User:Sefet/abitd

A Blog in the Desert

A little bit about me first.

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 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 such a jackass next time. Sefet is a role-played character most of the time, but there's a solid chunk of my personality in there.

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

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. Well.. actually, I could've, but it wouldn't have been anywhere nearly as interesting. That's what matters, eh? It's all about the journey.

Actually, part of that last is an absolute lie. There's no way I could've accomplished what I have without the support of my friends. Rabble, AlexisBelle, Lilac, Robare, and so very many others.

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

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 (Stupid wikiformatting-- I'm not going to try to fix the table.)

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....

03/11/09

Compared to yesterday, a fairly dull time in the desert. Mostly I sat around chatting and trading, followed by a brickmaking extravaganza.

I discovered quite by accident that 3 copies of the winner’s firework was in my inventory—a consoloation prize perhaps or a thanks-for-participating gift? I’ve decided that Pyro is fun enough to pursue at least a bit, so I traded for a mess of Salts of Silver while I started up some copper salts in my acid bath. I of course forgot to check materials required prior to making the stars and found myself shy of sulfur. It’s always one thing or another. I’d been by the Goods a couple of times already, so I chose to forestall the purchase of the sulfur to another day.

Thermometers, sheet glass, and leather continue to be wonderful trading items and I am blessed with all in abundance. Not only did I stock up on many salts, I procured 30 cut and cuttable stones, 10 more nerfertari’s crown mushrooms (uncommon shrooms used in crossbreeding and as one shrine’s tithe), and a ton more gems and white sand.

The evening brought with it the first ‘prime time’ Tower Hour and I successfully ignored it. Amusingly enough, there was much less competition during this Hour than in the early morning one the previous day and only eight or nine players had their scores reduced to virtually zip. The more I think about it, the gladder I am that I’m waiting. In the meantime, I continue to stock pile resources. My project chest now contains materials for 4 Rich Soil Towers and 3 Solid Land towers. I built a second chest for bricks and made five thousand bricks to fill it. This took a little longer than I anticipated, so I called it a night shortly thereafter.

03/13/09

Pilgrimage postponed until Sunday, due to the death of teammate’s close friend. Last day or so has been about piddling around camp, gathering up some resources, and otherwise not pursuing anything seriously. It’s nice not being in a madcap race to do something.

Short term project one is a bigger, better, badder firework and this requires a lot of stuff that “I’ll get around to”. The first order of business was to make a ton of sulfur. I made another 100 jugs, then ran down to the sulfurous springs and gathered up all my jugs would hold plus a cicada. Seriously, who would build a cage right next to the only supply in the zone of a rare resource? Tlanthil would, but to his credit appraently the cage hadn’t been touched in two days, which is more than I could say of a number of mine back in the day.

Got back home, started dehydrating sulfur and promptly wrecked another basic tub. I lacked the spare canvas to make another, but discovered I didn’t really need the damn thing. Now that I knew dessication, I can boil the water away in a kettle, similar to the way potash is made. Sweet. Processed enough of the junk to last me a while and stored a few leftover jugs in the shed.

Made 2 large batches of copper salts before I realized that none of the stars we can make actually uses copper. Doh. Started up some silver salts using the last of my acid and crafted a few dozen silver trail stars.

Processed a chunk of rotten flax—the first I’ve done in a month, as I’ve been trading for most of my finished goods. It was nice seeing the distaffs spinning again. The big thing about flax isn’t the planting and seeding—it’s the processing on the Rake that’s the annoying bit. That’s going to end soon with the advent of the flax gin. Dump a couple hundred rotten flax into the hopper—come back in a couple hours, move to distaffs. That’s the good life.

Flax gins are expensive to make and require two people to operate. Fortunately, I’ve got Mandisa around when she’s not in some mysterious other-world growing invisible onions. The monstrosity uses 4 baskets, 800 clay bricks, 100 leather, 40 small gears, 20 bearings, a couple of specially cut turquoise, and a number of assorted other things (rope, flystones, oil, and leather) in its construction. That’s going to be a bit. I had pretty much everything on hand already except the baskets (800 papy!!!), cut gems, and the gears.

I’m reluctant to part with the bearings, in case they are needed for the raeli. No one can make cut gems yet, so that isn’t really pressing. I decided to knock out the baskets. I ran around and made several papy runs, winding up with 900 or so little yellow plants. Dried them out and loaded them into the loom, but quit before weaving. Will do that only when they are needed—never know when price fluctuations at the Goods make make it more beneficial to trade the raw good for a finished product.

Looking forward to the weekend!

03/16/09

Quite a bit of fun was had over the past couple of days. Friday night we pretty much solidified we’d be running around with our Pilgrimage for two or three hours before everyone kinda broke up due to real life commitments. That’s when the curve ball was pitched: Rabble didn’t realize lilac wanted him to plan the route and really didn’t want to lead. He was very content with just keeping up with spreadsheets. I knew what generally happens at this point, so I decided to jump the gun and volunteered myself to take the reigns. Few people really want leadership roles in games, myself included, but I’m the fill-them-when-needed personality. Everyone agreed handily and I had myself a pilgrimage to plan.

Truth be told most of the hard work was already done and my bits would just be coordinating the group, handling navigation, and smoothing things if they go horribly awry.

The Pilgrimage itself went very smoothly and we hit all of the shrines we wanted to in Queen’s Retreat and Meroe and ventured to one shrine in Saqqarah before having to call it due to time restraints. Points carry, so we’ll pick up again in a couple of weeks when everyone can get back together. Our score presently weighs in just under 3k points. Passes are generally around 4 times that, but our spirits were buoyed by Sunday night passes that were only 6k and change. There’s 4 other groups competing that we know about (with one that stalled out) and two or three more that are just gathering resources. I’d say in another 2-3 runs, we’ll pass.

Worked my first marble quarry with Rabble, fizzle (Rabble’s mule-wife), and PeacefulPanther, earning a piece of Oyster Shell Marble. I’d forgotten how fun those were to operate. Takes a bit of coordination between the people to keep from dropping the marble as it is being lifted from the ground by a giant skill claw.

Spent quite a bit of time on pyro, designing a worthy successor to Ascension, my previous boomer. I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no such thing as too much gunpowder and have been trading like mad to get all of the components necessary. The current project, ‘Sparklight’, does a very cool thing with spinning yellow circles and a horizontal fan of silvery goodness.

Acro Madness hit Shabbat Ab both Saturday and Sunday and I managed to escape only getting some on me. A number of people are beginning to pass Acrobatics: I now have 23 moves myself!

Started up a newbie-mule for the Test of Mentorship. I named him “Costello”, just so I could yell in regional: HEY, SHABBAT!!! Ran him around on the newbie island, completing citizenship in under an hour. Hit the mainland and ran to UBody, picked up and completed Init in record time (level 2!). Picked up Harmony then ran over to the acro line. From request for introductions to ZAP was all of 10 seconds (level 3!), started Art init right next to the line. Hit over to the ‘Plex and joined Flaxation. Used the resources there to build and destroy a sculpture (level 4!) Warped to Sefet standing by ULead and got my Init started, then warped to Mandisa, ran back to the Acro line and got the signatures for my Init, then warped back to Sefet and turned it in (level 5!). Back to Mandisa and started Init to Arch. Using supplies stolen from Sefet, the compound construction skill was learned and the compound was built-- almost got what I needed to get it to 16 size, but was stymied by a lack of time. Still, for a couple of hours, I think that was pretty good.

03/17/09 It’s time for....acro-maniacs!

Meandered over to the Chariot Stop to help out a person, RosieRazor, in need of a few acro lessons...and as long I was there, I hopped a chariot to Falcon Bay to meet Varick—one of my pilgrimage guys who happens to be a Master Teacher to me for acrobatics. He gave me a precious facet of a move, then I wandered back to Shabbat Ab.

Once back in SA, I find to my horror Rosie has thrown together a little acro blob. These things get big and out of control quickly in Shabby Town. Still, I didn’t have anything pressing... and there was a few people with some moves I still lacked.... and some of them I had never danced with... Screw it. I threw myself into the throng. In several hours I had taught another seventy or so facets and had learned move after move. The happiest moment was when I met a perfect student, MidnightBlue. He only needed one facet, which I was able to provide. Seeing him get zapped filled me with pride and a renewed determination to Finish Acro myself. When I stopped at midnight, I had run out of partners with whom to acro—and clocking in with 27 moves, I lack only a single facet of “Pinwheels” to complete the Test!

Outside of acro, the world continues its own progress. Herpocology (Herpeology? Herpocology?) Snake-handling. From what I understand, people are somewhat disappointed in the graphic for this one—a hole in the ground with linen cover.

Also, a surprise technology was revealed! Teppy like to keep things fresh and another technology premiered no one was expecting: Distilling! Finally, the desert brings us hard liquor! I can’t wait to see how this one works.

03/18/09

Logged in to find yet another acroline going on a few blocks from my house. It’s kind of amusing that I picked my campsite for the solitude afforded by the edge of a zone, and between the SA Acrofield, the Goods, and SAIW all nearby it’s one of the busier neighborhoods in the game. My ‘ragpicking’ neighbors continue to expand their campsite into a ludicrous size, but have not encroached on any of ‘my’ space, so it’s very live and let live.

Meandered over to the acro line to try my luck. It was a speed line with 3 minutes allotted per station. I really, really like speed acro—it takes the 1-2 hour waits out of queueing for the line itself. As it was, after waiting exactly three minutes, I moved to station one. It was Rabble and he noted my progress, commenting that if I didn’t zap in a few minutes, he was going to use his prophesy on me. We laughed and hung out a few minutes—we already knew he couldn’t show me Pinwheels.

Moved over to stations 2 and it was Astrina. She moved her arms in slow circles, executing the pinwheel move...and a glow surrounded me as I was thrown up in the air by a bolt of lightning! At long last I had passed Acrobatics! Cheers went around and I stayed in the line for the better part of an hour afterwards, teach what I could to those who need it. I won’t go far as to say Acro Masters (squee!) have a ‘moral obligation’ to teach others, but I like helping and it feels good to give back.

Now that I had hit level 20 (Prentice of Body!), I could learn the Toxin Extraction skill, which had just been unlocked in Saqqarah. Well, I needed a few critters for Safari, so I took the long way to Saqqarah—didn’t find any, but it stretched the virtual legs. In Saqqrah I learned most of the techs that I was missing: Toxin Extraction (make arsenic from certain mushrooms), Structural Reinforcement (allows upgrades to certain machines we can’t make yet and the creation of large distaffs), and Herpeculture (I finally got the spelling right!).

I’m not sure I want to fool with snakes and the cost for the building is insane—50 linen, 40 or so cut stone, a bunch of paint, concrete, some gold, and other things. Honestly, I’m not even entirely certain what they are used for yet.

There’s a fireworks contest up in Cat’s Claw Ridge tonight. I think I’m going to try my baby out. I only hope Sigil isn’t there. He’s one of a few people that take pyro Very Seriously and not winning this contest would be a very expensive loss for me. My current boomer uses over a hundred stars and 350 gunpowder.

Current longer term resource-intense projects:  Stockpile resources for more towers. 50 should do it, with a target start date of June 1st.  Stockpile resources for my own Vigil  Pass pyro

03/19/09 You light up my life...

Pyro! Ran down to Queen’s Retreat since I heard a new star type was available there—grabbed it and warped back. It requires Salts of Copper, which I had in abundance since I screwed up a couple of batches a while back. I tinkered with my own firework until I felt I had a dazzling display. I probably drove the wife nuts playing optometrist. (“Is it better like this? Or... like this? Now? Or.....like this?”) At last I had operation ‘Sparklight’ finished and dashed to the contest ground to be ready to go after a new Lost episode.

Neomoder was already there, hanging out. He commented on the light crowd, being just he and myself. He had never been to one before, so gave him the complete run down of what to expect when the contest began. It was when I wished him good luck later that his confused reply indicated he thought the contest was supposed to be already underway. Apparently he had not adjusted for Daylight Saving and hilarity ensued. That all got straightened out and I logged for a bit.

When I returned a minute before showtime, the area was....packed. There was a total of nine contestants...including Sigil. Crap. I waffled on not displaying, but pressed on. Heck, with nine people I just had to place in the top 3 to count as a ‘win’ this time. Quite a crowd of spectators had gathered on top of a ridge overlooking the field. We then began the show...

I’ll skip the blow by blow... I lost. Lost hard. Last place lost. To be fair, some of the other entries were...spectacular and my score was undoubtedly diminished by virtue of going right after what would be the winner. The winner was Sigil and his firework? Wow. Over 460 stars and 1500 gunpowder went into it. He used rapidly firing squat canaries to form perfect geometric twin pyramids of light in the air, which then erupted from the tip into a secondary light show.

It was a brutal and expensive lesson to learn, but it just means I’m going to have to try a LOT harder. I’m also going to have to abandon the idea of ‘wow....those explosions look pretty’ and instead focus on a ‘concept’, regardless of whether you really could do a firework like that in real life.

Afterwards, I brought on Costello and finished his Init into Architecture, nipped up to Stillwater for Obelisk Construction, and passed Principles of the Obelisk. He’s now ‘parked’, until I’m ready to get mentor points for Sefet.

03/20/09 Listen while I pla-a-a-a-a-y...for my dream, tangerine.

Fished a little and caught some catfish. Catfish can be made into flower fertilizer, if I really feel like it, but otherwise I’m content to have a lot of fish sitting around in case a Vigil calls for it. The industrious pyramid builders of Egypt finished the last of the veggie pyramids (+7 yields...woo!) and finished the first Pyramid of Deep Oceans (+1 to fishing yields), so between that and my own speed, my fish are getting a little bigger when I reel them in.

I needed to flax and flax hard. I’m finally starting to run low on rope, I’m out of canvas, and I was planning on selling 20 linen later in the evening to Pascalito for some more marble. This is the first Telling that I’ve not been intimidated by the whole marble thing and I have to say....having access to a person that does marble for set prices makes all the difference in the world.

This time, I was after two pieces of tangerine marble, which presumably is a color and not a flavor. It’s one of the most expensive, but the investment should be worthwhile. One will be used as part of the tuition for advanced tub design, the other for the advanced tub itself. Marble tubs never wear out and are fairly necessary for people serious about pyro.

Chatted up Pascalito and placed the order—he was going to work the quarries and send me a message when all was ready.

Flaxxed for a while and rotted close to 200 flax in a single bundle. Even without advanced hybrid strains, generating a lot of flax isn’t a problem. The bottleneck always comes down to processing it. Fortunately I found an herb right next to camp that gave bonuses to endurance, so I set to work on the rake/comb (I always forget which is which) and idly processed flax while planing boards.

After running around with friends in another game (yes, it turns out there are other games), I returned to Egypt to find a message that my marble was ready, but I had missed Pascalito by about half an hour—I had forgotten he was a European player. We’ve done this dance before, so I was familiar with the steps. I hopped online the next morning before work and closed the deal, returning home laden with my shiny (and hopefully not citrus-flavored) purchase.

The rest of the tuition includes 200 each of saltpeter and sulfur and 20 tar. Rather than drive myself nuts with basic tubs, I’m just going to trade at the Goods for the materials. Sulfur is cheap and saltpeter isn’t too bad right now.

03/23/09 One little, one little, one little flax gins...

Friday night I flaxxed off and on and piddled with camp chores while our Pilgrimage group debated on whether or not we could venture forth that night or if it would have to wait until next week. In the end we cancelled, as apparently the final episode of Battlestar Galactica was coming on and AlexisBelle couldn’t miss it for the world. (With my adoration of Doctor Who, I can certainly sympathize.)

While I was out of town Saturday, Gemcutting was researched in Saqqarah and there was much rejoicing. I returned to find they had also opened a new Test: The Test of the Pathmaker, our first Thought test. On Pathmaker boards, you have to connect all of the dots (aquaduct towers) with lines (pipes) following certain rules. I started the Principles to it, but I’m not very hopeful: one of the requirements is ‘mine a huge diamond’. Sheesh.

At any rate, this now meant that flax gins could finally be built and automated processing started up. Woo! I had a small number of cuttable turquoise all ready to be massacred by my inexpert hand, when I discovered the developers had pitched a curve ball: the building requirements had changed. Suddenly, instead of turquoise cut into a ‘full eye’ design, we needed sunstone (cut the same way). Yipes. I checked the Goods site and noted that turquoise had been all but cleaned out in anticipation of the gins. Now would be Sefet’s time to profit! Muahahaha!

I took my cache of six turquoise to the trading post and exchanged my gems for six or so sunstone, plus an additional 200 concrete and a couple of other things. I just beat a person that came in to wipe out the rest of their sunstone inventory.

Afterwards, I ran down to Saqqarah, got the tech and hit back to the ‘plex. Building the gemcutting table in Fort KbtS wiped out all of my spare cut stones (I have some I’m hold in reserve for tithes, Towers, and the raeli), but it’s a beauty. In a few short minutes, I remembered why I suck so badly at gem cutting: it’s the 3-dimensional rotation and trying to determine how deep certain flaws go. Full eyes can be cut about 1/6th of the time from any given gem. Basically they look like a long tube and it’s hard to get a gem that you can carve up that has just the right flaws to pull it off. I can handle a few simple cuts, but it looked like I was going to have to trade for my flaxxin’ gems.

The first came from Orrin, who needed cuttable stones. Not cut stones, mind you—those I could’ve borrowed from a project chest. As luck would have it, there was still a Goods teller available, so I traded for 60 cuttables and 70 brass and bronze in return for a ton of gravel and a little linen. 45 cuttables went to Orrin and the rest I tucked away.

No sooner had I left Orrin’s camp that I joined up with a dig that Rabble was hosting, netting another chunk of stones to supplement my supplies. I wound up being one of the ‘pickers’, so it was a bit more exciting than ‘click every 20 seconds or so on the hole’.

The second gem came from Malard, who was busy making his own Pathmaker and needed a bit of sheetglass. I set him up with half a dozen, then returned home.

I wound up having to make more charcoal and fire up the Master Casting Bench to make a TON of gears and some more bearings, but in the end I finally had my flax gin ready to go. It takes two people to start it up and each must be level 10 or higher. Mandisa is level 11.

It took a few goes to get it going correctly, but in the end, the gin started spinning nicely, crunching up rotten flax at a painfully slow rate. It’s one of those things you load up at the end of the night. Now...should I make a brick machine?

03/24/09

I’m seriously loving this gin. Login to have enough tow and lint to fill all of my distaffs, set them to work while I go flax. Four harvests later, I can fill up the gin and go about the rest of my business, come back and weave canvas and linen to my heart’s content. My heart requires a lot of canvas and linen.

I’ve decided a brick machine simply isn’t worth it—it will make 300 bricks, 6 at a time over the span of a few hours. Given the same raw materials, it takes me about two and a half minutes. Not standing in line for that incredible offer.

Pathmaker principles changed and are a LOT easier now: you can bypass all of the mining and gemcutting requirements (and there were many) by just building and opening a Pathmaker for judging...OR you can say ‘screw it all’ and beat and judge three Pathmakers that have ‘passed’ the Test. I’ll be taking the final option for now. So, I figure it’ll be three weeks before that’s done. Played McArine’s pathmaker, which is across the road from the Goods, but couldn’t beat it in a single sitting, although I came maddeningly close a couple of times. I may check out one of the others later for a comparison and take a screenshot of the finished puzzle. That way if it passes later, I already have the solution and don’t have to figure it out again. That would be... irritating.

There was a Yokir tournament held and I went to participate. Yokir is similar to a three man game of 5 card Euchre. Given that I had played neither Yokir nor Euchre before, it really comes as no surprise I lost hard. After it was over, I found the instructions in the second Tale’s wiki and it made a lot more sense. I’ll play again the next time a tourney comes up.

A lot of new Tests got released: Venery, Bijou, Reason, and the Critic. This will give both Thought and Harmony two more Tests each. Mind you, no one can demonstrate any of them yet. Bijou requires ‘fine balance’, Venery needs a couple hundred of specifically cut gems (among other things), Critic requires a person who has judged a Venery and a Bijou (among other things), and Reason, I simply have no idea about. Promise of the next body Test has been advertised as well: The Test of Darkest Night. It will require finding mushrooms and is fun in an exploration sort of way.

Finally, I flipped over to my Safari chat tab at some point and discovered someone had found otter holes they couldn’t do anything with. (They were on another mission and couldn’t be bothered with them.) The coordinates were in Shabbat Ab....on the northside, just a few hundred coordinates to the east, near the shoreline! The message was 10 minutes cold, but no one said they were claiming them. I went ahead and did so, hustling my butt over to see if they were still there.

They were and in ten minutes I had captured my third otter. One otter and one rat to go!

03/25/09

The shed has begun getting close to full, so I went on a spring cleaning mission and traded a ton of tar, silver, dried papyrus, and a few miscellaneous things to the Goods for a few dozen debens of brass, bronze, a couple of small gears, 20 cuttables, and the slab of night granite marble I had traded away several days previously. The marble worked out well...I had sold it for 10k script (the unit of Goods currency) and bought it back for 4.1k. If you time the market, you can make a killing and not worry about overpaying on things you ‘just gotta have’ later. Presently, I’m floating around 11k extra script in my account, which is a lot.

Poked around the camp a bit—the nice thing about not having anything really pressing is that you can just do nothing, so I did that. Fished a bit and bolstered my tilapia and catfish reserves, wandered around a bit, baked a few clay bricks—nothing pressing needed to be done.

After a while, several of my fellow Pilgrims were online and chit-chatting when one, AlexisBelle, proposed an Oyster Shell Marble dig. She was wanting to build a new wine tasting table, and it required a half dozen slabs. PeacefulPanther and I both volunteered to help and we went to it.

She and her husband live in Falcon Bay in an out-of-the-way location by a small lake. Very nice country and the camp was well-decorated with fruit trees and lilies. I arrived substantially earlier than Peaceful, so I was shown a tour of the grounds, which included an explanation of where future expansions will be placed and a couple of lillies to take home at the end. Very nice of them. Smoked a couple of new herbs in a hookah, when Peaceful showed up and we headed over to the quarry.

I was introduced to a variation of quarrying which is a little hard to explain, but went swiftly, with very few slip-ups. In the end, we extracted a dozen pieces and three went home with me to the ‘plex. Tonight, I’m going to make more jugs and start planting the lilies.

03/26/09 You’re so venery, you probably think this Test is about you...

Planted the lilies, including one I had picked up at the university a couple of months ago. My big holdup there was that I thought because 100 jugs of water were ‘used’ up in the planting, the jugs themselves would be expended. There’s a basis for this when jugs are used to repair mines. It turns out they are not, and I happily arranged three lilies around the sacelum, in between the fruit trees. I rather like them and I may be fertilizing them to make more.

Venery was apparently unlocked when I wasn’t paying attention and Ping announced he had one ready to go by the Chariot Stop. I had no idea what to expect, so I trucked on downtown to see what it was. Apparently, it’s a little podium. Curiously, I clicked it...

I was rewarded with the beginning of a story: “Felix and the Fate Stone Part II: Electric Boogaloo”! It turns out veneries are treasure map-style quests. You read a clue, then figure out where you need to go to get the next clue, lather, rinse, repeat. The Venery took about a half hour to run and I happily ran along the river following clues that took me along the path a young man took to bury the shards of the Fate Stone, in an effort to restore his grandfather’s flagging health. It’s a story we can all relate to.

Ping had set it up so that each of the ‘lockboxes’, things that hold the clues and can be placed on any object, including trees and people, were loaded into sculptures he built around Shabbat Ab that helped tell the story, from mocked up buildings to the Fire Pit of DOOM--- it was a great romp and it has inspired me to do the Test. When I finished, I was even rewarded with a Certificate of completion with the time stamp of how long it took me to run it: 23 minutes.

I’m still working on what the story for my venery is going to be, but I’ve got a few ideas brewing. The resources to build one include 49 cut gems (but fortunately the cuts are a type that an epileptic monkey could cut his first try), some gold, and a couple dozen small gears for the lockboxes and 250 paper and 100 boards for the podium itself.

My last project wiped me out of my small gears, and I desperately need to restock before Raeli comes out. The one component I can guarantee the oven will take is a gearbox...and that means lots of the little monsters. The brass for them is in short supply in my camp as well, so I slaved over the reactory for a while to eke up a small cache. I’ll try to get them cast today or tomorrow.

The gems will have to wait until I can trade for a larger supply. In the meantime, there’s half a ream of papyrus paper to make-- this is in and of itself quite an accomplishment. Fortunately, I had enough linen on hand to keep the 4 public presses running almost constantly. Used up my papyrus reserve and came up 80 paper short, so I took to the banks and made an incredibly good run, netting nearly twice my usual volume of little yellow flowers. I have enough now to finish the paper tonight and still have some left over for ash.

03/27/09

A little time and a lot to do, but you just can’t rush gems. Well, you can but doing so is very regrettable. I threw a few turquoise into the gem cutting table with the indication of making a few eyelets. I wound up with only a single one, having accidently shorn one too thin, another having hidden flaws that left me with nothing, and a last one that would’ve been a waste to make an eyelet. The last pared down into a perfect ‘reflection’, a cube with a nice diamond pattern on each side. I unloaded the gem from the table and blinked with surprise when one of my Principle tabs lit up. It turns out that a reflection-cut turquoise was one of the gems I’ll need when I build my Pathmaker! Serendipity, Sefet is thy tool.

I sauntered down to the public works and finished my paper in two parts—did a chunk before running around with friends in a different game for an hour and change. When I logged back in, I found to my horror, I had left 16 linen in public racks the entire time to dry. Fortunately, every scrap of cloth was right where I had left it and I was able to continue ‘makin’ copies’. I had a small line of people show up one after another for a time, but not to use the paper presses: they had heard I was downtown and wanted to acro with a master. Heh. I got Nemoder within one facet of passing the Test and I heard he got the last a half-hour later.

Swung by the Goods and waited a bit for a Teller. That piece of Night Granite that’s been passing back and forth between us got traded back for another 10k script, which in turn became 20 aluminum salts, 80 boards, a couple of medium gears, 20 brass, and 5 cuttable stones.

Fired up the casting box and started cranking out gears until I had run through all of my bronze. All total, I have about 30 small and 16 medium gears now: more than enough to build any gearbox I require.

There’s a pyro contest tonight. I don’t have anything to participate with, but if I’m in the neighborhood, I may drop in to judge. Inspiration is always nice and judges get freebees of the winning boomer at the end too.

I noted with some interest that Towers are nowhere near as competitive this time: the last couple of Hours less than 14 people built. I’m still waiting until at LEAST May, but I find it interesting it’ll be a much cheaper pass this time.

03/30/09

Once again our pilgrimage was derailed, by PeacefulPanther this time. She was very apologetic, but I pointed out that life does indeed happen. It worked out well, as a number of people wanted to participate in the Great Herb Hunt, a 36 hour forage-a-thon. I didn’t bother with it, as I did not intend to drive myself nuts competing against people with the inclination to stay logged in the entire time, foraging. We’ll try again next weekend, but we’re now facing new groups in the Competition to Give Stuff Away. I’m not very hopeful—we’ll see.

Finally got around to collecting the decrees from Costello and passed Principles of Mentorship. Later that Friday evening, I helped walk a pair of players through their Worship Initiation. One was a player from several years ago who vaguely remembered things, the other was a nine year old named Dave. I don’t judge and I’ve honestly had younger players act more mature than grownups. Some things just take a little more explaining. In the end, they both zapped and I could go to bed feeling as though I accomplished a major good deed.

Demi-pharaoh elections ended with my group pretty much deciding to pass a random (A). Sigh. For variety, I played out Mandisa’s Kingmaker group. It was the most bizarre group. In the end, only two people, myself and someone else, voted. We elected a third guy, who said he wasn’t an idiot. In politics, that’s pretty much all you can hope for. Either way, I’ve now passed Principles of the Kingmaker.

Spent a good bit of time playing Veneries and Pathmakers—at last count, I’ve played and beaten all of the veneries presently available, save one, and all of the Pathmakers I’ve found (save one), including McArine’s hideous Pathmaker from Hell. Without a doubt the veneries are the more interesting construct.

Malard build a veneries that tells a short little story that lets a person wander around some of the more prominent landmarks around the chariot stop—I flagged it as ‘great’. It was not overly challenging and was completed in about 9 minutes. He and I chatted for a bit about it. His theory is that people really don’t want a hard game, just something to kill a few minutes while waiting for the chariot. His theory, while cynical, seems spot on: he passed the Test for his venery Sunday night.

The oddest venery I played was a math challenge by McArine, whose game theory seems to run along the ‘make them suffer’ line. There was no story, which disappointed me, but the challenge was very solid. It ranged from “find a palindromic coordinate spot nearby”, to going to a coordinate which were prime factors of a six digit number, from graphing an intersection of two formulae to converting coordinates from base 13, ending finally in my neighbors backyard, as it was the average coordinate of the seven other waypoints. My confession: I brute forced the graphing part, running up and down a stretch of desert until I found the waypoint.

The happiest accident was finding otter holes while hunting the aforementioned palindromic coordinates. As luck would have it, I had precisely nine boards on me, so I couldn’t afford hardly any mistakes. A half hour later, with only one precious board wasted, I caught my final otter. One rat to go!

Enthused by having a couple of tabs gone, I decided to finish Principles of Towers. There was a solid land hour (the easiest) coming up and I figured ‘what the hell’. I dropped three towers around Shabbat Ab and when the dust settled... it was ugly. There were a total of 76 towers placed—the most of any Hour thus far and my own score was reduced to... a third of one per cent. To pass Principles, I needed to build two different types of Towers and claim 7% of Egypt. I was annoyed. I wasn’t expecting to get 4%, but I was hoping for at least 1%. There was another hour coming up at 4:08am Sunday morning and it was a doozy: new life. This requires valuable seeds, eggs, and some gemstones I didn’t have in abundance. I grinned. I was going to build some Towers.

I prepared myself by cashing in some cred at the Goods and walking out with enough eggs and sapphires (topaz? I always confuse two towers) to build three towers. I already had enough of everything else: canvas, lamps, bricks, rope, and seeds and I found I could carry the materials to all three at once. Now, I had to position myself. I nipped up to Heaven’s Gate and set a waypoint near the south side. It was surrounded by some spiffy looking cat statues and would guarantee me control of a good chunk of the northwest of Egypt, if all went to plan. I parked Mandisa up by the Chariot, then moved down to the south east section.

Nine minutes run from the Queen’s Retreat Chariot found my second waypoint, on a mesa overlooking a vast stretch of desert. I packed up and headed west. Finally, I made my way to Meroe. This position would give me a large portion of southwest Egypt, again if my plans reached fruition. I set up camp where two rivers met and logged off to await the Hour.

I logged in a couple of minutes early, then set to work when the Hour began. Construct! Load items! Waypoint! Rinse, lather, repeat. The single warp from Meroe to Queen’s cost me three days in travel time. After taking the free warp to Mandisa, the 4 hours to my final build spot seemed paltry by comparison. (I didn’t leave Mandisa at the HG tower spot for the simple reason that I didn’t want to walk back to the chariot when it was over.)

Three towers and one screenshot later, I logged, not even waiting to see the score. That night I dreamed it gave me 6.5%, taking me just shy of the 7% I needed. When I awoke, I checked the system logs from my iPhone...

Hour of the towernewlife, 16 towers built. The top 10 claims are: Tula claimed 4.25% using 1 towers. chris35 claimed 4.35% using 1 towers. evelyna claimed 4.57% using 1 towers. Voyna claimed 5.80% using 1 towers. SamAdams claimed 6.37% using 1 towers. Carrera claimed 11.22% using 2 towers. Xasis claimed 11.42% using 1 towers. Forgiving claimed 14.42% using 2 towers. Turkeybone claimed 17.88% using 3 towers. Sefet claimed 19.70% using 3 towers.

Rock on! I logged in and closed out the Towers tab, having now passed Principles and a solid 1/5th through the Test itself. I now weigh in at level 23, with only two Principles to go. That’ll change very quickly...

Saqqarah put raeli on timer yesterday.

03/31/09

Logged in next to Saqqarah’s UArt with a solid half hour left on the timer. There were several dozen people and one developer, Apophis, who showed up to usher in the dawning of a new era of technology. We nervously bounced around and I noted with some amusement we had subconsciously grouped together with others from our own respective regions.

At long last, the tech opened and I get the message “You learn to construct raeli ovens using folded birchwood resin to encase the drive shaft.” Oh gods—this is going to be bad. I don’t do alloys when I can avoid it, so although I have a resin wedge, I rarely gather resin unless it is to trade to SAIW or another alloy-maker. Still, I may have some in the shed. I warp home.

I quickly confirm raeli (pronounced RAY-lee, incidently—I got that confirmed from Apophis) ovens are built on clay, so there goes the manual dredging theories. I build my construction site and it is bugged. Typical. Only the first half of the materials are shown and they are pretty much spot on what I expected: 25 moonsteel sheeting, 10 bearings, couple dozen cement, 3 shovel blades, 60 copper wire, 3000 clay bricks, etc... I needed to forge some more moonsteel into sheeting quickly, so I nip down to public works and fire up the four forges there while Mandisa dutifully worked the one at the ‘Plex. In 10 minutes or so I had forged what I needed, confirmed I had a little folded birch resin (about 70 debins) in my shed and was ready to go right about when the construction sites were fixed and we could see the rest of the requirements.

No gearboxes this time. That was a bit of a surprise. Instead it took 5 medium gears (leaving me tons) and 20 small gears (leaving me a quantity). It needed a 5000+ quality carpentry blade, which I had anticipated, and 1777 folded birch resin, which I had not.

A few words about resin production would be apropriate here. When you nick a tree with a resin wedge, about 40 minutes to an hour later, it produces 1 resin. It will then produce another resin unit every 30 minutes or so until it gets about 6 or so, then stop. If you re-nick the tree, the whole timer is reset.

By an odd coincidence, the ‘Plex is built next to six folded birch trees with 4 others within a minute’s jog (three by the road and one up by Mandisa’s cottage). I quickly harvested the resin from those and spent a long fruitless hour looking for more. I now have nearly 10% of the required resin.

I looked at the large clay patch by Fort KbtS. I knew what I had to do now to preserve it against the now-large guild on just the other side. I became everything I hated and I covered it with compounds, drying racks, brick racks, and wood planes. It looks hideous. I placed a sign beside it in both English and French, apologizing to any who care. It’ll all be torn down once the raeli is ready.

The really sad part? All of the sycophanting fawning the vocal players gave Apophis and Teppy for this “interesting and creative” solution to the raeli overpopulation last Tale. To nearly completely wipe out the possibility of oven ownership from solo players and small guilds? That part sickened me more than finishing the 25th wood plane ringing the clay patch.

The devs have stated that opening the tech in other regions will allow other resins to be used instead of folded birch, but 1777 of ANY resin borders on insane. I’m hopeful that maybe, just maybe, when the tech is unlocked in another zone (Adn will be next), it will mean that EITHER of two resins will count toward a 1777 total.

We’ll see.

04/01/09

Very abbreviated playtime. Mostly ran around looking for trees, collecting resins. I see a lot of this activity in my future. Gremlins keep swiping the resin from ‘my’ trees whenever I’m away from camp, so this is going to take for-freakin’-ever. I bought a Very Good Resin Wedge (8551 quality) for an obscene price (30 linen), but I can’t make them myself above the 6k mark. Tonight I’m going to nick a tree and see how long it takes for the better quality to produce some resin. I’ve heard a 9001 quality wedge takes 19 minutes. The one I’m using presently about an hour.

I’ve been harvesting all the resin I can find—hopefully when other ‘flavors’ of raeli come online, if I can’t combine resins like I mentioned yesterday, I can trade even up with someone looking to build one of the other types.

In the meantime, a better use of my time might be in Mass Production of Flax and Papyrus and just trade for resins at a 5:1 ratio, if I can get it. That’s five flax to one resin, incidently.

The realis themselves are a massive disappointment for many: they left the same code in place. We’ll still need a number of them to get different colors and they appear to follow the same color bands we had in Tale 3. There were a LOT of potentially fun changes that could’ve been made here. The new graphic looks nice, but everything else was just...blech.

Started the Test of the Critic— to pass, I’ll need to judge more Art Tests than anyone else. Fireworks, Beetles, Raeli Mosaics, and Raeli Gliderports are mentioned in the Principles tab. Gliderports? Not in yet. Based on previous Tales, they launch little clay glider planes with smoke trails. Should be fun.

04/02/09 – Trying to find a resin, I believe...

Threw myself wholely into resin asquisition. The q9001 wedge mentioned yesterday actually takes 26 minutes to generate a dollop of resin, not 19 as previously reported. My own new toy, the q8551, takes 32 minutes from the time the tree is nicked to make that first sweet deben of resin. Good enough for me and much better than the hour plus I had been using.

One of the odd side effects from all of the resin gathering I’ve been doing is a insane surplus of wood. Space in the camp is getting to be a premium, simply by virtue of the fact I don’t want to have to build a lot of chests just to hold wood and resin and the thought of just dropping it on the ground just kind of bothers me. At one point I had well over 20k wood and I’m pushing over 3.5k resins of various flavors stored.

While timing the wedge to judge its effectiveness and during a little downtime, I went hog wild with charcoal making, doing some rather cavalier experiments, not caring if everything got reduced to cinders. I even filled the firepit a few times just for the pittance of charcoal it gives. In the end, I began having charcoal storage issues: I just wasn’t wasting enough wood! I filled the forges to capacity, discovering in the process they even have maximum capacities, and have begun filling up the casting benches to store it all (around 2500 charcoal). Sure, I –could’ve- left the axe at home while making resin runs, but where’s the fun in that?

After a while, I worked out that by using hotkeys, I could save time and even gather from and re-nick trees at a short distance. Rahr! All the resin, no more woodsy buildup.

I worked out a ‘resin loop’ that takes me by close to 50 trees. Mind you, many of them are being poked at by other people as well, so a number of them won’t have resin when I complete my circuit, which in and of itself takes about 28 minutes to run. It starts off in my camp where I can hit 9 trees, nibbles 36 minutes of travel time to drop me off at a waypoint behind Robare’s house, where there’s a bounty of 14 or so trees, then it’s jogging over to the goods, where another 8 trees line the road, then south on the west side of the Nile where two groves give another 15 or so trees, waypoint back to Mandisa, then jog north to Stillwater where there’s the last half dozen or so. Many of the trees may have already been tagged or renicked by the time I get there, but there’s always hope! I may have the resin within a couple of weeks at this rate.

Folded Birch Resin stockpiled: 541 debens.

I met a neighbor across the river who was reserving her clay patch so no one, including herself, could build an oven there. She covered her patch with scupltures! The neatest one was a little carrot patch infested with bunnies. High marks for creativity on her plan to block builders.

The Pilgrimage has officially stalled for now. Lilac won’t be around this weekend and the following weekend is Easter. At this point, we plan to make a big push the weekend of the 18th -19th.

Finally, the Test of the Funerary Temple and the Test of the Raeli Mosaic was opened, but seeing as I have no oven yet, I haven’t bothered picking up the Tests to begin work on Principles.

04/03/09

Ran around my circuit collecting resin. Folded Birch Resin stockpiled: 841 debens. I’ve had to reorganize my storage considerably to accommodate all of this and I’m debating on building a second warehouse down by Fort KbtS to accommodate resin overflow.

Adn put Raeli on timer last last night, so we won’t know what the ‘other’ resin type will be until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. Pyramid Lakes is the only other region that can research the technology at this time, so people have already begin starting that along. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to trade resins 1:1 in a mutual beneficial arrangement with other raeli oven builders. We’ll see.

Finished one of my circuits to find a person poking around the bottle trees. Korynth, or something similar, a level one trial account, had already gotten a woodplane and a couple of brick racks started. Oh goody. The ‘ragpickers’ next door have a welcome banner, so new arrivals fresh off the ferry from Welcome Island will on occasion show up. I like new players, but only from afar. I’ll help them with whatever, but I hate waiting for a month plus to tear down leftover starting trash from the non-subscribers.

She seemed very determined with her grass gathering, so I wandered over to introduce myself and throw a few supplies her way to hopefully mitigate the amount of trash built. I gave her a hundred boards and chatted for a few minutes: she sounds like she’s definitely going to subscribe, has been very impressed with the friendliness of people, and doesn’t sound like an idiot. I gave her enough bricks to cover Compound Construction tuition and went on my way.

A bit later on, I checked on the area and she had torn down her ‘nubian yard trash’. I think if she winds up building in my area, I won’t be terribly offended.

My saddest moment...rat tracks were announced a minute before I had to log. I could’ve finished Safari, but I value sleep a bit more.

04/06/09 So tell me what you want, what you raeli raeli want!

Friday night was committed to gathering resin at any cost. I happily trooped over around and through anything to check trees over and over again in 32 minute intervals. Saturday morning was more of the same until the lunchtime hour...

I placed my oven in the clay patch by Fort KbtS and tore down all of the trash I had built to ‘guard’ it. Ovens look extra neat this time: little ore buckets on a loop scoop clay from the earth, upending their prizes onto a conveyor belt, which then runs into pinch rollers and into a warehouse looking structure with a chimney on top. Happy at last, I set my oven to dredge tiles and took off for another round of birch gathering. A second oven? Maybe eventually, but this resin had a different purpose.

I tracked down Cali and Robare, whose trees I had been gleefully keeping clean for the past few days during my loops and gave them gifts of resin 50 and 70 respectively. Both were extremely surprised at the generosity, but I find it’s a small price to pay for keeping the peace; a sterling reputation is the best currency you can have in a social game.

After the oven had produced a few tiles, I fired it up and timed the colors....white, snow, ghost white, Gainesboro, thistle, and plum gave way to deeper orchid colors before settling into black. A very pleasing assortment that came to around 17 or so colors total. It’s a not-quite-purple oven and a nice change from the deep reds I had the far north last Tale.

Now that I can produce raeli tiles, it was time to start on the next project: something that uses them! Picked up the Test of the Funerary Temple and winced at the requirements to build one. It was the most challenging thing I built in Tale 3 and the costs had not changed: 5000 firebricks, 250 concrete, 50 iron bars, 600 boards, 100 cut stone, 200 silver, 40 gold, 4 mirrors, 16 sheet glass.

As luck would have it, I had just a smidgeon more than 250 concrete stockpiled, along with the hundreds of silver and just enough cuttable stone. The glass was also covered easily, leaving me with... a lot. Nipped down to SACFAR and cut the cuttable stones quickly using their eight saws while planing the rest of the needed boards. I supply the public works with carpentry blades frequently, so I don’t feel bad about using them and wearing a couple out when I need to.

The gold was problematic. There’s a public mine I knew about, so I made my way there. It was not collapsed but had been repaired 29 times. This was one hell of a hot potato. If it collapsed, I’m morally obligated to repair it and nasty things are said about people who don’t repair public mines they crash. Repairing a mine a 30th time would’ve cost well over 300 leather. I picked a bit at it, but passed the test of greed, leaving with a small sackful of ore. I then traded for a chunk of gold and gold ore at the Goods—not quite enough for the temple, but the price was rapidly reaching astronomical levels. Smelting it all down, I was 4 short. Good enough for now.

Parked my butt at my iron/ruby mine and dug at it until it collapsed, smelted the results and came away with 300 iron. The iron bars would account for half of that, leaving me a bit on hand for future projects.

Grabbed a fifteen hundred charcoal from my stockpile and carted it back to SACFAR and fired up all ten forges. Iron bars take fifteen minutes each to make, but ten at a time isn’t so bad!

The mirrors are the biggest pain, due to the 800 silver powder requirement. That works out to 80 cycles of a barrel grinder. Each time the grinder stops, it needs 4 leather and 4 oil to repair, so if I was doing this solo, I’d be looking at 320 leather in manufacturing costs. Ick. Fortunately, I had help from two sources, Mandisa and some food that was leftover from a dig in Falcon Bay. With quite a bit of finagling, we got things going a lot more efficiently. When all was said and done, it probably only cost about 64 leather and oil to crank it all out.

Back home, I fired up the bench and made the mirrors and a few extra pieces of sheet glass. Always a good feeling to have extra glass around the house.

Gathered a bit of silt for the firebrick bonanza. I had 3500 or so leftover from when I thought raelis were going to use them, months ago. The hour was getting late, so I was only able to knock out a few hundred towards the balance needed.

I did get the last of the gold I needed though, by trading birch resin to a person who had covered a massive clay patch by his somewhat remote home with dozens of tiny compounds. 10:1 seemed like a winning deal to each of us.

On the way back home, I noted that The Test of Darkest Night had been opened, so I picked it up. With this test, one must find and devour fresh mushrooms off the ground. Because everything is a hassle, you must find 7 of 5 specific mushroom types and return to the UBody and get a new list of mushroom types 7 times. It’s a test that takes a while to do. Fortunately, Principles is just ‘find and eat 7 of your listed mushrooms’. It’ll be a while before I’m rambling in the desert again, but it’s now filed away for later. Most of the ones on my list are fairly common this time, so here’s hoping.

04/07/09 I would bake 500 bricks and I would bake 500 more...

Baked a thousand firebricks and constructed my Temple by a small copse of trees by the road. It is amazingly cool looking. Last Tale it started out tiny and grew as you added more tiles to it. This time, the art is stunning and it begins HUGE. I’ve been told it does not get any larger, but the graphics change as you glorify it with tiles. I baked a few rounds of tiles and got the glory to around 1000, with some tiles left over for trading. I was rewarded with what looks like a flight of stairs leading down to a temple antechamber. You can’t go down the stairs of course, but it looks incredibly nice. It isn’t just a flat graphic on the ground; it really looks like there’s a basement down there! Can’t wait to see what comes next.

Picked up the Test of the Raeli Mosaic, although it’ll be a while before I build one. I’ve already got my ‘concept’ picture down: black cat with green eyes on a table. It’ll be a while before I have all of the materials to make it (takes a lot of steel cable), so it’s very ‘back burner’ right now.

On a whim, I decided to clean out a little wood and I dropped a Tower of the Living Land down in Queen’s Retreat during last night’s Hour. My impulse got me about 5.5% closer on Towers. Am now a quarter down w/ that Test. May go ahead and participate tonight during a high competition Hour, just to see. I’ll need a few thousand bricks first and to position Mandisa up in Heaven’s Gate afterwards.

As of a couple of days ago, I have a diamond mine! I bought it for cost from Numaris, another militant soloer. He’s on the list of people to spare when the revolution comes. I mined it until it broke and output is ‘fair/ok’. 13 or so small diamonds and 8 mediums.

On the tech front, things continue to advance beyond my ability to worry about dealing with them. Silkworm farms can be built for those who have attained level 28, but that’s still a bit off for me. On researched technologies, metal treatment is now available, as is crossbreeding! People have been splicing flax genomes for the past few days, creating strains that are wonders to behold. The current ‘best’ produces after a couple of weedings: 2 flax, 2 rotten flax, and 2 seeds. It’s unlocking god mode for flax. Never again will you have to run dry and just harvest for a few minutes to rebuild seed supplies! These seeds are made freely available in public chests at various chariot stops around Egypt.

04/08/09

Added a few more tiles to the Temple o’ Doom and got to work makin’ bricks. There was a Tower Hour coming up at 11:14pm and I was hopeful that with some momentum I could tack another 10% to my score by dropping four rich soil towers down in my happy spots around Egypt. It’s one of the two ‘cheap’ towers to build, but I figured ‘what the hey’ and made a few more brick racks to improve my bricklaying speed. Four kilobricks later I was ready to go.

Killed some time by playing a few more Pathmakers. I’m going to need to start tracking these better so I don’t have to repeat them later. Not that many of them are that challenging, but still. Bortox noted that regardless of complexity most Thought puzzles eventually pass, due to the sheer cost in construction. There just isn’t that much competition.

When the Hour of Towers began, I started my circuit hopping to the four corners of the Universe, building as I went. When the hour ended, my score served as a stark reminder of why I should be putting the Test off another month or two: 58 towers built. My own slice of the pie? 5%. Not dreadful, but much less than I was hoping for. Some total freak built 9 towers and claimed 19%. Meh.

I’m definitely putting a kibosh on certain tower types for the time being. I’ll only participate in the rarer towers, but won’t go nuts trying to get materials together for them. An Hour of the Hand of Man is coming up this weekend at some point and that’s a potential. It requires a lot of ash, so I may just drop one to see what I get. My canvas supply is also critically low, so that means it’s time for... FLAX!

Picked up some flax seed of the day from the public chest. This is Zaniac’s creation and takes one watering. When harvested it yields 2 rotten and 3 flax (or possibly the other way around). With horror, I realized that multiple seed flax didn’t the way I thought it did and I used up all of my seeds with the planting. Went back to the chest and grabbed a couple. I let those plants go to seed and each seed harvest yielded 3 seeds. Incredibly nice.

I’ll need to bake some more tiles and get my tradin’ swerve on, whatever in the hell that means.

04/09/09

Another day, another batch of tiles into the Temple. Its glory is now just above 2k... well short of the 7k required to pass Principles. Gettin’ there.

Flaxxed a bit and quickly generated around 800 flax. It still amazes me how quickly flaxxing goes now. I dried and burned a couple hundred just for a little ash (papyrus is so much better for ash, but I’ve got a TON of wood and flax), chucked a couple hundred into the hopper for auto-processing overnight, and hamboned around the compound, tossing fistfulls of seeds into the air with joy and STILL and many hundreds of flax and seed leftover. It was a nice night for flaxxing.

Time constraints prevented tile trading, but I did help out a visitor from a neighboring region with a bit of charcoal. SaiCoSis was very grateful to not have to return home for a pittance of charcoal to start her raeli toasting and a piece of unexpected linen in return.

Took a look at my Reasoning score, which on the whole was odd, as we haven’t been given the Test of Reason yet. Apparently, I’m a good judge of Pathfinders and Veneries, and have been slacking on Empty Hand Puzzles. Good to know. ;-) I may take a couple of hours and bring that up to speed this weekend.

I broke down and created a new warehouse by Ft. KbtS to contain my resin stockpile and extra wood. As a consequence, the ‘main’ shed now looks much happier for space.

04/10/09

Temple is now up to 2.4k and my off-and-on resin harvesting continues well. I’m likely going to buy a share of Numaris’ Tile-of-the-Week Club. Fifty resin buy in gets you a split of each color an oven he is building makes each week until it goes through all of its colors. All said and done, it’s a pretty good deal.

I processed more of the flax I had grown and quickly wove a dozen canvas. In preparation of the next Tower Hours I’ll be playing in, whenever they are, I started work on stockpiling resources. There’s two that are so costly, most avoid them utterly. I’d like to be able to build one of each of those, as well as 2 each of the ‘midrange cost’ Towers, and I’ll happily avoid the 2 cheapies.

The 2 costly ones are Night Soil and Racing Mind. Night Soil requires 2 night granite marble and a bunch of rarer mushrooms. I’d been trading one of the two pieces of granite I had back and forth with the Goods several times now and it was time to trade for it back ‘for keeps’. Racing mind requires a hundred pieces of paper, a special cut gem, a bit of quicksilver, and chemical extract known as ‘Nut’s Essence’, which is typically used in crossbreeding experiments. The essence itself is made from rare mushrooms and other fun things. The two slightly cheaper ones are New Life (the seed Tower I built for Principles) and Hand of Man (the ash and iron bar tower). Any way I chose, I was going to need a bit of resources.

I perused The Goods’ inventory page and I grinned widely. Prices had flipped on marble yet again and night granite was cheap and oyster shell marble (which I had in abundance since the quarrying episode a couple of weeks ago) was very pricey. Sweet. I traded 3 o.s.m. for: 2 night granite, 2 carrot seeds (we still can’t reproduce these), 250 firebricks, 3 ‘hairy tooth’ mushrooms (needed for the aforementioned essence), a few iron bars, a couple of eggs, and still had change left over. Tonight I’ll check upcoming Tower schedules and see what I can plan for.

While I was out and about, I got leads on a couple of mushroom types needed for my first round of Darkest Night. I made it to a large patch of Toad Skin mushrooms and passed Principles. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to a grouping of Nile Fire shrooms before they despawned. Maybe next time, eh?

They fixed a bug with Venery principles, but it looks like I’m going to have to run two of them again to get credit for playing them. Sigh. I’ll try dev calling it to see.

04/13/09 Lightning striking again (and again and again....)

Started the weekend off with a race to get two towers ready for the Hour of the Hand of Man Tower. No such luck-- I was only able to get materials for one Tower, but it still scored me 9%, taking me to just under 2/5ths of the way to passing. Afterwards, I focused on getting the materials together for two of the most expensive tower: Racing Mind. It required my paper stockpile, six quicksilver, a couple of cut gems, and some Nut's Essence. The last component sent my wife to giggling.

The Essence is made in a toxin kitchen using a bit of fiddling. There's no public toxin kitchen in Shabbat Ab, so I had to go to Cat Claw Ridge (CCR) to access one. I get there and I find I can't make it; I needed to learn Botanical Identification first!

Back home and then to a SBody with the necessary tuition, then -back- to CCR... and the fun began. It wasn't hard, just a little fiddly, as mentioned. Everything is now sitting tight for a few days. I hope to get 15% with 2 towers. We'll see.

Devoted myself to trying to see how many puzzles I can solve across Egypt. I hit zone after zone, trying unsuccessfully to trade Raeli tiles and beat every empty hand puzzle and pathmaker I came across. A lot of pathmakers have sprung up recently, but they uniformly lack any semblance of real challenge. To date the hardest Pathmaker I’ve found was the first I attempted: McArine’s back in SA.

I really wanted to finish Principles of Reason, so I checked on the wiki for bijou puzzles that may be opened. I needed to beat three of them, and there were four up. I made my way to Meroe, to check them out. There were three of them (one not yet released) in a little row in a ‘Museum’ the locals had built. To my surprise and delight, there were also a couple of mosaics there—the first I had seen. (One was the apple logo, the other a cute undersea design replete with a jellyfish, fish, and underwater plants. I favored the latter and voted to reflect it.)

Bijous are gem cutting tables that have a cut displayed you have to match with the provided gem. I really, really suck at gem cutting. However, bijou tables are better than ‘normal’ tables by three virtures. First, the gem to play with is provided free. Second, it is guaranteed that the gem they provide to massacre will produce the displayed design. Finally, you are allowed an infinite number of tries. This is great for practicing cuts without wasting precious gems. After a bit of time, I beat both as well as the one in Nomad’s Paradise, passing the Principles of Reason! (For what it’s worth, the one up in Adn had a couple of people waiting to play it and looked hard—but there were easily another 12 empty hands to play...and beat.)

In the off time, I spent time cooking tiles (over halfway to Temple Principles!), gathering resin, and tending to camp chores. I had just finished a birch run, when Philidelphia announced she had found a rat in Heaven’s Gate and wanted to give it away. I pounced at the opportunity, and she confirmed it was mine. It was in the furtherest reaches of the zone, but elation lent speed to my stride. In retrospect, the grilled cabbage probably helped too.

I arrived at the rat tracks and found they were indeed active—but the rat had wound itself in a circle several times and was impossible to see where it actually was! I traced the circle slowly and after several minutes, the tracks diverged from the roundabout and darted towards a nearby cliff. I hastened after it, determined not to let my prize escape. I pounced...and finished Safari! Never had lightning felt so good. Journeyman of the Human Body. Rahr!

The concensus is that the Venery principle bug thing is, in fact, ‘working as designed’. That’s fine. I’d already redone Malard’s. I would wait until after Sunday passes and hit Dreasimy’s and the one that passed and that’s a level in the bank.

Sunday passes came. Trillian’s group passed Pilgrimage and my group is hopeful for next week. Vigil scores are down in the 70k range again... now that there are a lot more toys in the sandbox, chunking everything into a firepit for two solid days just isn’t as appealing. Once again, I failed to achieve Prophesy, missing by....a hell of a lot, actually. Oni (fish guy) passed the Test of the Mosaic. McArine passed Pathmaker and Ping passed Venery. A moment later, I got struck by lightning.

Unbelieving, I flipped over to the system channel to see what had happened. Reason had happened. The many hours I had spent playing those puzzles paid off! It wasn’t worth a level (Tests only grant levels when your highest rank increases, like student to prentice or prentice to journeyman), but filled me with great pride. The first to pass the Test! The scores for myself and the top 7 runners up were posted and I had won by about 25%.

A minute later, someone (the third place scorer) noted that the Test hadn’t been open a full week. Teppy agreed and took back the Test pass. I was “unzapped”.

I was still staring at the screen in mute disbelief when the ‘You have gained a level’ screen appeared and lightning struck me again. What the hell? Had Teppy changed his mind? Why did I just level up? Oh! I got credit for passing Critic Principles. I figured it had bugged when he unzapped me. I turn my attention back to System—I had passed the Test of the Critic.

Apparently I’m the most critical and judgemental person in Egypt.

The Test pass revocation mildly irritated me and actually upset a number of people, who presumably have a vested interest in my passing tests, by virtue of their Prophesies. I’ll just dedicate myself to maintaining my sizable lead and try for a pass next Sunday.

There was already a queue to play McArine’s pathmaker, so I nipped over to play Ping’s venery again. After beating it in record time, I nipped down to Queen’s Retreat to play Dreasimy’s. It turns out it was one of three I had not yet played! It went quickly and I passed the Principles of the Venery. Level 28 now.

Returned home and logged for a bit of ‘offline Mandisa time’. A couple of hours later, I logged back in and realized I had forgotten to judge the venery after completing it. DAMN! Went back to QR and was glad it let me judge it. Looking over the wiki, there were a bevy of new bijou tables to play in Meroe. Went there and beat every last one of them. I’m getting better with gem cutting, but more importantly—I’m getting better at understanding How people design their puzzles and that makes them easier.

I found my screenshot of the solution to McArine’s Pathmaker, so I expect to hit level 29 tonight.

04/14/09 Born on the bijou

Gathered a little more resin, killed a few sheep, harvested some grass. Ah, the quiet simple life of the virtual Egyptian. Sunday, I decided that I would just have to maintain my lead in Thought by playing as many puzzles as possible, so that’s just what I did!

I solved McArine’s Pathmaker, as expected, and got my level, then moved on from region to region looking for bijou tables. I played a few more and beat them, but the solution to a couple are still eluding me. I still really hate gem cutting.

I checked the wiki to look for any open veneries I may have missed and there were two! One had just opened and I high-tailed it down to play. It was a well-designed venery that didn’t involve too much running and required finding locations based on song lyrics. Mandisa was quite helpful at looking things up as I dashed hither and yon.

The other posed a unique challenge: it was entirely in French. Thanks to the power of Google translate, it wasn’t impossible to beat, but a number of the locations were kind of difficult to pick out of a crowd. As an example, one clue wanted you to find a vineyard... and there were a lot of vineyards around. Le sigh.

Along the way, I added another 14 empty hand puzzles to my list of ‘beaten’. The major problem I have with them is that I have no real way of determining if I’ve played them before. Resultantly, I ‘redo’ a number of puzzles by accident. If I don’t pass Reason this week, I’ll need to make a list of Pathmakers so I don’t start running into that problem with them.

Temple principles are proving more challenging than it should be. People pursuing Temple are incredibly paranoid about other people getting ahead of them in glory, so even though I have no intention of doing that test, trying to get people to come off tiles is insanely challenging. Tiles scale for value, so the first tile of any color is worth 100 points. To get 200 points for a color it costs six more tiles. (So: 1 = 100 7 = 200, 49 = 300, 343 = 400, etc.) I had a lead on a person who was willing to trade a few tiles for resin, but he backed out. I can solo Principles with a single oven, but it will take a while. I’ll keep my eyes open for potential traders and be vaguely hopeful.

04/15/09

Slammed my head over and over against a couple of bijou tables until I eventually gave up. Solved a different one and a couple more empty hands and felt better.

Burned some gray tiles and the temple is now at 4.7k points (kiloglory?). Gathered some more resin and I’m now halfway towards oven number two. At some point I’ll need to start getting the clay for another 4k bricks.

Our pilgrimage group is finally getting its act together—it looks like we’re hitting out Saturday morning and will be making an extended run that should take several hours. Somehow I became the de facto leader and have laid out a course that should enable us to pass the Test with a little more than 7k points. We just need to confirm two of the players who weren’t online. Here’s hoping!

Chatted with Rabble, one of my fellow pilgrims, a bit about tiles— and it looks like we’ll be able to help each other out with 4 colors each way! So that’s 1200 points into the temple I can count on ... or another 800 with a pile left over for trading. It turns out all ovens built along the Nile have a pruplish tint to them...and since the Nile is the heaviest populated areas, my colors aren’t that rare. The next oven will be in Sticksville, Egypt population: sheep.

Tonight’s the night for the Hour of the Tower of the Racing Mind. I’ve got two Towers to place, which means I’ll need to burn no travel time for once. Plant, spousewarp, plant. I’m hoping for 16%, but I don’t know how competitive this first one will be.

Crossing my fingers!

04/16/09

Very little playtime—pretty much just ran over to where the Towers were going to be placed, dropped them when the Hour began, and logged. I checked my score a bit later and was disappointed. Only 7 people, myself included, participated, but everyone built multiple towers. In the end, I only got 10% for my troubles, taking me to 49.89% control. The tower itself was absolutely beautiful: imagine a pale brown rectangular solid that’s given a half-twist and covered in heiros. Now make it tranluscent so you can see a thin solid cylindrical core supporting the beacon on top. Slap a few offeratory bowls around the beacon and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the design.

Burned the last of my unique colors from the oven. The Temple is now at 5k.

There’s another Racing Mind hour coming up on Saturday—I’ve got half a mind to start the pilgrimage run with the materials to build a tower on me, then placing it wherever I am when the hour begins. That could be fun!

04/17/09

Made a papy run and squished all of the yellow flowers flat into papyrus paper, giving me enough for a Saturday tower. Ground an amethyst to perfection and dropped it in a chest with some quicksilver and materials for the construction site. Just need a thousand bricks and some Nut’s Essence and I’m good to go!

Spent some of my store credit at the Goods for some more Hairy Tooth mushrooms and I’ll make more Essence tonight.

A mosiac was advertised as having just gone up in Shabbat, so I hustled down to check it out. Although I’ve passed Critic, I still enjoy the tile art for its own sake. The mosaic was an excellent depiction of Kermit the Frog’s head suspended over crossed staff and flail. Very nice looking, if I do say so.

I had just returned home and gathered some more resin when an announcement went out there were two more bijou tables and a pathmaker opened in Meroe. Jeez. I book it down there—I really want to pass Reason. I beat the pathmaker quickly and was able to knock out one of the bijou tables. The other had a player on it, who wasn’t able to beat it by the time I needed to log.

Still no new veneries active. Right now I’d say I’ve got a better than average shot at winning this weekend.

04/20/09 It was the seed of the moment...

Starting Friday and through Saturday another 10 or so Bijou tables came online, another Pathmaker, and a couple more Veneries. I hit them all, beating most of the gems and all of the rest. The greatest challenge was another foreign language venery—this one in German, with a (very) rough English translation. I hoped it would be enough for a Test pass, because I really didn’t think I could take another week of gem cutting.

I put together the materials for two more Racing Mind Towers. The original intent was to drop one during Saturday’s Pilgrimage as a surprise, but we didn’t run as expected—Varick was a no show the entire weekend. Our next opportunity will be....3 weeks from now. I seriously had less trouble running this with a guy from New Zealand last time than with people in my own time zone. Sheesh. Both Towers went down anyway and I earned another 10% for my efforts. 60% completed!

While wandering, I found a field of neglected flax seeds waiting to be destroyed by the sweeper. ‘Tedra’ something-or-another. I put a few dozen of them in my pocket and promptly forgot about them.

I traded tiles with Rabble, burned a couple more batches in my oven, and finally made 7k glory, passing Principles of the Funerary Temple. (Ding! Level 30!) Less than 30 minutes later, a person advertised ‘7k glory packs’ of tiles for 100 folded birch resin. That’s about when I slammed my head into my desk—that’s all I’ve been after for a while. I went ahead and bought a pack for fun and received 70 colors (a number were duplicates of ones I already had, but that’s ok). I slapped them all into the Temple and it now has around 11k glory. Hilarity. At some point the temple gained a gatehouse, so it now completely blocks the road. I’ll see if I can get a world builder to scootch it somewhere reasonable.

After deciding to start working towards my own Bijou and Veneries, I traded for a bunch of gems from the Goods and started hacking away. I’m still not great at it, but I was able to cut about eight or so gems out of the 30 I needed. I’ve gathered all of the materials needed for by Bijou except for a piece of marble, which I’ve contracted from Pascalito. The venery will take a while.

I’m slowly assembling the necessary materials for a second oven, but this is a more leisurely project. I’ve already finished most of the moonsteel, a sixth of the clay bricks, and well over half of the resin.

Sunday passes came earlier than expected while I was offline. Logged back on to find I am still the most reasonable person in Egypt! Test of Reason Passed—woohoo! They now have a ‘zap me’ button for offline test passes so you can still get the warm fuzzy feeling of being struck by lightning.

There’s a couple of Hand of Man hours coming up—I discovered I had a few hundred dried papyrus lying around, so I stuffed it into a firepit for the ash. I needed some flax, then I remembered the flax seeds I was still carrying! I planted a few to see what they’d produce and I was not disappointed: 1 watering yielded: 5 flax, 2 rotten flax. When left to seed, each bed produces 6 at a go. Flaxxing has just entered ‘god mode’. Using the new seeds, I can easily tend 30 beds at once and drop a few extra to pay back the seeds used at the same time. Each couple of minutes yields 210 flax. I grew 1k without realizing it and unlocked the ‘grew 7,777 flax’ achievement.

Aside for a few hundred reserved for processing, I dried the rest out downtown—a dozen hammocks makes drying mass quantities a dream. I may add a second firepit just to speed up the processing.

04/22/09 My Towers...it’s now or never

Mass produced hundreds of ash from thousands of flax with thousands of wood. Monday night I dropped two Hand of Man Towers and scored 11%. Buoyed by my success, I plunged headlong into gathering resources for more! I quickly threw together the materials for 3 rich soil towers and worked on two more hand of man towers.

While this is going on, I have several other projects ‘time sharing’ my attention: Mosaic, Venery, and a Bijou table. I put the second raeli oven project on the back burner (heh) and was thus able to alternate between other various aspects of soul-crushing fun.

I’ve already passed Venery principles, but I’d really like to build one myself. This takes 7 lockboxes and a starting point. Each lockbox requires, among its other components, 4 specially cut gemstones. I’ve gotten fairly decent with crafting simpler cuts and was able to cut a little more than half of the total stones needed. As a side note, I also cut the stones needed for the Bijou table, and one of the ones for a Pathmaker, should I ever decide to do that one.

I’m going to need to take a couple days break from the gemcutting, so I’ll pick up on that next week. I tried outsourcing the stonecutting, but the one respondant I got wanted 500 folded birch resin for just 7 turquoise. I thanked him politely and went about my day.

Left a tell for Pascalito, my quarryman, for a piece of rare marble that I’ll need to finish the Bijou table. Everything else is tucked away in a project chest.

I had a spot of luck with paints! Shiva made a public offer to mix paints for free, so I inquired what the raw material cost would be for a mosaic. I had all of the materials on hand, save 125 copper. A good bit of mining and refining later, I was on my way to Adn. True to his word, a few minutes afterwards I was ‘porting home with some 600 debens of paint. He noted that he has all of the recipes down, so if I ever need anything, just look him up. Excellent.

Also needed for the mosaic were 500 specially treated boards: 250 glossy blonde boards and 250 glossy white ones. I’d built the wood treatment tank but I hadn’t really played around with it much. Basically you add different reagents at different times to work out formulas for making boards with certain attributes. It’s nasty complicated and every tank is slightly different so recipes aren’t universal. Elfus was selling ‘kits’ of mosaic boards for 150 resin, but since he was the one who had backed out of the tile trade last week, I opted to not engage his services. It took about half an hour and some wiki researching, but I developed recipes that worked fine and all it cost was water, wax, sulfur, and a bit of potash. As a bonus, I now understand the mechanics behind how the tank works, so the next project will take less experimenting.

I built my mosaic in Mandissa’s house, but it’ll be awhile before I have it finished and opened for judging. The tile placement works a little like tetris, using tiles from your inventory to fill a little tray. Pieces from the tray go onto a grid of triangles. I still haven’t finalized what I want the picture to be of, but I have ideas.

At some point during all of this, diania opted to increase my property’s resale value by planting an Essence of Harmony (a gazebo-looking thing that’s used in a couple of Tests) by the road in front of my house. She had been stalking the locals for palm fronds for the past month. In the end, it makes things insanely convenient for south StillWater/north SA people.

Rich Soil Tower was, as mentioned before, one of the cheapest towers to build and I expected heavy competition. As a result, I figured it’d take three well placed towers to get 5% and stay in the top 14. I tried a couple of different tower spots and nearly ran out the clock getting to the third site without burning too much travel time. When the dust settled, I was the second highest with 9.5%. All total, I’m now at 80.5% on Towers.

Tower Hour tonight is early. Six pm early. As a result, I parked myself and my wife where the towers will be built, with materials in hand. I’m trying a new spot in the great northeast and using my ‘comfort sport’ in Queen’s Retreat. I’m counting on another 6-7% tonight. We’ll see.

04/23/09

Very, very short play session—logged on and built the two Hand of Man towers, earning another 11% and change, taking me to 92 point something. There’s no good Hour coming up before this weekend, so it looks like I’ll have to wait another week before Mandisa passes Marriage after I pass Towers.

Traded 299 Hawthorn resin to Cali for a like amount of folded birch. I now have almost enough resin for another oven. I’m just shy a few thousand clay bricks...the glass...the blades...30 moonsteel...a mess of bearings....you get the point.

Still haven’t heard from Pascalito about the marble for my Bijou. I’ll ping him tonight to see if he forgot or if he’s too busy with the current project: an Aquaduct pump. A network of aquaducts must be built for the Test of Life, but the main pumping station is a regional project requiring hundreds of marble. It’s very likely that Pascalito got booked hard for that one.

I’ve narrowed my mosaic picture down to one of the following: a folded birch tree, a cat on a table, or a camel sidelong. Right now, I’m really leaning towards ‘camel’. Put it on sand below a blue sky....should look good. Not monumental, but good. I’m going to need a lot of colors I don’t have access to. I’ll have to see if I can find a non-paranoid temple builder to trade for some browns and blues.

04/24/09

Last minute cancellations of other plans allowed me some desert time last night. I log on to see there’s no good tower hour in the near future, but there’s a Solid Land hour (the cheapest and most competitive) coming up in under two hours. I needed 7.8% to pass. If I pushed hard, I could rack up 5%. I decided ‘what the hell’ and started to cut my last few cuttable stones while I performed a physical inventory of my chests to see what I had on hand. Answer: a lot of nothing.

That was not entirely true, as I had canvas and rope aplenty and enough straw to build many thousands of bricks, as well as dozens of medium quartz gems. Hmm... that left me with only worrying about cut stones, of which I had enough for two towers, and white sand, of which I only had enough for one. I made three thousand bricks while I thought and schemed.

I hit the wiki and confirmed that the local patch of white sand is out in the boonies and would require a 15-20 minute run to get more. The Stillwater patch was, interestingly enough, much closer to my house. That’s when it occurred to me that The Goods is even closer. Maybe, just maybe, I could pull off something patently insane. Five towers in five zones in twenty minutes, unassisted.

Robare was at home and he agreed to meet me for a quick exchange once he realized the fate of the free world was at stake. “It would be highly irresponsible of me to decline when the world is in mortal danger!” Robare kicks ass. I traded in some of my credit for a mixture of thirty cuttable and cut stones and a ton of white sand. I thanked him profusely, judged his mosaic and ran downtown.

At SACFAR I was able to fully employ the 8 rocksaws and 30 brick racks to finish processing the stones and the last bricks needed plus a few extra. I ran across the street to a small compound I had built a few days previously. I had intended it to house my mosaic before I discovered how large the structure was and the building sat empty. I built a large chest and dumped bricks and sand for two towers in it, then warped home to finalize my plans. At this point, the Hour was to begin in but thirty minutes.

I shuffled inventory back and forth between several chests and the shed and double checked everything before heading out. I’m rather glad I did, for I discovered that in my haste, I had neglected to make the clay lamps needed for the beacon. That was quickly corrected and I was on my way.

The only rule I gave myself was that travel time didn’t matter. I couldn’t use waypoint travelling, as doing so would keep me from using the fast travel option on the chariots for ten real minutes. With less than fifteen minutes to go, I was ready by the Stillwater coast a couple of minutes east of their Chariot. I bided my time, listening to the frogs and then, in hardly any time at all, the Hour had begun.

I dropped my first tower without even checking the percentage: it didn’t matter and would be reduced in seconds anyway. Precious seconds I needed to be in motion. I hit the Chariot and warped to Nomad’s Paradise. My second Tower went down almost by the Chariot and I glanced: 1.6%. On to Shabbat Ab! I spousewarp out of habit, throw down my third Tower, and spend four minutes running downtown. I get to the chariot and nearly warp before I remember to get the rest of my materials from my storage chest. THAT could have been embarassing.

Resupplied, I warped to Meroe and ran a minute west to drop my fourth. I took a peek: 0.61%. Five minutes left and I’m dashing back to the chariot. Although I said originally travel time didn’t matter, I’m not going to waste it needlessly. With two and a half minutes to spare, I warp to Queen’s Retreat and navpoint to my ‘sweet spot’ on a mesa in the eastern desert, overlooking the vast and bountiful sand. I built my last Tower with one minute left on the clock.

I spousewarp then jaunt back to downtown Shabbat Ab for luck. The Hour ends. I’m struck by lightning. Towers passed!

Hour of the towersolidland, 46 towers built. The top 14 claims are: Creed claimed 2.20% using 1 towers. Duncan claimed 2.48% using 2 towers. Shinjaki claimed 2.80% using 2 towers. diania claimed 3.08% using 3 towers. Ryyssa claimed 4.43% using 2 towers. Chelle claimed 4.90% using 2 towers. murtha claimed 5.38% using 3 towers. Yamantalai claimed 6.56% using 3 towers. Tammie claimed 7.36% using 2 towers. KebiRoz claimed 7.75% using 4 towers. Ikuu claimed 9.03% using 3 towers. Dusksgirl claimed 9.76% using 3 towers. Nighthawk claimed 10.24% using 3 towers. Sefet claimed 13.71% using 5 towers.

04/27/09 Do you know the way to Falcon Bay?

Friday night got off to a great start as our Pilgrimage FINALLY got back under way. We left from Nomad’s Paradise, tromped down into Khmun, turned east into Saqqarah and Falcon Bay, and ended up in Sinai. The only major snag was when we took a wrong turn heading into Falcon Bay from Saqqarah, trying to avoid a mountain range. It was a bad decision I take responsibility for and cost us a half hour of time. The only other distraction was a brief break in Pascalito’s house as we cracked open a half dozen bottles of wine to pre-emptively celebrate. They were stronger wines and I was amused to see the normal glass hoisting animations included an additional treat: shrugging, stumbling slightly, then totally face planting. Good times. As a bonus my marble should be ready Monday or Tuesday—they’d been having some problems with their dual logging.

We didn’t hit anywhere near the number of shrines we had originally projected, but made a great deal of progress, ending with a score in the 6500-range. We figured that was good enough for a pass on Sunday or another week or two and, if not, we’d revisit if necessary.

Peaceful Panther had gifted me with some extra cuttable turquoise and with a few spare I traded for at the Goods, I was finally able to finish cutting all of the gems needed for the Venery.

Sunday was spent out of the desert mostly as the wife and I celebrated our anniversary with a trip to visit the Atlanta Civic Center and see the treasures of King Tutankhamun (her idea)—it was a very enjoyable trip.

In the late afternoon, I configured my Venery, which involves running around North Shabbat Ab with a songbird companion reuniting the fragments of a woman’s soul (heart, personality, identity, shadow, and intellect) to allow her to pass into the Afterlife. Couple that with some wordplay, a riddle or two, and I think I’ve got a venery that should win in a couple of months.

When Sunday passes came, I passed Pilgrimage and Mandisa passed the Test of Marriage (on our REAL anniversary.....Awwwww!!!). Now that the wife has an actual video card, Mandisa is showing up more often in the desert. This will make for a happier Sefet and hungrier sheep.

I learned how to farm silkworms, but it will be a while before I build a farm. Those suckers take fifty sheetglass in addition to other pricey resources to manufacture. Then there’s the thistle garden to feed them, etc. Saqqarah has researched Chromatic Touch (allows the dying of silks) and Modern Sheep Farming (allows up to 50 animals in one farm, I think), but I haven’t had a chance to get that way yet.

The next Test that will get my attention is likely going to be Darkest Night, with working on pyro during the daylight hours when no shrooms grow. Varick showed off a firework he got as a reward for judging a contest and I was just simply agog: there’s going to be rough competition ahead.

04/28/09 – I’ll get oven two I know I will—I’ll be the king of wistful clicking

I put in my application to a new Guild: SA Waterworks, a group dedicated to passing the Test of Life. Most regions have an aqueduct guild, so here’s hoping. Waterworks is building aquaduct towers and channels on a point system. The more you contribute to the project, the higher the place in the build queue you are. Makes sense and is fair.

Aqueducts require hundreds of marble, thousands of concrete, and hundreds of thousands of raeli tiles, so this isn’t something that is going to be thrown up overnight. So, I have a bit of time to gather resources to donate.

I grew two thousand flax, originally intending to trade it for raeli tiles, then something caused me to check out the Goods. I had a new mission. While I negotiated their inventory, I fired up the forge and started making a few items. An hour later I had worked out the most horribly convoluted trade I ever had: close to 4k miscellaneous articles of mine (wax, honey, marble, flax, papyrus, rotted flax, dried papyrus, rare mushrooms, and many other things) in return for brass, 5 glass pipes, 60 iron, 30 moonsteel, 500 clay, 30 lead, 50 cuttable stones, and a small host of other things besides. Robare took a look at the trade page and simply said “Holy crap.”

Returning home much less encumbered, I kicked the casting box into high gear and started cranking out small gear after small gear as I diverted the forge to moonsteel sheeting. I was going to make a second raeli oven!

For hours the Sefetplex buzzed as a hotbed of ruthless industry. Crucibles and stones were cut, and another thousand clay gathered and fired. The last dozen debens of resin were harvested and an accounting was made of all that was collected: I had a raeli in a box. Well two chests, actually, but you get the point.

All that I needed now was a place to put it. I checked over the wiki’s known color maps, and it looked as though I’d need to venture to Nomad’s Paradise to obtain the soft browns I desired. I headed that way and explored. I travelled the length of the zone, hitting every oasis and strip of water looking for clay. Everywhere I turned either already had an oven churning away or was completely covered by drying racks and wood planes.

I followed the river down into Khmun all the way to the map’s edge. Every inch of clay claimed.

The hour grew late and I, frustrated. Tonight, I’ll try again.

04/29/09 – Tiles, They are a Changin’

I picked up my Quest for Clay where I had left off in Khmun, travelling south for precisely two minutes before finding an unclaimed patch. Don’t get me wrong, it was in striking distance from someone’s compound, but somehow I still manage to sleep at night. Happily, I plopped down a construction site and started loading in the materials. One additional trip from home was needed to carry all of the bricks and resin, but after a few minutes it was dredging clay.

I jogged off to search for mushrooms for Darkest Night, but finding none, I returned to the oven. This, in my opinion, is the best and worst part of Raeli operations: burning a few tiles for a couple of hours and camping by the oven to see what colors it gives and how long it takes to achieve them. Consequently, the bulk of my night was engaged in staring at a swath of color that very gradually changed in hue and luminosity.

This oven was to serve two purposes: provide camel or sand colors for my mosaic or generate tiles I can use toward the aqueduct. That monster requires white, black, yellowish, greenish, and pinkish tiles as well as ‘wildcard’ colors. The point system for the SA Waterworks guild gives more points to the yellow/green/pink subsets, since they are rarer and specific. The original spot I wanted to build should have given me some nice brown, but I was now miles off course. I nervously kicked off the burn sequence:

Success! The oven generated 13 new colors for me, including some that would be great for the sand in the mosiac (bisque, blanched almond) and colors that match both the yellow-ish and green-ish color requirements. It’s a predominantly goldenrod-colored oven that eventually deepens into a couple of darker olive colors. I couldn’t be happier.

Piddled around at the ‘Plex, grew another kiloflax after upgrading to a newer flax strain: 4 regular, 3 rotten, 6 seeds...one weeding, no water.

Mandisa popped on and ran around a bit, tending to sheepies and whatnot. We watched a poor soul run through my venery, cheering her on in our room as she made the right choices, wondering what she was thinking as she just stood in a place for a while, and so forth. In the end, the player asked me for additional clues twice, something she said she has never had to do.

I fine tuned a couple of the clues to ratchet down the difficulty a simdgeon. We’ll see how it goes in the coming days.

04/30/09

Bit of a mixed bag last night, with lack of any real focus. The biggest test-related activity was working on the mosaic a bit, where my Grand Discovery was that I can rotate tiles in the tray. The way they work is you pick a color of raeli tile from your inventory and a random shape 2-8 triangles big appears in a placement tray. The highlighted one can be placed if you mouse over the puzzle grid or rotated/trashed if you’re moused over the tray interface. You can have nearly a couple dozen pieces in the tray, so you have a variety to pick from. Pieces that are placed on the mosaic can be moved if needed, but you can’t overlap tiles, so they’ll be a lot of wasted tiles as you fill in spaces.

Found a person with sky blue tiles and we’ll be trading a half dozen colors tonight. Now I just need some darker camel-colored tiles and I’ll be in business!

Helped Mandisa out with her Empty Hand Puzzle—I gave her a material list and she got everything together. Instructed how to do the construction sites, etc. The puzzle design portion was a bit overwhelming, so I designed a stupidly easy one that hopefully will get her a Principle pass within a few days. If it doesn’t pass by Monday, I’ll start bribing people openly with resin or glass.

Wound up tending a Vigil with Rosierazor over by Robare’s camp. Zeus had apparently built one for the sole purpose of passing Principles, then made it open public. The point total on this one will be low, but it was fun scrambling around for a bit for items and it got Mandisa a level, so it’s all good. Scary note: at less than 24 sacrifices, it was already asking for specific gem cuts –and- wines of particular vintages. If I try for a Vigil pass, it is going to suck. Hard.

Rabble offered us (the former pilgrimage) a baby queen ant, but the last thing I want to do is scramble for fresh leaves every three real days to feed the stupid thing. He’s also hosting a series of digs this Saturday for bauxite, gypsum and having a mix party for concrete and cement. Hopefully, Mandisa will be up for at least part of that—concrete/cement is one of those things we can’t really do ‘in house’ and many structures are starting to require it by the boatload.

I took to the anvil for the first time in a while to see if I could make a better shovel that the 7300 or so that I was currently using. The answer? Why, yes I can. I nervously tapped out a 7850 and Mandisa will inherit the older one. At some point I may just break down and buy a pair of damn fine shovels. A pair of 9k+ quality shovels and very good food may allow us to ‘burst dig’ a hole. For now, though, these bring a bit of oomph to the dig, being about 3.5 times more effective than a ‘plain iron’ shovel.

05/04/09 Gypsum, tramps and thieves

CAMELS! Sefet has camels! In the span of two Egyptian days, camels gave to visit, eating about 9k straw between the two of them. They quickly bred, getting up to seven before the cullings became necessary. They are absolute monsters to feed, going through thousands of straw a day. Sadly, I may have to let them go—they are just too expensive to keep. Alternately, I’ll throw in a few hundred straw a day into the pen and see if I can keep them, but thin. Each slain camel yields the leather of three sheep, but leather isn’t exactly a resource in which I’m running in short supply. The sheep themselves have been trimmed to just a couple pair in each pen, with several sporting just one pair.

The second round of Demi-Pharaoh played out and I wound up endorsing a person I didn’t like at first and I briefly debated with myself on deadlocking the group. It would be tricky, but possible. Mystivia is a middle-aged housewife with sensible ideas, once I finally got her talking. I didn’t hold with all of her positions, but saw no reason why she shouldn’t advance. The other likely candidates were... decidedly weaker.

Wound up finding a trader, Taffer, who could fill my order for Hornet’s Wing Granite and sold me an aluminum mine to boot. Total cost? 3k wood and 150 slate. Bwahahaha. Finished the Bijou at long last and designed a cut that isn’t overly complex, but looked kinda neat. The challenge is finding players willing to truck it to the north end of Shabbat to play it, but I’m hoping to pick up a few people who are die hard Reason buffs.

Ran Mandisa around and got her a couple of levels by passing venery and reason principles. At one point while running Mandisa through McArine’s monster of a venery, I was close enough to home to see a group of Pilgrims hit my shrine. W00t! Free glass! Much later I found out they had gifted me with 28 sheets of glass. Very nice indeed! This was shaping up to be a good weekend.

The mosaic is coming along nicely. I found a couple of aspiring Temple builders willing to part with many tiles in return for a minor strategic advantage. 2 colors for one is quite a leg up. I thus came into possession of sky blue and brown tiles. The brown are quite literally central to my work and since I received them late last night, I will be mashing them into shape tonight. Depending on how they wind up, I’ll either continue with my camel plan or shift the design to a horse. (A running gag in the desert is people with “I WANT A PONY!” mentatlity.)

Baked and set aside a couple thousand tiles for the aqueduct, yellow and white. Added a cistern and a few copper pipes and a clay pipe segment or two. Off to a good start!

There was a cooking and eating contest I largely didn’t participate in: The Feast of Shemu. Gourmets and gourmands created and sampled pepper-inspired dishes across the land and those that served and sampled the most received prizes, including a new seed type for the top place chefs: cucumbers! In the end, I received a participation award of a couple dozen debens of resin. Didn’t spend too much time hunting meals, though, just ate when I was near a serving kitchen.

Saturday was spent breaking in the new shovel at a couple of group events: a bauxite dig followed by a gypsum dig. Afterwards, we all stirred up cement. I’ll have to say, a couple dozen people with decent stat buffs stirring cement is a wonder to behold: a process that takes a half hour plus was reduced to a handful of seconds each. I walked away with some 300 cement, plus a couple dozen cuttable stones and a number of medium stones as well. The amount of bauxite and gypsum I left with will produce another 1800 cement if needed.

It was about this time that I discovered I had fundamentally misunderstood a key concept as it relates to concrete. Concrete requires 15 cement, 250 gravel, and 100 units of water (jugs are reusable)...but does NOT require anyone to stir it. It’s a one-button click to make. Don’t get me wrong: I made a lot trading away a good portion of my first 100 cement, but if I had but known... I could’ve saved a fortune on what I’ve paid for concrete over the months. Live and learn.

Now 300 cement with a sufficient quantity of gravel will yield 5000 concrete, which is enough for the rest of the game, one hopes. Gravel, however, is only fun in moderation and by the time I had made some 750 or so I felt as though I had (wait for it) hit my limit.

The initial plan was to stockpile concrete for the Test of Life and the aqueduct towers, but I discovered at the cement mix that I wasn’t in the first round of 20 selected—it turns out the guild had been functioning for about 5 days before I joined up. Consequently, I had a choice: stockpile for another month or soup up the ‘Plex a bit.

Shortly thereafter, the ‘Plex was sporting an upgraded flax gin, capable of processing 600 rotten flax at a time (over a day or so) and a large distaff, a monster of a distaff with triple the capacity of a normal one. I gathered 200 slate and wove a like quantity of rope and learned the Mechanics skill in the hopes of one day improving the speed of the gin. We’ll see how that goes.

Robare, an elder in the Waterworks, had been offline for the past few days. When he got back he read a note I had left, expressing disappointment but understanding in missing out on the first round of aqueduct building, but to let me know if there was anyway I could help out the existing members with quarrying or whatever. He replied back that he would chat with the other elders and see about bringing me onboard as an initiate and if my contributions outpassed the existing members, it may be possible I’d bump one of them into the next round. It’s not a definite, of course, but it was the most hopeful news I’d gotten recently.

The most amusingly random thing was while I was lounging around the ‘Plex, tending to the forge was a pair of out-of-towners, possibly newer players. They wandered around my house and finally came to a stop before my glazier’s bench, discussing at length a key they thought they had. They were both amusing and confused. I leaned casually against the shed and once I had determined they were talking about McArine’s venery, I gave them directions on where to go next. They scurried off with nary a whisper of gratitude, but that’s ok. It never hurts to help, except when it does.

05/05/09 – (I will fit you....) tile after tile

Sunday Passes ran on Monday and it looks like I’m a strong contender for a venery pass next week. Woo! Trivia: venery has a couple of different definitions. It either means a collective group of animals (e.g. A venery of kittens is called a ‘kindle’.) or “the sport of hunting”. It pays to increase your word power.

Devoted the evening to working on the mosaic. I tinkered with tiles until I got a rough camel shape, then fine tuned it more until I had a better-looking one. I mean from a distance and slightly squinting, it looked pretty good. Even the wife, who helped me with a few suggestions was in agreement. It was a camel! So, I summoned a couple of art critics in independently to see what they thought. My seven year olds were glad to oblige.

The boy looked at the brown lumpy thing. “Cool! A dinosaur!” Ugh. After I said “Camel, maybe?” he squinted and agreed. I brought the girl in. “Hey, what does that look like to you?” “Oooh! A DINOSAUR!” I slapped my forehead. “A cow? A horse? Did I get it right?”

I tweaked it a little more.

The hard part was fitting the tiles around the camel. I threw away the khaki tiles I had previously put in as a few placeholders, mostly because I screwed up and traded away all of my remaining khaki, so my sand was going to look hideous. My wife suggested a nice blanched almond color for the sand, so I baked a couple hundred of those and started assembling.

The more I played with the design tool, the greater respect I had for anyone who completed one of these monsters. The entire board isn’t used, you see. There’s a border that’s about three triangles deep that goes all the way around the picture that acts as a border. When the mosaic is closed (pressed into place by glass sheets, one assumes), any tiles under the border are not shown. I figured that it was for people to have an easier time of fitting the pieces into the edge. That’s when the nagging voice in the back of my head prompted me to ask the collective intelligence of E! if that was really the case or did every single stupid triangle on the border have to be fitted. Answer: every last damn one of them needed to be filled. Finding tiles that fit proved to be incredibly challenging.

In the end, the sand was completed and I spent twice the time on the sky. All total, I went through about 300 tiles working on the mosaic, but when I was done, I felt good about it. I posted it on the wiki and made general announcements. A couple of people filtered in to see ‘Sparky the Wonder Camel’ and I figure I’ll pass that Principle in a day or two.

I celebrated by catching an ibis for Mandisa.

05/06/09 Levellin’ la vida loca

Playtime virtually zero, as my wife and I spent some time offline celebrating Mexico’s triumph over the French in the American tradition.

Logged on very briefly to handle a few camp chores, curse the camels, and shill a couple votes for Sparky the Wonder Camel and the bijou. They each needed one vote by the time I logged.

Checked in later in the evening and was tickled pink to see that I had passed Principles of both Mosaic and Bijou! I can now turn my attention to hunting mushrooms and stockpiling aqueduct resources.

It was around this time that I came to the realization that I’m the highest level character in the game. I’ve passed every Principle that’s been unlocked except Life, which no one has since no aqueducts are functional yet. The university of Leadership’s census confirms there are no people who have passed four tests in the same discipline yet, so I’m the maximum current level: 32. Rahr!

05/07/09 Here I go, again cuttin’ stone...

I’ve decided to pass Marriage which will involve getting Mandisa to pass about 7-8 tests. Since I don’t have to worry about getting too obsessive over her passes, this is more of a long-term plan. I’m beginning with obelisk (again).

Looked at the costs for the various obeliesks. Scary. Fortunately, Mandisa’s literal backyard is in Stillwater. Obelisk prices are cheaper there. By cheaper I mean “if we built a Desert Obelisk like Sefet’s, the 80 cubit structure would only cost about 250 linen, instead of the 400+ in Shabbat Ab.” The best alternative looked to build a cut stone obelisk: at a whopping size 22, it requires 67 cut stone and like 90 concrete, along with a few other things.

I gathered my materials to find I was short by a dozen or so small sapphires and a dozen units of salt. I made up a trade for the Goods—only to find all of the tellers were offline. This turned out to be a good thing. While I idled around cutting stones and between making extra charcoal, I checked out the wiki and discovered to my horror there are obelisk queues active in Stillwater that would keep Mandisa from building for another two months. I cast about and looked for a better alternative.

I found it in Heaven’s Gate. With no queue and no active builder for the past month and an obelisk size of 11, this is where we’ll build.

Now I just need the salt and gems.

05/08/09

Once again, no tellers at the Goods. I really wanted Mandisa to get her obelisk up, so I’d have to find alternative sources. I ran over to my sapphire mine in Adn and begin scooping out sand, looking for those precious glimmers. This mine has an extraordinarily poor output and the next time I’m in the area, I’m going to tear it down and rebuild. Still, I managed to eke enough gems out of it and I returned home. Still no tellers.

I have a metric ton of coconut water, but my skill at dessication isn’t enough to evaporate the water. (I know how stupid that sounds.) Tuition is a huge ruby and my ruby mine has the virtue of being almost as shoddy as my sapphire mine, but with the added benefit of not being able to be torn down/rebuilt, because it is an actual metal-producing mine. Only sand mines can be torn down and rebuilt.

I put out a call locally in Shabbat and pinged my pilgrimage group and in a span of moments, I got back a couple of responses—a local who could set up kettles for me to cook some salt and good ol’ Rabble, who was more than happy to give me the salt I needed. A few seconds later, I’m on my way to Saqqarah.

I meet up with fizzles, Rabble’s mule-wife, and she hands me the salt and I give her enough water to make five times the amount at least. I warp back home and assemble everything into a project chest for Mandisa. I believe in making things as least frustrating as possible.

Rabble chats me up and he’s decided to give me the tuition for the next dessication level. I balked at first, as I generally don’t accept gifts of such value, but he sited his fortune at his water mine and that he’s previously given one away to a complete stranger. To give a relative value of its worth, these sell typically for 1200-1800 papyrus on the open market and I’ve never seen one at the Goods for trade.

He’s hosting an acro line tonight and will pass it along then. Happy days! There’s several tuitions that call for salt and I’m looking forward to advancing along those lines soon.

In the meantime, Mandisa hopped on and with a few travel tips, made her way to Heaven’s Gate. I updated the wiki and she spent a bit of time finding the perfect scenic spot for her obelisk. A few minutes later, I’ve updated the wiki and she’s built a pointy spire. Now she just needs to hold it for 7 real life days. Here’s hoping!

05/11/09

Made up a list of things I wanted to try and accomplish and managed to do nearly all of them. I met up with Rabble on the fields of Acro and he gave me the ruby he had promised and 20 salt besides. I spent an hour teaching facets to new players as a way of giving back and it worked out nicely. Mandisa ran through the line herself and now has about 8 moves.

I set about my list. It mostly comprised of learning skills I had skipped and picking up a couple of skills in Saqqarah. Saq would have to wait a bit, though—there was mechanics to be leaned here first!

The mechanics skill has 7 levels, one for each school, and each has an insane cost associated with it (1000 gold wire, for example). The one I sought to learn at cost 300 malt(raw) and 300 malt (burnt). There were malting trays and grain ovens at SACFAR, so all I needed was 600 barley. Blech.

Barley is hell. It grows in a bed like flax, but you have to maintain an eye on fertilizer, water, and weedkiller levels. Three different weeds can grow and barley stops growing and starts dying if there are weeds in the bed. Each weed type is treated a different way. All total, it takes about 2-8 minutes to harvest a single bed and good luck trying to do more than 3 at a time. Each bed yields 1-4 barley, depending on if you have to harvest a ‘losing’ bed early, but if you succeed in growing your barley completely, you get 10. Since I passed a Worship test (Pilgrimage), my barley gets a bonus +10 whenever it is fully matured. It’s in my interest to get that barley to survive!

I had heard there was a ‘speed barley’ routine where you don’t care about weedkiller and fertilizer (which was good because I had neither) that involved drowning the barley in water and harvesting as soon as it started to grow. You get 2 instead of 1 and thus a profit! Yeah—that didn’t work out so good. I was going to need weedkiller and fertilizer.

The weedkiller was easy enough: pop a certain mushroom into a kettle with a little water and 20 seconds later: 50 weedkiller! I made 500. Fertilizer requires a carp and a little water and I had no carp. There’s always SOMETHING. Carp can’t be found in my fishing hole, so I trucked myself to Stillwater and fished up a couple hundred debens there, discovering a ‘Oxy’ fish hiding hole in the process. It’s an uncommon fish type, so that’s a happy thing. Shortly thereafter, with a metric ton of fertilizer, I start growing.

Barley is hell, even with all the right stuff. A couple of hours later, I hit the malting trays and grain oven. This part wasn’t bad at all—malting trays take just a minute to germinate 20 barley into malt. The grain oven just took time and a LOT of wood (600 maybe?) to toast a ton of malt. The grain oven is actually fun to watch work, as portions of your grain cook down to light, medium, dark, and burnt levels—it doesn’t happen all at once and if you’re trying to make certain beer flavors, you will take out your grain at whatever point.

At long last, I bought Mechanics Level 2...and still couldn’t tune the flax gin. Maybe next time.

Took the ruby and bought Dessication level 2, made a ton of salt from a few hundred more coconuts I cracked and learned Cooking 3. Traded at the Goods for a few mushrooms I needed and learned Cooking 4. Spent a little slate and learned Rocks of the Ages, which allows me to quarry for marble.

Headed over to Saqqarah with Mandisa to bag a gazelle and brought over Sefet to learn Marble Mechanics and Advanced Marble Mechanics. This allows me to use gearbox-driven winches to replace human workers on quarries. With Mandisa online, we can now effectively quarry marble by ourselves.

Stopped by Meroe and put in my application to Worship World—a group dedicated to passing Worship Tests. They host Vigils once a month and I think I’ll be able to gather everything I need to participate in the June one. After I was accepted in, I started stockpiling resources and spent the bulk of my remaining time engaged in such endeavors. I quickly filled a 5k chest with materials and started rapidly filling another. There’s going to be a lot of mining and trading in my future, I foresee. Some of the requirements (50 medium stones) go directly against my other main project: aqueduct stockpiling,

Speaking of, I was finally accepted into SA Waterworkers, mere minutes after I said to myself that I was considering repealing my application and instead join up in Meroe. Huzzah! Apparently they are changing their rules because it is a race against time and other players: the top 20 contributers will build the first towers. Apparently, they decided that a number of their existing members were too complascent, just knowing they were in the first 20 positions and had ‘guaranteed’ build rights. Yeah...not so much. Robare tallied up my contributions (5k tiles or so, 250 concrete, etc) and I found myself in 6th place on contrbution-based points.

Met up with Rabble and a few others and stirred another 400 cement. I can now trade a bit and still have enough leftover for the rest of the game.

The remainder of the weekend was spent gathering more vigil supplies: fishing, mining, flaxxing, gathering the fun stuff that is the basis of our existance: slate.

Now to find a way to buy extra white and black tiles (these won’t be hoarded by temple builders).

05/13/09 My sledge...hammer!

Started off by completing a trade at the Goods and unloaded a couple hundred leather and a few dozen debens of cement in return for hundreds of fish, 20 antimony, and a ton of medium stones. The fish went into my vigil stockpile as did a number of the stones. The rest had a somewhat lower calling.

I had been making gravel off and on and now it was time to increase my stockpile considerably. I’m having to work hard to maintain my standing in the Waterworks—I really doubt I’ll be in the first 7 builders, but I should make the top 14 without too much strain. I smacked rocks into powder until I had a few hundred scoops of gravel and created another couple batches of concrete.

I then hit both ovens, burned more white and yellow tiles and donated another 2k tiles and 1100 concrete to the Cause. For those of you keeping score at home, I’m currently holding at 7th or 8th place. There’s only so much I can do with only two ovens. People with tiles are hording them for their own aqueduct projects, so I’m going to need to build another to increase my output. I have nothing set aside for the next oven yet, besides a few hundred resin. Moonsteel is the worst resource to acquire.

Rabble, as it turns out, sells an alloying service for cheap. I swear this guy is rapidly becoming my favorite person. I may build him a Tower or two in appreciation at some point. I looked over the list of requirements for a ton of moonsteel. The base costs are somewhat pricey, but doable, with the exception of antimony. Antimony is a hoarded metal, but I had traded at the Goods earlier with precisely this expectation in mind. The 20 debens would cover the materials required for half of the moonsteel needed for an oven. The rest I’ll just have to take in stride.

Gathered a ton of clay and I have about 1500 wet bricks that I’ll need to bake. Busy, busy!

On another note, my happy little corner of Egypt has been invaded by yet another trial account who felt the need to build in ‘my’ area. He’s tucked in the far corner by the Ragpicker’s raeli oven. Sigh. Here’s hoping this one will be gone swiftly without building too much crap outside his compound.

Finally, for no apparent reason they’ve changed the apiary graphic. They now look less like beehives and more like “solar powered microwaves for cooking bees in the Egpytian sun”. It literally looks like a revolving flat honeycomb under a glass dome. Little bees buzz around it and it’s not unpleasant to look at—it is just nothing like one thinks of when you say “beehive.”

05/14/09

Apparently I have two wishes left. I log in to find the new player’s compound in my corner completely gone. No trace whatsoever. Since I didn’t think to remark his name, I have no idea if he relocated or quit. Either way, I’m amazed at the consideration, particularly since I’m having to put up with other nuisances beyond my control: people stealing resin without nicking the trees to make more and some inconsiderate taxidermist who has dropped a number of mounted fish along my shoreline. Mounted fish can be neither picked up nor examined, so I have no idea what boob dropped them. They don’t decay, so I have a feeling I’ll be looking at them for the rest of the game.

Made a couple of papy runs to build up stock for a trade proposal for Rabble for enough moonsteel for an oven and 100 debens each of brass and bronze. The brass/bronze will be more than enough by far to keep me stocked for a while after the oven is constructed. It wasn’t until late in the evening that he logged on and confirmed the trade. (He had just logged on to kill animals. “It’s been that kind of day.” I nodded sympathetically.) The metal trade should complete tonight and there will be much forging and casting over the weekend.

Thousands of debens of charcoal needs to be made now. Part of the trade used up my last 700 units. In preparation of Charcoal Fest, Year 2, I gathered a couple thousand wood while searching for more resin. Spent some of it firing quite a lot of clay bricks. Tore down the old furnace in the corner, as it was horribly ineffecient and has been unnecessary since I built the gyration cell months ago. Some of the scrap went into the raeli project chest and life is good.

All total now, I’ve got 2k of the 3k clay bricks needed, a third of the resin needed (1k to go!), and the rope, canvas, carpentry blade, glass pipes, crucibles, and cut stone done. Once the metal trade is done, I’ll have the raw materials needed for the moonsteel plates, bearings and small gears. Then it is a matter of just casting/forging those along with the shovel blades, moonsteel plates, copper wire, iron bars, and probably something else I’m forgetting.

Ever get the feeling certain aspects of the game weren’t intended for casual players?

Oh—the new “I want your pony” law goes into effect today. Trial player’s stuff is claimable after 14 days logged out and paid players have 60 days after account expiration to reclaim their stuff. After the 60 days elapse, if they have designated an ‘heir’, that person has up to 2 weeks to lay claim to everything before it becomes ‘free for all’. The only thing that’s good about the bill is that all of the fragile chests go away and scavengers will have a field day as they discover little troves around Egypt from long abandoned campsites.

05/15/09

Met up with Rabble and watched as he diligently alloyed hundreds of debens of metal like it was child’s play. Very impressive and I even walked away with some leftover materials!

Whenever I had an odd moment, I went on miniature resin runs and ended up over the course of the day a few hundred closer to my goal. I believe I’m about 650 shy, not counting a few hundred hawthorn I should be able to trade even up for more folded birch if it comes down to it.

Restocked both wood and some charcoal—enough to get by for now, at any rate. Otherwise, the bulk of my time was spent casting and forging. When all was said and done, I made all of the small gears, bearings, shovel blades, bars, wire, and plates I’m going to need after several hours.

That leaves: resin, bricks, pinch rollers, and medium gears to go. I figured that I was going to need about 13 medium gears (read: 195 iron) for both the oven, which takes five, and eight for my aqueduct tower gearbox. That and the 60 iron needed for the pinch rollers meant I was going to need to revisit one of my iron mines for a while. That’s when the Waterworks threw a curve ball. Nothing too bad, though.

We had gotten to the point where the only things we need to start building is a few hundred marble and two hundred thousand tiles or so. This left a hole for each player to build their own gearbox when it was time to build: no point value. That changed when the elders decided to start accepting contributions of small, medium, and large gears, with a weight that makes a person sit up and take notice. Medium gears, for example, are worth 70 points each and they are wanting 120 of them. Not game breaking, but enough to swing a couple of people into higher positions. (Speaking of, I’m currently in eight.) It’s become critical to get that next oven online.

Set my macro to mining while I kept an eye on it and read some Stephen King. After I had harvested enough ore for about 400 iron, I started the smelting process and left it at that.

On the non-raeli front, there’s a couple of contests/activities this weekend. One’s a scheduled roleplay event, which promises to be a disaster and the other is a challenge to Egypt to find and dig up the monuments they built at the end of Tale 3, which contain the challenges (read: New Tests) written by them for us to accomplish.

The latter contest requires an archaeologists shovel, and I was fortunate enough to hammer out an 8k quality one at my anvil without too much grief. Could be fun!

05/18/09

The ‘reclaim your heritage’ monument dig began and ended without much fanfare. It was, in my opinion, a completely wasted opportunity for the dev staff to advance the story, do a little roleplay, but alas, not so much. The top prizes were to be given to people who worked on the most monuments (18 in total from the 3 previous Tales). I decided not to be one of the guys who ran around to each monument, dig one shovelful, and ran on to the next. Instead, I really wanted to unearth one monument with the team of Shabbats that gathered in Saqqarah to reveal the Tale 2’s monument of Body. As we dug, it slowly was raised pixel by pixel from the unforgiving virtual sand.

In the end, it took about 5 hours and we were proud of our accomplishment. Raising the monument was its own reward. Thank gods I really believe that, because my lottery award for the work done was precisely 55 papyrus. Heh.

During the dig I took a break of about an hour to gather the last few dozen resin needed and built oven number three a very short distance from the chariot in Cat’s Claw Ridge. I haven’t fired it up yet, figuring I’ll just make a larger batch of black tiles when the time comes.

The competition in Waterworks is getting...fierce. It’s a given that I’ll be one of the top 20 contributors, so that isn’t even on the table. It’s now a question of whether I’ll be one of the first 7 builders. Passes go in groups of 7, and there are 7 regions working on their own projects, so not making that first cut could mean a month or two before passing the Test.

The elders of the guild discovered a horrific math error in the project requirements and they are going to need a lot more materials to build over a ridge. This could work out to my advantage or detriment, depending on what I can afford to contribute. To shore up my position in 7th place, I made and donated 18,500 bricks and would’ve made more had I not run out of straw.

It was time to upgrade the compound a bit. Added another greenhouse, another rocksaw, another student’s casting bench to the Plex and added a few more kilns in Fort KbtS.

Took a ‘break’ by adding to my Vigil stockpile. I supplemented my stockpile with many, many things, but the best break came when I saw that glass rods were trading at an all-time high at the Goods. I only had a few, but they would command a pharaoh’s ransom. All total I traded a few bearings, a little cement, and three glass rods for some 600 fish, 190 or so small gems, nearly a dozen medium diamonds, a like number of topaz, gold, gold ore, cuttable stones, and a few other tasty tidbits. I made out like a bandit.

Aside from that, there was a lot of miscellaneous things. I even made a slightly better shovel! Made a couple of papy runs to replenish my flagging papy seed stock, upgraded my flax production to the latest seed (4/4/5, no water), and rode a carrot wave to the tune of several hundred units of bunny bait. Generated hundred of charcoal, gathered thousands of wood, and fished a bit. Made some gravel, hamboned with strangers, and cheered Mandisa when she got another move in an acro line.

Mandisa also passed Obelisk and that was cause for much celebration!

05/19/09

Devoted myself to Vigil preparations and ran papyrus another couple times, getting a couple of baskets closer to my goal. Traded a metric ton of silt to Simon for 15 medium-sized gems. Exchanged a considerably quantity of steel sheeting, a little cement and a couple hundred slate at the goods for a few marble slabs, some tungsten ore, a hundred or so cuttable and cut stones, a little papyrus to round off a basket, more gems, and a little miscellaneous stuff.

When all was said and done, my Vigil stash is only lacking a few dozen cuttable stones, a basket, 50 small gems of some flavor or another, a few hundred fish and a few hundred grilled fish. What I’ve socked away borders on staggering. The only thing that’s bugging me are things that AREN’T on the list, that I know the vigil fire calls for these days: cut gems (I don’t know if there are any gem cutting tables in the area), chicken meat, and wines. I haven’t a clue about wines at all. I asked about them in the guild chat.... but have yet to receive an answer. This is not encouraging.

I built a storage warehouse in Meroe near the vigil altar and moved a lot of stuff down there. Will move more closer to ‘go time’.

Otherwise, Rabble was in my neighborhood, so I gave him 28 debens of rare herbs he was looking for and danced with him as Mandisa, earning her a couple more moves: 12 total now!

Fished a bit and am learning how fishing bands work. Basically they are strips of coordinates that yield ceratin types of fish and go diagonally for a couple hundred coordinates. Where they intersect water equals what fish are available there.

The waterworks project is coming along nicely. Burned 1k tiles, but am holding off on donating until I have more to give.

Got an unexpected nifty this morning. Checked in on the sheep before work and one of the developers, Zatarg, was looking for a volunteer who could test a new ‘thing’. I waved my hand and in a moment, I was playing with an entirely new chat interface. It rocked. Everything from customizable colors to click-for-info to variable font sizes. Embedded urls are now allowed and your name in a line changes to color of the text for that line. Each aspect is flaggable and customizable. It rocks. :)

05/20/09

Got in late and logged in right when the last portion of the ‘free stuff’ law went into effect. Basically, all of the fragile chests that have been created around Egypt can now be claimed for the contents. I hit the chests that had belonged to former member of the months-defunct obelisk guild and was rewarded with dozens of linen, hundreds of clay, and thousands of bricks. This is just what the doctor ordered.

Converted the last of straw into tasty bricks to supplement what I looted and donated another 14k bricks to the aqueduct.

I made my way over to CCR and fired up the third oven for the first time. I love this part. The joy of discovering new colors! Oven number three makes medium-purple and beautiful deep blues (royal blue and slate blue notably). I ended the burn prematurely, since I wanted some of the royal blues for my temple and socked away some 700 or so to donate later this week. We’re almost through with pink and green tiles! I estimate we’ll have the aqueduct up in 2-3 weeks at this rate.

The most unexpected thing happened: Rabble, my patron saint, has opted to donate up to 10k resins to our pilgrimage group—just because. He likes collecting resin (who doesn’t?), but has a limited need for tiles and doesn’t want to sell to raeli guilds. Tile cartels annoy him like they annoy me. This’ll mean another oven for Alexis, lilac, and myself, with a sizable chunk leftover. Yay! Now I need to start getting ‘all the other stuff’ together again.

05/21/09

Swung by Saqqarah and picked up the resin. Afterwards I hit ovens 1 & 2 to gather enough tiles to make a decent donation to the Waterworks. Numaris had just donated enough pink tiles to finish out that color requirement and enough green to establish a definite lead over me, despite my recent brick making endeavors. Any given week I produce more tiles that Numaris, but his colors are worth more points, so it is a neck-and-neck thing for now. That will hopefully change once the ‘specialty’ colors (yellow, green, pink) are done.

Gathered a metric ton of clay while the ovens fired and once the tiles were tucked away, I began baking in clay bricks in earnest. I increased the array of kiln in Ft. KbtS to 20 and now that they ‘fixed’ kilns so they degrade through use, I made a quantity of ‘backup’ firebricks, just in case. In no small time I manufactured 3,000 clay bricks.

Made a few hundred charcoal and obliterated nearly 500 wood trying to run multiple ovens simultaneously. Win some, lose some. Knocked out the cut stone, crucibles, small gears, medium gears, rope, canvas, carpentry blade, copper wire, and part of the shovels and iron bars needed. I was getting to the point of wondering why I thought these sucked so bad, when it occurred to me: I had forgotten I was going to need to make a ton of moonsteel sheeting. Ugh. Time to scrape together another metric ton of things to trade.

Ended the night a little later than normal, but it was for a worthy cause: another ibis for Mandisa! She’s now 4 animals into Safari and has –finally- achieved a permanent 1000 carry, leaving her less likely to suffer from onion overstock.

05/21/09 Supplement: Alexis and the Raeli

Once upon a time in Queen's Retreat, there lived a woman named Alexis. She and her husband Tyler spent their days and nights in an isolated oasis a fair clip and a half from more urban settings. She was known in her area for being kind and friendly. She had many adventures, including one time when she joined up with several Pilgrims, including the dashing* Sefet, and travelled the countryside. More than anything that was not Tyler, she loved her home.

She swept the silt from the doorways and admired the land she and her husband had arranged so meticulously. Trees and flowers adorned her yard and the landscaping was kept in awesome beauty.

It came to pass that her friend and fellow adventurer, Rabble, offered her a sizable amount of resin, enough that she could build a raeli oven of her very own! She had never thought that she could afford one, but she had socked away a few things here and there in the hopes that one day she too could build one far from home.

The very next day, she awoke to smoke in her kitchen, but this time it wasn't Tyler experimenting with cooking! Some fiend had build an oven directly against her home!

This upset her greatly. For the first time, she felt a rage build within her soul and she hunted down the one responsible...who was apologetic, but unremorseful. He needed tiles for an aqueduct he was building and the maps indicated this spot would yield the pink colors he desired. This angered her to the point where she decided to quit and told her friends goodbye.

Rabble stepped swiftly to the forefront and spoke to her at length. In time, he (and a bottle of wine) calmed her to the point where she decided against her previous act...for a time. For now, the oven still churns, dredging at a little more than clay. It stirs a woman's soul. We wait now, for soon one or the other will fire.

* He ran everywhere.

05/22/09

Spent some time doing investigative research (read: spying) on the other aqueduct projects going on around Egypt. As it stands, I think we’re going to be the second group to build. Of the nine projects ongoing, only one had the intellect to withhold posting all of their secrets: Pyramid Lake Institute of Technology. They have ties with two of the major raeli cartels (each of which lays claims to dozens of ovens) and only mention they have a target build date of May 28th or sooner. Luck to ‘em. We’re two-three weeks away ourselves, based on tile counts.

After us, based on threat level:

Queen’s Retreat Waterworks with about 195k tiles to go. Our closest known competition and will probaby finish the week after we Keep Pumping (in scenic Meroe) -- weeks behind us. They’ve only gathered about 60k tiles, no concrete, and 6k boards. Their only perk is they have all marble needed. Falcon Bay ToF, operating under the “Shadock Corporation” is about on level with Meroe Nomad’s Paradise Aqueduct Association: maybe 30k tiles gathered. It’ll be a couple of months at least before theirs is online. Society of Sad Saqqarah Scientists is on par with NPAA Cabal of the Arch (located in Adn) looks like it is being handled by two people. Adn Aqueduct Association may even be less successful than the OTHER Adn guild.

If other regions are building, they are completely unknown to me so far. I would’ve expected something from Stillwater.

Hours later, I chatted with KalmKitty, whose application was rejected by SAWW, due to them being full up (rather like mine was at first). She wound up joining Adn’s AAA and confirmed a couple of things: the CotA project IS a “private” project and AAA is, for the most part, leaderless. They have a number of worker bees, but no direction since the organizer, Bortox, quit.

The Project of the Evening was: trade for moonsteel. Rabble’s trade list is a very organized point-based system. 200 Moonsteel would cost 50 “rabble points” (my name, not his), with things like 30 slate, 5 ash, or a glass pipe being worth a point each. I had a sizable quantity of soda and a bit of lime, so I opted to pad my trade with a number of glass pipes. The fact I needed a few for the oven sealed the deal. I knew Rabble was running low on the antimony needed for the moonsteel, so I arranged for a trade at The Goods.

After working out a trade for a quantity of ash and lime (both of which was much cheaper than expected) and a couple of pinch rollers (to save myself the annoyance of firing up a master’s forge)... and a few copper plates in case I want to make another honkin’ big distaff down the road(I do), I find out Robare won’t be able to do the trade for up to a half hour, as he’s making potash. That’s cool. I’d use the down time to do miscellaneous tasks and confirm the moonsteel purchase order. I pulled up the wiki and cursed.

Rabble was nearly out of base metals so could only handle trades that included most, if not all, of the metal required. I didn’t have anywhere near the tin or iron (300+ iron?!?!) on hand to make the trade. Fortunately, I had caught the change early and hastily reworked my Goods barter to include 100+ iron and a quantity of tin.

After completing the trade (which due to timing, I nearly lost the pinch rollers to a newer player), I made my way to Saqqarah, laden with 300 copper, 150 iron, 40 antimony, 56 tin, 16 glass pipes, 25 ash, and 150 slate. Rabble’s a bit backlogged on orders, so I leave my side of the deal in a warehouse and, at his request, gave his wife coordinates where the finished goods could be dropped off overnight.

I wandered around, unsuccessfully looking for mushrooms, when someone locally announced a gazelle! There didn’t seem much enthusiasm for the sighting (read: none), so I logged Mandisa, warped over, and ran to join the hunt.

Mandisa got there and there was no one but the gazelle-- not even the finder stuck around. I looked at the gazelle. The gazelle looked back. I made a decision and charged it. Gazelles are designed to be a group encounter, but I was near a river. I’ve heard of two very determined people being able to tag with a river helping and I like a challenge. The gazelle ran. I pursued, swinging wide...it darted back and forth. It bolted away from the river. I chased it around an empty chariot stop. We circled a small lake. I pursued it up a sharp hill to a plateau and back down...nine times. After getting it away from the terrain from hell, I chased it back to the Nile. I relentlessly pursued the creature until after twenty minutes, it lowered its head. I successfully solo’d a gazelle. Muahahaha!

05/26/09

Bit of a long weekend, with much time spent making gravel and fishing. Put oven number 4 online in eastern Shabbat by the coast. Mandisa noticed the spot while getting an ibis, and it was just barely far enough away from another oven to plant. It gives a few more colors I didn’t have before: indian red and a few different shades of violet. There will not be an oven number 5. This I swear.

Saturday, Egypt’s lungs were polluted in the Great Egyptian Smokeout! Smokeoff would’ve been a more appropriate word choice, but it was a contest with two challenges: improve your fumeology score the most and/or share a hookah with as many different people as you can over the course of the day. The top prize for each category was the full tuition for cooking 5: several dozen rare herbs. Additional prizes were scads of rare herbs plus medium stones and gravel for participants. I spent a good bit of time on the contest running around sharing herbs and the use of my hookah. When the contest ended, I placed in the top 49 for improved fumeology scores and in the top 14 for ‘socializing’. Dozens of rare plants were dropped into my inventory by the gods and all was well.

The real prize, in my opinion, were the cucumbers. During the contest Zog discovered that growing cucumbers near a lit hookah would reproduce seeds. Within a few hours everyone in Egypt who wanted seeds had them freely!

Gravel was the number one time sink, as I have an eternal need for concrete. 400 concrete went towards the tuition for mechanics 3 and I still can’t tune the flax gin. Ah well—the next level of mechanics is either going to be 49 acid or 40 cuttable gemstones, whichever I can find cheaper first. Also, I donated some 1.5k concrete to the aqueduct. I’ll be taking a break from graveling for a while.

Burned tiles at all of the ovens to make contributions to the aqueduct. I additionally found a couple of public raelis in Saqqarah and supplemented my contributions by another 1.5k tiles. Presently we are just 95k tiles, a couple thousand cut stone, and a few hundred marble from completion. We’ll be online in under two weeks! My own donations leave me holding tightly to 6th place, with a chance to pull into 5th by next week.

After months, I finally got around to getting my camp decoration done! Orchid worked with me for a while and the results are stunning. She even moved my temple off the road and into my yard where it belongs! Screenshots will be forthcoming later this week, but for now here’s the rundown: a path now runs from the road to the ‘Plex and from one the back doors down to Fort Kbts. At the road end, two large blue banners sit astride the path and more than a dozen windmere trees line the path, swaying gently in the Egyptian breeze. (They are technically ‘plants’ and not ‘trees’, so no wood from them, but the blueish look to them works well.) The ‘Plex’s front door is flanked by two large boulders with flame coming out the top and the boulders themselves surrounded by tiny ground plants. Along the back doors there are red, white, and blue plants.

The grove next to the Guildhall got a slight makeover with some of the ugly trees being replaced with cinnars and the plants tweaked for a more overall ascethic look. The capstone is what she did with Lake Sefet-by-the-Nile. I requested it be ‘enlarged a little’, put in a fountain effect, and maybe put a bench or two in for when company comes over. What she did far exceeded even her own expectations...

Lake SbtN is now a little wider (no more dashing across it!) and a cone of water sprays across a third of it in a beautiful arc. On the bank, there is a permanently lit campfire, surrounded by four benches. In turn, there are now four palms arranged around it to provide shade. It looks amazing and Orchid herself was impressed by how well it turned out. I shared a bowl of some of my rarest prize herbs with her to christen the park and it was a good night.

05/27/09

I find myself in a somewhat curious holding pattern. This is the mid-game, the stage of the game where people relax and take things in stride, barring the occasional Project. There have been no new Tests released in the past month, the ones I want to bother with I’ve either done or have all of the prep work done for: venery is on auto-pilot, my Vigil supplies are as complete as they are going to get, barring some last minute gathering, and the aqueduct is now just a matter of collecting tiles from the ovens for two more weeks.

It isn’t really in my nature to relax and I honestly don’t feel compelled to start passing Mandisa through the same Tests I just beat, so I found myself experimenting with a couple more things...

A long term goal of mine is to maximize the mechanics skill. I’d gotten 3 levels of it, as noted yesterday, but was still failing to tune my flax gin even once. I looked over the remaining tuitions and decided ’49 acid’ was the cheapest of what remained. This was obtained from the goods at a dire cost: 10 gold, 30 cement, and a clay dome that I happened to have lying around the ‘Plex. I also got 20 medium stones to resupply my gravel stockpile and a few dozen fish because they were there.

Tuition was paid at SArt and I returned home to put my newfound skill to the test on the infernal flax gin. Failed. I tried it on CelAmun’s flax gin. Failed. I tried it on Trillian’s flax gin. Failed. ARGH! Mechanics 5 will cost me 40 gemstones...maybe next week.

The other project I decided to apply myself towards is the creation of an acoustics laboratory in Ft. KbtS. Once the Test of the Windsong is released, it will be used in creating wind chimes of various notes. The laboratory itself is a pain to build, and on top of that there are 12 ‘upgrades’ you can build into it. Each upgrade allows for more tuning options and, in theory, will let you access all of the possible notes (including sharps, minors, etc...) for a range of a few octaves.

The laboratory base itself required steel sheeting, of which I had some leftover from a few months ago when raeli were a distant speculation, steel wire (easily made), 500 black and 500 white raeli tiles, 250 concrete, and a few thousand specially treated boards. At some point, I’m going to sit down and analyze why I find things like this “fun.”

The raeli tiles hurt a little... it’ll mean 2k less points when it comes time to finalize the Waterworks points, but I’ve got enough cushion to afford it. I may eat those words next week—we’ll see. The boards were a greater challenge.

I built a second carpentry shop next to my first and knocked out a few carpentry blades on the anvil—I’m getting rather good at those and the 6k+ quality blades can plane about 500 boards before wearing out. From that point on, it was a matter of planing wood and treating it.

It took a while to figure out the wood treatment ‘recipes’ I needed to make assorted boards: soft and pliable, rigid and fireproof, etc..., but in the end I was able to cook everything without too much waste in the experimenting. The saddest part was using up nearly all of my lime stockpile; I hate gathering limestone.

I ended the night with only black raeli tiles needed. I’ll hit up one of the ovens in Shabbat in another day or two and complete the project. If nothing else, I’ll be a little ahead of the game when Windsong is released.

05/28/09

Spent most of the evening out of the desert and working on the wife’s computer—it got hit hard by a virus and the first round of cleaning failed to repair the system.

For the most part Sefet just sat around ovens while they baked and chatted a bit during the many system reboots.

In the end, I decided against finishing the acoustics lab until after the aqueduct is complete. I can’t really do anything with the lab at the moment, so it is strictly a vanity project. Meanwhile, I’ve got Numaris nipping at my heels in Waterworks points contributions. Net result? By the end of the evening, three ovens were burned and another 2k tiles were donated. I’m still hanging in 5th place solidly and it looks like we may be the first region finished! At our current rates, we’ll have everything up next week. We’re down to 58k tiles, 1544 cuttable stones and 127 marble to go.

I did find out a little more about diania. She’s on some sort of extended sick leave so right now she has “nothing to do but atitd and doctors”. It certainly goes a bit to explain her eight ovens and recent contribution of several hundred medium gears. She’s stated that once she passes temple and aqueduct she’s donating all of her ovens to the public. That’s pretty altruistic and I can see me doing that myself if and when I pass Temple.

On one of the channels, we took a moment to remember some of the people who fashioned the early days of this Tale, for better or for worse, who have gone on to other things. A number of the names are peppered in my own blog:

• MouseD, the cicada hunting speed-addict
• bortox, master of cooking and meal seller
• Zaniac, crossbreeder and utter maniac who once fished ALL of the fish for viticulture in a single night
• Tactician, an utter ass
• tlanthil and Ichigo, the two driving forces behind Shabbat’s early research burst and the founders of SACFAR
• Eldar and shadeking, the metalsmiths of SA Ironworks
• Choltai, a friend from Tale 3 who stated her goal was ‘to Complete at least one Tale!’
• PeacefulPanther, fellow Pilgrim—you will be missed
• ...and others numerous to count.

At some point, I’m going to depress myself by seeing how many names I picked for Prophesy no longer play. The ones who are still around earned a handful of points this past week, but I’m still going to be short a good portion when passes come this weekend.

05/29/09

Not much in the way of desert activities— mostly just gathered a few herbs around camp (since the deco went in, the herb spawns at home have easily tripled). Jogged over to Saqqarah and swiped tiles from the two public raelis there, to the tune of 1200 tiles.

While in Saqqarah, I dropped in on Camp Rabble and gave him a few dozen more debens of rare herbs. He likes experimenting with cooking and smoking, so I’m all for encouraging his vices. In return he gave me 7 slabs of Oyster Shell Marble with promises of a couple of slabs of Tangerine to follow this weekend. It’ll be nice to get all of the tubs upgraded fully. Now that I’m maintaining camels, the amounts of dung generated are copious. In a matter of days, over a thousand debens of virtual fecal matter have accumulated in the single pen.

06/01/09 Pump, pump for your love!

The weekend started off innocuously enough with resource gathering for next weekend’s Vigil. I gathered enough ‘extra’ supplies to ensure many, many sacrifices and volunteered for a couple of shifts ‘calling’ the fire. Spent a couple of hours just moving boatloads of miscellaneous things down to my warehouse by the fire.

Late Friday, word went out that Pyramid Lakes got their aqueduct up. This didn’t come as a surprise to any of us: their members included the two major raeli cartels. We were secure knowing that they’d only get a week’s head start. It would hurt, insomuch as they’d get 2-3 weeks of passes before we would be able to start getting enough points to compete without SERIOUS veggie growing. We still decided to Get Serious and knock out everything that was not tiles.

I desperately needed cut stones for the vigil, and was happy to hear of a local effort to perform a dig, but five minutes before my shovel hit the ground, I got a chat from one of the Waterworks elders noting that they were going to do a 6-man dig for the aqueduct cuttables and wanted to know if I was interested. None of the stones would be for personal use. I didn’t even hesitate and in an hour we dug over 1200 rocks for the project, finishing off that part of it. Aplus donated several quarries (quarreys? quarrys?) to the Cause and on Saturday diania and Daniels worked them like demons.

Bear in mind, the entire weekend I was fighting to keep my 6th place spot in the tower queue. I made it my goal to claim 5th place and kept the tiles coming any way I could, raiding public ovens and my own at every opportunity. Inkoaten held fifth place with an iron fist, but I was gaining rapidly. While I was doing this, diania was fighting just as hard to take first place from Catlyn, who had garnered a massive lead before I joined the guild, due to a gross overvaluation of the 45000 treated boards needed by the project. Diania’s obsession meant to me that Inkoaten would have fewer opportunities to grow his lead over me.

Saturday afternoon everything changed. I was attending a Rabble-hosted dig for cuttables in hated Saqqarah (made out like a bandit) and after it was over I asked him how their aqueduct project was going. Their wiki showed they were probably a week or two behind us, but I keep my cards close to my chest. Rabble confirmed my worst fears: they had all of their materials together and were moving them to warehouses at that moment. Crap. At best our aqueduct would come in third. I warned the rest of the WW crew. That night we buckled in and ground out all the materials we could as cheers went up across Saqqarah: their aqueduct was up.

By Sunday morning, we were down to 35k tiles to go and everyone scraped the bottoms of their ovens to get the materials together for the balance. The afternoon was spent double checking, cross checking, and possibly double crossing as we moved things down to the River. The points were tallied and the top 7 were: diania, Catlyn, Cali, Aplus, myself, Inkoaten, and Numaris. It took a lot of time and coordination, but after another hour, the tiles and supplies were shuffled to the river and the Pump was constructed!

Sunday passes came and went. Once again, my venery was a runner up, but we had two surprises! First, Diania passed Temple with a mere 35k points, due to the cartels dumping into their aqueduct. This frees up her ovens, hopefully. Secondly, although I did not pass Prophecy, I came only 2 points under the lowest scorer, with 4 passes saved for next week. To quote Google, “I’m feeling lucky.”

After the pump was up, our next major hurdle was to raise that sucker by 350 feet. This meant the creation of 35 gearboxes...not an easy accomplishment, but one that was tended to by Aplus, Inky, Daniels, and Numaris. I can do gearboxes, but my designs tend to be inefficient and slow. This part took hours and into well past my bedtime. We were starting to hit the exhaustion point: sleep deprivation caused Aplus to screw up a number of gearboxes and we had to scramble to gather more gears as the original count was too low.

Add to this we were being hassled in regional chat by Shuofthefieryheat, who was miffed that we built the pump in his backyard (read: barely in sight range of his compound) and didn’t send him a personal invitation to join the first constructors. Bear in mind, at no point has our project been secret. His name had been kicked around as one of the region’s locals that we’d considered soliciting to join the ‘next 20’, but after his major hissy fit, he pretty much ruled himself out of it. Some people just can’t hints or direct statements. His loss.

But at long last the pump was raised and the towers started going up! When mine finally went up on the rocky hill, I said my good nights and crashed hard. I’ll pass principles of life by growing veggies another time.