User:Sefet/Aug2009

08/03/09 Fleece is the word (is the place, is the time, etc...)

Unsuccessfully tried to grow more thistles using the current void set—maybe in a couple of days. Completed all of the raeli trades and my friends once again came through with flying colors. Lilac and Alexis have both been incredibly supportive—Lilac donated her entire stockpile towards the temple in a desperate push to get me a pass and Alexis also donated more tiles and time than I could have ever asked for. After an insane amount of ‘push’, got the temple to 56,400 points using over 156,000 tiles. Bring it on, Pascalito!

Teppy pitched a curve ball. At the last minute, there was a Reflections tournament announced and the top 21 players would receive 49 raeli tiles of an undiscovered color—gold. Crap. I’d have to win or buy those. That’s 300 points and not something I could afford to ignore. Knowing Teppy, he’d wait until after the tourney Sunday night to run passes and I’d be 200 points short. Nightmare scenarios ran through my head. There were several practice tourneys before the big one. I’d just have to learn to play...and so I did.

I’m bad at the game, but it is insanely fun. The action takes place over a small circular reflecting pool, where 26 or so bubbles hang in a three-dimensional space. The players take turns making triangles with the bubbles until one cannot. Triangles cannot intersect, so the trick is to leave you opponent with ‘worthless’ bubbles that cannot form vertices of valid triangles. I would pay cash to have this as an iphone app. Mostly lost the practice tournaments, ekeing out a win here and there, enough to establish some basic strategies I hoped would serve when it came down to it.

To take a break from raeli activities, I decided to work on something totally frivolous: a modern sheep farm! MSFs combine the fun of sheep farming with...ummm....more sheep! A single farm can house dozens of sheep and requires less work than scooting between a number of pens. As a perk, sheep in MSFs can be fed thistle bits to supplement the onions. Finally, in case Teppy re-introduces sheep pox this Tale, sheep in MSFs are protected. The project took a lot of wrangling.

First, there was the matter of figuring out how to make white paint... then 500 specially treated boards, then 125 cut stones... then making gravel for the 300 concrete... and so forth and so on. After a couple of hours, I had everything I needed in a project chest. Time to clear some land. Virtual sheep were shifted around and I tore down the two pens in front of the guildhouse. There was a twinge of sadness, as one of those pens had been with me since December 16th—3 days after we went ‘live’. Since I couldn’t shift the products elsewhere, I took the pre-processed saltpeter and leather into my inventory and left some 13000 mutton and a like amount of oil on the ground to rot. The land was clear, the construction site went up... and there was no option to build the farm! In all my running around, I had neglected to pick up the skill to build the farm. ARGH!

Made my way to Saqqarah to correct that oversight and in the process also learned the ‘ambrosia brewing’ skill. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds interesting and possibly delicious.

The next project was a springbox for the flax gin. Springboxes allegedly increase productivity and now that we gained advanced blacksmithing, two new objects appeared on our anvil’s project lists: springs and sharp-edged knife blades. Both are –nasty- pieces of work, but thankfully I’m fairly decent at the blacksmithing minigame and didn’t need to screw with the knife blade. In order to build a springbox, I’d need a spring and a gearbox. I fiddled with the gearbox design table and worked out an extremely cheap gearbox for the required outputs. In a nutshell, gearbox design is a small 3d puzzle where you have to make shafts rotate at the correct speed by adjusting gear ratios, making sure the gears fit together. The challenge is that you have extremely limited restrictions on how they can be designed. Made the gears for it, went to assemble it, and found I needed a cotter pin. Bees are on the what now?

Cotter pins? Oh...requires a level of carving that I have. Went to carve it and found I needed a higher quality knife. Uh oh. To make a higher quality knife, I’d need a lot of little things (easily made) and a quality 8500+ sharp-edged knife blade. DAMN!

Took to the anvil and hammered my heart out. To my credit, I got it on the third go. This is something maybe 5% of the population can do and if I really cared, I could make more for trades. Gearbox went into the flax gin and I’ll test it out at some point. I was busy, as I had a tourney to lose!

Showed up in the Wepawet spirit arena and stopped by a pool and fought a number of challengers, ending at Rank 2. There weren’t an exceptional number of players and I won a couple more games than I lost.

The biggest surprise came when passes were announced in the middle of the tournament. Beaten. Again. By thousands. Ay passed with 58k+ points. He’s with one of the raeli cartels with 30+ ovens and their own ‘funerary queue’. Hmph. The website of one of the other members now notes she is stocking 2400 of each color in warehouses for the next person.

As a minor consolation, I placed in the tourney and was able to add Gold to my temple.

It WILL be glorious.

08/04/09 Dream weaver

Celebrated my birthday by fishing for perch. Well, virtually fishing. Well, virtually-virtually fishing, as I wasn’t actually virtually fishing myself—that’s what macros are for. Kyline wants perch for tiles, so by Ra I’ll provide perch. I fished up a thousand debens, traded for 500 at the Goods and Alexis provided another 500 so I’ll place an order tonight. Should be good for 2400 or so tiles, or as I like to think of it,150 points. Need to start burning ovens tonight.

On a whim I built a Tower for Mandisa and snagged a little less than 8%. She’s nearly done with that one. I may have to start taking her on acro tours.

Along with the fish, I picked up a lot of miscellaneous odds at ends at the Goods—a half dozen baskets (they were cheap and I want more fruit trees eventually), a few loom frames for the next project, a couple dozen cuttable gems and a few things like pinch rollers to help with the next oven.

Didn’t really feel enthused at the prospect of gathering clay and making bricks, so that’ll have to wait until later this week. Instead I fired up the casting boxes and made bearings and gears until I forgot to fill them with charcoal. Sigh. I’ll have to start them again to make another double load of gears soon, but there’s always more stuff that needs to be done.

Oh—the loom frames I mentioned earlier? I decided to upgrade my tech a little and add an automatic loom to the ‘Plex. The requirements weren’t too bad—a few cut gems and a bunch of gears along with the loom frames, some boards, and a few other bits. In short order, I had another machine humming away happily, cranking out a linen every five minutes. It’ll do linen and it’ll do canvas, just not both at the same time. It’s slow, but more effective than relying on me to weave when I remember to.

08/05/09 The powder of love

Placed an order for a zillion tiles, but I know I’ll need 100 zillion by Sunday, so the fish will need to keep rolling in over the course of the week. Fished off and on and gathered enough to double my order, so I’ll do that tonight once I’ve had an opportuntiy to pick the colors that are ‘best’ for my situation.

A spot of good fortune came by way of an announcement that Pascalito was selling tiles for silver powder 1:1. He has a few colors I can’t find anywhere else and that made for an easy decision. Powder is pricey when you’re a soloist who can’t cook good food to reduce the endurance timer a bit, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiam—it isn’t like I’m really using leather anymore anyway. After a while I had ground up enough silver for 250 tiles each of a couple of sought after colors and it was a quickly done deal.

From then on out, it was a matter of hitting a couple of ovens and baking what was needed.

Gathered a few hundred clay, but otherwise a quiet night of fishing.

08/06/09 Binging and perching (Not a song title pun, but I couldn’t resist it)

Stood by the river fishing. For hours I fished, hauling up perch 8-9 debens at a time. Every now and then I ran over to a new warehouse I built by Ft. KbtS just to house fish and unloaded my catch then returned to my labor of love. Not that I particularly enjoy fishing, mind you, but I dreamt of the thousands of tiles such fishy wealth would provide.

In time I had accumulated 13 kiloperch and I left an order with Kyline to spend 8kp of it. I wish I could’ve seen the look on her face when she saw:

Sefet: 560 of the following: Deep Sky Blue

Sefet: 700 of the following: Feldspar, Lime Green, Sandy Brown, Forest Green, Crimson, carrot, Aquamarine, Dark Red, Blue Violet, Tomato

Sefet: 840 of the following: Peru, Light Sky Blue, Light Green, Light Cyan, Dark Turquoise, Pale Green

Sefet: If any are out of stock, please apply any overage to bundles of Violet and/or Azure

Sefet: Payment will be 8330 perch

Sefet: Thanks :)

Thanks to a broadcast from Ariella, I figured out that Kyline’s group was researching mutagenics in their region, which takes some 50kp, among other things. Hence, I know the bulk fish should be very welcome. I’m just dreading hauling all of the stuff back and forth from three zones away.

Now I need to figure out what colors to order next.

Also placed an order with the Shabbaticals for ‘only’ 3k tiles. Those will cost me a chunk of my remaining silk, but soon I’ll start working out new thistle recipes (or pay Ajars to research them for a % of the silk grown).

08/07/09

I sit amongst spreadsheets and charts that litter my desk, the whole of it looking like it came from A Beautiful Mind. On them are frantic scribblings, tracking colors, quantities, pending trades, expected oven burn rates, and the like. It is both awe-inspiring and disturbing, both in scope and nature. My temple shall be...something something.

Anyway, continued my Perch-o-thon, eventually yielding a total of 17,065 debens of fishy goodness. Kyline finally logged on and her two word reponse to my endeavors and first order: ‘’wow. cool.’’ Excellent. I was half-worried I was going to scare her off with the volume involved, but she was eager, running about to burn a couple of ovens. This bodes well.

Still there’s the logistical issues I mentioned yesterday of transporting all of the goods. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and get half of it out of the way. Carrying a ton of fish with me, I built a storage warehouse near the ‘trade point’ in Pyramid Lake. From then out it was all Mandisa’s show. Eat a grilled pepper for the bonus, load up on fish at home, spousewarp, drop off fish, nav point a short distance away from the Chariot, then expedition travel back home. Each round trip burns 15 hours of travel time, but with 41 days banked, I’m not too concerned. I’ll arrange for similar transport when it comes time to move the tiles back. Someday I may learn how to cook decent recipes to speed things like this along.

Speaking of, Alexis has offered to provide three types of herbs I’m missing for the cooking five tuition. Unless circumstances deem otherwise, I’ll run into her tonight at a small wine-tasting party lilac is hosting. Her husband, Varick, was quite a vintner, but has now apparently gone on to other places, leaving quite a number of aging bottles. I’ll bring over one of the two remaining bottles I made. I think by now they are old enough for the flavors to be expressed and I’ll finally know what type of wine my own vineyards produce!

Helped a trial account get established across the river. Nothing big: just a little leather, oil, a couple of flystones, and that I had a nearby array of brick racks he could use. Chatsubo’s his name and he’s a soloist. We’ll see how that develops.

I’ve had a LOT of people play my venery lately and it has received a number of complements. Makes me somewhat reluctant to tear it down at the end of the month to build Mandisa’s. I’d leave it up, but I’m ‘’not’’ going to cut another 2 dozen gems for lockboxes when I’ve got a number of perfectly good ones just sitting there.

08/10/09 Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999 (BC)

The highlight of the weekend was the party we had at lilac’s. We had a small but enthusiastic turnout: lilac, Alexis & Tyler (her husband), Juliack (a member of the Tiki guild I didn’t know), and myself. Many wines were sampled and I’m now very close to finishing my second book. I brought one of my two meager bottles and now I finally know my vineyward’s flavor: cool, refreshing menthol. I have successfully bottled Sefet’s Vap-o-rub. We fired off dozens of fireworks and smoked muchly. A great time was had by all!

Went tile-crazy, as per the usual. By Sunday, Kyline came through on everything except tan—her connection failed during the burn, but Alexis was able to cover those. All total I burned about 2 weeks worth of Mandisa’s travel time hauling fish and raeli chips back and forth. Somewhere around 24k tiles made their way in such a fashion from Pyramid Lake.

I went around and maximized my points, burning all of my ovens and adding glory to the temple in ever decreasing amounts.

Completed a couple of trades with nourbese and parted with most of my remaining silk thread. Nourbese, in a spate of generosity, gifted me with thousands of tiles—she really wanted to see me pass! It took my temple from a hundred shy of 59k to about 59250 or so. It’s gotten horrific seeing how many tiles yield so few points. At that point, with all of my resources tapped, it was all over but the waiting again.

Took my mind off the temple with a couple of diversions: fishing and thistling. The current void sets were very good for the tanks and I worked out simple recipes for two of the tanks. After a while, I had made about 1k thistles for one tank and 500 or so for the other. I very much want to repay lilac and Alexis with silks for the generosity they’ve shown and later this week, I’ll be able to. I think silk is where I’m going to make my specialty. It’s challenging enough that most sane people don’t want to screw with it and it is necessary for a number of tests and projects.

The fishing was for a bit of altruism: we’ve recently started a bit of research locally, with Egyptian Life unlocking Basic Chemistry and starting work on Taxidermy and the P.A.S.S. guild working on Gardening or some such. My best guess is that they are working toward unlocking our region’s rose or something. I really should pay more attention to the research front, but like many Egyptians I tend to just be grateful when other people do the work on techs. Still, they needed thousands of fish—I had thousands of fish...

I donated my stocks to UArt and brought them down to under 2k fish to go, then went to another region to see about some beer. By the time I got back, RosieRazor (of P.A.S.S.) had donated everything except 470 catfish. All right! I took my pole to the water by the ‘Plex and reeled in the fish. Returning to the University, I put my first technology on timer. It felt good.

Sunday afternoon came and went without passes. Sunday evening came and went without passes. Finally, at 11pm or so, an announcement was made: it was the Test of Life passes! This came as a heck of a surprise, as it is calculation-intense and has always been one of the last test scores released at Pass-time. Minutes passed and there was still nothing. It became nerve-wracking. Finally, other announcements started coming through, almost in a reverse order from ‘the usual’ pass announcements... it would be a full five minutes before Temple was announced.

My temple is glorious.

Egypt recognizes M:Sefet, Level 34 Journeyman of Three for passing the Test of the Funerary Temple for his Temple at egypt 1530 2322. The Temple features the splendor of 126 colors of Raeli Tiles, for a Glory Rating of 59258.

It’s over. The nightmare that has consumed my very being for weeks is over. I skipped, yes SKIPPED, to each of my ovens and gave them to the Pilgrimage.

Lilac and Alexis, may your temples be glorious.

08/11/09

When I was much younger, I collected comics. One particular non-superhero magazine stood out due to its brilliance on social commentary: Howard the Duck. Mind you, it was a complete box office disaster, but the comic itself was genious. Anyway, a particular story comes to mind. Howard Saves the World(tm) and the following issue deals entirely with him trying to come to grips with what he’s just done and “what do you do the day after you save the world?” As I remember, he mostly sits around the house feeling like he should be doing something else.

And so it was with Sefet... feeding camels and silkworms, killing sheep and time with equal apathy.

Eventually, I decided to finally build that wine tasting table that I’d always wanted. With Mandisa in tow, after a time I was able to get a OSM quarry and fit it with a pair of winches. We dredged up slab after slab slowly. At some point, I’m going to need to get recipes to take advantage of the cooking skill I now possess. Speaking of, I’ve now heard of people holding two man digs with adequate food and 9k shovels. It may be time to start shopping for a pair!

When all was said and done, I had gotten enough marble for the table and another acid bath besides. Mind you, I still need wine glasses for the table and our best glassmaker quit the game a month ago. Another thing I get to learn!

I stopped by Saqqarah and picked up auto-mining. This will permit mines to ‘run themselves’ for a period of time and finally obsoletes standing in front of a hole clicking gems. Yay!

Saqqarah has also researched automated charcoal manufacturing, but you have to have a permanent 7 focus to learn the skill. Bear in mind there is no way to permanently increase your focus skill at this point and we see yet another of Teppy’s stall tactics. Yes, I’m bitter about this. People put a lot of work and resources into unlocking technologies and then to be told ‘you still can’t have it’ is just wrong. The prime example of this was the Storage Improvements technology which was to allow us to dig basements in warehouses, allowing them to hold more. It was researched on April the 20th and still has yet to be implemented. All it would take is increasing max capacity from 25k to 35k or something. Is it REALLY that hard?

Time to start working on Pyro, I think.

08/12/09 I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say “alloy.”

Decided to look at the requirements for a couple of projects: an auto-mine and an automated sawmill. The mine is a little pricey in steel but pays for itself eventually. The sawmill is another story entirely: a slab of expensive marble called ‘Island Blue’, several cut gems, a chunk of raeli tiles (twitch), a dozen steel blades (each of which takes 5 steel and 10 minutes to craft), 4 pinch rollers, a lot of gearwork, and more. I don’t use that many boards, so the latter is more of a vanity project.

Well, first things first. I needed cable, so I popped open a chest that was housing components for another raeli, now unneeded, and extracted a pinch roller. After installing it in one of the large distaffs, I could now make cable out of steel wire. I noted with some dismay that my massive charcoal stockpile has dwindled greatly and I’d need to make a batch before the night was over. A lot would be required for alloy making and forging.

It was about this time that I looked at the Goods to see if they had any of the marble in stock and they did. A single piece costing an obscene 10k ‘points’. Scrolling through the inventory, I searched for something that could get me that many without draining reserves too badly when I noticed they were now trading in raw silk. I didn’t have very much left after the raeli tile trading bonanza, but the 57 threads I had left was good for nearly 37k in store credit. Silk is that expensive.

Not believing my good fortune, I chatted up Robare and arranged a trade for a couple dozen cuttable gems and the marble and still had 20k left over in credit. Yeehaw!

I hit the gem cutting table and carved up all the gems I needed with little waste. I’m pretty good at a few of the basic cuts and the ones I needed looked like 14-sided dice (a tetradecagon!) and were not overly difficult.

Afterwards, I fired up the forge and started cranking out steel wire and blades while I worked the reactory to craft alloys. I had plenty of steel, but was shy by dozens of debens for the projects, so I threw myself into my work. To a lesser degree, I also made some moonsteel, sunsteel, and thoth’s metal, all of which are made from alloys or alloys of alloys. My work on the reactory finally showed when I achieved a 100% crystallization (read: perfect score) on a batch of steel. It was a warm and fuzzy feeling.

It was going to take far too long to make all of the blades and wire, so I built a second student forge in the ‘Plex, crowding the center slightly. Eventually I’ll pick up eastern meditation (the feng shui skill) and rearrange everything to be more ascetically pleasing. I loaded up the forge with charcoal and kicked it off. Things were humming along nicely. It was about this time I got a message from Kuupid.

Kuupid is the grandmother of a player named ‘Haunting’, who is 14 outside of Egypt and the subject of considerable drama a few months ago. She made a bad marriage choice and had all of her things taken by her spouse, who then divorced her. The community was outraged and Brandon, the asshat, eventually quit. Haunting’s house and property began to rot, but they were all owned by Brandon and after a time, Haunting also disappeared. She was pre-paid for the year, so her account was still valid.

In my wanderings around Egypt, I stumbled across her abandoned house weeks ago and, seeing that Brandon had quit, made a note of when his account’s 60-day limit was up. When the time came up, I laid claim to the house and everything inside. Nothing particularly grand, aside from a number of the fireworks and display cases pre-paids receive, but it was her home and I intended for her to get it back. She’d been offline for a month but Kuupid still played fairly regularly and I left a message for her to let Haunting know everything was saved for her. Now a couple of weeks later, I had heard back from Kuupid—and Haunting was ecstatic.

I sent Mandisa over to transfer the property back, while Sefet minded the forges. Returning back to Sefet’s work, I noted the fires almost died due to lack of charcoal and discovered to my horror I was out of charcoal entirely. Nuts. Over to the oven and a batch was processed with less than a minute to spare. I let the flames die out only after the last of my steel had been forged and I surveyed the fruits of my labor: enough for an auto-mine, and a goodly percentage of the stump grinder done! I carted the mining package out to a little used iron mine of mine and set it to work. I’ll see how much it pulls before the mine crashes.

I received a heads-up from Kuupid that I had missed the distaff when I was transferring everything, so I hastened back to Khmun to take care of that loose end. When I got there, Haunting’s pet otter was scampering around the middle of the floor.

Seeing that felt good.

08/13/09

Checked on the auto-mining mine—after about 19 hours, it had pulled a little over 4k ore and hadn’t collapsed yet. Definitely a good sign and already slightly better than what I could accomplish with a macro. When I’m feeling particularly masochistic I’ll need to make a few more for other mines.

Next stop: the silkworms— over 1k raw silk produced in tank one, but no requests until tonight. Tank five, the other one I fed, won’t be ready until Friday, so I’ll just hit them both then.

Ran into Alexis down at Rabble’s camp and gifted hear with enough raw silk to pay for her navigation 5 tuition. Once I returned to Shabbat Ab, I set aside a like amount for lilac. Still had some 400-and-change left over. When the other tank produces, I’ll have enough silk to upgrade the acoustics lab. More on that some other time.

Dug around in another iron mine for vast quantities of ore, made a ton of charcoal (all my local sellers are off-line or have quit), and fired up the MCB to start manufacturing gears. I built a small construction site off to the side of Fort KbtS and started loading in the raw materials for an automated sawmill. The first thing I noticed was that I had forgotten about the pinch rollers. The project called for four of them, I only had one left on hand and each took a solid chunk of time and iron. Ah, well. Fired up the forges and was glad of the extra charcoal.

During all of this, a fellow I’d seen around named OZtwo showed up. (As a side note, I never did ask what happened to OZone. Wait. Ozone? Oztwo could qualify as being an exceptionally clever name.) He was hanging around Sekhar’s never-used compound by Ft. KbtS for an exceptionally long time, when a nasty suspicion arose in my mind. I checked Sekhar’s expiration date and my fears were confirmed: I misremembered the ‘expired’ date for the account and his stuff was available for claiming as of a couple of hours previous. Confirmed by checking the building and seeing it had a new owner. Damn it! I seriously doubted there was anything of value to me in either of the two small chests that comprised the entirety of the compound’s contents, but I wanted that eyesore torn down.

I jogged up to OZtwo and requested that, if he wasn’t going to use the structure, to please tear it down. He confided that it was his plan to and offered it to me. I politely declined and a moment later, the worthless building that had graced the edge of my camp since December was gone. Huzzah!

Once the pinch rollers were done, I quenched the forge and loaded the last of the materials into the construction site. The sawmill was a beauty to behold and I was glad I had made a couple of extra blades the night before. Apparently it didn’t come ready to go ‘out of the box’. I loaded up the hopper after failing to tune it and kicked it into high gear. When it stops (whenever that is), it’ll break the steel blades, so I’ll try to remember to ask the wife to pop some wood in sometime this morning. I have no idea how quickly it is processing the wood. This may be a weekend-only thing.

08/17/09 A-lem-bic, just a little bit.....

The mid-game is finally on me. With temple done, I feel as though I can truly chillax and do all of the things I wanted to do for the past couple of months. As usual one thing led to another.

The silk worms paid off nicely and I gave silk to Alexis and lilac as planned. With the bulk of the remainder, I upgraded the acoustics lab. It now only needs 20 rabbit pelts and ‘Worm Spirits of Fire or better’ to be fully upgraded. I wasn’t going to mess with ‘Worm Spirits’ just yet, but decide to start playing with the acoustics lab anyway. Fired up a glazier’s bench and made a few fine glass rods that would later become chimes. I was now ready to play.

Bear in mind, I didn’t bother reading the wiki articles on the lab in advance. Resultantly, it came as a bit of a surprise when I received not a single note, but a little snippet of a melody, called ‘gliding condor’. The lab listed the 14 or so upgrades I had already given it as options to mess with the chime. I poked a couple and random and could hear the melody change, mixing in what seemed like another melody. After a minute of picking random things (it seems you can tune a chime indefinitely), it gave me a new melody: Gliding Owl, or something like that. That’s when I decided to look it up.

Turns out there’s 99 ‘verbing bird’ combinations (Hovering Finch, Soaring Eagle, etc.) arranged on an 11x9 grid. As you tune, each tuning option moves you in a certain direction along the grid. Simple enough right? Well, each lab’s upgrades is a different ‘direction’ than another, so you have to figure out how your own lab works. As an added bonus, it isn’t an ‘open’ 11x9 grid: it’s a maze. Tune until you have your desired melody, remove chime. When you assemble the chime tower, you string melodies together and can even have multiple playing simultaneously. This will be a challenge.

After a long while, I determined a few vague directions for some of the upgrades and wanted to get the rest of the upgrades done. I chatted with a couple of bunny merchants, one of whom was off-line, the other out-of-stock. The going rate for bunnies is 20-25 carrots per, so I went and grew carrots. 3k of them. This didn’t take as long as it sounds, as I grew at an aqueduct in Stillwater that granted a bonus to carrots and lucked out by growing over the peak of a ‘carrot wave’. Growing 7 carrot patches at a time, yielding 66-69 carrots per patch made for a happy Sefet.

Well, I decided I’d have to try out the alembic at some point and now was as good as any. Taking the last bottle of my first wine experiments (which I knew was a weak wine of lower quality), I popped it into the alembic after skimming over the wiki article on it.

The alembic only has a few controls: more heat, less heat, and a few radio buttons to control the amount of the flow. Depending on how hot it is when you pop your alcohol in is the type of spirit you get (Worm Spirit of..., Fish Spirit of..., Vegetable Spirit of..., etc) Once the booze is in, you have do fiddle with the control a little to keep the temperature near a dot on the line to keep the mixture ‘pure’. This is where the second part of the spirit’s name comes into play. “...of Fire” is purer than “...of Water” and “...of Gray” is utter sewage. The longer you keep the temperature where it needs to be, the more quantity spirits you get, up to the maximum allowable by your booze. Alcohol percentage may have something to do with that.

My first attempt gave me a handful of Vegetable Spirits of Water. The acoustics lab rebuffed me, noting it wanted Worm Spirits. Fine. I was out of alcohol, but I had some mid-range quality stuff soaking in a barrel I could try! I bottled it up and threw more grapes of nearly double the quality into a barrel to make up for it and trotted back to the alembic.

The next two tries both wound up becoming Worm Spirits of Water. I had Fire for just a second, but lost it and once it becomes ‘tainted’, you’re screwed. Finally, with the last bottle I was going to waste on this endeavor until more wine is ready, I bottled 1 Worm Spirit of Fire! I took it to the acoustics lab...

“You need at least 10 Worm Spirits of Fire.”

ARGH!

I vented my frustrations on my citrus grove, mulching a few trees in my Quest for Tasty Fruit. I now have six trees in my orchard, mostly lemon with some grapefruit. They look nice arranged around the mentorship pool. I’ll add some more when I get ahold of more baskets.

After the alembic adventures, I knew I needed to ramp up the wine production. This was already on my ‘to do’ list, so it wasn’t like I was going out of my way on a project. Made a few hundred nails, a few copper straps and a lot of boards (always more boards these days, it seems). Put up a few vineyards near some iron mines I owned an hour’s jaunt from the ‘Plex for a new wine flavor and tended all of the vines when I remembered. Made a couple more barrels and the Winery now sports four of them.

My copper situation was getting unpleasant, with my mines being repaired five times or so each, so it was time to go looking for new ones. Needed pulleys, so I attended a couple of digs for more cuttables. Fully kitted out, I went wandering and snagged two new copper mines and two tungsten mines! A good run, in my opinion. As a side note, I finally organized my personal mines on my wiki user’s page.

Thistle voids changed and I figured out The Perfect Recipe. It takes nothing except toggling the sun button once during the entire run. Unfortunately, by the time I did this, I had no sun to work with. Something to do tonight.

Took a few screenshots of the ‘Plex and surrounding areas for Kotas. At some point I’ll get Fraps working and make a short video.

As a final note, when Sunday passes came, I took notice of the Temple winner. For the first time in seven weeks or so, the score dropped. It was down to under 57k. To have passed last week, I didn’t have to add a single tile during the week leading up to it. No regrets though, not a one. I got shot down after coming so very close too many times for that.

08/18/09

As anticipated, I grew thistles! Lots and lots of tasty thistles. Well, tasty if you’re a silkworm or Eyeore. There’s a harsh diminishing returns after 1k thistles go into the tank, but I went ahead and grew 1100 anyway and popped them in just hours before the worms hatch. They’ll still need to mature and take time to spin, so I likely won’t have silk tonight, but by tomorrow I’m hoping for enough for 22 silk cloth and another easy-to-make thistle request.

Met up with JulianJaynes, seller of things what hop, and acquired a few dozen rabbits. With some luck and a dexterity bonus, I hope to nail the pelts I need for the acoustics lab.

Otherwise, a short quiet night, tending the grapes, killing sheep, and refilling the sawmill.

08/19/09

Although I’m not actively pursuing Tests at the moment doesn’t mean I’m idle: aside from the Eternal Pyro Project (more on this another day), I’m also stockpiling resources for two large endeavors: a medium house and an airship.

Medium hice (mouse, mice...house, hice) can only be built be Scribes of Architecture, which I am! They are extremely resource-intense and are mostly a vanity project. Bear in mind, it also acts as a container and should hold about 130k (5 warehouses) worth of stuff if the Tale 3 figures are still accurate. When I say resource-intense, I mean it: 23 marble, 2k concrete, 4900 nails, over 10k treated boards, hundreds of linen (for the window treatments, I reckon), a thousand paint of various hues...and a lot more! This is more of a long-term project, I admit, and I hope to be done by Christmas. Actually, I hope to be done a couple of weeks earlier than that, loading up the last board on my 1 year anniversary in the desert.

Unfortunately, I managed to forget to reload the sawmill as soon as I got home from work and by the time I checked it, it had ground to a halt, producing over 5k boards and an equal amount of sawdust. Well, at least I could start processing the sawdust into wood pulp. Someday the pulp will be paper, once we have that technology.

The other Project, is an airship. Egyptians had those, didn’t they? It’s more of a hot air balloon than a tie fighter, but I’m not complaining. Someday that technology will be researched and when it is, I’ll be ready! Compared to the house, the 80 silk cloth requirement seems almost cheap. Mind you, it also requires a good bit of aluminum straps and straps made from a complex alloy.

That complex alloy, water metal, is made from steel, moonsteel (neither of which I had on hand), and silver. I still had plenty of base metals, so I fired up the reactory and worked for a while. It amuses me slightly when I think of how intimidated I used to be by the entire alloy-making process. After a bit, I had more than enough and socked it away into the warehouse. I’ll likely devote a project chest to it tonight and start flaxxing again. The rope won’t spin itself! Well, actually it will, but the flax won’t jump into the gin and distaff by itself! Although I hear Tedra’s been working on that...

The silkworms cheated me with their diminishing returns, yielding only a little more than 1k thread. Still, that’s a quarter of what I’ll need, so no complaints there.

Decided to try my luck at bunny slaughtering and knifed every last one of them. Net result? EXACTLY the number of pelts I needed! Minus one. Typical, really. I’ll just pick the last up from the Goods at some point later.

Visited my aluminum mine I bought from Taffer months ago for the first time. This is a mine that would benefit from an auto-winch and I may add that to my ‘to do’ list. For now, I went ahead and fired off a macro that got me much more ore than I would have on my own. I’ll need to run it again tonight for enough ore to rationalize the charcoal spent refining it.

08/20/09 Bill me up, Buttercup!

Rather horrific night. Log in, staring at the aluminum mine. Despite several attempts to get the macro hitting the right colors, I was unable to get it going well. I’m definitely going to need to come back with a winch kit. I go to warp home and can’t. Mandisa’s account has expired!

A week ago, my debit card info was stolen and had to be cancelled. The new one was to arrive ‘in a week or two’. My one credit card expired at the end of July and I never received a replacement. I ordered a replacement, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Net result? One expired Mandisa. Running back from eastern Meroe is an inconvenience, losing her cornerstones would be bad.

Franticly, I look over the billing options in the game. There’s a spot for credit card information, or you can otherwise select “PayByCash”. Excellent! I input ‘paybycash’ in the credit info and the game tells me I need to go to www.paybycash.com to remit payment. Ok. If PayByCash.com actually had eGenesis as a merchant, that would be the end of the story, but oh, no—things are never that easy. PayByCash didn’t include ATitD or eGenesis in its list of valid payees, so I checked out the eGenesis’ corporate (I use the term loosely) website. Everything there says PayByCash.com or credit card.

Hmm. Maybe I could get a disposable credit card number? Yeah...turns out Paypal only does that with Debit balances you have, but has a ‘credit card MasterCard offering’ that ‘lets you start shopping immediately’. 30 seconds later, I’m approved for an obscene amount of credit I don’t actually need and I find out that they ‘tie the charges to your Paypal account’ until the plastic arrives in the mail. Terrific. So, seeing as how I have a shiny new Mastercard without any numbers (which means I can only make Paypal payments with it—which I don’t need as my bank account ties into it), I can’t do squat. I take the time to remove the old invalid debit card from my paypal account—to have it cancel my ongoing webhosting subscription. This was becoming nightmarish.

Annoyed beyond reproach, I place an in-game billing call, explaining my failure to pass the Test of Figuring Out How to Give Teppy Fifteen Freakin’ Dollars. Some hours later while offline, I receive word back from Teppy that he takes Paypal. Brilliant.

I make the payment and hopefully Mandisa’s account will be reactivated this morning. I’ll straighten out all of the billing info once my replacement cards arrive and cancel the Paypal card as soon as it arrives. I do it sooner, but you apparently can’t register for account information without the numbers on the card itself. Again, brilliant.

08/21/09 Thistle while you work

Not very much going on in an abbreviated session. Mostly I wanted to verify Mandisa’s account was straightened out (it was) and her cornerstones were still in place (they were). Celebrated by growing flax and starting a fully loaded gin.

I played around with the thistle spreadsheets now that I had the new voids, but couldn’t make anything useful. Instead I wound up growing thistles for the sheepies.

The sheep reproduce amazingly fast in the modern sheep pen. Since it holds up to 50 sheep before they stop breeding, I prune them down to 15 pair and the next day they are back to around maximum capacity again. Although I still have some 33k onions or so, I figured I might as well take advantage of the other prime benefit of the spiffy pens: sheep will also eat thistle bits. Sure they require specific nutrients as well, but they are nowhere near as fussy as silkworms, only requiring two randomly-selected nutrients of average or positive quality. That’s easy!

Shortly, I returned to the camp with 75 thistles and load up the pen. Turns out each thistle becomes 1k ‘bits’ in the pen and you can fill up the entire feed trough with just 50 thistles. I’ll see tonight how quickly the sheep devour them, but it should be ‘cheaper’ than onions.

In other news, this weekend there will be another cooking contest: this one for +10 dexterity recipes made with camel meat. The top prize for chefs is 49 silk cloth, the top eater prize is a light box (a very pretty camp ornament). Amusingly enough, the prize you get for participating is a handful of leather. I don’t stand a chance in hell on this one, but the top 21 in either category gets a new veggie seed: eggplants! This means that by Monday people will have Cooking 6 and 7 (6 requires eggplant and 7 is just burnt barley, malt, and wheat).

If I can figure out a recipe, I may just give it a go—it isn’t like I’m using camel meat for anything anyway.

08/24/09 Camel, camel, camel, camel, camel chameleon...

Quite a bit of a weekend, so I'll begin a bit beforehand. As noted, Thursday we found out that Saturday would be a Festival Day, honoring the 'camelus dromedarius', aka the common housecamel. Participants were asked to either cook grand camel meat dishes that provided a significant dexterity boost or to wander around sampling the meals cooked by others. Grand prizes would be awarded to the top chefs and gourmands, but it was the third prize that held my interest: eggplant seeds. A new veggie and finally we would be able to attain higher levels of cooking. Not that I really got cooking, but now was my time to learn how to use the skill. I read the wiki and Arame had posted a MUCH better explanation of how the mechanics behind the skill works and in short order, I learned why I sucked at cooking.

I had gone in assuming that certain foods 'gave' certain bonuses and you could mix and match between existing recipes to come up with new things. Yeah, not so much. Basically, cooking is based on pairing bases with additives that are ‘close’ to the base on a (x,y) chart. Your cooking level determines how many of these 'pairs' you can use in a dish. That's a little over-simplified, but conveys the gist. In no time at all, I was able to work out a recipe that in my test kitchen yielded 6 points over the minimum required for the Festival.

As usual, I took a theme and ran with it. My meal contained everything camel-related I could find: meat, milk, oil, camel's mane mushrooms, and toe. Wait-- scratch the last one. The only thing I was running low on was the mushrooms. AlexisBelle came to the rescue and provided me with enough to make a few more servings. The more servings you make, the more 'diluted' it becomes, lower effects and duration, but the more people you can feed. I hoped that 79 servings would be enough to place in the contest without ruining the meal.

I built a kitchen in my trade hut by the Chariot, rationalizing that people will go a few steps for food, but not five minutes up the road. When the time came, I mixed up my meal and was pleased that it still gave enough of a bump to count towards the Festival! All that remained was heavy promoting and sampling meals around Egypt myself. This I did with enthusiasm, inviting people to celebrate Camel Day in Shabbat Ab. Other people had wines, beers, and rare herbs to lure people in. I relied on showmanship. I also ran around sampling where I could, earning my 49th beer tasting point, courtesy of Yerbouti, granting another permanent perception point.

My participation in the Festival was a stunning success-- I placed in the 'top 21' on both ladders and won a total of six seeds. I gave a couple to Alexis in gratitude and she shortly generated enough eggplants to bury the TikiGuild in a purple pile. I made a few myself, cracked a hundred coconuts, and rummaged up all that I needed for Cooking level 6. Now that I had tasted how cooking works, I wanted it all. Cooking 7 didn't require that much more, just a little cooked barley, wheat, and malt. I had barley and a little wheat. I just needed a bit more wheat. I'd never grown any before-- how bad could it really be?

The answer I found was 'nightmarish'. Wheat plots can be home to up to seven different types of weeds and the only thing you can do is water the bejeezus out of it. Every four seconds a weed will either appear or disappear. You can only harvest when there are no weeds at all present and you must be fast, because once that 4 second window is up, you've got weeds again. In 45 minutes of watering, I successfully harvested 3 beds. I eventually gave up on the other beds. Fortunately, those three I did harvest gave me all of the wheat I needed, about a hundred or so.

After building a grain oven and a malting tray in Fort KbtS, I was in business, happily toasting away the fruits of my labors. A few minutes later, I had achieved Cooking level 7. At some point, I'll see what fantastic dishes I can prepare!

Saturday was busy, aside from the Festival-- a Tower hour came that afternoon and a single Racing Mind tower put Mandisa over the top, earning me a few dozen more marriage points.

Also that day, a new pirate group formed, just a day later than expected. This time I was the captain and it was time to play dirty. Noticing there was only one other pirate online, I build the ceremonial ship and wandered away to refill our aqueduct. By the time it was done, we had four players online. I presented the group with statement that everyone was wanting to advance Principles, but I wanted to give people options to sell their shares for a little silk and gold. No one took the offer, so I divided things up 'evenly'. 111 for each online pirate, nothing for the poor offline people and the lion's share for myself. It was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off and the on-liners approved the split. Unfortunately, even though I had 777 doubloons, the Test was bugged and I didn't get Principles advancement. There was also another interesting bug that lets you assign a negative amount to a pirate as part of the split, but there was no way I was going to 'finalize' a split like that. I reported both to Teppy. We'll see how it goes.

Pilgrims visited my glass shrine for the first time in months, contributing a massive 35 sheet glass. I was stunned, but pleased. Minutes later, disaster befell the group in downtown Shabbat Ab. Apparently one of their group, a newer player, noticed our clinker shrine could be torn down and did so, leaving 435,000 debens of the pollution causing waste on the ground. Hilarious. There was a bit of a hurried, harried effort to rebuild the shrine. Then the long process of reloading the clinker began. I couldn't help as people who have passed Pilgrimage can't tithe, but Mandisa could!

Finished off Saturday night failing to develop a good-looking firework for a pyro contest on Sunday. Instead, I decided to fine-tune my 'Birth of the Tadpoles' pyro, adding another hundred stars I made. It drained all of my explosive resources, including some 2,500 gunpowder but looked half-way decent.

When Sunday came around, I meandered over to the pyro stadium and setup (read: picked a spot to stand on and waited). I really enjoy the little nervousness right before the show. All of the hours of preparation distilled down to a few minutes of fly or die. It was a very heavily attended show, with a dozen participants and over twenty judges. I waited until 7th or so to fire off mine and received a score that was well above the ones to that point. Several entries were disqualified by the judges as frauds and one guy fired too late to count. When all was said and done, I placed third in the contest, putting me in the top 1/3rd of the participants and earning another notch in my belt. All I need now is to place in the 'top 1/4th' (read: win first place) in a contest and I'll have passed Pyro! Time to start building back up the reserves.

Sunday passes came and went. Our Aqueduct passed its third batch of people—everyone who was in ‘my’ group have now passed and I’ll likely be retiring from the guild soon to free up the slot.

Oh, and I passed the Test of the Retired Pirates—Sefet is the Pirate King!

08/25/09

Began my evening journeys visiting the UArts of far and distant Adn, Sinai, and Pyramid Lake to learn new stars for the next firework. Mandisa’s chief complaint with my fireworks is that they need more color diversity. Hopefully, these will add to my options nicely. Once I get a few stars of each made, I’ll play with them to see what they look like. These should include a ‘popper’ (a little cotton ball of a flash. No trail or tail), a white cone, and some type of red, blue, and a yellow. Many take odd metals (magnesium and tungsten?), so it might be a couple of weeks before I have any to fire. I desperately need more acid baths.

Traded at the Goods and got the last gems I needed for my monumental tower of rich soil. I’ll put that up at some point when I feel like enduring a bricking bonanza. Don’t get me wrong—bricks go quick enough, but when you’re making 7k of them? Yeesh. I also bought the last rabbit pelt I needed for the acoustics lab upgrade, as well as a chunk of metals, salts, and glass pipes.

Met with lilac after encouraging her to throw her hat into the ring for a tower hour and gave her a few miscellaneous supplies to let her compete in that evening’s Hour. We enjoyed her Very First Wine (a menthol-banana concoction that makes me wince to think about too much) and bitched about Teppy. Good times.

When Alexis got on, we all discussed the Rabble situation and everyone has reached the ‘acceptance’ stage. We decided to leave things the way they were with the buildings, since we all use the equipment to some degree and almost all of the cornerstones are mine anyway and it doesn’t bother me to repair my own buildings to keep Camp Rabble in a functioning state. The warehouse stuff we’ve opted to treat as a Home Depot with unlimited credit. So if we need something, we’ll yoink it.

I took advantage of that by checking out the quarry options. One OSM quarry was fitted with two winches, so Mandisa and I could effectively hoist some marble. I cooked up some food (my first Masterpiece!) and settled in front of the quarry. We lifted out one piece of marble and the quarry broke. Each quarry has a hidden pre-set random number of pulls that can be made and it looks like we got unlucky. Ah well. Took a little metal home with me and set up one more acid bath to fizz away. They really need to soak a few days to get the best return on the metal over time, so salt generation can be a slow process.

08/26/09

Engaged myself in the dubiously fun task of building my own OSM quarry, as I wanted to expand the number of acid baths in the ‘Plex from three to six. My wife logged on Mandisa and I ran around her, breaking slate and occassionally asking her to stand in a different spot. It went extremely well and in short order I divined the location of the marble and was the proud owner of a quarry.

Next, the quarry needed gearboxes so I fired up the casting benches and made gears while I worked out the design on the assembly table. All total, the gearboxes cost 6 medium gears and 18 small gears, which I reckon is pretty cheap. Once they were in, it was just a matter of enlisting Mandisa’s aid in working the quarry. When all was said and done, we hauled out four pieces: enough for my acid baths and one to trade to lilac, who will give me wines in return. The wines will be used to fuel the alembic.

My own wines are coming along and the production is increasing. Barreled the last of the Plex grapes (some 533 grapes or so), so everything there is on ‘cruise control’ until I build more vineyards and barrels.

08/27/09 We like the stars that go boom!

Pyro production is now in high gear. Changed out a couple of the acid baths and made some white comets after gathering a ton of cactus sap. Played around a bit with the design tool for an exceptionally long time and I think I’ve got an interesting start. This one –has- to win the contest so I’m going all out: I figure 600-700 stars and about 20k gunpowder ought to do it. Either that or leave a giant smoking crater where the Sefetplex used to be.

Kept the marble tubs full of dung and by the end of the night I was able to make another 800 or so gunpowder. I’ve even started feeding the camels more than a handful of straw again to get more output from them.

Made the auto-mining kit for the aluminum mine and installed it. I’ll check on it this weekend sometime; I’ve got plenty of metals to dissolve in the meantime.

After meeting up with lilac as planned, I had a variety of wines to try in the alembic. I popped the first bottle in and, to my surprise, it wouldn’t generate any worm spirits. I played around with the temperature gauge and discovered it would only make vegetable spirits. Nuts. I bottled 40 vegetable spirits of fire, which might be good for something later. Rather than waste the rest of the wine, which produced gods-knew-what spirits, I trucked over to my winery for some old reliable Vap-o-rub.

I had about 10 bottle’s worth of wine in the appropriately-named ‘Alembic Bait’ barrel, so I bottled it and went over to see. First bottle in, worm spirits. Ok, I had a starting point. I blew the test of greed and ruined the purity of the concoction, so I started over. Twice. Finally, I discovered I could dump in more booze while it was working and that increased the ‘potency’, which I think is tied into how many spirits you can make at once and may be related to how slowly the temperature fluctuates. Pouring in three bottles, I was able to obtain a further 10 worm spirits of fire. Seconds later, I was the proud owner of a fully upgraded acoustics lab. Muahahaha!

In other news, The Test of Beacons was released and it looks like a Test that many will pass eventually. It works like this: every Egyptian week the gods seek to grant favors to people who do certain mundane tasks. This week it could be killing a camel, next week it could be growing flax, etc. If you perform this task, there’s a chance you might trigger a beacon in the form of a glowing altar nearby within an hour. Here’s some catches: you have to be around at least one other person and not near your camp (read: buildings you own) to trigger the beacon.

Once the beacon appears, you’ve got three minutes to get three people (including yourself) to meditate at it to ‘anchor’ it to the physical world for thirty minutes. Each priest who meditated will receive part of a vision of a ritual to perform at the altar, but not the sequence in which it should be performed. Once the three guys figure out what to do and in what order to appease the gods, they perform it and get 1/7th of the way closer to passing the Test. The ritual always involves medium gems and that’s about all I know.

08/28/09

Abbreviated session last night, as I was bone tired and wanted to catch up on some sleep. Dug up a few slabs of OSM and got together a nice trade at the Goods prepared. Unfortunately, there weren’t any Tellers available, so things are tucked away for now for hopefully a trade tonight. If it goes as expected, I should net hundreds of salts and saltpeter, saving me gobs of time to manufacture them.

I ran down to Queen’s Retreat and picked up a new star recipe: Trail of Love. It’s a pretty red, tight comet with a longish tail that isn’t terribly pricey. Translation: nearly everything I’m looking for in a star. We could really use a better diversity in our star selection. By the end of Tale 3, they had 46 stars to pick from in their designs. We have thirteen.

Otherwise I knocked out more saltpeter and stars and threw a few thousand straw at the camels.

Continued my quest for the perfect firework. I now have a few mortars lying around that have nifty ‘effects’ designed in them...swirls, colored explosions, and what have you. Because the materials are interchangeable and not expended until you fire the ‘real deal’, as long as I have an ample supply of gunpowder and stars, I can tinker endlessly and save designs for the cost of ten measly firebricks each.

The real trick is pulling off the “wow” effect. Be it complexity or the volume of stars or something completely unexpected, when the firework goes off and you stare at the screen and say ‘wow’, that’s a good thing. There’s definitely a fine line between “neat!” and “WOW”. I’m still looking for it. I caught a glimpse of it with an explosion I designed to satiate my wife’s desire for ‘more color’ and I think I know now how I can use it to win.

I’ll save that as a surprise for now. :-)

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