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. It's very long. In June 2009 it was longer than Stephen King's The Shining. As of August 7th, it was over 83,000 words long, mostly involving Raeli tiles. You have been warned.

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

Leading Up to Day 1

December '08: Let the Games Begin!

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.

06/02/09

Overnight the chain grew and well over a dozen towers are chained up. Due o our build locations, only a handful will allow vegetables to be grown nearby...and even then only peppers. This is going to cause us to probably not pass for a couple of weeks until we get the rest of the towers online and down to long stretches of flat grass with the second group of 20. I did take advantage of the one tower we have that gives bonuses to pepper harvests. While growing there, pepper output is tripled and after a while I had harvested some 3k peppers. Growing 60 at a time from each seed, this wasn’t as dreadful as it may sound. The peppers got traded in at The Goods for store credit and I went on with the rest of my evening.

The scoring for life is based on how many harvests are made at your tower or any other tower further down the line. Being one of first seven builders in Shabbat means I’m pretty much done at this point. I don’t really have to assist with the growing of veggies, but it’s good form to pitch in.

A new waterworks group has decided to build along the SA/SW border: read ‘over Mandisa’s house’. They don’t look very organized, but their guildhouse is right beside her compound and I can already anticipate the warehouse farm that will grow nearby. Mandisa has encouraged me to carpetflax the area, but that goes against my general principles. I chatted with the head of the group (of 2 presently), Augusta, and apparently the ‘master vision’ is to connect the Red Sea with the Nile. I commended the plan’s brilliance and encouraged starting from the Red Sea end. I don’t think they will have the resources to do this for months, but we’ll see.

Spent the rest of the evening playing around with wiki design and tweaking my Temple up a little. http://atitd.org/wiki/tale4/User:Sefet/Temple will be keeping track of what tiles I have in there. I’m sitting at a little over 18k glory, which is a little better than I was expecting by now. I’m also trying to get a tile trading page up (http://atitd.org/wiki/tale4/User:Sefet/Raeli ), but I managed to screw that up by losing the sheet of scratch paper that has the colors the second oven produces. Was running short on time, so I’ll do a full burn on that Raeli Wednesday or Thursday. No rush, really.

06/08/09 To everything...burn, burn, burn....

The latter half of the week was devoted to last minute Vigil prep work: ferrying things around, acquiring a few items, and mostly chillaxing in the plex, burning a couple of ovens and the like. I had signed up for a two-hour fire calling shift Friday night (10pm-midnight) and a four hour shift beginning at noon on Saturday. For a lark, I decided to build the bonfire myself and give it to the guild, so I knocked out 1k firebricks and a silver bowl to supplement a ton of wood and oil I have on hand and threw everything together in Meroe, a solid 12 hours expedition travel away, and gave it over to Korrin, the event organizer.

I popped in Friday evening early to see how things were going and the ‘vigil-antes’ had a nice little party in progress. The fire had been lit at 1pm and by 8 or so, the requests were coming once every 10 minutes. As there was not much action, we put sacrificers on a rotation and chit-chatted, knocked back beer, and had a grand ol’ time while the bonfire merrily burned.

By the time my shift was in swing, the fire was down to 5 minutes per request and we kept the rotation going. The fire ran me out of dried flax in a particularly large request and a couple of hastily thrown together flax hammocks helped provided the rest of the ‘sac’. As luck would have it, my relief was 30 minutes late, but otherwise Friday night went smoothly.

Saturday morning I popped in to see how it was going. The blaze was in full steam, requests coming once a minute. Three people were tending the thing, plus the caller. Rotas were a thing of the past and it became a race to keep the fire fueled. The caller on duty basically doesn’t get to sacrifice, so no points there. This was bad, as I was counting on racking up during my four hour stint without too much loitering around elsewhere. Still we handled what we could, but the odd request kept throwing one or two of us out of the picture for a while (“386 boards!” “14 nail moulds!”) while we got them manufactured.

With Mandisa parked at the fire as a free waypoint and my expedition travel chariot a block from home, I was able to raid supplies at the ‘Plex a couple of times and hit up the Goods once without draining my travel time like one poor soul from Shabbat (AbuTaid) did.

My shift started and ended pretty much on time Saturday—for a while it was only zowee and myself guarding the fire, so I wound up chucking a few things into the fire anyway. The only serious curveball pitched was a request for “a wine with a sugar level of at least 50”. Neither zowee nor I had wine on hand, but her RL & game husband Timm did ‘on the vine’. Timm had the graveyard shift on the fire, so zowee had to wake him up to harvest grapes! It got chucked in and everyone (including Timm!) was happy.

I hung around afterwards trying to score what points I could, tossing worthless things and vast fortunes in with equal abandon.

I checked in again later that night and the fire was in full “screw them over” mode: it was calling for rare cut gems that few people could make. I was able to provide a number of them, due to my foresight on bringing some lucky cuts with me, but for several we had to resort to putting out public help cries. It was close a couple of times, but by the time I logged, the fire was safe and I had some 144 sacrifices made.

Sunday morning, I check and have my expectations confirmed: the fire was dead and gone. It was killed around five in the morning by a particularly nasty cut request, but my point totals came to 175k (including some 22k or so I had going into the night).

Spent time during the day cleaning out the ovens and polishing the temple. It’s up to 23k points and about 95 colors or so.

Sunday passes came while I was offline. My venery was passed...over again for the 6th time as a runner up. It’s a little disheartening, but I’ll keep the faith. It just seems longer. The Test of Life passes went to....Team Saqqarah! Sigh. Checking my points, we scored about 1/3rd of theirs. Although, it’s almost impossible for me not to pass that one eventually so, again, the dude abides.

I was feeling confident on Prophesy having so narrowly missed last week. This time, I weighed in with 49 points. The winners had 51 and 50 points...with 4 passes saved for next week. Apparently, I am part of a more-than-four-way tie. Maybe next week, eh?

The winning Vigil scores were posted and I passed! I had been fretting all day that I was going to be shy, and in true me-fashion, it turned out to be complete overkill: Egypt recognizes F:Korrin (179119), M:Sefet (175669), F:zowee (132908), M:Timm (132908), F:Anyolina (124142), F:SaiCoSis (123550), M:Djoser (81548) for passing The Test of the Vigil.

06/09/09

“My Temple shall be glorious!” has become my battlecry, and I have begun active tracking down missing colors and amassing extras for trading. I had hoped to make a beneficial trade with a local Guild named Field and Stream who advertised their need for tiles in the trading channel, but the trade fell through as they finished negotiating with someone else for all of the colors they needed that I had.

Not to be deterred, I have an outstanding trade with fellow Pilgrim, lilac, that should plug several holes in my wall o’ missing colors, including some light coral and silver tiles.

I met up with Lill and we arranged for a bargain of 3 colors each way. Curiously, she wanted precisely 243 tiles of each color. The request meant I had to hit and burn at two ovens, but fortunately they were light colors (bisque and light steel blue) and didn’t require too long of a burn to generate. The 243 intrigued me, but not enough to question it as everyone has their own strategy for tiles. For the curious, 243 tiles going into a temple would yield 382.287 points. 49 = 300 points, 343 = 400 points. I’m content with 49 of colors I can’t generate, so the rest goes into the trade bucket to maximize my chances of trading with someone who has needed colors.

Bear in mind I haven’t advertised that I trade tiles, aside from having it posted on the wiki and mentioned in passing in my /info. Out of the blue, I was contacted by nourbese of the Shabbaticals for a trade proposition to be determined later. We exchanged wiki links and she logged for bed. I’m guessing she’s a European player, given the relative early hour (for me) we chatted. They have a goodly supply of tiles I could use and I to them. It wouldn’t surprise me if our eventual trade will involve numbers that will allow nourbese to split tiles between multiple temples.

Presently, I’m up to 99 colors in the temple. It shall be glorious!

06/10/09

And Dark Blue makes 100. Burned some khaki tiles for nourbese; she left her order with me overnight and it’ll mean four colors each way, if we can ever get online at the same time. Still need to catch up to lilac and re-visit Lill now that I have a few more colors in my trading stock.

I stopped by the Goods and made a flat-out purchase of gold, gold ore, gold wire, and some cuttable turquoise, all of which are for various Mechanics tuitions. I took the cuttable gems (along with dozens of others) down to SThought and bought Mechanics level 5.

Returning home, I finally tuned the flax gin! Trying a second time failed and I’ll need to come up with either 1000 gold wire or a huge sapphire and miscellaneous other gems. In the long haul, the Sapphire may be cheaper. I’ll need to see what Simon, our most prominent gem broker, will charge for one.

Burned enough black tiles to finally finish the Acoustics Laboratory. This will let me make wind chimes, but the more structural ‘upgrades’ I install, the easier it will be to discover the notes I will want. Some of the upgrades are cheap (20 cactus sap) and some are much, much worse (1000 concrete). I went ahead and knocked out a couple that were on the lower end of the scale. I can see already I’m going to need to make a lot more jugs, as the Vigil toasted my reserves and I’m going to need hundreds for these upgrades. The lab will be an ongoing low-priority project for a while.

Finally, I ran out to the boonies with Mandisa and captured her a short-haired fennic, completing her Principles of Safari!

06/11/09

Finally completed the trade with nourbese and after burning another oven, I’m up to 105 colors and just shy of 26k points—my temple will be glorious! I’ll probably need around 50-60k to actually ‘win’ this one, but it’s keeping me occupied.

I checked out Simon’s pricing for huge gems and they weren’t as scary as they could’ve been: 11k wood or 5k charcoal or 800 gravel. Pretty expensive, but not sell-a-kidney bad.

I’ve found that smacking medium stones into gravel is a great time-killer while waiting for ovens to get to toast tiles and have amassed closed to 700 gravel as a result of a need for a dark blue.

Between my ongoing wood accumulation (party cloudy with chances of late afternoon wood chips) and general need to punish trees, I have some 11k wood on hand. With relatively little effort, tonight I could have enough to purchase both a huge sapphire and a huge topaz, for mechanics and dessication skills respectively. Dessication 3 would give me the ability to make acid from salt and sulfurous water.

The big problem is Simon lives in Meroe and that’s a lot of hauling and would take several trips. I think what I’ll do is hire McArine or Trillian to convert the wood to charcoal, then mix up food that’ll let me carry some extra weight and bulk and do it like that.

Otherwise, I’m building up a small stockpile of goodies to get to Rabble for trading. I’m torn between building another oven, because at heart I’m a masochist, and getting marble for various projects and acoustic lab upgrades. I found a few debens of a particulary rare herb he’s after and will be able to throw in a few seeds as a gift. Picked up a couple hundred slate and bought a basket at the Goods before I noticed I had 400 papyrus left over from the Vigil. That’s fine: papyrus always makes for good trading stock.

Picked a few grass to keep the camels happy and worked my rhythmic strength up to a skill of 4. I now get at least two grass every time I pick, with chances of three. Why bother picking grass if I have greenhouses? Speed. 20 minutes to generate grass in the greenhouses versus a few minutes bending at the knees. I don’t do it very often, but it doesn’t hurt to supplement the camels’ food supply.

My lazy Prophesy picks haven’t earned a single point this week so far, but I’m hopeful for Sunday passes. I get to make another pick tonight and I’m certain BooBoo will pass Vigil.

06/12/09

Traded 10k wood to Trillian for 5k charcoal and smacked rocks around until I had enough gravel to give Simon a call. I failed to make working carry food, so I passed on buying the huge topaz instead settling on just buying a large emerald and huge sapphire, giving me the last bits of tuition that I needed for Mechanics 6.

I bought the skill and returned home. Failed to tune the flax gin. Ugh. The last level of mechanics will take 1k gold wire and gold is very expensive. Organized a trade at the Goods for most of the remaining gold and some extra gravel and sold back some of the things I had gotten solely for Vigil prepatory work. Tried to tune Robare’s flax gin... failed.

Made a few thermometers and a few hundred gunpowder to sell for the rest of the gold I’m going to need. I’ll conclude that trade next week. It’s going to take a long time to make all of the needed wire at a rate of 1/minute.

Carried a ton of slate and some herbs down to drop off at Rabble’s camp in Saqqarah. While passing through Meroe, someone reported that Nefertari’s Crown mushroom were found in Saqqarah. Excited, I burned more travel time to check it out. I still needed to eat seven of them for the first list of mushrooms given to me for Test of Darkest Night and my attempts to find them had gone poorly.

Arriving in Saqqarah, I asked regional for any sightings and in less than 30 seconds I had been given confirmation, with coordinates by none other than Rabble himself. They were apparently near his camp, which worked out well for me.

I came upon the bountiful mushroom patch. There were dozens! I ate the first muchroom—and the rest vanished; I had arrived just as they despawned. Argh! Made a waypoint, then wandered over to Rabble’s camp and failed to tune his flax gin. Left an order for some marble, burned some more tiles from the oven by his house, and warped home. Fired up the forge and made a hundred or so of the wire before calling it a night.

Logged on in the morning to prune animals and warped over to the mushroom field—as luck would have it, the timing was perfect for mushroom gathering. I was rewarded with a number of mushrooms to eat, leaving me with just Duelling Serpents on list one.

06/15/09 Wire! (huh! Good god, y’all!) What is it good for?

Logged on late Saturday following a beach adventure and concluded a trade at the Goods for the last of the gold I would need for Mechanics 7 tuition. I was already salivating over the possibility of getting my flax gin tuned to peak performance as a consolation prize for missing Prophesy yet again. Of all my Prophesy picks, only one person passed a single Test last week. I had picked BooBoo to pass Vigil, but found out Friday another group was running another Vigil, so there was no way my ‘ace-in-the-hole’ was going to pull off a Sunday pass, damn it.

Anyway, I also picked up a ton of saltpeter as I’m getting back into pyro and a ton of expensive mushrooms and things to further Mandisa along on Towers. There was a Night Tower coming up on Sunday and I was sure I’d get at least 20-25%. The last time this Hour came, one person built –one single tower- and got 100%. I’m never that lucky, but I’ll take a chunk where I can.

Rabble came by to visit and dropped off the marble I had bought. I upgraded the ol’ acoustics lab with a cold water bath and a quicksilver basin after making another hundred jugs and losing a couple of kilns in the process.

At some point in the middle of this, I realized that Mandisa lacked the skill to build the medium construction site for her Tower later in the evening. Sigh. This led to a side trip to pick up project management level 2 for her and pottery, just ‘cause I was in the area...and expedition travel!

Meanwhile, I’m mushroom hunting with Sefet in the deep reaches of the great eastern desert. Found a couple of Duelling Serpent mushrooms and that’s got me pretty close to finishing 1/5th of the Darkest Night Test. Just need two more and I’ve been hunting off and on, just fruitlessly (or mushroomlessly, really).

Spent the bulk of the day Sunday engaged in the incredibly boring task of making gold wire. I needed 1k wire. With my awesome 1 forge equipped with an extrusion plate, I’m cranking out 10 wire every 10 teppy minutes. A number of hours in, I decided to spend a chunk of charcoal and fired up two more forges in the public works, running those as Sefet and the one back home as Mandisa, logging back and forth, thereby tripling my create time. After an insane number of hours spent arduously working the forges (well, actually reading Stephen King’s The Wastelands in between the occasional relog and click forges), my task was done!

I boogied down to the school, bought mechanics 7, and crowed my triumph. I warped home, mocked the flax gin, attempted to tune it, and failed. I was stunned. I literally just sat there a moment wondering WTF before I griped about it in regional chat. That’s when I received an education from another player on how Mechanics really works.

Apparently there are 7 ways a machine can be tuned. For each level of mechanics, you learn a new way to tune a machine. When you try to tune, you effectively roll a die and if it matches the machine’s requirement, it gets tuned. So, level 7 mechanics means you will ALWAYS possess the ability to tune a machine, but you still have only a 1 in 7 chance ON ANY ATTEMPT to be successful. In practical terms, I can expect to try 10-20 times to tune any machine....with a 20 minute timer each time. That sucks a little, but it’s a lot better than having mechanics 6 and rolling a 1d6 every tune attempt, never knowing that you needed to roll a ‘7’ to successfully tune the machine.

Late Sunday night came and passes did not come. We assumed that Teppy forgot about us. By 10:20pm, two things were happening fairly close together: the Hour of Towers and time for those mushrooms to spawn! I had navigated Sefet and Mandisa to their respective starting points when the time hit and the Hour begun. Mandisa built her Tower and it was a beauty! Reflections played off the smooth marble surface. This was easily the most expensive tower to build, but it had captured 35% or so. I blinked. The tower had dropped to 18%. Damn it! 11.5%! This left me feeling vaguely bitter. Still, I consoled myself by reminding myself Mandisa would pass Tower principles if nothing else, putting her at level 20. There would be other Hours. I flipped over to Sefet.

I was still a bit early for my particular mushrooms to spawn, so I sat down and picked up my book again, reading a few pages across the room from the screen. After a few minutes, my attention was diverted back to the screen as a dialogue box appeared. Ah, I thought. This will be the ‘The Hour of Towers is now over. Your score will be updated in a moment and displayed in Main’ message. I figured I’d bite the bullet and see how Mandisa did. The dialogue box actually said. “You are now known as Sefet, Level 33 Journeyman of Body”.

I was ALREADY a level 33, Journeyman of Body...but this dialogue box could only mean one thing! Sunday passes! I passed something! Excitedly, I dropped my book and I quickly flipped over to the System channel, trying to pick my name out of the screen of winners and runners up. Venery! I had passed Venery! After six weeks of being a runner up, The Sum of the Parts was now recognized as the best Venery in Egypt (that had not already passed)! Elated, I no longer cared that mushroom time had come and there were no mushrooms to be had.

I continued to read and, sure enough, BooBoo didn’t make Vigil...it looked like PLIT’s aqueduct got another pass... I looked to see the scores for Prophesy to see how far behind I was. They hadn’t posted yet. I held my breath and started looking again through the names who had passed...diania for Vigil, lill for Life, Aplus for Pilgrimage. I was still scanning desperately when lightning struck! I passed Prophesy and am now Sefet, Level 33 Journeyman of Two.

06/16/09

Two projects I’m running presently: Towers and explosives. Hmmm...that sounds more like a project for mid-September. (Too soon?)

I login as Mandisa with 15 minutes to go before the Tower of New Life Hour begins. I hastily double check the project chests to find that I forgot to unload a few critical components off Sefet from the previous night’s trades. A couple of relogs and inventory shuffles later, I’m leaving camp just as the Hour begins. Terrific.

I hit the chariot stop and warp to Khmun and then to Meroe. I’m about to continue on to Queen’s Retreat, when a name catches my eye: EvilSnowman. He had ‘won’ the last Hour hands down and if he had a Meroe Tower, it would slaughter the Tower I had planned in QR. Right. He crossed the bridge to the east of the Chariot and hung around a compound for a minute or so, while I trundled east, then broke south to feint down a road. Once I was nearly out of sight, he left the compound, heading north. I immediately double back, heading northeast, passing the Vigil spot by a few hundred yards. Confident I was now east of EvilSnowman’s building spot, I threw down the Tower and warped back to Sefet. 11 minutes left.

Four minutes to run back down to the chariot and I got a break with a free warp to Nomad’s Paradise. I wander a short distance from the chariot, build the construction site, and pause. I get a bad feeling and tear the site back down. I’ve learned to trust my instincts. Hitting the chariot again, I warp to Cat’s Claw Ridge and start building with a couple of minutes left in the hour. I finish it up handily and warp back to camp. Relogged Sefet just as the scores came in.

Mandisa picked up 25% towards completion with just two Towers built. I grinned with delight and booked a trade that would get me enough materials to drop a couple more Towers tonight.

Otherwise, the bulk of the evening was spent in the occupation of firework design. I had forgotten how fun and time-consuming it is. I now have five tubs in constant operation, converting tons of dung into useful saltpeter. I’m going to need thousands of debens of gunpowder. It’ll be another week or two before I have a show-worthy firework. I’ll be damned if I’m going in with anything less than 500 stars in it and lasts than 20 seconds. I played around with making a new type of star called “The Tickler”, but it turned out to be a disappointing thin line of no real use to me. I’ll need to see what other stars are available now at the universities to increase the variety of the colors in my Boom!

I’m putting the Temple on back-burner. The last pass was nearly double my own Temple’s glory and I have a feeling I’m not going to be able to seriously compete with the raeli cartels until a number of their members have passed and tiles are open for bulk sale. Disappointing, but true. I just don’t have the drive to build 12 more ovens to pass the one Test.

Our aqueduct is coming along nicely. Group ‘B’ and another 20 towers are scheduled to go on-line in another week. Now that I’ve passed Prophesy, I don’t have the whole Sunday-pass anxiety thing anymore and if it takes a few weeks to pass Life, so be it. Hopefully this batch of towers will give us multipliers to something useful to grow. Cabbage or carrots would be nice, onions would be ideal, as those can be macro’d. And yes, one system out there has a garlic tower, which means that combined with pyramid bonuses, you get 24 garlic each harvest.

We’ve expanded our cistern to hold 700k water and a few of us pumped it until it was full. Good times, good times.

06/17/09

Logged on for a pleasant jaunt: had to position Mandisa in Meroe for her Tower spot and raced Sefet out to the deserts between Shabbat and Nomad’s Paradise to the west in the hopes of finding the last two dueling serpents for part one of Darkest Night before logging for dinner.

Mushroom time came an hour before Towers, so I checked the spot suggested by Shroomdar (the mushroom tracking utility people log mushroom finds to) and sure enough: no mushrooms. Annoyed, but not surprised, I began a spiral sweep of the area, crossing over a small river and into Nomad’s Paradise proper. In the distance, I saw a pair of specks. Could it be? I dashed closer and my heart cried out with joy! It was! It was a pair of dueling serpents! I ate them and warped to Mandisa in Meroe.

I turned in my completed list to Meroe’s UBody and received another list and 2 constitution points. Nice. This lists contains nothing godawful (I think), so I’ll be working it over the next week or two. Made Sefet’s way to CCR where Mandisa would be dropping her second tower.

The Hour began, Mandisa dropped a New Life tower, warped home to grab more bricks, then spouse warped to Sefet and built the second tower. I hadn’t bothered to check the first tower’s score: scores in the first minute only lead to dashed expectations come score time. I did, however take a look at the second. 4.88%. Nuts. Still, between the two I might just pull in 10% and I must’ve gotten lucky the night before.

I checked in after a while and my jaw dropped: Mandisa claimed 40.35% using 2 towers.

This now puts her in at 75% completed. There’s one more New Life hour coming up tonight a little after midnight and I’m thinking about hitting it to get what I can from it. Probably not, though. Mandisa’s test passages are more of a ‘whenever’ thing for me. Otherwise, Sunday 7:00am is the next ‘practical’ Hour, but it’s a much more common Tower.

Finally, I lost a couple of neighbors last night: Biker and Sweetnothing, who were just south of The French, have quit the game to play Lord of the Rings Online. Bit of a pity—they were good neighbors, kept the grass plucked and the trees nicked. Any homeowner’s association would be glad to have them. That gives me a brilliant idea! I’m going to engage in a little Art and put a Satellite Dish on top of the guildhall. Just need a clay dome a glass rod and a few things for the ‘mounting’. Muahahaha!

06/18/09 Don’t know much about ecology...

Woke up in Egypt to find it was early evening. Still a few hours before the mushrooms are out and not that much to do. After finishing up camp chores (you know, failing to tune the flax gin and starving the camels a little less), I meandered over to my remote oven in Khmun and kicked it off. Tiles kind of accumulate when you ignore an oven for the better part of a week, so I baked about 1600 of color I should have no trouble trading: yellow green.

I had just finished when I noticed an ad from someone trading tiles: Tedra, of flax seed crossbreeding fame. As luck would have it, she needed some dark green and a major chunk of yellow greens. Sweet. I arranged to meet her between SA and Saqqarah and burned some silver tiles in one of Rabble’s ovens there while waiting for her to finish up a burn of her own. I walked away with a tasty pile of powder blue and peru and it was nearing ‘shroom time.

This list contains the following: Acorn’s Cap (stupidly common), Camel’s Mane (not terribly bad), Sun Star (I’ve never seen them), Pool of Tranquility (very uncommon), and Dung Rot (the ‘oh, crap’ of the list, pun unintended).

Sun Stars are ‘daytime’ mushrooms that apparently only grow in the western deserts of Queen’s Retreat, so that would be another day.

The Dung Rots scare me. I’ve only seen a couple in my months of wandering. Supposedly they spawn in areas with soil acidity levels of 32,000+. That’s an arbitrary number, but it is large. This is the equivalent of mulching your garden with the contents of a dozen car batteries. In theory, if I can figure how to pollute the ground properly, I can make them spawn. Although no one has ever done this before, I’m not easily dissuaded from my virtual pseudo-science! I have five rarely-used levels of ecology and can test for heavy metal pollution, soot, soil phosphor levels, ground water levels and soil acidity. Ecology supposedly plays a major part of our ecosystem, but no one has quite figured out the mechanics behind it yet, due to it being so...cryptic.

That left the other three and I figured the rarest were the Pools of Tranquility, henceforth PoTs, so I checked Shroomdar to see when and where they have been sighted.

As luck would have it, PoTs have been found recently in Stillwater, not too far from the chariot. I loped over, climbed a rocky ridge, and when shroom time came, one popped up next to me! I surveyed the landscape for others. I realized with dawning horror that I wasn’t alone on the ridge: another fungus forager was darting around, devouring mushrooms! He was on the other side of the caldera-like ridge, so I scooted around and found several more on my ‘side’, near the base of the slope. When all of the mushrooms were gone, I had nommed five of the seven PoTs I needed. I made a mental note to return tonight.

Mushrooms typically last about 30 ‘real’ minutes before despawning and different ‘flavors’ spawn at different times after midnight. Checking Shroomdar, I still had 10 minutes before Came’s Mane spawned and they had been sighted in Saqqarah.

I scootched on down, getting lucky on the chariots and not wasting much travel time. Fortune smiled, and I came across a large spawn of them on my way to where they were seen and ate all seven in a single spawn!

I became greedy and asked in a Mushroom Hunter guild channel if anyone had seen any Acorn’s Cap. Time was growing short on those, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. No one had, but the general suggestion was ‘Stillwater’, a little north of the Chariot. I’d try it. I warped back to Mandisa, whom I had left in the backyard, guarding the temple... and saw an Acorn’s Cap right by the Nile! And another....and another... In short order, I had eaten my fill of those as well.

In one night I had knocked out over half my list!

I performed some basic acidity level testing both before and after burning a firepit...no change and no pollution. I’ll try glazier’s benches next.

Mandisa’s hour of Towers came...and I was blissfully slumbering by choice. I’m not going to let the desert rob me of sleep again. *grin*

06/19/09 Keep a-pumpin’, growin’...

Logged on to find I had –just- missed mushroom time, so that Pool of Tranquility and the elusive dung rots would have to wait for another time. I decided to occupy myself until I could go hunting for the Sun Stars which spawn at precisely noon and a diversion was quickly located: more of the SA Aqueduct had come online overnight, including a cabbage tower!

I made my way down to the tower to gawp at its usefulness, seeds in hand. This may not draw people from distant regions, but it’ll keep the locals from going abroad to grow beetle chow! I grew a cabbage plant to see. 33 cabbage from one planting. Yeehaw!

In short order, I grew over 1500 cabbage and had it stashed away in the terrarium. All we really need now is an onion tower and we’re set.

Meandered my way down to Meroe , near the western map border in the hopes those delightful mushrooms would appear. Mandisa joined in the fun as well, warping in whenever a cicada cage was discovered.

At long last I arrived with plenty of time to spare.Chilled out and when the noon hour came, sure enough: mushrooms on the horizon. These grow in pairs, it seems, with another pair in sight distance if lucky. In a few moments, I had eaten my seven and had one left over that I pocketed as a momento.

All I have left now for this page is one PoT and those damnable Dung Rots.

Ecological update: I tried generating soil acidity again, this time with glazier benches, but no luck.

06/22/09

Not much desert activity to report this past weekend-- much of it was occupied with my eldest’s birthday party and a Torchwood marathon

The aqueduct finally hit sand and I’ve started growing onions to pad up our score. Due to the ease of growing the suckers, I can run 13 beds simultaneously and it’s a bit of shame we were never able to find an onion tower. In the end, diania and Daniels built literally a dozen extra towers in a fractal pattern trying to desperately find a carrot or onion grow spot. When all was said and done, when passes came, the winners were the ones with scores in excess of 9800 harvests. Ours were around 5600. I’m going to need to grow a lot more veggies.

Continued working Darkest Night. The Pools of Tranquility were precisely where they should’ve been and were cheerfully devoured without fuss. Otherwise, despite hitting the mushroom spawn points several times, I’m still six Dung Rots from finishing that page.

Tiles, tiles, tiles! I burned all of my ovens, a couple of Rabble’s, one of the public ones and brought the temple up to 30k glory! Unfortunately, the pass went to a Temple with a score just shy of 45k. It’s hard not to get discouraged sometimes.

06/23/09

Another night, another failure to find Dung Rots. I swear Darkest Night is contending with Temple for ‘most annoying Test’. Apparently I am nowhere near alone in my frustrations: complaints about recent changes to mushroom spawn size and frequency have made the test nigh impossible for some. I’ll keep plugging at it off and on, but I’m going to turn back to Temple for now.

Traded tiles with Arame and picked up some light blue and light sky blue tiles. Temple is now weighing in at 31k glory and I noticed AlexisBelle has several brownish colors I could use. I’ll try to trade with her later this week and add another 1k to the score. Sigh—so many colors needed. I’m going to have to face facts and start gathering resources for a fifth personal oven. On the plus side, resin is a lot easier to get now that most people are ‘done’ with ovens: it isn’t that unusual for me to get 4 or more resin from a single tree. My personal record is 12 hawthorn from one scraggly shrub.

I should go ahead and start getting the stuff together this week. I know a couple of good spots in Heaven’s Gate and Queen’s Retreat to build.

On the tech front, Advanced Chemistry has been released and put on timer in under hour. This technology will give us crematories, which is a more expedient (supposedly) method for generating ash.

Also, they had a miniature “role-play event” this past Sunday (it was gods-awful), but resulted in wheat being released. I haven’t gotten ahold of any yet, but as I understand it, there are a number of different strains that will only grow during certain times of the year and they take a long long time grow, in some cases up to 15 minutes. I’m not exactly knocking myself out to get any just yet.

06/24/09

As mentioned yesterday, I’ve come to accept I’m going to need another oven. I’ve been gathering resin when I think about it over the last couple of weeks and have enough now if I traded hawthorn for folded birch. I’m going to need a lot more iron, some brass, and a few thousand clay bricks...again. I’ve placed an order with Rabble for 200 more moonsteel and 20 brass and will pay with a goodly chunk of gravel and linen. I expect to spend one night mining and another forging. We’ll see how enthused I am when the time comes.

Tile trades are coming along nicely. I traded herb seeds to Pascalito for a couple of colors I was missing entirely (light slate gray and moccasin) and have enough spare seeds to make a couple more similar trades should the right colors come along.

The largest pending trade I have right now is with AlexisBelle, which will take about a week to complete, but wipe 8 colors off my ‘to get’ list, mostly browns that have been eluding me. Add to that lilac owes me some crimson tiles and RosieRazor has expressed some interest in trading and I’m coming along on the temple nicely. With the addition of some indian red I burned last night, the Temple is just under 32k.

I think tonight will see me gathering clay in Khmun while I burn some Dark Goldenrod tiles.

06/25/09

...And for once, I’ve done exactly what I set out to do! Gathered a couple thousand clay while burning dark goldrod tiles, then came back and used the SACFAR facilities to turn those into wet bricks. As a side note, Numaris has been replacing the kilns that wear out at SACFAR, but I find it a little tacky to use those personally when I’ve got 20-something kilns at home.

Rabble dropped in and delivered the metals I ordered and I paid him with a ton of gravel and some linen.

On tile trades: Contacted Rosie and she’s still getting her list of tiles together, haven’t heard from lilac, Alexis is dutifully burning towards our trade of 7 colors, Inkoaten has not been online but I hear he has an orange-red oven that would give me a few wonderful colors—I must find him, and then there’s Numaris.

I finally kenned onto a good idea to pick up the pace with my trades. Instead of contacting people who have been advertising, I read the wiki user pages of the people who built aqueduct towers locally and stalk them! This is how I found out about Inkoaten’s oranges and Numaris’ aquas and turquoises. Got in touch with Numaris and he was very glad to make some trades. I set up a nice deal and after a while I was able to add Cornflower Blue, Medium Turquoise, and Aquamarine to my temple in bulk. My glorious temple’s score is now 32,886 and I’m expecting this week’s pass to be in the 46k range.

In between trades, I baked all 3k bricks for the next oven, gathered the last resin needed and started working the metal goods. That’s going to keep me occupied until sometime this weekend, I’m certain and I still need to mine more iron.

06/26/09

Part of the ‘win conditions’ for Tale in the Desert is that Egyptians must design new Tests for the next Tale: one for each discipline. Unpopular and sucky Tests are thus retired to make way for new, and hopefully more interesting propositions. For the first time in just over two months, a new Test has been released, and the first of the ones designed by Tale 3 players: The Test of the Hexaglyph. This Thought Test involves gods-know-what, but the creation of one requires a ton of exotic metal wire, mandibular glue (finally, a real use for ants!), miscellaneous oddities, and a 100 orange paint.

To my delight, I found that my orange paint recipe isn’t that bad: some clay, a lot of carrots, a little lead and saltpeter. With my upgraded paint lab, I can knock out 100 units of paint in a few seconds. A lot of people don’t fool with paint, because working out recipes is extremely ‘fiddly’, but I’m ‘ok’ with much of it. Being the type of person I am, I made some for Rabble and have a standing offer for my local Shabbat Abanians (Shabbats? Shabbatanites? Shabbanists? Abholes?”) to mix paint free if they bring the components.

Principles will involve building and tearing down, getting 7 ‘good ratings’ on one left up, or beating three that have passed. Aside from Venery, Thought doesn’t appeal to me, so I’ll likely wind up just playing the three a few weeks from now.

The evening found me burning a few ovens (A, B, and C) to shore up a few colors in the temple and adding to trade stocks slightly. Made a couple of papy runs and traded 150 to diania for 50 cadet blue tiles. Given that she’s the only person in Egypt with this color of tile, I consider it papy well spent. All total, only added another 550 glory or so to the Temple.

Forged ahead, making most of the moonsteel sheeting for the next oven. Got really annoyed with myself when I found a few hundred 'extra' folded birch resin I had thrown in a random chest one day. It could've saved me a little hunting a few days ago-- not that resin is particularly rough to obtain now; the trees in my camp yielded the unheard of 6 each yesterday. Still putting off mining iron-- I'll have to tonight if I want to drop the oven on Sunday evening.

Added Aplus (Cali’s husband and Goods teller) to the list of quit players. Although we have a census of paid accounts, I wish we had a count of active accounts—logged in at least once in the past two weeks, for example. If I had to guess, discounting mules, I’d put the number around 450. Interestingly although probably not surprising, the ‘survivors’ are forming a tighter community, at least in Shabbat Ab. I’ve heard reports that Meroe is ‘dead’ and Heaven’s Gate only has literally a handful of active players. Shabbat Ab stays ‘bustling’ with pass through traffic as well as regular chatter in regional, but I think we’re more of the exception than the average.

We seriously need more Tests available to keep player retention higher.

06/29/09

Friday night became “Build Another Oven Night” as I realized with some surprise that I had enough iron and iron ore to cover all of the miscellania that the oven required, except for the 2 pinch rollers. I traded a basket at the Goods for a pair when all of the smithing was done and by midnight I had an oven-in-a-box.

This left me with the unfortunate task of finding a good place to build it. I really wanted some of the more exotic colors, but Falcon Bay and Nomad’s Paradise are carpeted with Raelis already, leaving a dearth of pristine clay. I expressed my concerns to the Pilgrimage and AlexisBelle came to the rescue—she knew of a possible spot near the east map border. A quick confirmation later, I was on the way! The patch was located next to large campsite, abandoned now and Alexis’ only stipulation was that she claim the campsite when the salvage laws permitted. I readily agreed and the oven went up. Once a tile was dredged, I spent a couple of hours testing the colors.

This oven produced a number of blues and sea-greens. All in all, it produced nine colors I could not before! Rather a pity I had all of them already in my temple due to trades. Still, more diversity is good and it will add to my trade stocks in the coming weeks.

The next morning was...a bit of a departure from my normal universe. I had a number of people randomly chat me to trade for tiles. Meeting each in turns, I cleared out a surprising volume of stocked tiles. I only got one or two new colors out of the deals, but wound up with thousands added to my temple score. I knew it wasn’t going to be enough come Sunday, but I was curious to see how close it fared. Answer: pretty poorly. The pass went at 45.3k or so, about 8k more than my temple. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’re rapidly getting to the point where it will take thousands of tiles to add each 100 to my score.

Played around with hexaglyphs—there’s been a handful built in SA and I set myself to beating a couple. Rabble noted he had built one and tore it down for the principle pass and was going to give me glue, cut gems, and metalblue from his leftover salvage so I could build my own. I thanked him and beat the ones I played, making internal notes of the strategies the designers employed.

I attended a dig of Rabble’s and spent an hour picking up rocks in return for 150 cuttables and 30 medium stones or so. We’ve come a long, long way from when I was happy to get 15 and 2 respectively. I also note with some mild amusement that I now wind up being a picker at nearly every single dig I attend.

I successfully spent the weekend not growing wheat. There were a couple of wheat-growing contests that didn’t interest me, so I was happy to let others tend to their crops while I burned ovens and gathered herbs.

Sunday passes came and went. Still 3k off passing the Test of Life and I have covered the Temple already. The big surprise came from Numaris, who passed 3 single pass Tests at once: Pathmaker, Hexaglyph, and Bijou. As a result of Numaris’ victories, Rabble passed Prophesy.

Time for me to build my own hexaglyph! I devoted myself to mining a pile of iron (after repairing a collapsed mine) and burning my last 1k charcoal to run the ten student forges in SACFAR, knocking out 25 iron bars, 400 nails, and a number of iron straps in record time. I already had 100 linen and orange paint on hand and in the end, I assembled my chalkboard in my trade building near the chariot stop and designed it with what I hope is a challenging puzzle.

Now, the waiting begins!

06/30/09

Logged on to mild disappointment: no one had played my hexaglyph in the past day, so the only vote it had was Numaris’. I played Numaris’ hexaglyph again the previous day and found that it was bugged: successful completion didn’t advance my principles tab. I had reported the bug, but they had not yet fixed it. Teppy had spent the day addressing the in-game lag and everything is working much better, so I have no complaints at all there. Besides, it’s moot if I can pass the Test myself...

I advertised my puzzle a bit and went on with my plan to burn a few more tiles. I’ve long since run out of ‘new’ colors I can burn, so what I’m doing is rotating ovens 2-3 one day, the others the following day, picking the color that has the least amount in the temple already and divvying up the results between the temple and my trade stock.

I started my “A” oven, leaving Mandisa and her 3k offline onions to guard it, then hit the road. After hitting up one of Rabble’s ovens, I jogged over to Khmun and tapped my “B” oven. Home again to wrap up that oven then a quick resin run before jogging out to the fartherest corner of Heaven’s Gate to bake at Rabble’s oven there. I needed some more indigo, so I let it burn while I wandered away from the keyboard for a bit.

When I got back, I had a pleasant surprise: the oven was showing purple! I didn’t know the oven could produce that one and I only had a single tile of that ‘flavor’ in my temple already, so I hastily stopped the burn. Indigo can wait!

After returning home, I sorted the piles and filed the tiles. Current glory score: 38,147.

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

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