if I choose to do that Test or as trade if I don’t. Either way, the tubs are going to be busy for a while. (I built a sturdy tub to supplement the basic one.)

I should probably knock out some more pulleys and go looking for more places for gem mines. Sapphires and emeralds would be good.

I’ve just a few miscellaneous restocking tasks to do otherwise: need a lot of rope, a little canvas, and more papyrus and limestone.

Finally, I built a big box to stash all of the ‘stuff’. Constructed a warehouse adjacent to the ‘Plex. It will hold 25k worth of items, so I’m nowhere near as cramped on storage space as I was.

01/05/09 Limestone Cowboy

This past weekend things are starting to kick into higher gear, in several regards.

Silver was finally discovered! This gives us...silver! Which honestly is nowhere near as useful as everyone makes it out to be. The big deal with silver is that it was holding back our tech tree... which now is growing quickly again. I jumped down to Meroe and planted a silver mine and harvested a little. For me, silver will eventually be made into mirrors.

For fun, I decided to skill up carving. This involves a bit of back and forthing between glassworking, carving, and forging. To get carving two, you have to whittle a bunch of pointy sticks and make a lot of tinder. You then get the ability to carve better stuff, which is used as tuition in conjunction with nearly a dozen glass blades....which meant more limestone gathering. I have terrible luck with flint and went through most of my stockpile getting the limestone for that harvested. Finally worked my way up to the limits of available technology with carving four, woo! Among the diverse things I can carve now, includes large crude handles for lead mallets... an essential tool in gathering limestone at 3x rate.

I had tried unsuccessfully to obtain lead through a variety of channels and with the Casting technology going on timer in Saqqarah, this became even more priority. Casting gives us the ability to build casting tables, which allows for more tools and components, such as iron cookpots for cooking, lead tools (chisels and mallet heads), and various other metalwork.

I bit the bullet and chose to either build a mine in Adn’s lead field blindly or take enough leather to repair the one public mine I knew of there, with a handful of grilled peppers just in case. Arriving in Adn, I surveyed the landscape... it would be a pure gamble. The leather cost to repair: about 32 leather. I cursed and clicked repair.

The mine itself was actually fun to work. With lead you pick the gem that has gone the longest without being odd color out and each click increases the ore gathered up to 7/pull. In no time at all I had a full load of lead and a few sapphires. That’s when I failed the Test of Greed. Hmm, I say. If I get enough for -2- furnace loads, I should have enough lead for the rest of the game. I had the peppers so I could carry an additional 500 weight for a few minutes per pepper. As I harvested, I counted and threw my inventory on the ground to make room for more ore. Bricks, boards, rope, dozens of jugs, small sapphires all wound up as trash on the landscape as I waddled back to the chariot stop with close to 1000 lead ore.

About an hour after Casting came off timer, I was the proud owner of a full set of lead limestone mining tools, an iron cookpot and a few miscellaneous things. I can’t say it made picking up another 350 limestone fun, but at least a lot more tolerable.

I’m making decent progress on Acrobatics: attended a couple of lines and picked up a number of moves, taking me to 9 moves total, giving me a permanent dexterity of 2. Fear my leet thread-toting skills.

We now can replicate cabbage and garlic seeds, the former by planting beside multiple wild herbs, the latter by planting after eating a meal from a kitchen. I’ve started looking for herbs and the veggie box at the Plex now boasts a small number of them. They will come in handy as cooking recipes are discovered or when we get hookahs.

The Test of the Prophet and Test of the Vigil both started Sunday afternoon. I got the insane idea over dinner that since weekly winners of competitive tests (like both of those) are on Sunday night and Vigil just opened, there wouldn’t be much competition: in fact, it might be possible to pass Vigil on the very nature of being the only person to hold one, even if it is just a handful of sacrifices. Reality slapped me in the face. In order to build a sacrificial bonfire, I’d need 1k firebricks...and 2.5k wood. Annoyed, I settled for making a Prophesy on some guy I’d never heard of before that would likely pass Obelisk Monday or Tuesday.

The punch line came when ‘Sunday passes’ (as the weekly score results are called) came: Teppy said there would be NO passes on Vigil this week, as there will be a one week minimum before scores will be counted. Apparently, there’s other people who think like me.

A Zen moment: "The sheep are looking healthy and frisky."

01/06/09 – Stop! Hammer time!

Logged on to find Advanced Blacksmithing was now available—which means the End of the Stone Age! I’m running to Saqqarah so often, I should invest in a commuter shuttle. Got the tech, returned to the ‘Plex, built an anvil, and fired up the casting box.

After a bit, I had a full complement of tools, save the tungsten chisel by virtue of not having been able to secure that metal. Bit of a pity really, as they can make very decent carpentry blades in less than a minute with a few whacks. I’ve found I can do much the same with a ball peen hammer, but it takes more work.

Went to make a hatchet, and discovered the sucker takes 20 iron. Le ouch. I immediately regretted making those medium gears on whimsy over the weekend. Fired up another batch of ore, scraped together my last metal and start smacking at making a hammer.

It was god-awful. I noted with some amusement that after 40 strikes, the sad lump of metal would’ve been better off if I had never hit it. I scrapped the project and tried again....and again. Fortunately, when you ‘scrap’ a project, it doesn’t use up the metal you’re working with. You get (x) number of strikes on your product, where (x) is determined by the type of metal used. Iron gives 180 hits. Finally, I ended up with a Quality 6600-something hatchet that I decreed ‘Good enough for now’, affectionately named it BarkReaver (mark 1), and gave it a quick workout. Nice.

Gathered more ore, ignored some acro line announcements, and began processing. I’m going to need a LOT of metal and charcoal to make my own kettles, as there aren’t any public ones. More on this in a bit.

Kotas popped in for a short visit, which always makes for a pleasant time. Instructed him in the Art of the Charcoal Hearth and brought him up to speed on various things implemented while on holiday hiatus. Started off his sheep pen right with a pair of lambs and a metric ton of onions. (He had left offline onions turned on for a couple of weeks, so the sheep should start getting hungry again around the time the sun cools.)

Did a quick papyrus run—I’m a firm believer that “You can’t have too much ash”. I want to fire and forget the next few batches in the fire pit. I say that, but I’m going to stoke anyway. 10 minutes worth of fire staring with 16 stokes increases lime output from 13 to 19, with a corresponding increase in ash generation. I’ve got enough for several runs now, it’s just a matter of finding the time. Making the kettles take priority and here’s why they suck:

1 kettle isn’t enough to process any quantity of ash into potash (or make weed killer or fertilizer) effectively. 2 or 3 is the bare minimum. Each takes: 30 iron and 24 copper. The copper is processed in a forge with pinch rollers (which would take another 40 iron to make, but there are some in the public works), and will cost about 70 charcoal to make. The iron pot is made in a Master’s Casting Box, which takes 600 charcoal to fire (eats 250 immediately and another 20 charcoal by the time a pot is done. Any leftover can be recovered when the fire is put out.) Given that each 15 units of metal costs 484 ore and 20 charcoal to process, you can see how this quickly becomes an expensive proposition.

Downloaded and started up Selune’s mining macro, because color games REALLY suck for the colorblind and in a bit I had a considerable chunk of copper ore mined. Moved it over to one of the iron mines and let it run for a bit—wound up with a huge quartz, which as I recollect is a happy thing, used for tuition for something or another.

Checked on the sheep before I left for work and dropped another pair into Kotas’ pen, which will effectively double his production. It’s a feel good feeling to sheep a friend.

01/07/09 – I read your true colors (shining through)

Started off the night with a fun little diversion: let’s make a shovel! Tackling the project with just a shaping mallet and a ball peen hammer, in a while I finished up a 7300-something shovel I affectionately call “DirtBane” (mark 1). It should serve nicely until I can afford the metal to play around some more. It seems to be fairly effective. Just ‘digging’ with it yields 5 debens of dirt, instead of the normal 1. According to last Tale’s wiki 6 people with grilled food can do a dig if they all have quality 8000 shovels. Good sign, but I think my next anvil project will be a better hatchet and those are pricey.

After playing with the shovel (“Holes! Look, I’m diggin’ HOLES!”), I began setting about the somewhat daunting task of mining and processing all of metal and charcoal I mentioned yesterday I’m going to need. In the middle of all of this, Teppy broadcasts he’s testing out a new mining system for colorblind people. I could hardly believe my fortune. I dumped my inventory into the Shed of Holding and jogged over to my local bane: the copper mine. Turns out with colorblind mode enabled, it displays the name of the color of the gem when you click on it. This is borderline miraculous. It takes more time than normally sighted people, due to all the clicking, reading, and thought processes involved, but my accuracy jumped from 20% to 80% or higher. The best part of it all is that it shows Teppy listens to his players.

I happily mined away and fired up enough ore to complete the metals I’m going to need, but in the process used up a chunk of my charcoal reserve. My plan was then to at least make the copper plates in the public works downtown, then come back home, finish the charcoal, then go back and do the pots. No such luck.

My brain snapped, I think. Instead, I went over to an acro party being held halfway between my house and the chariot stop. An hour and a half later, I’ve picket up a handful more facets, learned my 10th move (Asian Influence) and am late for bed. I did teach literally dozens of facets to a couple perfect students and gave several people new moves, so it was a decent line.

Logged after wandering back to the ‘Plex. New goal: kettles by the weekend. Heh.

01/08/09 – I’m coming up, so you better get this potash started...

A few miscellaneous activities today. Made a batch of charcoal, then hauled all of my metal and charcoal downtown to visit the public forges and Casting boxes. A half hour later, I skipped back home, hundreds of charcoal lighter and ready to build! Assembled two iron kettles and another glazier’s bench (this one will house ‘normal’ glass production).

I then turned my attention to converting some ash to potash for this weekend’s glasswork. As I poked and stoked, I reflected that I’m almost ready to call in for my developer camp decoration. I’m thinking a fountain by Lake Sefet, a small path leading up to the front door, some more foliage around the place (including some brilliant blue plants) and possibly altars or something snazzy near the front porch.

I’ve been using a week-and-a-half old pic of the ‘Plex as my desktop background and have had a number of people ask questions. May even wind up recruiting a person eventually. *grin*

Tried my hand at making a better hatchet on the anvil, but I’m going to need more practice it seems. The other option, of course, is to knock out a few ‘ok’ hatchets and sell them at or a little above cost.

Finally, I attended a dig up in Adn—very productive, yielding 5 medium stones and nearly 3 dozen cuttable stones for each of the 15 participants. I could definitely tell a difference using DirtBane (mark 1). I should probably take a couple of hours this weekend and just practice with the anvil.

Hmmm...I’m going to need more ore and charcoal.

01/09/09 – It’s my potash and I’ll cry if I want to

Played on the anvil a bit more and I’m getting better. Knocked out a quality 7300+ hatchet, named BarkReaver (Mark 2) and gave it a whirl. This one will occasionally yield 3x wood harvest on trees, which makes it a very nice step up from the last. As I understand it, 8k will give me a consistent 3x, so that may be my ‘goal’ hatchet. Turns out I’m doing better now than many ever do on an anvil, so smithing could be a trade for me if I keep working at it.

Stoked a couple of fires a few times with 100 limestone and papyrus in each. Five stokes seems to give an ‘ok’ yield without driving me nuts staring at the flames waiting for them to turn white once every 40 seconds or so (the only time you should stoke). Cooked the resultant ash into potash and turned my attentions to the second bench I had made. Time to bite the bullet and start sheet glass.

Sheet glass, as you may recollect, is a pain (seriously, no pun intended). It takes 2 minutes to fire each one, the bench will require charcoal during that time, and there is a nasty likelihood you will do everything right and still break the glass at the end, losing all your materials. Sheet glass fabrication works like stone blade fabrication with a 1-7 ranking. At rank 7, you never fail (and get the option to make mirrors once we have silver powder).

I had enough lime and potash to fill the reserve in the new bench and noted with some interest that it is the most temperature-stable bench I’ve ever worked with. For the uninitiated, benches take very little charcoal to get up to a workable temperature. New glass has to be made at 3200+ degrees, but can only be worked while the temperature is between 1600-2400 degrees. If the temperature goes outside that range, your project is ruined. Every 10 seconds there is a temperature fluctuation. Adding charcoal boosts the temperature for about 60 seconds, with an amount that is consistent for each bench (example: the first bench raises 7.5 degrees per 10 seconds, this one is 8.5 or so). It will then remain stable for a half a minute, then begin dropping temperature by a chunk every 10 seconds by an amount that is, again, determined when the bench was made. This particular bench only loses about 40 degrees during a production cycle, so it is a dream come true for glass working. As long as I keep half an eye on it, I won’t lose any materials due to screwing up the temperature.

That being said, after filling the 19 deben reserve, I had six debens of glass leftover to begin my expensive trek to perfect sheet glass skill. Six debens of glass later, I was still 1/7 in my skill and only a single piece of sheet glass survived the manufacturing process. Last time it took me about 18 pieces to get to 7/7. I think it is going to be worse this time... much worse.

1/12/09 -- Funky Cold Cicada

Picked up where I left off with glassmaking for a bit and after I broke the first two pieces without a skill up, I began to feel the frustration. Then, I hit a streak of luck! The next eight pieces all came out fine, with two exceptions...both of which were skill ups. Moved over to the soda glass bench to work while I boiled away more ash and stoked up more lime. Finished making the twenty glass rods needed for Navigation 2 tuition.

I’ve been waffling between two different projects for the short term: a paint shop or a fleet furnace (this extracts mercury from red sand). The former requires a LOT of glass, the latter, a ton of resources and forty small diamonds. I went ahead and started gathering resources for a lot of glass: hundreds of limestone and a good chunk of ash.

Fortunately, distractions abound in the form of Tests: Marriage and Cicadas were both released over the weekend. Passed the Principles of Marriage and married Mandisa. She’s very sweet, you see. I’ll never pass the Test of Marriage, which requires both spouses to pass a number of Tests, but that’s ok: I’m not pursuing Harmony this Tale.

Passed Principles of the Vigil with a sacrifice of 409 thread. (They were real fine, my 409.) When Sunday passes came along, the scores were already 200k+, but that’s ok: I’m not pursuing Worship this Tale either.

The first Round of Demi-Pharaoh started and my group is the Usual Gang of Idiots. I can almost categorize people for these as follows: (a) only signed up to pass Principles (b) didn’t have anything better to do (c) doesn’t speak or understand English (d) The Serious Candidate (usually a researcher this early in the tale) and (e) signed up, but never shows up. In theory, everyone should just vote ‘d’ and be done with it, but instead it pans out like this: (a) will vote for themselves and there’s a 50% chance they’ll flip at the last minute (b) Is actually the ‘Kingmaker’. They will question each ‘d’, then eventually get votes themselves from at least one other person because of their ‘insight’. (By this logic, reporters should be running our government) (c) will generally either vote for themselves or side with the majority (d) answers questions, then looks shocked when people don’t like the answers and when they lose at the end of the round, congratulate the winner and note that this obviously wasn’t ‘their’ time, but will look forward to the next run.

I usually play (b) for fun, but, at heart, I’m strictly (a). For a change of pace, I decided to see if I could pull off (d). If I do say so myself, I sounded like a very capable politician when questioned, sensitive to the needs of the people, with definite goals and ideas for the office. This, of course, meant that one of our resident (b)s got the critical vote from the other (b) instead. From our group, with a day and change left, two (a)s voted for themselves, a (c) is holding her vote, a (b) voted for the other (b) (the other (b) will not vote for themselves until the last minute, because it would be both presumptive and crass to do so), one (e)....and me, who playing as a (d), can’t vote until the last minute for the same reason. I severely doubt I’ll pass Kingmaker, as it is just a Harmony Test disguised as Leadership one...but that’s ok: I’m not pursuing Leadership this Tale either.

The song of the cicada came out and the race was on! Ran a couple of hours when the Test was released and got a cicada. I got so happy when I heard that chirp that indicated a cicada was nearby, I must’ve grinned my damn fool head off. After marriage and the subsequent “free teleport to spouse”, I can range far and wide in my bug hunts without squandering Travel Time. Ran around for a few more hours and came up with five bugs total. This is a good start, and that’s ok: I –am- pursuing Body this Tale.

Speaking of, Shabbat Ab hosted the Mother of All Acrolines: it lasted 26 hours before it finally died. I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to go through it several times, but real life takes priority. Acro’d a little and managed to win my 11th move: Wide Squats.

In other news, the newest ballots came out, and my Raeli Antimonopolization Act of Year One was on it! This tickled me pink, and a reporter from P! gave me an interview to help promote the law as it comes to a vote. E!, of course, spent their time griping that all of the proposed laws suck, but we’ll see. (And honestly, if my vote doesn’t pass, that’s ok too....as my ’06 blog will attest, I can knock out Raeli Ovens with the best of them) Whether it passes or not, I’ll be discarding the Bill from my inventory and writing something new in the next couple of days, but I haven’t decided what.

Silver was discovered in SA, right at the Saqqarah border, so I built and guilded a mine.

Turned my attention back to construction. The area by the field of bees is flax-friendly, so I worked to restock the rope supply. In the process, I churned out a couple dozen linen. There was a trader who was wanting to sell diamonds for linen, so I chatted him up to get the price. 1.5 linen per small diamond. I thanked him for his time and went back to work. Tried unsuccessfully to make a better hatchet while I converted more ash, and got a notice there was a guy, Marcus, with diamonds for trade in return for glassmaking supplies. That I had in spades. I chatted him up and we struck a deal. 40 smalls in return for 20 potash, 10 ash, and 200 limestone. Looks like I was going to make a fleet furnace after all.

Met up in Saqqarah to complete the trade, then back home to make 600 firebricks and 30 cut stones for the furnace itself. It’s also going to require an iron pot, so that’s ANOTHER trip to the Master’s Casting Box downtown with a billion charcoal. I was running low on that, so I knocked out another 400 or so charcoal. When I go down there this time, I’d like to make 4 pots at once. That’ll cover both this project as well as a future upgrade to my eventual paint shop. In a worst case scenario, they are also great trade objects.

Checking inventory, I was going to need another two loads of iron before I could afford to make four pots at once, but before I could get halfway to the mine, Teppy announced he was throwing away any unclaimed Christmas presents on Monday. Crap. Mandisa never picked hers up.

Logged in as her and began running. Only two of hers were ever found and one was in Heaven’s Gate: the most isolated corner of Egypt with no chariot stop. In the end, I recovered both gifts of pepper seeds and chocolates and warped back home to end by the sheep pens.

Tonight’s goal: get the furnace online, get some red sand, and start that puppy up!

01/13/09 RAMA-lama-ding-dong!

Very brief time in Desert, due to personal complications. Was able to meet my goal of getting the furnace going so tonight I’ll have my first quicksilver! With another 900 or so units of red sand in the shed, I don’t expect to need to get more from Meroe for quite some time. As expected, I also have spare pots for the eventual Mass Production of Color upgrade to my non-existent paint shop.

Added a couple of basic tubs to the ‘plex to start cranking out Saltpeter (whenever I happen to remember to process)—with 5 sheep pens, including Will’s, it isn’t like dung is in short supply.

The past day or so, there has been considerable buzz on the drama board (E!) regarding the laws on the ballot and the fact “they all suck”. The three laws that draw the most ire seem to be: an otherwise innocuous clean-up law that unintentionally allows Improved Brick Racks to be salvaged if unused for a week, Proposition Eight (a law that ONLY allows marriage between two men), and my own Raeli Anti-monopolization Act of Year One (RAMA, as it is now known as).

Honestly, I’m not expecting RAMA to pass—my personal goal was met in getting it to the ballot and forcing people to discuss things of this nature BEFORE it becomes an issue. Amusingly enough, RAMA has had the following accusations thrown against it: it’s a communist law, it rewards the people who are rich IRL because they have multiple accounts, it will prevent technology from being unlocked, it doesn’t say ‘player’, it doesn’t address the most pressing matters facing Egypt right now (how could it? I’ve been soliciting votes for nearly a month), and it causes cancer. Well, not the last, but you get the idea.

I expect it to get about a 24% approval on final votes (narrowly beating out prop 8 with 17% approval), due to slandering from Big Raeli industry. Possibly ‘the tile cartel’... either makes me giggle.

Our laws typically break down as follows:

I want a pony. (Feature requests) I want YOUR pony. (Stuff is made public, or tear-down-and give me stuff laws. This is always the first type to pass) You can’t have a pony (Restrictions on whatever, serious or otherwise...see Prop 8) OMG! PONIES! (The truly ludicrous laws—rainbow out of butt laws that people pass around as jokes)

RAMA is a little bit of a variation. It is a ‘You can’t have ALL the ponies.’ law, or ‘Everyone should have a chance to own their own pony.’

We’ll see how it goes. There’s one day left on the ballot.

01/14/09 – Don’t Rock the Vote, baby

Began the conversion of Fort Kotas-by-the-Sea into a Raeli Workshop. The technology may be a month away or longer, but there’s no sense in not stockpiling resources for a few ovens! Tore down the carpentry shop and a kiln, due to the size of the Master’s Casting Box I installed (no more running to the heart of downtown with 600+ charcoal). Even with that, I had to expand the building a couple of squares to accommodate the construction. Installed nine or so true kilns for the Mass Production of Firebricks (each oven will take 4k). Fort K-b-t-S will eventually also house the gearbox design table and likely a few improved brick racks as well. I’ll continue to manufacture all of the glassworks at the Sefetplex.

Ran around looking for cicadas, picking the odd one up here and there, finally getting enough for a cage, but will need to place it tonight—I have an odd mental defect that keeps me from remembering to carry linen when I’m out and about, so I couldn’t place my cage when in the Heart of Nowhere. Along the way, I stopped by the Essence of Harmony and Passed the Principles of the Prophet. Also came across a wild beetle, furthering me in the Principles of Scarabs—apparently the five I found prior to starting the Test didn’t count towards ‘find a wild beetle’. I’m finding a lot of new types of mushrooms to add to my pitiful collection... my herb/veggie/fungus chest is rapidly reaching the bursting point with all of the wonders I’ve discovered while wandering.

I mis-timed the ballots—they close tonight, so we’ll see how those go.

The first round of Demi-Pharaoh elections closed and they went almost as I expected them to. By the evening, 2 (a)s had voted for themselves, one of the 2 (b)s had voted for the other (b) and it came as no surprise when the other (b) voted for herself. The only thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that the (b) actually taunted me by saying she would not be giving me her vote, then added “maybe if I had asked a little differently”. Well, when the round started, Aiko (the b in question) asked “who are the people looking to advance?” and I responded that “I would appreciate the consideration to advancing to the next round.” I noted with some amusement she added to her /info a line she used during the round “Those who ask for power don’t deserve it.” (or words to that effect). A poor rationalization is better than no rationalization, I suppose.

The surprise came when the (c) cast her vote for the (b) that had no votes. She offered the explanation of “He was the only one who voted for someone else!” This was a bit of a relief. If she had voted for Aiko, my plans would’ve failed. The (e) never showed up and it left our score at 2 to 1 to 1 to 1, with myself the deciding vote: which is exactly how I wanted it. With ten seconds left in the round, I voted for one of the (a)s, forcing a tie for our group, meaning no one passed. The Test this time is NOT to become the DP...it is to guess the one who will be DP...and ensure your selection wins. Since it was obvious I wasn’t going to go to the next round (I’ll have to go back to being a b next time), my next best scenario was to prevent anyone from our group from advancing. Would I have done the same if Aiko hadn’t acted like a total prick? Maybe not. ;-)

Finally, Hated Saqqarah (still doesn’t have the nice ring of Hated Karnak) unlocked Advanced Metallurgy, so I picked up the tech—only to find that the building will require topaz, which I don’t have, and one of the iron pots I was holding in reserve for the paint shop. ARGH!

01/15/09 -- Lucky in the mines with topaz

Unsuccessfully hunted for cicadas, but dropped my cage in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to need more bugs to get a decent score for speed, but I’ve passed Principles if nothing else (level 15).

Spent some of my time fixing up the Plex and Ft. KbtS, destroying a mason’s bench and bullet furnace, adding another rock saw. I just don’t need a bench presently and will reconstruct if necessary. Kind of funny how buildings that were very expensive just a couple of weeks ago now seem cheap to replace.

Attended another dig. Incredible returns for an hour’s effort: 10 medium stones and 75 more cuttable stones. Put the new saw to work and started a few pulleys for fun. My secret confession: I like seeing how many things I can have running at once. Between 4 distaffs, the pottery wheel, a couple of rock saws and kettles and a few kilns, it looks like a miniature industrial complex with everything animated.

Unsuccessfully tried to get someone to come off some topaz, nor could I find a public topaz mine. I may not have the tin to make alloys yet, but I really wanted to finish the reactory. Finally, I took to the internets, read everyone’s Guild page on the wiki and found someone with a topaz mine fairly close to my camp, east near the Red Sea.

A few days ago, I had tried to drop a mine where no ore vein existed in a greedy attempt to get more rubies, but was met with a mine that did nothing. I had to tear it down (note to self: LEARN SALVAGE SKILLS). Other people have talked about sand mines—mines that did not sit on veins, yet they were able to extract gems freely. That’s when it hit me like a pound of firebricks: my failed mine was on grass, not sand. IDIOT!

With a Mining Kit (boards, bricks, pulleys, leather, rope) in hand, I dashed to the east and checked out the area around that Guild’s topaz mine. It looked like there was space a bit to the northeast...sitting on sand. It was a blind stab...you can’t douse for gems, only pray.

I built the mine. The fourth pull yielded a small topaz! Sefet would have his reactory!

01/16/09 *brick rolled*

Started off by mining the needed topaz for the reactory and finishing the construction. I decided I was going to need to fully upgrade my camp into a Raeli Oven producing factory and that was going to take a LOT of metal. Upgrading the student forge with a pair of pinch rollers and an extrusion plate to make metal sheeting and wire was going to cost...60 Iron and 40 Copper. Ouch. Add another 15 or so iron to make nails for a few brick racks for Ft. KbtS and I was looking at hours of mining and hundreds of charcoal in processing.

In the end, the student’s forge is now fully upgraded and Ft KbtS sports five Improved brick racks to complement its 11 kilns.

I decided to start cranking up firebrick production to see how well it all works. KbtS is incredible and the only limitation is a minor wood shortage, even with the bounty of trees nearby. It does show I’ll cap out at 12 kilns and 6 racks. Generated around 3500 firebricks out of the 4000 needed for the first Raeli.

Next up is more copper sheeting so I can add two more kettles. I’ll just have to replenish the iron pots later. Being able to convert a lot more ash at once is far more useful at the moment. I’ve shown I can knock out the firebricks—next is the Vast Quantities of Sheetglass.

Unsuccessfully looked for a tin mine. I’m going to have to go region to region looking for a public one. I really hate trading for metal.

A bit lonely around the ‘Plex lately. Mandisa is busy with her schooling, only popping in every now and then to feed greedy sheepies and Kotas is now on hiatus for his move. Even the chat channels are no longer abuzz with constant idle gossip: only the occasional discussion on recipes or trade requests. Drama levels are comparatively low at the moment.

01/19/09 – Cartouche this!

Friday night, I hunted unsuccessfully for a tin spot. I did find some more iron just north of UWorship and I placed a couple of mines there. The whole ‘lack of tin’ thing is starting to bug me. Bought two levels of salvage skills (finally), just in case I have to tear something down.

Finally got a hold of a public tungsten mine—the color game was hell, even with colorblind mode turned on. Finally got enough ore for two metal, made a wide chisel and gave it a try. Making carpentry blades is now cake. Knocked out a 6500 quality with close to zero effort.

Added a third kettle to the ‘Plex, increasing potash production by 50%.

Started off Saturday doing what I do best: glassworks. In short order I managed to break another eight or so sheets of glass, receive one skill up (now 4/7!), and enough sheet glass for the upcoming Raeli oven.

Due to my time cicada hunting, I’m falling a good bit behind on technology. I find that I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t have to keep up with the larger guilds, I’m –NOT- pursuing Architecture, and I simply don’t NEED to do things like drop 5 or 6 raelis the week the technology opens. I still have a compulsion that if a type of structure exists, I want to build it because.... well, just because. This will lead to my downfall, I’m sure.

I did a little unsuccessful cicada hunting to take a break. Point scores remain low....too low for the test to have been open a week. It occurs to me this is due to two reasons: safari isn’t open and most people won’t wander the desert for hours –just- to hunt cicadas and with technology continuing to be unlocked at a pace that can only be described as “breakneck”, many don’t want to fall behind the tech race.

Saqqarah (of course) opened masonry and the new hotness was concrete. This gave people access to the blaster furnace which is twice as efficient as the compression dealies. It requires both concrete (100 debens I think) as well as a lot of steel sheeting, meaning it will be a while until I can make one. Concrete or cement (I confuse the two), if I remember correctly, requires bauxite, gypsum, and gravel. The first two are found in digs on the east and west side of Egypt. Gravel is made from pounding medium stones to dust with sledgehammers. The lot is chucked into a clinker vat and a couple of people have to keep it stirred until it is ready. This will likely be something I’ll need to trade for.

Someone discovered that clay bricks can be made in improved brick racks now if you have masonry. There’s nothing that uses them currently, but it seems to be something to file away for later. Should I get masonry and start stockpiling them, I wonder?

People are playing with all of the new hotness, but I decided to take a little break and go cicada hunting and maybe get a speed point. A couple of unsuccessful hours later, my plans quickly began to unravel.

There’s an unexpected event notice: “Celebration of Isis (1” appeared on the calendar. One what, we didn’t know. The description wasn’t very helpful. “An annual event to celebrate Isis. Construct the largest Spire of the Sun to win”. The largest who of the what? It will start in an hour. OH GOD, WHAT IF IT TAKES CLAY BRICKS?!?!!?

I make my way to Saqqarah, dodge an acro line along the way, and pick up my ‘missing’ technologies: barley cultivation (I’ll expound another day) and masonry, the latter just as the Isis event begins. I’ve got the materials to build a small construction site on me and I check it out. It will only let me build a ‘size 1’ Sun Spire and it requires: a few small gems (emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz), a little copper wire, and a sheetglass. Well....let’s see. I only have access to two of the gems, I’ve got a handful of copper, and the glass is ‘spoken for’. That was easy.

I headed back home and went through an acro line instead. Picked up my 12th move (+3 dex, baby!!!) and returned home. I don’t know quite what happened, but I think the part of my brain that knows there’s something that could be built that I’m not building began screaming at me and the next thing I know, I’m intently reading guild pages trying to find a place to blind drop an emerald mine.

Long story short, I get lucky....twice. I built a sand/emerald mine just a little walk south of my topaz mine and a sand/sapphire mine in Adn, just south of the lead patch. I carried supplies for two mines with me when I went to Adn (just in case). The pull rate for the sapphires was very disappointing, yielding only one gem for 75 tries. I tore down the mine to rebuild it and try for a better rate... only to find I had forgotten to pack enough boards for two mines and the equipment I salvaged from the previous mine left me a couple dozen shy. Grrr!

Mandisa to the rescue! A little woodplaning and one spousewarp later, the mine is back in action. Action being a relative term, as it was 150 pulls before the first gem popped out. Mined a few more gems out and returned both of us home.

Built the Size 1 spire next to the ol’ Obelisk. It looked like a tiny Jell-o mold. I checked it and it gave me the option to upgrade it to a larger size. Hmm...just 1 copper wire for a little bigger. I could do that. Hmm...just another sheetglass and a couple more gems to get a few more sizes up. Thus, it nickeled and dimed me until I had spent 4 or 5 glass and it was a pleasant size 42 (don’t panic!). It now looked like a large Jell-o mold. I decreed it ‘good enough for me’ and went back to hunting cicadas.

After a long dry spell, I hit cicada alley and picked up a number of bugs in rapid succession. Planted a second cage in a horrible, horrible spot (time constraints being what they are) and received my first speed point!

On Sunday, things continued breezing along. I spent most of the day falling farther behind the technology curve as advanced glassblowing (thermometers!) came off timer, the first greenhouses got built, and water mining came online. We are now just one technology from Raeli technology... gearboxes. I can only hope it’ll take them another couple of days. Many hours of cicada hunting yielded only a single cicada, but it was worth more than the last 4 I picked up combined.

Some bright spots:

My cartouche was one of the largest 49 in Egypt, yielding me a prize of 25 steel. Definitely worth the sheet glass investment. The Goods will be opening in ‘another day or two’. These guys are the traders that make soloing possible. It may mean the end to my resource shortfall. To cap things off, their headquarters will be halfway between me and the chariot stop. I couldn’t be happier. Neither of my cicada cages crumbled by Sunday night and I picked up my second speed point.

I ended the night harvesting a couple hundred papy. I’m going to need a lot of potash soon. No man should have to choose between glass and cicadas. ;-)

01/20/09 – I bless the trades down in Africa.......

I decided that tonight, I would have tin. Started things off by generating trade bait. Charcoal. Lots and lots of it. Generally everything industrial is powered by it and as my friend Kotas will attest, some people just suck at making it. In short order, I had generated a massive pile and began hawking my wares, offering it or leather (which I now have in abundance) for tin. Not even a nibble. I’m rather surprised by this, but note that most are now hording glass-making supplies, notably ash and potash.

Ok. I can do that too. Usually. Massively screwed up a load of lime and ash with an improper stoke that cost me an hour’s work. Sigh. A person advertises that they are looking to buy linen—something I have a good stockpile of. I send an inquiry to see if they have tin to trade. No response. I turned my attentions to other things to break the funk. Never, ever hunt cicadas when depressed. The endless empty quiet desert does little to improve things.

Then something positive happened! After a half hour, the person I chatted replied, apologized as she had AFK, and had access to tin. A quick negotiation session later, I had committed up to 25 linen at 2 tin each. For those keeping track at home, this is me cutting my throat to get a deal. Assuming she has access to a blast furnace in her region, 750 ore can be made into 48 metal in about 20 minutes. She advised me it’d be about an hour. With a lighter heart, I resumed my cicada hunting.

An hour later, she chats back the tin is too much of a pain and she’s just going to do the linen herself. Sigh. Still no cicadas. I knew I wasn’t going to get a speed point this night, but at least I could build up a better inventory or work towards a water mine or something instead.

I warped back home, fed the sheep (to my knife), and took a look at my ash supply. Virtually zip. Did a papy run and that always perks me up. There’s something just cathartic about picking those little yellow plants for me. Fished a little, played around with cooking – at some point I need to skill that up to make better dishes. I actually have a decent herb selection due to my forage-as-you-go wanderings.

There are times when things just go...right. While plucking papyrus, there were two adverts that piqued my interests and made my spirits soar.

The first was from a Marble Quarryer (Quarrier? Quarryman?) named Pascalito who was hawking his wares for cheap. Marble is used in several tuitions and structures, notably including the Pilgrim Shrine and the tuition to make it (more on this much later. For now, suffice it to say I really, really want one.) Marble is a pain in the butt to locate, pricey to build a quarry for, and requires 4 people working in tandem for a few minutes to harvest. Translation: this is something I cannot solo in my wildest fantasies and is usually so damn expensive as to make its procurement prohibitive. The cost? 16 linen for the three slabs that will pay for my Pilgrim Shrine Construction tuition. For me and my willingness to flax beyond all that is sane and holy, this is a very reasonable price. He takes my order and delivery should be the following day. He’s a European player, so I made a note to catch him as early as possible. (As luck would have it, he caught me this morning as I was logging in to do my morning sheep check and culling. The trade completed smoothly. I bookmarked his wiki User page and will be getting all my marble from him this Tale.)

The second came literally a minute after finalizing the deal with Pascalito. Shabbat Ab Ironworks is now open for business, offering metals, tools, smithed items for Reasonable Rates. Truth be told, the prices were what I’m willing to pay, and I negotiated 20 tin for 48 leather. Yes, it hurt a little inside, but I really need the tin and it should be enough to get steel operations up. Delivery would be most likely the following night. They are local, so that’ll make future trades more time-efficient.

I’m going to need to go on a limestone run in another day or two, but for now I was content to work the lime I had on hand and cranked out about 15 or so glass pipes without ruining any. I like running a bench while cooking ash down to potash. It makes the potash work effectively ‘background’ work that just takes a few clicks every couple of minutes. The pipes will eventually be used in the water mine or made into thermometers. A public glory hole (used in manufacturing thermometers and other advanced glassworks) was built over by the limestone pits, which is a bit of a relief. You do NOT want any sort of lag when working one and I was worried about the activity level around the ‘Plex.

Making the steel sheeting for the Raeli is going to be time consuming. Going by last time, it will take 300 steel sheeting. That means 100 steel getting processed, two at a time, for ten minutes a run. Net cost: 100 steel, 8 hours 20 minutes and 500 charcoal, plus 60 charcoal each time if the project is broken down in chunks.

01/21/09 – In the steel of the night

I had spent an idle moment during the day wondering if I would be pursuing cicadas or technology in the evening. Viticulture had been unlocked, so now grape lattice thingies (Vineyards, Sefet. They are called vineyards.) can be built and wines produced. One of my two tiny cicada cages had crumbled and that really decided it.

I took to the deep desert and continued a back and forth pattern, so that every inch would be covered. Nothing. In the midst of this, I receive notification from Eldar that my tin was ready for pickup! Huzzah! If I can’t have a cicada, perhaps Sefet can have steel?

Reluctant to return home just yet, I logged in as Mandisa, topped off the pens with the couple thousand of onions she was holding, and completed the deal. Returning home I gathered the iron, some charcoal, and a lot of towering palm resin and fired up the reactory. It sucked. A lot.

Disappointed, I logged back in as Sefet and continued hunting for a couple more unsuccessful hours. When I had just about given up hope and was literally seconds away from warping back home, a cicada chirp came calling from upon a high hill. Better than nothing! I nabbed the bug and it gave me motivation to press on for a few more bugless minutes. Muttering ‘good enough’, I returned home to work on alloys anew.

Crafting alloys is a new minigame that takes a LOT of practice to get right. The short version is you have to click around a series of grayish swirls that kind of follow your mouse when you click, trying not to get them to ‘stack up’ too soon. It has a hell of a learning curve, but at least you can ‘redo’ your attempt without it costing your 8 metal (7 iron, 1 tin for steel). Each redo costs a few charcoal and a resin. This adds up. I spent probably a couple hundred charcoal before I made a single steel. I scrapped it, deciding I can do better for the cost of 8 metal. A few more tries later, a much better success and 3 steel came as a result of fiddling with camera angles and experimental concepts. Hmm...3 steel resulting from what the game considered a 50% success. Good enough for me. I played around until I ran out of iron, discarding any attempt that gave less than 3 metal. I hit 5 metal returned once, and that was just a thing of beauty.

On occasion, I look back to my Tale 3 blog to see how things progressed from a tech and test standpoint. It turns out, we’re not that much farther along with tech than last time at around 5-6 weeks. The main difference is that last time a couple of alloys were broken and could not be manufactured. That held us back a bit. On the testing front, it would be a few more weeks before I began looking for my first cicadas and at this point I had only 5 acro moves. Interesting.

While bughunting, I googled ‘cicada cages’ to see if the cages we use were based on an existing design and I came across the following passage from Mimes, by Marcel Schwob, A. Lenalie:

Here, thou didst weave for me, for the first time, a cicada cage. There, in that thicket, thou madest captive for me one of the shrilling cicadas and placed it in my hair where it sang without ceasing. It was more beautiful than the golden ones of the Athenians of yore; for it was alive and sang. I would that once again I might have one. And Daphnis replied: - The cicada is silent at noon-hour when the wind pierces reddened spaces in the heart of the stubble, and the green-pointed hemlocks spread their white umbrels for coolness. Now they are asleep and I know not where to find one.

Freakin’ poetry, that is. Culled the sheep this morning and found my persistence paid off. Barely earned another speed point, putting me at 3/7 for cicadas.

01/22/09 – I’m hot for clinker

Very brief evening, but filled with much purpose....just not at first. I pretty much just want to check out how the sheep are doing, but log on to see a few minutes previously Malard was advertising concrete for sale. Concrete! That’s useful! I had been meaning to get a ton for a blast furnace, so a chat him up to see what he’s looking for. Gravel mostly, which I can make but don’t have time for, stuff, stuff, stuff...or linen! I immediately fixate on the linen and two chariot hops and 7 linen lighter I return home with a hundred debens. I’m on my way!

I checked the project requirements. Ouch, ouch, and ouch. The concrete, of course, 5 pulleys (which I have), 50 leather (easy), 100 boards, 6 crucibles (hmm...shouldn’t have torn down the mason’s bench), 10 glass pipes (well, I guess I can put off my water mine a bit longer), and 100 steel sheeting (oh dear Ra in heaven).

I didn’t have much time (Lost premiere!), but wanted to get the project done. I could rebuild the mason’s bench, but that would mean an hour knocking out the crucibles. Meanwhile, thanks to my previous alloying experiments, I had enough steel to make sheeting...at 10 minutes per 6 sheets. I had nearly half of it done. Ah ha.

Logged Mandisa and sent her to the public works with a sack of rocks. They have 5 benches there, along with about 20 carpentry shops to make boards. She can’t use forges, so I flipped back and forth between my spouse and myself keeping the steel sheeting coming. After ten minutes, it started getting tight for time and I didn’t want to spend another ten minutes waiting on a single crucible then it occurred to me: there were up to three crucibles in the old compression that might be salvaged when I tore it down. Well, I wasn’t going to need it anymore, so I pulled it down and was rewarded with all three of the crucibles. For the next hour I popped in every now and then to start more steel sheeting. I sighed softly as I loaded in the last of the sheeting...a full third of the Raeli oven now gone, in the interest of nearly doubling my metal output.

It was so worth it. 9 charcoal, 1000 ore without babysitting the device will yield 54 metal in 9 minutes. (For comparison, for about the same ore, the old one would’ve made 32 metal with 40 charcoal in 40 minutes.)

As a closing note, when I was at Malard’s I was stunned by a small grove of citrus trees. They come with Indonesian bees. I proclaimed that I was stunned at the rate tech was being unlocked. He gently chided me for not reading my level up notices. They are a skill available at my level, not a technology! I bought the skill just before bed, and see that each beehive/tree costs a dozen linen and a ton of clay. At least now I know why people are suddenly clamoring for the linen. It ain’t just for obelisks!

1/23/09 - Glass, glass baby (too cold!)

Made a few rounds of charcoal after wasting a ton in the reactory. I was led into a false sense of accomplishment when my first try yielded a 75% rate, with 5 steel output. From that point on, I simply failed at nearly attempt. Rather than burn up my remaining stockpile, I turned my attention to my glacier’s benches. I never got around to replacing the sheetglass needed for the Raeli, so now seemed as good as a time as any.

There’s quite a lot of projects that use glass, now including beetle terrariums, as entomology came off timer in Queen’s Retreat. Always nice to see Saqqarah beaten to the punch, even if QR rivals ‘Saq’ in the pain-in-the-ass-to-get-to department.

I’d left a large bit of glass in the benches to be heated and worked and I had a goodly supply of potash on hand, so I tried something a little more ‘exciting’ and ran both glacier’s benches at the same time: one working on sheetglass, the other on glass pipes.

Sheetglass continues to be an exercise in building character. Over the course of an hour, I lost 12 sheet glass, 11 due to uncontrollable failure based on skill level and one Sefet-based timing accident. I did get another skill up, to 5/7, so that was nice. Worked until both benches were down to the mandatory glass reserves.

My stockpile when all was said and done? 24 glass pipes (exactly enough for a water mine), 30 sheet glass (exactly enough for the Raeli oven AND a beetle terrarium). Dug up a hundred dirt and set a few linen aside in case I decide to build a terrarium over the weekend. If I make the water mine, I’m going to need a bit more material (large gear and copper strapping—and I’m strapped for copper as it is.)

Finished off the night by rounding up my firebrick count to an even 4k.

The chat channels were abuzz with discussions on territory claiming and how clay patches are already being ‘reserved’ for raelis by dumping compounds on top of them. People are freaking out nicely. “What if we made a law that made them all public?” “We need to make a law to keep people from reserving all of the clay patches!!!” “If only there was a law that controlled Raeli construction BEFORE we get the tech open in a couple of weeks!” (This was when I rolled my eyes.) Also, there’s an evil rumor that Teppy may change the building costs for ovens this time around. That would make me a sad Sefet.

01/26/09 -- Just another manic monkey

Kicked off the weekend in high gear, determined to get the Raeli as close to completion as possible, and work on side projects along the way. First order of business was to replace the steel and get as close as possible to the 100 needed for the sheeting. I had 9 measly debens of tin left and that wasn't going to get me far with my reactory experience. As luck would have it, I soon was able to employ an alloy maker named Zaniac who worked for 'whatever you think is fair'. I thought 6 linen was fair to make 9 batches, but he griped a little, so I upped the price to 9 linen and a couple of canvas. He noted that it was a low tip, but he'd do it. I suppressed my natural instinct to show him the error of his ways, and instead settled down to watch a self-proclaimed Master at work.

To be fair, he really was good. He had to restart a billion times, discarding any result that offered less than 5 steel on each crystallization, but within an hour he had returned somewhere around 57 debens of the impossible metal. I had watched him intently-- with some luck I'd be able to replicate some of the success at home with the batch still in the reactory. I left happy and if I had to employ his services again, I'd have no regret at bringing a larger tip. Cleared the metal at home after a dozen attempts, yielding 5 steel. Including my 'on hand' stockpile, I had some 83 steel now.

Next, it was about making the metal sheeting or at least a lot of it. Steel sheeting, as you recollect, takes a long time to manufacture in a single forge, so I carted the last of my charcoal down to the public works and fired up all four forges there. Being able to knock out 24 sheeting every 10 minutes took the task from 'arduous' to merely 'inconvenient'. While the forges pinched metal, I made a couple of batches of charcoal to supplement my almost non-existent supply. With 5/6ths of the sheeting completed, I traded for four thermometers (for expedience sake) and contacted Shabbat Ab Ironworks, who just started selling steel, to barter for the remaining 17.

I'm beginning to develop a very healthy respect for Eldar and shadeking, the proprietors of the Ironworks-- they are always friendly and professional. The steel cost me 400 wax and 18 cuttable stones and was ready the following day. I'm still going to need brass for smaller gear work and need to crank out the remaining sheets, but the bulk of the oven is now 'load ready'. Whew. Just in time to have Teppy hold a quick poll about Raeli Ovens in Tale 3 (How many did you build? Have access to through Guilds? Do you consider yourself a casual/moderate/hardcore player?) Oh gods. This will not end well, mark my words.

Enhanced the homestead a bit and added a terrarium. I just love watching the beetles scoot around in there! Played around with breeding a bit, but it'll be awhile before I have a bug that is 'show-ready'. Although I'm not pursuing Art, I don't believe in just making a crappy-looking bug statue just to pass the Principles. I'll at least give it a college try.

Added a second charcoal hearth. I've found I can work two at once without a regulator and that's a good thing. Needed a LOT of charcoal for the next stage of the projects: firing up the Master's Casting Box (forever more referred to as a MCB) takes hundreds. After a bit I knocked out four batches from each hearth. Cake.

Mined and processed thousands of ore. When I looked in the shed and saw in excess of 200, I decided it was time to spend some. I had been saving up a bit to buy a much better hatchet from the Ironworks (they sell quality 8500 ones), but decided that could wait a little-- I had other projects to finish first, namely the water mine.

In short order I cranked up the MCB and a glazier's bench, the former to forge a couple of replacement pots, a large gear (this takes a hundred iron), and some medium-sized gears, the latter to make some replacement glass pipes, as I had spent some trading for thermometers with Eldrad (not a typo, just a similar name to Eldar's).

Placed the water mine by the shore, adjusted the pitch of the dredging tube, and waited a bit. In short order a gemstone appeared in the collecting basket. I greedily snatched it up before the waters could wash it away. It will be a fun toy.

Ran around the desert and found a couple of cheap cicadas (four in pocket total) and found to my surprise the cage that still lives is the one that I thought I had placed in a horrible location. The deep desert one had fallen! Did not have enough points to advance over the weekend, but as I missed Sunday by a whisker, I'm confident for tonight.

Harvest some papyrus, just to rebuild my dwindling seed supply, flaxxed a bit for the rope, and otherwise just chilled out.

The weekend ended on an odd note. Pet monkeys are now available on the billing menu for $75. This is actually the ticket to go to the Philly player's meet and you get a free monkey that runs around and does Horus-knows-what. To celebrate the monkey, Zomboe, the legendary hatchet maker, held a contest for 'the best monkey-themed poetry' to be submitted in an hour. Winner would receive Mr. Saturn, a quality 9782 hatchet, which is undoubtedly literally the best in all of Egypt.

I like writing (can you tell?) and I occasionally pretend I'm good at weaving the written word, so I gave it a stab.

The Monkey Who Fished for the Moon

In the stillness of Egyptian night,

A monkey regarded the moon.

The slender simian with hand outstretched

Tapped lightly at a lagoon

And wondered then at wandering light

Reflected, from the moon!

He paddled the puddle with a stick he'd fetched

The orb distorted so soon--

Only to reorder in a moment or two

Before the monkey who fished for the moon.

Twas then the primate grew quite irate

At the silvery, shimmering moon

And then once more he stretched out for--

When out came the cry of a loon!

Startled, he fumbled into waters and tumbled,

Discarding all hopes of the moon.

Throughly drenched, his gaze was thus wrenched

To the skies above the lagoon.

And then did he spy where his prey didst fly

From the monkey who fished for the moon.

After a while, the poems were read by Zomboe and there were dozens of entrants. After the 8th or so was read, I realized I probably horribly misjudged the scope of the contest-- nearly all were limericks and short four to six line 'funny' ones. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

After a couple of hours, they were all done and Zomboe expanded his generosity to the best three he liked and an audience favorite. Korrin, who wrote a fun little verse about an itchy monkey, and I both received several accolades from the public and Zomboe judged that Korrin won the audience poll. This made sense, as he had just whispered to me that I had won first place!

Mr. Saturn is a true glory to wield, always harvesting 4x with a good chance at getting 5x. The bottle tree trio yielded 70 wood. I will not see a better hatchet this Tale.

01/27/09 – Groove is in the Hearth

Began the day cicada hunting. Picked up several in a corner of the world, gained a speed point (4th!), dropped a cage in the desert, and went on my merry way.

With my dual hearths and ability to level forests in moments, I turned my attentions to charcoal production. I’ve found that the only time I ruin charcoal is if I try to use a regulator, so I now only run things full speed. Rahr! After knocking out a thousand charcoal (and still having more than 3 kilowood in the shed), I said to myself “Self, you need bronze badly. I’ll bet you can trade charcoal for some more tin.” Bronze is a copper/tin alloy and after watching Zaniac I was a little more confident in how the whole thing worked.

Now then, what was the value of tin/charcoal? Going by Ironworks prices, 100 charcoal to1 tin, but I figured I might get a better deal elsewhere. I posted on E! an offer of 500 charcoal in return for 12 tin or 250 tin ore. Within a handful of seconds I had three respondents and made a note that next time, if a next time were necessary, I’d adjust my prices accordingly. Got ore from Nekojin in Falcon Bay, and smelted a portion down to nine tin to work with. Mined and refined 60 copper and I was set.

I started working the reactory and brass is harder than steel. Terrific. In the middle of this debacle, SAI contacted me, letting me know their first bronze was in stock and at steel prices. I traded a bit of copper, resin, and wax for 10 debens of it, so the immediate pressure to succeed was lifted. I worked at the reactory again, taking small amounts as they came up, and suddenly everything clicked! I could see what I was doing wrong and why! I knew I had it figured out when I made 5 brass a couple of times in a row, then 7 steel in a single go.

I can now make alloys!

The brass was needed for small gear work. I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the Raeli tech tree and I’ve been successful so far. Fine casting (allowing for small gear work) was unlocked late last night (again, coincidence—I thought it was already open), and cast 15 small gears, more than enough for my gearbox.

The shocker came though as cries of dismay came forth from Saqqarah. The costs to unlock Raeli had suddenly changed....dramatically. It now included tens of thousands of resin, many from rarer trees. This is going to push the technology out at least a month or two and speculation ran wild as everyone tried to figure out why!

What would make the most sense, and what I’m hoping for is that Teppy is changing the dynamics on how Raeli ovens produce their colored tiles. Normally, the spectrum an oven can generate is based on the location of the oven and in previous Tales, people were forced to drop at least several ovens to get an array of colors. Now, maybe adding different resins during the baking process will alter the color of the finished product? If so, that would be very cool!

Either way, if the cost remains static, the only thing that remains for my oven is hammering some steel I have into sheets and waiting for the tech! Hades, I’ll even take them resin every time I’m in the area.

In the meantime, I can focus on other pursuits, like finishing cicadas and acrobatics!

01/28/09 Bugs in the wind..... (or “How Sefet Got his Grove Back”)

Almost obsessively, I’ve started checking my cicada status on login and then once an hour or so. I note with some grim displeasure that one of the two cages have fallen. Hmph. I might make a point on Wednesday, but it will be much closer now. I ventured into the deep desert and meandered through the northeast quadrant— I found no bugs (but several Hunters) after an hour and a half in the far reaches so I hit back home. Checked my statistics... and my other cage had crumbled.

I was devastated. Well, disheartened at any rate...enough so that I moped around the ‘Plex for a few minutes before hunting down a few of my acro masters for lessons. I tracked down three, but no new facets were learned. I need to seek out Ay, Etruscus, and Robare still.

Other people were planting papy (my usual solace), I didn’t feel like playing with metals or glass, although I did burn a load of papyrus I had on hand in the fire pit for some ash. Ash is always good to have around.

Noticed I had a lot of clay sitting around in the shed, so I took it downtown in hopes of making a clay dome for a rabbit hutch. Couldn’t find a public pottery deck or vault kiln, so I contented myself with making a few dozen jugs to restock and wandered by home still laden with clay.

An idea came and I moved over to the Field of Bees and began work on an Indonesian Beehive. A couple hundred clay and a dozen linen later (which wiped out my stockpile of both), I had a small clay dome. Looks kind of neat, but has an annoyingly limited draw range. (My one serious gripe about the game is the extremely limited draw distance on many structures.)

I decided to invest a little time flaxxing to start replenishing my spent linen. Halfway through processing a lordly amount of flax, my comb/rake/whatever wore out and needed replacement. Ah. No nails in stock. Typical. I fired up the forge, cranked out some nails and in my remaining time hammered out some steel sheeting.

Checked on the bees and an orange tree has sprung up next to it! In another day or two when it has finished growing, I’ll have sweet oranges! I read up on bees and apparently if I have a couple of citrus trees, the bees will start making flavored honey. Three or more trees and you can start crossbreeding them to get desired flavors. This has some promise.

01/29/09 It’s the end of the world as we know it...and I hear bugs....

Not much going on. Ran to the farthest corner of the world and nabbed a cicada for myself and a couple for Mandisa. Etiquette be damned, I’m going to have Mandisa pass cicada principles. (It’s considered poor play to spousewarp your partner to get a bonus bug from a cage, but everyone pretends they don’t do it.) Still don’t have enough for a cage and speed point costs are climbing and have exceeded 8k for the first time. I now have 7.5k points which –might- be enough for today. We’ll see, but I really need a cage or two in the wild.

While in the Heaven’s Gate area, I idly paused at oasiseses (new word) to gather herbs. I now have in excess of 54 unique types, so once I have a hookah, I’m in business. There’s talk of a public hookah bar opening downtown soon, so we’ll just see how that goes.

Back home, I sadly looked at my Raeli oven chest I had worked so hard for. After viewing the new research requirements, it seems very obvious the materials required will have radically changed since Tale 3. I’m going to hang onto the sheeting just in case, but the sheetglass may get diverted to a greenhouse.

I started stockpiling what I think will be Raeli oven costs, starting with clay bricks. Clay is much slower than silt, but I still managed to get over 650 bricks baked. (Clay bricks are made from 8 clay, 4 sand)

Finally, the orange tree produced its first fruit.... tangy oranges!

01/30/09 –

Three hours of no cicadas. Well, check that. Three hours and one cicada cage I already found a week ago. Mandia was pleased with the 1800 points it gave and somewhere someone was saddened as their cage crumbled. I missed speed by 1k points and I’m thinking it isn’t going to drop below 8k again. I may put cicadas on hiatus. The hours of not finding anything is a bit wearing.

I started construction of the Pilgrim Shrine, trying different materials to find a cheaper marble. Surprisingly, sheetglass works and I left a message for Pascalito ordering 7 Oyster Shell Marble. Since Raelis are so far away and will likely have different costs, I didn’t have regrets at giving up a portion of the stockpile for payment. All total the marble will cost me: 15 potash, 20 ash, 4 medium gears, and 20 mushrooms, and 5 sheetglass. We’ll see how it goes.

Tech is making another leap as they unlocked Beer Brewing, Wood Treatment, and as I was about to logoff, they were collecting the last seeds to unlock Advanced Avian Handling. CHEEKINS!

I finally managed to track down another acro Master, Robare, and he was able to give me my 15th move: Crunches!

Played around with a hookah for a bit and got my fumeology score up to 8. Just 41 more until a permanent perception point. Heh. Basically hookah work the way you’d think. Clean out the bowl, put some herb(s) and some water and charcoal in it and puff away. Eventually, you’ll reveal the true taste and your score goes up. You then must try a new herb, as each will only give one point ever.

Hmm...at some point I need to flax up some more linen.

02/02/09 – I saw the vine and it opened up my eyes....

Cicada’d muchly and ended the weekend with 6 speed points, virtually no score, and 1 cage sitting on a small island in the middle of nowhere. Very close to finishing the Test and I’m tempted to just ‘cruise’ for now.

A few diversions this weekend, including several Sevenblade practices and a tournament. I sat out the tournament itself to attend a dig (70 more cuttables, woo!), but I heard the winners took home extra cornerstones. I probably should have played the tourney, given that I made it to ‘rank 2’ during the practice session I played. That means I won 7 more games than I lost against equal ranked players. Got spanked hard in the second round though. Left with a ‘practice prize’ of 1 steel. Heh!

Sevenblades itself is Liar’s Poker, but instead of a dollar bill with a serial number, you’ve got a 7-headed weapon that might have (for example) a couple of tridents, a couple of axe heads, a dagger, a mace head, and a sword blade on it. Different weapon types are different values (2 swords is a higher bid than 2 maces, for example). The idea is to bid up until someone’s bluff is called, both blades are revealed, and someone wins.

Sampled my first beer at the dig: a bold concoction with a heavy date flavor. Got a point of ‘Beer Tasting’ and am happy. Apparently all of the gluttony vices (wine tasting, beer sampling, fumeology, gastronomy) lead to increased perception. That’s a good thing.

Newbies have started encroaching on what I consider ‘my’ land. I find this irritating. It’s due to the Test of Mentorship. Used to newbies would only spawn at certain starting areas and Shabbat Ab was free of them. Now all newbies start off on a Welcoming Island and when they have finished Citizenship, they can teleport to welcome banners that players create to begin their life in Egypt proper. Don’t get me wrong; I like new players a lot. I just don’t want them in my backyard.

Net result? 1 unpaid account directly across the river from me, 1 on the other side of the clay patch, and 1 who had the audacity to build within range of my beehives. Someone else built a hideous sculpture, but tore it down after getting more eyesores than positive votes. I tried to make nice with my closest new neighbor, giving him a bit of rope and a carpentry blade to get a carp shop going. Didn’t even get a ‘hello’ from him. At least I can take small comfort in knowing that in another month and change I can probably rip down his compound.

The encroachment into my garden spot was concerning, so I worked a little at beefing up my presence. Saqqarah had researched viticulture, and I went to a-learnin’.

Placed a second fruit tree (greenish lemons), built 5 vineyards, and expanded the ‘Plex to maximum size and seriously upgraded Fort K-b-t-s. The costs to expand the plex were nothing short of horrible. A thousand bricks, a couple hundred flax, rotten flax, and tow each among other things went into it, but it looks pimpin’ and I’m ready to call in the world builders to finish the camp decor.

The vineyards are host to a strain of grapes called ‘Balance’ and tending them is....complex. Very complex. Grapes suffer from constant problems, it seems. Once an hour you can tend to them a number of different ways and your actions versus the problem of the minute affects the resulting acidity / color / quantity / quality / skin / sugar content and probably something else I’m forgetting. Each time you tend, the vitality (hit points) of the vine drops a bit, so you can’t play the game forever, but the idea is to get a high quality cluster of probably 21 or more grapes (enough for a bottle of wine), then seal them in a small barrel. The more sugar, the higher alcohol your eventual wine will be. The mechanics behind all of it is amazingly complex and looks like what I’ll play with between Test pursuits. Picked up a barrel for 50 leather—our neighbor Daniels over at the Jawa place is a cooper—and I’m anticipating my first harvest tonight or tomorrow.

Sunday, the buzz on E! was that Teppy had promised to release a couple of Tests this weekend. Knowing our tech tree, we decided that one was going to be Pyrotechnics and the other....maybe Tomb of the Immortal, Towers, or Safari! Pyro is stupidly expensive and not many people will be pursuing it.

The afternoon pressed on, and finally Wahim took the stage. He announced the release of Pyro (nobody was shocked) and that he had “gotten some advanced Raeli tiles from the scientists at the University” and released both the Test of the Funerary Temple and the Test of the Raeli Mosaic. I was livid. I knew Teppy would be watching E! to see how Egyptians reacted, so I lit into Wahim:

Sefet: Ok. Wahim’s a jerk! Safari? No. Towers? No. Let's give them a Test that'll take a month for the tech to be available for. Taemon: Maybe we are lucky and it takes six months! Or a year or something. Sefet: Or we'll find trees that erupt in a GEYSER of resin.

A few minute later, Wahim responds...

Wahim: And finally, a Test for those that pursue the Discipline of the Human Body. Show that you know, not just the barren land, but its fauna. Ibis, Fennec, Falcon, Desert Rat, Bullfrog, Otter and Gazelle all roam our land. Your task is simple, Disciples of the Human Body - find four of each, to pass The Test of the Safari!

RAHR!

The only problems so far: no one had any female rabbits to open the Test, and once they were finally obtained, they turned to sand when you dropped them, so no one can hunt falcons. Heh.

So Safari is open and we can say good bye to cheap speed passes on Cicadas, but we can look forward to increasing our carrying capacity muchly.

02/03/09 –

Logged on to find that Mandisa and my cages had crumbled. I mean Mandisa’s cage had crumbled, not Mandisa herself. Damn, damn, and double damn. Well, damn about the cages—I rather like Mandisa in a non-crumbled state. Just 1700 points, 2 bugs in pocket, no cages, and I can’t cruise for a few days for the last point to pass the Test. Damn!

Grabbed 80 boards, a half dozen linen and a ton of canvas from the shed and ran down to the University of Body to start the Test of the Safari and check on the current cage costs: five. Safari requires level 12 to start (which I’m thankfully overqualified), so Mandisa can’t get it going quite yet. Each of the 7 Safari animals require a different method to capture, from rat and fennec traps to boards to block otter holes, so I’m travelling a bit more encumbered than usual. I need not have bothered... didn’t find any animals on my trek, aside for the usual random sheep spawns.

Rather than hit my usual cicada haunts, I hit down to the sw quadrant of the world, sweeping through Meroe and Queen’s Retreat. As seems to be usual, I only found a tiny handful of bugs in several hours, none worth very many points. With five total and out of time for the night, I warped back home without picking up and placing a replacement cage.

I had a few minutes before leaving for work, so I culled sheep and nipped down to UBody to ‘spend’ my cicadas and the cage costs had changed overnight. They had dropped to 4, the minimum! It certainly goes a way to explain why I’ve been having such poor luck as of late: there just aren’t that many cages out there to find! I gleefully bought a fresh new cage for both Mandisa (who had precisely 4 cicadas) and myself.

I already have a couple of better cicada hiding spots picked out, so I’ll head out there tonight to hide our prizes.

02/04/09 –

I’m on the Cicada home stretch and it is feeling good! Mandisa and Sefet ran around collecting more bugs. I now have two placed and she has one. Her point total is higher (around 6k), but I’ll be gaining points twice as quickly as long as they don’t crumble. I’m sitting around 4k right now and speed should cost around 10k today, if my predictions are correct.

The problem with cicadas presently is Safari. As mentioned previously, many people are now running around the deep desert looking for critters and tripping over what were previously well-hidden cicada cages. Add to that, fennec traps. To catch a fennec, you have to build a trap and check back on it the next day. There’s a little more to it than just that, but that’s the gist. The traps last many weeks, so what you have is typically people setting up large grids of public traps every hundred coordinates or so where once only cicada hunters roamed. Placing a cage in the middle of a trap array is begging to have your cage to crumble in hours, so cicada hiding places drop considerably. The arrays are being built currently and I came across a number of traps in my wanderings.

While exploring coastlines, my speakers (which are kept at ‘max’ for cicada reasons) issued forth a blaring RIBBIT! A frog! Perhaps I would get Safari off to a hopping start? Frogs are only found at nighttime and you can only track them by their sound. They ribbit once a minute or so and the volume indicates how close they are and left/right speaker indicates direction. When you get to where you think the frog is, you can pounce. Failing gives you a bit of a timer before you can try again. I settled down to where I thought was the right spot...and missed. Several times, in fact. In the end, Marie helped confirm the sound was coming from the right side. I scootched over, pounced.... and caught my first bullfrog! Happy, I went on my way.

During the Great Bullfrog Roundup, others in a neighboring zone had spied and captured a gazelle and another griped that the ‘otter maze’ was too hard and had eaten a hundred boards without being captured. I’m looking forward to matching wits with an otter warren.

I also got to see something I’d only heard of in legend: rat tracks. I had been secretly worried they weren’t able to be displayed by my video card, due to the fact I had NEVER seen any...ever. There they were though, clear as day and looking like tiny pawprints in the sand. There were large gaps between the sets where the sand had reclaimed them. Rats have a nasty tendency to disappear after a while and if one is captured, the tracks stay until the sand covers them all, so I raced to track the rat.

The tracks looped. They doubled back. At one point I lost them altogether, only to pick them back up again as I jogged away in disgust. The tracks began getting fresher. I could tell because they were closer together. Finally I dashed to where the front of the tracks should be... built a rat trap... and I caught my first rat!

I may not have planted a single flax or built the first brick last night, but I’m now halfway to my first strength point.

Finally, ‘Sami’ unveiled a new compound type. Everyone who has seen it has commented that it looks incredible, bordering on majestic. Sami notes the construction costs are ‘reasonable’, they can be built up to 80-something size (a little larger than Tale 3’s ‘Plex), but... you have to have a special blueprint in your inventory to construct it. The blueprints are tradable, but you need to have it to construct, expand, or to load materials into the building being built or expanded. This horked off a lot of people. I’ll spare you the drama that came from trying to decide who should get the blueprints.

It was eventually decided that one would be given as a lottery, one to the winner of a Conflict tournament this weekend, one will be an Easter egg hunt (“I’ve hidden it in a towering palm somewhere in Egypt. You’ll find it when you gather wood from it!”), and the last will be held as a future prize.

I haven’t seen the building myself yet, but it would take a LOT to make me want to tear down the ‘Plex after what I’ve invested in it. Actually, I don’t care how snazzy it looks: there’s no Plex like home.

02/05/09 –

Began the day by looting and pillaging. Well, I should clarify. The Departed Player’s Cleanup Act (aka DPCA, DARPA, DPPCA, DAOMGWTFBBQCA) allows people to claim property left abandoned by players who have quit the game for a month or longer. I’ve had my eye on Ovid since he quit... 31 days ago. Feeling as though justice is finally done, I claimed the mine he had built on my tin spot. I now have tin! I then went over a small hill and claimed a copper mine in need of some repairs....and the small compound hugging it. Nothing of real value in it, just a small bullet furnace, so I’ll likely tear it down....or leave it up as a small landmark. Then I got greedy.

Knowing Ovid lived locally, but not knowing precisely where, I wandered from building to building looking for property to claim. I never did find his home, but I did lay claim to another. Rifling through the chest within, I came up with a handful of ‘treasures’: some camel milk, nearly 2k thread, a couple hundred clay and slate, a little copper and canvas. Honestly, it felt like I was robbing Goodwill. Tearing down the structures within yielded a few extra boards and bricks. Tearing down the compound itself yielded no materials, as it had been sitting in a state of total disrepair for a number of days. Leaving the trash on the ground for ‘the sweeper’ to clean up in an hour, I returned home, wove a few linen to replace my depleted supply, and plotted my next activity.

I traded some steel sheeting at the Goods for some concrete and gold wire: when I eventually get a beetle pretty enough to show, I’ll only require some marble to build the statue now.

Night was falling, so I decided to work on frogs. Hugging the coastline of the Red Sea, I made my way south, listening for a telltale croak. As I made my way south, MouseD gives me a chat. MouseD is hardcore Cicada-hunter Prime and wanted to know if I had passed yet. I checked my points....both cages were still up and advised him that I had not, but if all went well, it would be just a couple more days. This pleased him, as he was looking for a person to pick for a Prophecy. Heh. He brought me up to speed (if you’ll pardon the expression) on Teppy’s modifications (read: nerfage) of speed awards. MouseD currently sitting at 10 speed points or so (should be 14, but Teppy changed the way speed is award past 7-8 points this time, in an effort to slow us down, literally. I had wanted to get to 21 eventually, but I think I’ll stop at 7 and if I get more, that’s just gravy. Travel is already much less painful.

Suddenly, a croak! I turned to the coast, walked a few steps, and pounced while waiting for the next croak to help me get my bearings. Surprise! I caught the frog on the first go. Now one animal shy for +1 strength (and an additional 500 carry), I cut across the land, hoping to find otters, rat tracks, or maybe even a cicada! No such luck, so I decided to start breeding rabbits to catch falcons.

I’ve found that my life usually runs like this: I make plans, I execute plans, they go horribly awry, something really neat happens instead, everything works out. Rabbits were, of course, no exception.

By an incredibly happy coincidence, when I returned to Shabbat Ab, I found an entirely random announcement that a local guild The Wanderers had set up a large amount of public structures, including a vault kiln and pottery deck: exactly what I needed to make a clay dome for a rabbit hutch! The deck takes 2 hours to make and then another hour to cook. To alleviate some aggravation, they have a good set up: normally there should be a ready to go dome in the kiln. Just take it, move the wet one from the deck to the kiln, start a new one spinning. I get there and one is baking and one is spinning. There’s no way of knowing how long it’s going to take, but I’ve got 250 clay on me from the House of the Fallen earlier so I decide to hang out for a few minutes. Happily, I had to wait less than three minutes. Both machines stopped at about the same time. I happily took a new dome, moved the wet over to bake, went to make a new one... and found it takes 400 clay. Crap! I had no jugs on me, the wife was parked at the Harmony gazebo, I was too close to the Chariot stop to expedition travel....I as going to have to run home. I gave hasty apologies to the wondering Wanderers wandering about and dashed home to get more clay.

On the way home, there was a cry on E! that a gazelle had been spied in Saqqarah and they were mobilizing a group to tag it. Argh! I had to ignore the call...there will be other gazelles, I reminded myself, and Debts Must Be Paid. Hitting the ‘plex...I had no clay on hand: it had all been made into bricks. Sigh. I grabbed a few dozen jugs and hit the clay at full force, scooping with a mad abandon. Halfway through my labors, another gazelle call was made...in our regional channel! Kfir had found one just north of SBody, by the Chariot Stop. Finishing quickly, I ‘ported to Mandisa, then warped to the Wanderers, started the dome spinning, and rushed to join the tiny mob converging on the hapless gazelle.

We kept this to ourselves to make the capture quick and a dozen or so locals surrounded the beast. Robare led the charge, and we tightened the circle... the gazelle broke free and we chased it down to a steep slope. It quickly darted in various directions, only to find one of us in its path. Backed against the cliff, it tried one last lunge for freedom, only to find me blocking it. It lowered its head in mute submission and we all tagged it. Yay! We congratulated each other, then dispersed.

Returning home, I built the hutch and filled it with the hundred of carrots that had been sitting for weeks. I put out a request on E! for a breeding pair of bunnies and seconds later, I received an offer to “come and get ‘em!”. It was only a chariot hop away, so I burned a little travel time, and in a few minutes I had my own pair of bunbuns. I gave Vowya a couple of linen for her kindness (I believe in rewarding those who ask for nothing.) and returned home, exhausted and happy.

Tonight I will see what a couple of rabbits can do in the better part of a day.

02/06/09

Apparently, they’ll make about 10 babies and eat 400 carrots (YIPES!). I cleared out the hutch, popped a breeding pair back in with 130 carrots and made my way to the center of the world: map coordinates 0,0 in the corner of Saqqarah at the Khmun border.

Tracking falcons, one drops a bunny on the ground and waits. After a couple of minutes, it will be snatched up by a hungry birdie (not shown), and fly off in a direction (north, northeast, etc...) to roost in a “nearby” tree. The nearby tree can be hundreds of coordinates and ‘tree’ is really anything that gives wood, including pointy bushes. By triangulation, one can eliminate most of Egypt using a handful of bunnies. Searching a tree kicks off a two minute timer, so it isn’t practical to just start randomly scouring a copse of trees.

When all was said and done, I caught 3 falcons, but the last eluded me and remained safe in its nest, devouring my last bunbun. I nipped home to restock the bunny supply. I was fortunate enough to catch a carrot wave (a time when planting can yield up to 15 carrots per seed) and I can tend 6 plants at a go without failing miserably. After a while, I earned the ‘grown 777’ carrots achievement and filled the hutch to about 600 carrots. That’ll keep ‘em crunching til I get home tonight.

Cicadas are very promising: both Mandisa and I have around 8500 points each and there’s a good chance she’ll get her first point today or tomorrow and I’ll finish the Test in the same time. Here’s hoping. The weekend is here and that means cicada hunters everywhere.

02/10/09

Spent the weekend sick as all, but managed to eke in playtime between NyQuil-induced lapses of consciousness. This has been a poor year for health, but I digress...

Friday speed was awarded... and I missed it by under 200 points! ARGH! With one surviving cage, it would be a break even chance that I’d pass on Saturday. I hit the coastline and caught more frogs, closing those out. A random encounter along the way with an acrobat gave me my 16th move and my 4th dexterity point.

Late Friday, someone found Ibis in a remote corner of Sinai and the race was on. There’s only 21 or so birdies and a LOT of people who want to tag one. Five hours of travel time burned and 25 minutes of cross country running, and I get there with three other people as the last two ibis are standing and a dozen and a half people are standing around acro-ing. The only ibis I could see was standing in the middle of a small construction project. The hell? I figured either the person was trying to draw attention to it to keep the acroers from being disturbed or they were trying to ‘save’ it for someone. I yoinked it—seriously pissing off TabiaSiti, who claimed she was saving it “for her dear husband who has yet to do anything in the game” and “this was to be his first” whatever.

If I had thought about it, I would’ve pointed out that (a) Safari requires level 12 so ‘dear husband’ must’ve done something before now and (b) he could’ve spousewarped in 0 seconds. Instead, I decided to downplay and apologized. She decided that she would enact vengeance upon me in the worst way imaginable: by following me around so I couldn’t acro with anyone. I shrugged and spousewarped home. Afterwards, I noted to myself she was a perfect student of mine and could’ve picked up a large number of facets if she had accepted my apology, but all is fair in love and ibis.

Saturday came and I took to the desert with bunnies, boards, canvas, linen... a full Safari hunting pack. On the way to drop my rabbits, I encountered a cicada cage worth nearly a thousand points. Checking my score, I noted that speed would have to jump a LOT for me not to pass.

The fourth falcon was caught with rabbits and a few minutes, then it was off to the eastern desert to track fennecs. Caught another rat along the way. The day was looking good!

There weren’t a lot of public traps set up yet: just enough to freak out cicada cage placers and to give me the rough idea of where along the X-axis a particular subspecies of fennec may lie. I ran around, hedging my bets and placed a dozen traps in likely spots. 4:00am came and I checked the traps. No fennecs, but a lot of them had ‘signs of a fennec’ showing. I stared at the grid I had drawn on a piece of paper wondering how I had failed, when suddenly it dawned on me: I was reading the ranges incorrectly! Previously the fennecs were showing at traps along 3600, but not 3800 on the X axis...now they weren’t showing at 3600....they were westward moving, but between 2600 and 2800...where no traps were. Using my traps on the Y axis I was able to pinpoint where the furry, sharp-toothed, short-haired, ruddy bastards were and planted cages in anticipation of the next dawn. They would move again, but by planting cages 250 coordinates away from the center point in each cardinal direction would guarantee a hit.

By sheer luck, while planting those traps, I found a fennec of a type I WASN’T hunting in a public trap. Two fennec packs were travelling in close proximity, it seemed.

It’s common courtesy to call out when a fennec is captured and I took full advantage of that, planting cages around a second called out spot...this time in Saqqarah. I hurried over to plant my cages, dropping the last by 3:30am. I checked all of my cages and caught two more fennecs.

Returning home triumphant, I would not tarry long, as a gazelle was spotted in Meroe and I joined a circle to tag it. It was shortly thereafter I was struck by lightning....having passed the Test of the Singing Cicada!

Rat tracks were found crossing a road in Shabbat Ab and another rat added to my collection, followed in quick succession by more gazelles. Trying to tag my fourth was more challenging than it should’ve been. Two gazelle circles I ran to failed to allow me a tag. I reported the bug, but never heard back from a GM—the only blemish in an otherwise perfect Safari. It would not be until Monday night that I would get a tag that counted.

All total for my Safari progress: 4 fennecs, 4 falcons, 4 frogs, 4 gazelles, 3 rats, 1 ibis, 0 otters (I think they are a myth). I now can carry 3000 weight, 2500 bulk. (“Is that a flock in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” “Can’t it be both?”)

On the tech front, hated Saqqarah unlocked all 7 Pyramid Construction technologies...AT THE SAME TIME. To put this in perspective, each technology required 700 or so linen and 100 pieces of marble, in addition to many other materials. People are now starting to seek out limestone blocks with which to build pyramids. This is done by boring glass rods into the desert. It’s a bit complicated and I’ll go into detail some other time.

Other regions are now getting angry at Saqqarah, as they seem to be researching out of spite. The thing is, you now have a group of probably 20 or so people dictating the pace of the game, based on what technologies they choose to unlock and how quickly.

Adn unlocked Advanced Charcoal Production and it goes off timer today. In anticipation, I mined 5k copper ore and smelted it down to 300 copper, then in turn processed most of it into copper sheets and straps. The sheets will go to 2 ovens, the straps...I’m not sure. I made 27 or so, which is enough for a wood treatment tank, or half of what I’d need for cooperage tuition. Decisions, decisions....

In other news, my pilgrim shrine is finally starting to pay for itself: over the weekend pilgrims gave me 21 sheetglass. Huzzah! I may build a greenhouse this week.

02/11/09

Trekked to Adn for advanced charcoal production and returned home after sampling some free beer and masterpiece meals that were in the process of spoiling. Even in the condition the food was, it raised my gastronomy skill a few points. I may have to visit bortox’s kitchens to buy a few good meals for the permanent perception bump.

Headed back home and redecorated the ‘Plex. The oven is smaller than a hearth and as efficient as two of them, so I tore down the hearths for space, moved the flax hammock outside, and started construction of the oven. It took all the copper I was expecting, but it required 600 clay bricks. Sigh. By a happy coincidence, this was precisely the number I had set aside for the eventual Raeli. I figure it’ll be at least another month before the tech for that comes online, so I’m now ok with spending my reserves.

Hit the coastline with Safari Pack in hand hoping to find the ibis. After nearly two hours and covering the coasts of Shabbat Ab, Stillwater, and Adn, I called off the hunt. Along the way, I picked up another 100 debens of various herbs, so it wasn’t a total wash. Even encumbered as I was, I stopped to pick up a flock of six sheep before warping home.

Arriving back in Shabbat Ab, regional chat warned me that a Goods teller (read: trader) would be on call shortly. I perused their inventory and compared notes in the shed and quickly decided on a couple of projects to work on: beetle breeding and that greenhouse. I was sitting at only 5 sheetglass shy of completing that project, aside from the 500 dirt which would take a while to dig up.

Looking over the exchange rates, I quickly discover I can make a profit on certain finished goods for raw goods and capitalize on both my abundance of leather and carrots. All total, in exchange for carrots and 250 leather (a dent in the stockpile), I left with another 30 concrete, 2 pieces of mud granite marble, 500 cabbage, 250 dirt, a half dozen canvas, 20 lint, and made a free and clear profit of some cuttable and medium stones. I was almost ready to submit my buy order to include 7 or so sheetglass when the price suddenly octupled. That’s the problem with dynamic inventory/pricing....it’s dynamic!

After gathering my goods, I turned my attention to my projects. A couple of choice beetles went into the tank with the cabbage and were quickly forgotten. Time to make some sheetglass! I had plenty of potash and lime on hand from some papyrus-plucking and ashing I had done over the weekend, so it was time to bite the bullet and finish up my glaziering skills. 5 successes in a row, then 2 breakages with skillups, so I now have 7/7 for sheetglass manufacturing. This means I will never fail with making glass and I can now make mirrors if I have silver powder in massive quantities. Mirrors are now in high demand due to a new obelisk type: metal.

I continued cranking a few extra glass out, because I could and they make great trade bait. When I was satisfied, I let the bench cool and built a greenhouse on the KbtS side of the ‘Plex. It looks pretty freakin’ sweet.

02/12/09

Very little play time— was out late taking The Little Boy to doctor’s and with a new episode of Lost... yeah, I’m one of those people.

I am absolutely in love with the greenhouse—someday I may try for a camel out of spite.

Logged on, slapped a couple of slate gray speckled beetles in the tank, carved a wooden handle for a person who needed one, and burned some of my papy to make ash. Tonight’s goal was to knock out most of the materials for the paint lab: 30 glass jars, a dozen copper sheeting, and a half dozen fine glass rods. The fine glass rods will require white sand, which I don’t have and another bench, which is more of a pain than it’s worth, so I’ll just trade for them later.

I decided that for the time I had, I was going to need a bit more than my 3 kettles to process ash to potash, so I jogged down to the public works. I seem to have an obsession with losing jugs, having expended dozens in the greenhouse construction. I replaced them, then made use of the public kettles, firing up all ten in a massive potash making frenzy. It takes around 15 minutes to process a kettle, so doing them all at once was an incredible time-saver.

Returning home, I fired up the bench and strapped myself in for a jar making bonanza! 90 seconds for each jar—30 jars total, with one wasted deben of glass when my concentration slipped near the end and I added more fuel too early.

The copper only took a few minutes and as I shut down the glassworks I checked in on the beetles: no more bugs yet. It’s very random how quickly they reproduce, but it’ll be a hundred generations before I have something ‘show-worthy’, I think.

Besides—I still need to figure how what materials I need to make what colored paint!

02/13/09

Traded away my last 5 sheetglass in return for 6 fine glass rods, and enough potash, ash, and lime to make...5 sheetglass. Muahahaha! Spent some time waffling between building a wood treatment tank or not, but ended up deciding that I didn’t feel like making 30 more glass pipes for a building I honestly don’t need. (Yet)

Poked around with color sampling. I’ll start the formal experiments and color mapping later, but always like throwing stuff together at first and seeing what comes out. Paint is peculiar—to make one deben of paint, it takes ten tenths of a reagent. Reagents include such wonderful things as carrots, copper, silver powder, cabbage juice, mushrooms and catalysts like lime, potash, sulfur and saltpeter. Fractional components are leftover in the pigment lab, so you don’t have much waste except when you’re playing around like I am.

The order the components are added matter almost as much as the components themselves in determining the final color generated. Add to this that everyone has a personal variation thrown in as well, so the recipe to make, for example, sky blue paint may vary wildly between Mandisa and Sefet.

After my vacation next week, I’ll be playing catchup and will try to fit in a full paint map, with the exception of several rare components I don’t have ready access to (Earth Light mushrooms, lead, and silver powder).

I haven’t been feeling particularly compelled to run all over Egypt looking for otters when I’ve had such limited time as of late—I may put Safari on hold for a bit until some of the “OMG! IBIS!!111” rush wears down a little in a month. I’m about 3/4ths done and I’ve got the strength I need to do most of whatever I want now, so there’s really no pressure to finish up. Safari is one of those tests that gets easier with time, so I’m ok with taking a break.

02/16/09

Came across an otter hole on Friday and this tickled me pink. I finished Principles of the Safari and got one animal closer to completion. Otters are insanely fun...there's a dozen holes linked underground. Click the otter and he goes to one of the holes linked to the current hole. Map it and find which hole only has three links, block those three with boards and catch the otter. You can pick up boards afterwards, so I caught my otter using up no boards whatsoever and my 'travel kit' now only contains a handful. Spent a number of hours unsuccessfully hunting ibis-- the one time they were found, I burned far too much travel time and real time running to get there too late. Joined the Stillwater Safari Guild to hopefully get those done a little faster. They're nice people and I've been sharing tips on the other critters, so it works out well.

Zaniac's been trying to 'update the base point of the cooking coordinates' which is an alien concept to me. I think the theory is if they waste a lot of common food in cooking, the better foods become more potent. Call it what you will, I call it a free meal. Zaniac cooked a number of free masterpieces and there was a little beer on hand, so I walked away stuffed with my first permanent perception point. I can now 'critically evaluate' dishes...that is to say, I can look at a kitchen and tell the duration and stat changes of the meal before I chow down. That rocks. Now I need to find a little more beer and I can bump that another point up.

I was stoked on the perception point and I vowed to get another. As luck would have it, dwaynedibley was in the market to sell hookahs. Burned all of my canvas (14) as well as some of my potash reserve, but I traded for a decent quality hookah (6400-something). It will allow around 20 or so tokes on an herb before it burns out. Spent a long hour puffing away and updating my Users page on the wiki to keep track of what's been smoked. Each herb will allow one point of fumeology ever after a random number of puffs, but it's up to you to keep track of what you've smoked before. After I go through the stockpile, I can try more complex blends of two or even three herbs at a go, but that's going to be a while from now.

Finally got 49 Fumeology, which is good for another perception point. It's now like I'm permanently on grilled carrots, which means I can dowse for iron, copper, or tin with no problems and mine a little faster, since I have the strength points to back it up.

Played around with beetles until I had one that wasn't going to be a total embarrassment. I'll be surprised if it wins, but I really wanted the Principles for that completed and off my screen. Built a pigment laboratory and played around with it until I had all of the paints I needed for the sculpture. Shabbat Ab's beetle garden was full, so I built mine in Khmun. I might be able to reclaim the marble after the judging, but I'm not overly hopeful since I'll be out of town most of the week. Discovered to my horror that building the beetle statue wasn't enough-- I still had to mix yellowish paint.

Ground up some silver powder and gathered my other reagents and went on a mixing binge. It was a disaster. Through random luck I was able to pull off 'goldenrod' and 'gold', but they weren't good enough for the "Mix yellowish paint" requirement. I bit the bullet and started calculating the personal reactionary values for the various pairs with the aid of a R/G/B tool. Yes, I realize this is where it starts getting...complicated. I'll try to keep it simple: a number of reagents react with each other in a specific way so the color of a carrot added to lead is not the simple average of their red/green/blue values. Some combinations will shift one or ALL of those values more or less than expected by a value that is avatar-dependant. In order to get a number of paint colors, it is necessary to work out what your individual reaction value is for many of the pairings, then calculate the necessary values that your goal is, then work towards it.

Long story short, after several hours, I had enough of my values quickly determined that I could mix some "Light Golden Rod Yellow" and finish the Principles of Scarabs.

My current demi-pharaoh group is stupidly quiet. Only one other person has even said anything the entire time. I voted for him since I'll be on vacation-- and the next election next month will let me get Kingmaker off my screen. I'm really looking forward to that.

Built a Glory Hole in Ft. K-b-t-s and knocked out 3 thermometers in as many minutes. It felt really good to do so and I'm looking forward to making more as needed for trades. A little bit after I finished, I hit the Goods to see what I could buy with the therms...and I was shocked. Happy fun shopping time for Sefet! I traded 200 dried papyrus (instead of making it into a basket) for a basket for a little extra credit (weird how that works sometimes), kicked in the three therms and in return I got: 20 soda (enough to make pipes for 10 therms), 5 ash, 11 linen, and 100 aluminum ore.

After witnessing the test launching of a few pyrotechnic stars from a portable lab someone had, I felt inspired to start working towards the Test of Pyrotechnics. I'll never pass that one, but since my main goal is to pass all of the Principles, I'd have to build a shell eventually! I traded some steel sheeting for marble and canvas, then went back home to build a Star Rack and an acid bath. Later, I stopped by a public chem lab and whipped up a ton of gunpowder. Rahr!

Ended with another unsuccessful ibis hunt. I'll get 'em next time.

02/23/09

Back from vacation for a weekend in the desert. While I was gone more technologies were unlocked: gearbox assembly, thistle gardening, another obelisk type, gyration cell technology, and possibly something else. It’s getting pretty hard to keep up with the Jones’—then I realized that to many soloers, I –am- the Jones’. As Rorsarch would say: hurm. Ran to Saqqarah and picked up all of the tech I was missing.

Planted a third fruit tree with a couple dozen linen I got from tearing down sculptures of expired players. Every compound I had flagged as ‘claimable’ had already been snatched up by other players. Such is life.

My primary goal was to get a gyration cell online over the weekend and that was a pretty tall order in and of itself: the project requires 50 moonsteel and 250 concrete for starters. Add to that a dozen crucibles, 20 glass pipes, a dozen pulleys, 50 copper sheeting (each one costs 6 copper to manufacture) and 20-something tin sheeting, and a thousand boards (literally) and my work was cut out for me. The payoffs would be fantastic: instead of getting 54 metal from 1000 ore, I’d be pulling 100...with no pollution whatsoever.

Moonsteel would be my biggest bane, I figured. I’ll also need to stockpile it for the eventual Raeli. Providence smiled when I found out our own local metalsmiths in Shabbat Ab Ironworks was selling the alloy at 5 Copper a unit. Woo! I went on a wild mining and refining spree that would be visited and re-visited several times over the weekend. I secured access to Field & Stream’s gyros on a temporary basis and provided a quantity of herbs for the extended hospitality. They have two and with Mandisa collecting the returns, no clinker is generated.

After a while, I had accumulated some 900 copper and had worn one of my copper mines out several times from the digging. I traded 500 of the metal to SAIW for 100 moonsteel and was extremely happy. They are working towards a deepwell and I may look at buying in this week so I can have access to petroleum, which will be needed for advanced machinery in the coming months.

I cranked out a couple thousand charcoal to cover all of the smelting and for trade—the gyro’s will process up to 1500 ore at once, but require 50cc to fire. A bit pricier than the other furnaces, but you will not hear me complain!

Carrying hundreds of copper and tin down to public works, I cranked up all four of the forges with pinch rollers and spent an hour squeezing out all of the metal sheeting. With some spare iron, I made a hundred-odd nails and planed quite a lot of boards waiting for my metal.

I hit the Goods so often, I think Robare is getting sick of seeing me. I traded spare thermometers (no failures yet!) for more glassmaking supplies and a few glass rods and the last crucible I needed. The biggest problem turned out to be the concrete: couldn’t find a trader, so had to rely on the Goods and the price was...horrific. I mitigated the cost a –bit- by trading 2000 dung for 100 of the concrete, but the balance cleared me of a lot of my spare goodies. Everything from copper to wire, glass rods, 1000 charcoal, a hundred quartz, and more went into getting the rest.

Back home, I turned my attention to the glazier’s benches and made several dozen pipes. After they cooled, I completed the gyration cell and celebrated by capturing an ibis in Adn! (A very lucky turn of events and the bird was announced in the Safari guild channel and NOT on E!) Six animals to go.

With all of the extra materials I had left over from my manufacturing binge, I built both a Gear Assembly Table and a Wood Treatment Tank in Fort Kbts (Ft. Kibitz, as I affectionately call it)

Wood treatment is one of those ‘complex topics’ I’ll go into detail with at some future date, but special boards will be needed for thistle farms and I’ll need to figure out what my individual recipes are to make wood of various qualities like ‘blonde, termite-resistant, fireproof’ and the like. Read: more than I wanted to screw with at the moment.

May be joining a pilgrimage for a few weekends to do that principle and maybe earn a test pass. I have a nasty feeling I’m going to need to grow a lot of barley for the tithes. My own shrine coughed out 7 more sheetglass, so I think in another 14-21, I’ll consider it as ‘having broken even’ and we can milk it for a free 200 points on our own pilgrimage.

I’m also making progress in Pyrotechnics—picked up a little acid and started my first batch of aluminum salts. Metallic salts are honestly kinda neat and I’m looking forward to ‘harvesting’ my salts tonight.

Finally, got a couple of medium stones and smacked them into gravel. Fun, but I wouldn’t want to do it everyday.

02/24/09

Less than productive night, I think. Car accident and cold left me loaded up on muscle relaxants and NyQuil—not a good combination for trying to stay awake.

Decided that the night’s goal would be to progress Principles of Pyrotechnics. Collected 29 salts of aluminum after letting it sit in the bath for a full day. Turned around and made them into 30 or so ‘squat canary’ stars. Couldn’t make a firework yet—needed paper. Paper requires papyrus, but not dried papyrus. Ran over to the public works after doing a papy run and made enough paper to last me a while.

Could not find that barrel grinder again for anything, so my ‘grind aluminum for powder’ box remains unchecked.

Played with the firework design tool and came to the conclusion that it is very hard to make something that looks decently without a LOT of time and a LOT of resources. I finalized a really crappy firework named ‘Sefet Passes Principles’ and signed up to show it off to a jeering crowd midnight on Saturday in Pyramid Lake.

Ore Extraction 4 & 5 are now learnable from SArch for the cost of 7 large quartz and 1 huge quartz respectively, so I picked up OE 4 for the cost of some trash sitting in some of my mines. I waypointed back to my least trashed copper mine to start searching for another huge and three seconds after I arrived an announcement of 6 ibis found in Saqqarah was broadcast on my Safari guild’s channel. I wouldn’t be able to use chariot travel time for ten minutes...argh!

I started running south, not very hopeful, and was probably 8 minutes in when I realized the Ibis was close to their Chariot Stop. Double argh! Still, no one had scooped the last few ibis, so I returned home by spouse warp and ran down to the Chariot and burned 14 hours in travel time in 20 seconds. Checking the Saqqarah regional chat, I was stunned—no one had breathed a word about the birds. A few minutes later, I had my 3rd ibis plume!

I returned home and mined until I passed out. When I feel more productive this week, I’ll start stockpiling what I think will be the Raeli 2.0 resources. I’m gonna need a ton of moonsteel.

02/25/09

Mined, smelted, and added to my finished metals stockpile. I currently have around 650 iron and 300 copper. Started some silver salts—I may play around with the firework design tool a bit more before the show and upgrade the Principle Passer from ‘Outright Embarrassment’ to ‘Kinda Lame’, just as a matter of personal pride. We only have three different stars to choose from now, so the winner is going to likely be whoever makes the biggest bang.

02/26/09 – I got my mind on my macro and my macro in my mine

Caught Eldar of SA Ironworks (hereafter forever as SAIW) a bit early in the evening as I did my daily camp chores...culling sheep, gathering wax, etc. I was ready to start hoarding moonsteel for the Raeli! My worst case estimate is that it’ll require 50 sheeting...which will take 400 metal. I have 50 on hand already, so...hmmm... I chat Eldar up and see if he can handle an order of 350 debens of the rare metal. There’s an extended pause and then a ‘Yes’, but it may take some time. Cool. It would cost me a total of 1750 –refined- metal to come up with that cost, and I had a little more than half of that onhand. He said he’d likely be able to get it tomorrow, subject to being able to get enough resin to cover the manufacturing.

I hit the ground running—I’d started the gyro earlier, but still needed a metric crapton of ore. Copper is the fastest and most reliable, so I hit those mines and drove them into breaking several times. The mining macro is godly, affording much faster work and more consistant accuracy than I can accomplish manually. It’ll usually take me a couple of tries to get it started ‘correctly’, so it is checking the right spot on the gems for color saturations, but the results are well worth it.

Copper repairs are starting to get pricey now that each have been repaired 4 times or so each—I may have to go dowsing for a new vein sooner than later unless I want to spend a ton of leather over the next couple of months in escalating repair bills.

By 10pm and another mine crash, I checked in on things just as Eldar chatted me that he was more successful than he thought and my moon steel was ready. Crap! I did math based on the ore I had accumulated...another 10k or so and let him know I had everything, but refinement was going to take a bit. He advised that it was ok, as he could process the ore in his Hades furnace and even get a slightly better ratio than what I could. This works out great for both of us and I ferry over 7000 ore to complement the 1050 refined metal. I threw in 250 or so charcoal as a sweetner.

If I planned this right, he’ll want to rush his Deep Well project now and the price he’ll be willing to pay for rope, wax, and leather should jump markedly in the next couple of days, allowing me to get a few things on the cheap.

My purchase did pique his curiousity. “What do you need all of this moon steel for anyway?” “A golem.” He didn’t get the joke, which was a bit of a pity, so I went on to explain my Raeli Theory and my desire to stay a step ahead of Teppy. He noted it was a bold bet, but I’d be able to sell off any extra moon steel at a nice profit, getting it as cheap as I did (which is very true!), as regardless people will still need it for gyration cells.

I stashed the precious metal in the Raeli project chest and gathered a few hundred clay for more clay bricks. I’ve got around 2k saved, but I have no idea how many I’m going to need. I’m guessing 4k, because it is both a pleasantly obscene round number and it is the exact number of firebricks that were required last time. I figure that if I horribly over judge the resources required, I can either apply the overage to a second oven or sell them to someone. We’ll see, but it is certainly exciting!

Next, I’m going to need more copper for wire and another waypoint and a few medium stones for crucibles.

02/27/09

Logged in to a giant replica of the Washington monument covered in heiroglyphs looming over the Sefetplex. My initial thoughts were “WTF is that?” and “Who built it in my camp...and why?!?” After the initial shock wore off and I examined it I discovered it was my own desert obelisk! It had received an art upgrade and apparently been force fed a year’s supply of Viagra.

They’ve been changing out the art on buildings slowly...I’d log in one day to find kettles had changed or the annoying flags gone from the glazier benches. I’m hoping the acid baths get a cool look soon. They presently look like a shrunken copy of basic/sturdy tubs.

I’m having a little too much fun with the pyro tool. I fiddled around and made an ‘ok’-looking firework, but what I REALLY want to try will require a ton more resources. When I finalize my boomer tonight, I’ll make a note of the complete cost for a single 6 second shot of glory and likely shake my head in disbelief. My ‘ok’ version requires 100 gunpowder and a similar amount of charcoal, cactus sap, and half that in metallic salts. It’d make a ‘serious’ pyro enthusiast laugh, but for me it’s a lot for a little return.

Went to replace a tub that crumbled and was surprised to find that I had finally managed to run out of canvas. Bear in mind, I haven’t flaxxed for like a month or so and now I usually trade for whatever finished flax goods I need. Traded 100 copper 50 tin and the 152 gravel at the Goods for a bunch of miscellaneous things: 5 crucibles and 15 cement for the raeli box (I’m getting excited!), 6 canvas and 17 linen for another tree (How Sefet got his grove back!) and stockpiling purposes, 50 saltpeter and 10 sulfur for more gunpowdery goodness, and a few miscellaneous items, just cause I wanted them: a little acid, 10 salt, and 5 gold.

Need to get more metal this weekend. Gonna need iron this time. :)

At some point I’m going to need to self-evaluate why I’m so obsessed with the Raeli. It’s not like I’m pursuing the Tests that need tiles.

03/02/09

“Faster and faster each impending disaster...”

Bit of a hodge podge over the weekend...I finally found where Zaniac had moved: just west of the Saqqarah chariot stop and used his barrel grinder on some Aluminum, leaving just ‘display your legitimate shell at a fireworks show’ as the finale for Pyro Principles. I was registered for Saturday midnight, so I was in the clear!

Attended a dig and, for the first time, I was the picker upper (by virtue of the fact I was known, trusted, and hadn’t eaten the negative carry food). For an hour, I moved around the hole in constant motion, in the end walking away with 10 medium stones and around 70 cuttables. I only needed about 30 or so for my own projects, so I spent the rest over the weekend on various alloys and finished goods from SAIW.

Returned from the dig to find some French people had built a compound adjascent to the water on the far side of the clay patch. Terrific. Their name translates to ‘Ragpickers of ATITD’, which I’m guessing is a French joke of some type. Also, a guild hall created by the husband of chris35 (of obelisk queue jumping fame) was placed by the road there. A frenchman was wandering around. I hailed him to find out why Falbala had built the compound up against the water, but he claimed not to speak English.

I get that a lot. For unknown reasons, we’ve gotten a lot of French traffic in Shabbat Ab. Mind you, I have nothing against French people—in fact a number of them are great people. I just don’t like it when people don’t know my language. I think that’s the American Bastard in me. Now couple that with my outright defensiveness over ‘my’ area and we have what could be an International Incident.

So, being the person I am, I chat Falbala (the person who built the compound, not the guildhall) and mention that with the guildhall where it is, papyrus won’t grow and a lot of people use the area for papy and could she move or remove the squares touching the water. I then translated everything to French with Google translate along with an apology for not knowing her language and waited for her to log back in. Once she had, she chatted back (in French, of course) and agreed to pull back off the coastline. I think they are ‘mostly harmless’, but I still get anxious over my clay. By the following day, they had two large buildings, four players in the guild, a camel pen, and a large numer of drying racks. Apparently it isn’t an outpost for wahou (the ‘main’ French guild), but a separate entity entirely. I wonder if they split for some reason.

At any rate, the sudden and drastic expansion caused me to drop a compound of my own square in the middle of the clay patch. I’ve now become everything I hate. The abyss has looked back and all that crap. I did refuse to claim the whole patch with drying racks or whatever, because that’s just ....tacky. One guy, whose name eludes me, has made it his personal goal to claim every inch of clay in Meroe and people were spazzing out on E! calling for his ban and possibly a law to restrict the number of Raeli ovens a person could build (again, I bit my lip).

Saturday, I ran though scads of charcoal and wood as I processed metals...added a couple of pinch rollers, shovel blades, 20 brass bearings to the Raeli project box (as well as made another 1k clay bricks) and made a chunk of sheeting, when I saw there was a pyro contest coming up at 3pm. Cool! I’d go over to the stadium and finish that. Cooled the forges and got there with thirty minutes to spare. Chilled out with Hepnezr, a neighbor across the Nile from me, and we shared in our nervous expectations. He’s from South Africa, so there’s not that many contests he’ll be able to participate in. He’s going for a Test pass—I’m just after Principles, so it’s a good chance he’ll win. By 5 minutes til, we have a total of four contestants and a handful of people have shown up to watch and/or judge. The top of the hour hits, we walkups register to fire our shells...and the judge selection begins. There’s only 20 people online that volunteered to judge. Three minutes after the hour, the contest is cancelled because we are one judge shy.

Le sigh.

I fooled around with a Vigil off and on until it was time to log for dinner and a movie—in the end that Vigil netted me some 20k points. I might pass the Test in a few months if I do nothing else with it.

Get back on before midnight, ready to fire off my shell—and there’s no pyro contest scheduled. I must have screwed up the time or date somehow. The next contest wouldn’t be until the following weekend. ARGH!

I finally heard back from lilac Sunday morning—their 7th Pilgrimage partner dropped and was I still interested in walking the Path of the Pilgrim? Hell, yes! Joined their Pilgrimage guild (makes things really easy for communications) and got the skinny: they wanted to tithe at –every- shrine except the one for ‘7 steel’ and wanted to get started on Monday. I made a list of all the tithes for the 65 shrines. Yipes. I checked my stocks and threw myself into the work of flaxxing and papying for a while. In the end, three hours after I was advised, I had the materials for ALL of the shrines, although I had to make some trades at the Goods for 60 barley, a unit of Antimony (seriously....what the Hell?), and a couple of cuttable turquoise.

I have a strong feeling we’re going to wind up doing 3x at a lot of shrines though. The winners this week were over 12k points.

Late Sunday the devs made a change to the Principles of Pyro to make it easier: they removed the ‘watch 7 stars from a portable star lab’ and fixed it so making salts satisfies the need to build your own acid bath and something else was pruned back. In the process they broke it for people who had already started. Many people got stuck with a bug that they have to learn a skill they already know (neutralization), thus preventing them from doing anything. In my own case, it flagged ‘display your shell’ as being completed, but unflagged ‘grind aluminum into powder’ and ‘build a clay mortar’. The clay mortar took 3 seconds to pick up 10 firebricks from a chest. I ran back to Saqqarah and hit the grinder one last time....Level 18 and Pyro Principles finished—without ever firing a firework. Yay!

03/03/09

Tonight wasn’t so much ‘play’, as it was discussion. Everyone from the Pilgrimage group was on, so we discussed each of the now 66 shrines in turn: location, how many times we would be tithing at each, how much carry was involved, running point totals, etc. Rabble is the organizer and will be forwarding the spreadsheet to us later today. That’s right: spreadsheet. You –know- a game is fun if you’re compelled to use a spreadsheet for organizing an activity. Admittedly, it isn’t the same type of fun as you get from ten minutes of Donkey Kong. This is more visceral, as it comes with a deep and abiding sense of accomplishment.

Needless to say, Worship Tests aren’t for everyone.

When all was said and done, the additional supplies needed bordered on ginormous. On the whole, most shrines will be hit 3-4 times with the exception of several that were too greedy or expensive. The greedy ones: 10 potash, 7 steel, 15 copper we’re skipping and may hit later if we need more points. The expensive ones or ones that require odd things only get one or two hits per: Nefertiti Crown mushrooms, sheet glass (there are 5 such shrines), barley, cuttable turquoise, and the like.

Fortunately, I had ton of extra papy on hand from a couple of runs I’d made. Within an hour or so of piddling around, I had grown and/or manufactured almost everything I need. I think I’m just a couple hundred rotten flax and 60 barley short. I’ll be supplying a ton of extra sheet glass for the group (my own shrine just spat out 21 glass—it’s now turning a profit!) and Rabble is providing some spare cuttable stones and antimony. Good synergy with this group.

Unfortunately, it may be a bit of time before we’re ready to go. The hard part of Pilgrimage isn’t the resource gathering—it’s coordinating a time 7 strangers can play at the same time for several weeks. If it were my ‘regular’ gaming group, it’d be cake: Jonathan or Adam excel at planning, Kotas and I aren’t afraid of grinding (although I think I’m the Master of Pointless Drudgery), and we generally have 7 reliable people overall. I think the earliest we’ll be able to get going is Sunday night, which will leave plenty of time for the others to scrape up a few hundred papy and flax.

03/04/09

Shorter play session (the rest of the week will be like this). Hit a small acro line by virtue of their being no wait and learned two new moves: Inverted pushups and Rear Squat. The latter looks like a chicken scratching at the dirt and amuses me somewhat. One more move and I’ll be at 3000 carry. I saw on a census report someone finally finished Acrobat and after a little digging I found it to be tlanthil. With over 2800 facets taught, he’s certainly earned that one.

That little compound the trial player built on the edge of my garden area finally became available, so I laid claim to it. I’ll make modifications to it later and perhaps make it into a wall, fort, or something else to discourage more settlers in my garden. Apparently bees aren’t enough.

There’s a disturbing law that just passed that replaces the DPAC with the following: trial accounts become lootable after 14 days logged off. Any ‘fragile chests’ left from DPAC are lootable. Paid players that quit can name an ‘heir’ beforehand. Heirs get first dibs on their stuff. Otherwise, after 74 days it becomes fair game. (60 days post-expiration + 14 days for the heirs. Good gods y’all.)

Finished the flax and slate I needed for the Pilgrimage, then took 190 dried papyrus over to the Goods and traded for some soda, lime, antimony, the rest of the barley and some strontium ore and zinc ore (for the odd Vigil sacrifice). I like accumulating stuff I don’t normally have access to.

Fired up a lot of equipment to process stuff for the inevitable Raeli. I’ll be so sad if I’m unable to get an oven on my own clay patch, but there’s some speculation the new ovens might be a thing to go in your compound that you load clay into. If so, that’ll be great! Note to self: sneak over to Pluribus’ house this weekend to see if he’s built one early.

My limit for keeping track of things seems to be 3 kettles (for potash), 1 bench (for glass pipes), a forge (for moonsteel sheeting), and a charcoal oven (to pay for operating my factory). I’m finally down to under 3k wood. I may have to harvest some more. Knocked out 9 or so pipes and a few sheets. Will try and get more later. I think ’25 sheets’ is probably a good stop point and I can convert the rest at ‘go time’ if I have to.

Installed a batch mixer into the pigment lab—I can now manufacture up to 100 paint at once. The idea, of course, is to verify the recipe at first with a single paint unit before committing a ton of resources to get ‘saddle brown’ or another ‘oops’ color.

Meanwhile, my neighbors have been busy. The French have built 3 camel pens and another compound. The pens seem a bit optimistic presently, as with 10k straw in my own pen, I’ve yet to capture a single camel. Why in the hell are camels still so expensive?! Not that I need one at this point, but still: sheesh.

03/05/09

The server was in a state of chaos last night with a series of crashes and inevitable rollbacks. As a result, most people (myself included) didn’t do very much besides chit chat and engage in activities that didn’t matter if progress was lost. The ‘rollback winner’ was a guy who broke a lot of glass rods looking for limestone blocks for a pyramid, mapped out a small chunk of land, and got rolled back so he had all of his rods back! The ‘losers’ were a group of people who lost one hour of a dig and a thousand stones. Ouch.

I contented myself with running around the desert like a ninny looking for an animal or two to put in my sack. With five left to go, I’m eager to finish Safari. While I was out and about, I ran over to Pluribus’ place (no Raeli) and tripped over several cicada cages along the way. Cage cost has been 4 cicadas for a month now. A number of people think it is bugged, if you’ll pardon the expression. The net result is that cages are everywhere and speed point costs have jumped to over 30k each. This, of course, is no shock to me and is why I pushed as hard as I did a month ago to finish.

There was an otter find announced on E! and I quickly called dibs. That’s kind of a ‘gentleman’ thing. It was going to take time to get there and people can often be jerks about poaching animals. I was fortunate in that the announcer, VicVic, offered to stay and guard the otter until I got there. Along the way, I received a somewhat desperate plea from a person to buy the otter-- it was the last animal he needed for Safari. I was torn. My natural instinct is for self-sacrifice and give the otter away, knowing that it helped someone else. I reminded myself that there will –always- be someone who is just about to finish, so I had to look after myself. The other Safarian was disappointed, but understanding.

Twenty minutes later, I catch up to VicVic in the outskirts on Falcon Bay. She’s dutifully standing by the otter. I thank her profusely and give her a gift of five sheetglass I was carrying as a ‘finder’s fee’. She was not expecting anything and was tickled pink at the gift. A little glass goes a long way in securing good will, I’ve found.

I was a bit sloppy catching the otter, due mostly to laziness in retrieving my boards, but the mapping went quickly. In fifteen minutes, I had bagged my otter had a cost of three boards. Given that others spend upwards of a hundred I should be proud, but I knew I could’ve done it ‘perfectly’ if I was a bit more diligent.

The otter gave me another strength point, so I can presently haul some 11 sheep around at once. When commenting on this, someone inquired “Sefet, what are you going to do with all of those sheep?” I answered, “Insulate my compound!”

Now I just need more hated acro moves for the dexterity to increase my overall carrying capacity.

Finished the day by making a batch of charcoal for the sole reason that I felt as though I had to manufacture -something-.

03/09/09

The usual grab bag of successes and failures over the weekend, so I’ll hit them in no particular order.

Burned a day’s worth of Travel Time to fail to get an ibis on an island in time. The fourth bird continues to elude me, but mark my words....it shall be mine!

I met up with Rabble and we and his mule/wife stirred up a couple of batches of cement. The mechanics of stirring work like this: it takes 250 stirs to complete a batch. Stirring trips Strength and endurance timers. You have to stir within a certain time frame or the batch hardens and is ruined. The timer starts at 2 minutes between stirs then gets quicker the further along you go, ending up at just under 10 seconds. I received 100 cement for my trouble and gave Rabble 600 charcoal and an herb for his. At some point, I’d like to meet up again and mix up some concrete.

Sunday night came and we were shy one person (PeacefulPanther) for our Pilgrimage, so that’s being bumped to later this week. Another French person (Asnath) not associated with any of the French people I’ve dealt with before created a competing pilgrim shrine literally just across the Nile from my own. This is bad because Shriners (which is slightly more amusing than ‘Pilgrims’) can choose to give her 30 papy instead of my 1 sheetglass....but not both. I fretted over this and had almost decided to have Mandisa build a shrine for the sole purpose of making Asnath’s unholy (shrines lose their ‘holy’ status if there’s another in the same area demanding more of the same good), when a group of pilgrims hit my shrine instead and hit it hard. They tithed 6 times, giving me some 42 sheetglass. I’ve gone from prophet to profit!

Made a number of papy runs to get back to a 500-ish stockpile and burned a load in the pit for more ash. I was in the process of making the ash to make potash to make sheetglass when the aforementioned shriners hit. Now I’m just going to sit on my ash (deliberate pun), it’ll be useful down the road.

The Test of Towers got unlocked and I decided very quickly I’m going to be waiting about 2 months before throwing my hat in that arena. Towers will be stupidly competitive at first and it’s a horrible resource drain as it is. I went ahead and took advantage of my knowledge of basic economics and picked up a TON of medium gems that will be needed for certain tower types cheap from the Goods. When those towers come up, I’ll sell them back for an insane profit. People have a nasty tendency to not plan ahead and will start scrambling for materials right before they are needed. Oh, the trade I’m so proud of? Sold 4 thermometers and got 5 glass pipes, a half dozen canvas, and 60 medium gems (sapphires and emeralds). Later on I also traded 40 steel sheeting for 100 leeks and 200 saltpeter.

We now get +4 to all veggie harvests due to pyramid bonuses, so garlic is actually ‘ok’ now and everything else is cake.

I went ahead and set aside a chest to house my own supplies for my own Towers, minus any bricks I’ll need. Those are very cumbersome and can be made in a few minutes, so there’s no real sense in wasting chest space on them yet. So, my current count: 4 Towers of Rich Soil (aka Tower o’ Veg) are now ready to go.

The garden I put my beetle in some 3 weeks ago finally filled and the judging commenced. I’m not going to win—there’s a number of pretty ones there, but that’s ok. I don’t intend to pass Art: I just want to get the marble back from salvaging the statue!

Acro’d a little and got my 20th move and a permanent 3000 carry. I look back to a couple of months ago and I wonder how I got by with a sixth of it. Down to under 20 facets from finishing the Test.

03/10/09

Daybreak brings new hope / My thoughts distilled to but one / Where's the damn ibis? -- A Safari Haiku

As predicted, Towers started off with a bang. The first Hour saw some 72 Towers built—only the top 14 scorers keep their points, the rest are reduced to near nothing. The top 14 accounted for 51 of the total Towers built, so some 21 towers were wasted resources.

The people who were so generous with their sheet glass passed Pilgrimage, removing a high scoring group from our group’s competition. Yes, technically each week a competing group is removed but still... get rid of the overachievers first!

Teppy released a new game mechanic involving ant farms—so people were scurrying all over the landscape collecting leaves and looking for elusive queen ants to unlock the technology. I really didn’t feel compelled to join the throngs, so I did other things.

Acro’d a little and picked up a couple of facets, taught a lot more. I was just finishing a tiny acro line of four people, when I clicked over to E! and saw an ibis announcement four minutes cold. I broke tail and bolted for the chariot. Would that four minutes cost me the bird? Being at the acro field, I was a little closer to the chariot than if I had started at my own camp, so that was a few seconds shaved. I hit the chariot and travel was free in two seconds. For once, Providence smiles.

Arriving in Falcon Bay, I compared my coordinates to the map and started a dead run northeast to cross the isthmus to the larger landmass above the chariot. Two minutes in, someone comments on the ibis: some 18 birds remain and they confirm the coordinates. I stop. I’d been running in the wrong direction since I left the chariot stop, having inadventantly dropped a negative value from the coordinates. NUTS! I switched directions and kicked it into overdrive. Fifteen minutes later, I skidded to a halt where the ibis had been located, now covered with people in a post-ibis acro blob. There were six birds left. I grabbed one and was overcome with a rush of euphoria: it was the last ibis needed. Only three critters left on Safari: two otters and a rat.

Returning home, I fiddled with a few camp chores, flaxxed a lot, tinkered with my firework a bit—fine tuned it so it looks a bit like a multi-hued fountain, then took off in search of the remaining animals. Running south, I eventually stumbled upon a large group of mines. I hit a couple looking for ones I could claim when I suddenly realized: this was the silver vein I had built a mine on and had forgotten to mark on my map! A couple of minutes later, I had located my mine.

My experience with silver has been thus: a living hell. 20 attempts to yield 3 metal. Silver isn’t an ore, it’s refined metal straight from the ground, but still... sheesh. I looked online and found a macro for silver mining made by Coyan. His macros for tin and a couple of other metals have been godsends. I idly hoped to be able to thank him in person someday. In a few minutes I got the macro up and going. 200 pulls from the mine later, I have a huge quartz and a thousand silver. This is easily enough of the metal to last me the rest of the game. Rock on.

During all of this, I received a chat from a friend asking if I was going to be participating in the fireworks competition later in the night in Queen’s Retreat. I looked at the scheduling calender. 12:30am. The hell I was.

Laden with metal, I wandered south into Saqqarah proper—it was nearing midnight and I’d be able to finish the evening by picking up Flax Automation from their UArt. I did so and called it a night.

If you’ve been following me for the past 34,000 words, you’d know the last five of that previous paragraph is an outright fabrication. After all of the preparation for Principles for Pyrotechnics, I really wanted to feel as though I had done it ‘legitimately’, which included firing the shell. If I did good with it, that’s a perk.

I pressed on through my yawns to their chariot, waited a bit, and travelled to Queen’s Retreat. The fireworks field was closeby and I set up on one of the patches to await the appointed hour. In time, three other contestants and a smattering of locals showed up. When the contest began, I registered as a walk up and chewed my lip nervously. I realized, with no small surprise, one of my competitors was Coyan! I took the opportunity to praise his macrosmithing.

After a couple of moments, we got our seven judges and the display began...

Each contestant in turn arms their shell and is given 20-30 seconds to launch it. Order is determined by the contestants, partially in a game of chicken because no one sane wants to go first. After a minute or two of no contestants arming a shell, the contest will end.

The first two contestants go and they are cute little fireworks with about a dozen stars each, the second is more appealing in my opinion as it is a vertical ring. The judges agree and score the second slightly higher. I go and set alight Sefet’s Principle Passer, which has been hastily renamed ‘Ascension’. The crowd murmers ‘ooh!’, as mine is the first multicolored firework, weighing in at 44 stars.

I placed second, giving me the ‘top 1/2’ marked flagged in my Test scorecard.

The winner was Coyan! His firework rightfully put mine to shame. With 250 or so stars, it was a behemoth. I knew I was in trouble when it launched up and hovered, rotating for a few seconds before expanding into a multi-tiered rotating carousel- which then fired sparks upwards from the tops. I congratulated him on his well-deserved win and logged out.

If I care to pass Pyro, I need to ‘win’ two more contests, or at least place in the top 1/4 and 1/3 in each.

Hmmm....