User:Sefet/March2009

03/02/09

“Faster and faster each impending disaster...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

03/03/09

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

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

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

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

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

03/04/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/05/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/09/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/10/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm....

03/11/09

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

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

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

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

03/13/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to the weekend!

03/16/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/18/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/24/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/25/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/27/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

03/30/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saqqarah put raeli on timer yesterday.

03/31/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see.

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