User:Sefet/Sep2009

09/01/09

Spent Monday sick, so playing catchup now—still a little woosy, so please forgive interruptions of my usual narrative style.

The weekend was mostly about working on Pyro, mostly. I finished the ‘rough draft’ of it and showed it to my wife. She gave me an “Awwwww!!!”, which is good enough, so all that remains is padding it with more gunpowder and colored stars. The effect itself is thus: I use red lights to trace a giant heart in the sky. It hangs where for about 12 seconds, then there’s a giant explosion of color from the center of it, leaving behind a cloud of white ‘poppers’. It looks really neat, if I do say so myself. My goal is to appeal to the 50% female demographic and I think this’ll do it.

To get to that point, I mined and processed a ton of magnesium and aluminum and I was finally able to catch a Goods trader, BL, to close the deal on more acid to supplement my dwindling supply. I lost track of how much dung and saltpeter I processed, but I’m to the point of squeezing camels to get more. I estimate I’ll be ‘show ready’ in a week.

To celebrate, I uncorked a couple of bottles of wine and finished off my second tasting book. It’s a good thing!

There were a couple of conflict tourneys held over the weekend and I’ll touch on both.

The first was ‘Tug’, the game of Telekinesis, and was extremely fun. My regret was I only got in a handful of games. In this game, you and your opponent pit your mental skill in a game of tug-of-war for an ore cart. It works like this: you each have a pool of 50 points to last the entire game. You spend as many as you want each turn in a blind bid. The person who bid the most ‘wins’ and the ore cart rolls towards them. Once the cart has moved four places from the middle (read: all the way to one side), there is a winner. If you run out of points, it is a simple matter for the other person just to keep bidding ‘1’ to get the cart back on their side.

I placed in the top 21 of that competition and won five pieces of tangerine marble, of which I no longer have any use.

The second was Kanivan Tak. It plays a lot like checkers, but without a board. Pieces shaped like giant eggs move forward in up to 60 degree arcs and once they reach either of the back two ranks, where they hatch into phoenixes that can move (and attack) in any direction. The controls are very fiddly and it is hard to estimate how far you can jump, but I still won a match, so I know I can play it if necessary. We had too many people tie at my ranking, so I didn’t get a special prize, but that’s all right.

The big drama to come down the pipe was a group of people from Stillwater who decided to ‘game’ the tournaments to win the very sweet prizes. By playing only against each other and deliberately throwing matches, they were able to ensure a number of them got the top prizes in each tournament. It’s poor sportsmanship, but there’s nothing you can really do to prevent them from doing it, aside from getting a DP to ban the offenders, which they wouldn’t do, due to fear of community backlash. The people who take conflict games and tournaments ‘seriously’, that is to say, those who enjoy the actual competition, have called out the offenders by name or by guild association. It promises to be ugly.

09/02/09

What started off with a quick login to ‘thin the herds’ turned into a small pyro foray as I manufactured 1k charcoal and gathered a couple hundred clay to make another 150 stars to go into the ‘finale’ portion of the firework.

Flushed out the acid tubs and they are now dissolving the last salts needed. From this point on, I just need to finish one batch of stars (I think) and make a crap ton of gunpowder from a ton of crap.

The major silk producers made a push to get airships researched and now it stands with just 150 silk to go. I’m stuck with an array of tanks with nasty thistle requirements and I’m not about to start rebuilding them to try for better ones. The void set changed and I spent an hour working out a ‘reset’ recipe for Tank 7. A reset recipe is a stupidly complex recipe that is impossible to do in bulk, but is useful for either generating small amounts of silk or, more frequently, to reset a silkworm tank to hope for a much easier thistle request.

09/08/09

Very little playtime this past week. I finished up my firework and, as luck would have it, there was a perfect time for displaying it on Saturday. I showed up to the field at the appointed hour and nervously paced, counting the participants twice.

In order to pass Pyro, all I needed was to place in the top 1/4th of the participants. This rounds down, so 1-7 participants meant I needed to win first place, 8-12 participants, first or second place.

The appointed hour struck and walkups were allowed to register as contestants or judges. We easily met the minimum for judges and I quickly made a headcount of the participants. When the lights dimmed for the show, there were nine aspiring pyromaniacs ready to take the stage.

I had determined to wait until the 6th or 7th turn to launch mine, hoping to follow behind an utter crap firework to get a few extra points from the judges. The first few launched and were passable, small 40-60 star affairs with one neat ‘gimmick’ in them.

The fourth person was disqualified by the judges as a fraud. She had launched a single star firework, hoping to finish her Pyro principles. Judges hate that. If three people vote an entry as a ‘fraud’, that knocks them out of the contest entirely, bringing our count down to eight entries.

I bided my time, and then I got floored. Nissim launched a shell entitled “tequila sunrise” and it was stupidly impressive. With 580 stars or so and what could only be an ungodly amount of gunpowder, it was everything a crowd could want from a ‘themeless’ firework. It got both a “Wow.” from one of the spectators and my wife, who was watching over my shoulder. Time passed and no one wanted to follow that monster. Guess who had to?

I sent my rocket up and it performed exactly as expected, eliciting an “Awww!” from someone. The audience was duly impressed and I received a mind-boggling high score, just a few points under tequila sunrise. Second place.

The seventh non-disqualified person fired her shell and it was ‘ok’ and received a moderate score.

The seconds ticked by and the final contestant didn’t launch. I hastily recounted the people on the screen to make sure I didn’t screw up. No, there was one other person. The contest ends after two minutes pass and no one fires a shell. The automated 60 second warning came and went. My passing or failing depended on this guy firing his shell. The 30-second mark came and finally—FINALLY—he armed his shell. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

He launched one star and was disqualified.

I wanted to scream. Dozens of hours, hundreds of stars, thousands of gunpowder gone. It was disheartening. I congratulated the winner and logged out.

Time for a little break.

09/10/09

Ok— back to the Desert. I have some design ideas for the next firework, but it’ll take a long while to get the materials together, so that’s on the back burner.

Checked on the thistle voids (bless you Numaris for posting those!) and was quite pleased—these were voids I could work with in relative ease. A few days ago I worked out an arrangement with murtha to provide recipes when able for a cut of the proceeds. She farms them out to people who need silk, so it all works out, assuming you can get recipes, farmers, and virtual sunlight to all cooperate within the 2 day time frame before the voids change again. I was happy to see I could provide both a reset recipe for one of her tanks as well as a solid, cheap, easy-to-produce recipe for a second.

As for my own tanks, I could not be more pleased. I was able to develop stupidly easily and cheap recipes for not one, but two (!) tanks, one recipe for nighttime and one for the day. The requirements of the recipe were so lax, I could easily manage 40 thistle beds simultaneously without fear of screwing things up. At 200 at a time, growing a thousand thistles was child’s play.

After finishing with the first round of thistles, I had a bit of time before the next could be grown. I was stuck waiting for mid-morning.

As I had some time on my hand, I took to Rabble’s reactories. It was time to upgrade the sawmill! I’ve now gotten confident at this minigame and after a bit I achieved ‘perfect’ scores at a few alloys and created a ton (read: 120 debens) of Thoth’s metal, a complex alloy, which then got dumped in a chemical bath.

The chemical bath treats metal in a similar way to wood treatment tank treats wood. Additionally, you can ‘plate’ metals with salts of other metals, but I haven’t needed to fool with that yet. I required “hard, stainless, ductile” metal for the sawmill’s hopper and was able to obtain it after a bit of experimenting and wasting more potash and arsenic than I should have. Sigh.

In the end, the alloy was treated and, once the forges were fired up, extruded it all into thin metal sheets. This was the last component needed and with pride I returned home and upgraded the sawmill to triple capacity.

By this time I had plenty of sun so I hurried to the Shabbatical’s thistle agro-complex to make use of their beds. Once again it took little time to manage vast amounts of silkworm-chow.

Ended the night by warping to the tanks and feeding them enough food to provide (hopefully) 40 silk cloth worth of thread. That’s half an airship in one night’s labor. For Sefet, it doesn’t get much better.

09/11/09

With no grand plans in the immediate, I took the opportunity to do a little casual camp work: repaired all of the buildings, fed the extremely emaciated camels, gather a few thousand wood. That sort of thing.

I started up the sawmill and the plan is to just let her rip for two weeks, as that’s how long it’ll take to process 20k wood into boards. After that, I don’t expect I’ll ever need boards again. (Three months from now, come back to this point and laugh at my naivety.)

From there, it was a trip down to check on the worms. It’ll be Sunday before the tanks I fed previously will process the thistle and the worms go through their next life cycle, producing more silk, thistle requests, and anguish, however one tank’s requirements that I didn’t have previously would be visible nd maybe I’d get really lucky and get another easy to work recipe.

Yeah, not so much. The request was an obscene combination of requirements that looked nigh impossible, but, as I didn’t have anything pressing, I decided to give it a try to at least work out a reset recipe. An hour later, I was the proud owner of 5 thistle that would reset the tank. All it took was 15 saltpeter, a couple dozen water, enough oxygen to keep a nursing home in business for a week, and a willingness to overlook the 16 separate steps to make the thistle. I turned back to the tank to feed the bastards, but it was too late. They were dead.

Ok, not dead-dead, but the adults were and I was left with a tank full of eggs. We are not allowed to feed eggs, as the food the worms will want isn’t revealed until they hatch. Since the last batch wasn’t fed, the worms will want the same nigh-impossible food the last batch wanted, but it was going to make me wait a day for the eggs to hatch before I could put the thistle in the tank. Fine.

At any rate, by Monday I should have three tanks with new recipes and hopefully at least one of them will let me get a chunk closer to the airship!

09/14/09

Worked another thistle recipe and got it in just under the wire on Friday. It was an ‘ok’ recipe and I was able to knock out a few hundred thistle, 50 at a time, before I lost sunlight. Moved from the tanks over to the grassy fields and flaxxed muchly.

After a time, I loaded up the machines and let automation weave cloth and canvas, spin rope, and separate lint and tow from the rotted flax. Periodically I popped in to cycle the equipment, but otherwise not much.

Fired up the forge and generated a couple dozen aluminum straps and a few miscellaneous metal pieces—my project chest was rapidly filling.

By Sunday, it was time to check on the silkworms. Most of the tanks were in the part of the life cycle that made it impossible to get new requests, but I was able to collect all of the tasty raw silk. 1055 here, 985 there, 450 here...5 there. Taking it back to the ‘Plex, I spent an hour or so weaving it all into cloth. I had more raw silk on hand than I thought I did and I grew excited as I worked. I had enough for the airship!

I took tally of my stocks and based on Tale 3’s costs—my project chest was complete! Now we just need to unlock the technology.

09/18/09

Not terribly much going on the last few days—killing and/or feeding animals, keeping the sawmill topped off, that sort of thing.

The week’s thistle voids are completely horrible. I can’t generate any vitamins with all of the ‘productive exchange’ chains broken. (These would be exchanges that take some of one vitamin and turn it into more of another one.) Although I’ve made enough silk for all of my personal projects (airship, navigation for myself and friends, upgrading the acoustics lab, with a little leftover for ribbons), a little more certainly wouldn’t hurt. Aside from being terrific trade bait, we’re still 150 silk from unlocking airship technology. Now that my own needs are met, I’ve no problem in helping that along.

The game’s pace has ground to an absolute crawl. This, along with my lack of non-vanity projects, is probably contributing to the general ‘meh’ feeling. Burned out? Nah, but when running a race, it’s nice to have a finish line.

I’m nowhere near alone there. I checked out the census reports and we’re around 1050 players—scratch that. We’re around 1050 paid accounts presently, down about 17% from three months ago. Given that figure still includes all of the yearly prepaids who no longer play, well... I’d put the ‘truer’ figure at 300, once you strip out the mules.

09/21/09

Buckled down for my next big project: the medium house I mentioned a month ago. This project is strictly vanity. Although it functions as a warehouse that can hold 130,000 items, no one in their right mind would build one over a half-dozen ‘real’ warehouses. The project requirements are nothing short of insane.

The materials begin at over 10k treated boards, move into a couple hundred rope,300 linen, 4.9k nails, and 2k concrete, add a ton of marble, and round it off with a 600 debens of various paint. While not a legendary grind, it would be tedious, but my reward would be immediate: I’d be the first person in Egypt with one.

I’d been working the flax throughout the last couple of weeks, so the linen and rope was covered. I began mixing paint. As luck would have it, I already knew the recipes for all of the colors involved, so that part only took a few minutes and a ton of resources. The paint required a few hundred debens of copper and iron and not a little amount of lead. That’s right: lead paint. If the pressures of virtual Egypt ever get too much to bear, I can always lick the walls.

Next up were the boards. The wiki noted I’d need 4900 ‘rigid rot proof’ boards and 2100 each of glossy white and glossy blonde boards. I stopped ye olde sawmill and was pleased with the volume of boards it had accumulated: about 4k above and beyond the aforementioned requirements.

Figuring out the recipes to make the boards was relatively easy and not that expensive. Mostly they used water, oil, beeswax, saltpeter, and sulfur... all of which I had in abundance. Just a bit of lime to round out the wood tone and after a long while I was set. No matter how you cut it, treating that much wood in batches of 500 takes a while.

Next up were the nails: 4900 nails. Savor the sound of that for a moment. Cranking out 60 a minute, this was just mindless grinding and over 400 iron spent.

Two thousand concrete requires an equal quantity of gravel, and that’s a serious pain. I had 500 concrete already on hand, so I consoled myself by taking this part in chunks. A couple hours of chasing rubble here, an hour of smashing stones there... Eventually, I completed the task as I framed it around the other ‘activities’.

Then there was the marble. 15 slabs of White Travertine. Rabble didn’t have any quarries for this flavor, so I had to do all of the legwork personally. With Mandisa in tow, I successfully located a vein of the marble not too far from the house. After constructing the quarry itself, it then became a matter of designing gearboxes for winches to take the place of two of the four required workers... then make the gears themselves for the gearbox. After all of that, it was a couple of hours of hauling marble to the surface via an oversized skill crane.

At long last, on Sunday afternoon I finished. I took a bit to survey the landscape to decide where to put my crowning triumph and enlisted Mandisa’s aid in exterior design. Bear in mind, we had no idea what it would look like, so the final decision was ‘between the grove and the road. Happily, I built the small construction site and stopped short before I loaded the first board.

The wiki construction requirements were wrong.

I performed a quick comparison. It needed everything I had made, but required an additional 2100 glossy black boards (cake) and 8 slabs of Canary Granite marble (the cake is a prevarication).

Crap. Crap, crap, crap.

I made the boards, which used a similar recipe to what I had used before, but this time it required lead to darken the wood. Yup. Lead in the boards. If I survive licking the walls, I just need to keep gnawing. I was almost disappointed I didn’t need 100 Asbestos for Insulation.

After picking up the skill to divine the location of Canary Granite (you can only ‘attune’ yourself to one flavor of marble at a time and flavor options depend on your perception skill), it occurred to me that maybe—just maybe, Rabble had one of those quarries and I’d just have to build the gearboxes! I hastily warped to his camp and jogged out to the quarry field.

Not only was there a quarry, it was already fitted with two winches! Finally something was going right. With Mandisa’s assistance, the marble was extracted and I returned to camp with the very lastest materials for the structure.

I built the small construction site (again) and in a few short moments, I was the proud owner of a medium house! It looks a bit ratty, particularly for all of the fine materials that went in it, but it has a two sheep carport and a water trough in the back. If I’m lucky, it’ll get an art upgrade someday. I’ll get pictures up soon.

09/22/09

The Beacon tab in the bottom left of my screen has been taunting me for a while now. As the only Principle I still have pending, I decided to do something about it. Unfortunately, no one knew what the ‘favored beacon activity’ was...and I didn’t have people nearby anyway. I keep full sets of medium gems on me at all times, just in case a conveniently located beacon appears, but so far they’ve been unused.

A thought occurred and I put out a call on E!, interrupting some random drama, to inquire about the existence of a Beacon-themed guild, organized or not. I would’ve thought that Worship World would be all about that, but apparently Vigilism is the main push there. After a few minutes I get a suggestion from Kartal to make one. I’ve run into Kartal from time to time and he’s the likable sort. He’s got the same sense of humor I do, which may bode ill for Egypt should our forces combine.

After we unsuccessfully investigated suspicions of an already-extant guild (BAE- Beacon Attracting Egyptians), we gathered our boards and erected The Flavored Bacon Conspiracy. With some luck, over the next week or two, we may be able to come up with checklists of things to try to force a beacon. There’s 42 activities that can make one appear, ranging from ‘picking grass’ to ‘killing sheep’ and anything in between.

Here’s hoping!

09/24/09

Relatively short playtime and very unfulfilling. By that, I mean I didn’t build anything and there were no real accomplishments. This begins what will be a fairly regular game of ‘guess the beacon activity’.

It looks like there could be much more than 42 possible activities, as nearly anything could trigger a beacon and in four Tales, no one actually codified what works, aside from a small handful of things. Over the course of a couple of hours, I tried everything under the sun I could think of: killed camels, killed sheep in a pen, tended grapes, worked quarry, used a chest, nicked a tree, gathered wood, thorns, silt, resin, tadpoles, dirt, sand, mud, slate, clay, sap (and injured cacti), judged artwork,fished, used expedition travel, grew veggies, collected coconuts, spouse warped, made bricks, cut stones, made jugs, used a kiln, mined, checked hives, herbed, cooked, flaxxed, dowsed, prospected, and dozens more things, all to no avail. A beacon was simply not to be found. The fledgling beacon guild has grown to nearly a dozen members and hopefully we’ll be able to work out a system to test things quickly on a checklist. I’ll need to engage my wiki-fu and get things organized. That’ll be my goal for tonight.

09/25/09

Updated the Bacon’s website and developed some nifty checklists to use when the weekly activities change. Speaking of, I noticed a pattern in the changes that has gone undocumented for years: the length of “week” for the purposes of this Test alone alternates regularly between 7 days and 8 Egyptian days. Armed with this knowledge, I’m able to fairly accurately predict when the activities will change.

Alas, no beacons.

We’re down to 85 silk cloth to unlocking airships. I mused that I could put it on timer, but then I wouldn’t have an airship myself. Hopefully I can find a recipe or two tonight for murtha or myself.

The chemistry recipe for potash ointment went on timer. This will permit direct transmutation of ash to potash without feeding a kettle for 15 minutes. Of course the recipe will require acid, which I can’t make and need for other purposes, and essential compounds, which are derived from powdered gems and various resins.

I haven’t really started playing with chemistry yet.

09/28/09 She can bring home the beacon...

Wow. That’s all I can really say to describe the weekend. It started off casual enough with a little plugging at beacon testing and camp chores, then it all broke loose quickly.

Someone got a beacon message earlier in the day, and it was thought to be ‘wine-related’, but we had already tested drinking wine. I bottled, crushed grapes, tended vines, and knocked back a glass or six, but to no avail. I took a break and came back on later to find that the beacon summoner had been drinking with his wife. That was something we hadn’t tested! Employing the beautiful Mandisa’s aid, we dashed down to the public bars to crack open a couple of bottles. Nothing. I had her log off, then traipsed my merry butt off to do other things. I was stunned, literally stunned when the beacon appeared some 45 minutes after our glasses were hoisted. Quickly gathering two other people, we anchored that sucker and tried desperately to figure out the proper ritual. With just minutes to spare, we succeeded and I was once again devoid of uncompleted Principles. Level 37, baby!

No sooner had I completed my beacon ritual, but another beacon was summoned by RosieRazor a few seconds away. That one went much smoother, in no small part to our third: Numaris. In short order I had completed my second beacon!

The following day was for thistles and Yokir (a Euchre-like conflict game). With under 100 silk left to unlock airship construction, I decided to make a push and see what I could make to hopefully unlock the tech next weekend. I figured out a single easy recipe and knocked out nearly a thousand thistle, when I got distracted by one of three mini-tournaments. At two hours long each and single-elimination, it was going to be a fast one. I went, played my best, and got wiped out in the first round. Still, due to a lack of players, I qualified for “top 21” players and made off with a couple dozen gems for my time.

When I got back to the thistles, I realized I had overstayed in the arena and I no longer had enough sunlight to finish growing. I go to double-check the wiki—and airship construction was on timer! WOO!!! I danced all the way back home.

I fared no better in the second tournament, but again placed in the “top 21”. I now have gems bursting from orifices that were ne’er meant to harbor same.

Sunday morning I was itching. I had signed up Mandisa for Beacons so she could test for FBA after the FBA changes Monday morning, but couldn’t resist another Beacon when a new addition to my guild asked for one! Once again, Mandisa and I knocked back booze then hied away to a place away from traffic. (Beacons are shy, it seems). Elfus, the guildie, is also the Producer for cory0210’s “Male Oprah Show” (it’s really, really hard to describe.) It turns out the “Yo momma so...” contest was going to have to be cancelled because the main participant had to work. I told him I wasn’t aware we had to sign up and had some jokes written for the occasion. Next thing I know, I’m slated to go up against Yerbouti in a battle of cheap insults in about an hour and a half.

We completed the beacon (my third!) and then I had to hustle home to pick up my airship supplies—it would be off timer before the contest started. My pockets laden with what I hoped were the correct supplies, I sat in front of Saqqarah’s UArt for the last nine minutes of the countdown. Near the end, one other showed up: Orrin! Orrin is a big silk producer and most likely the one who put it on timer the previous day. When the skill came off timer, we hurried to the edge of the field and built our ships: the costs were the same as Tale 3 and in seconds, we had cast off our earthen shackles and soared where only the ibis had gone before.

A minute later, we realized we couldn’t land.

Turns out airships are bugged and won’t permit landing. You can log off and back on and you’ll be outside the ship where you launched from, so right now it’s just a ‘cool factor’. And cool it was: in just a few minutes, we had a crowd gaping at our airborne adventures! From my vantage point in the skies, I joined the Male Oprah Show.

Basically, I was aiming for an Egyptian flair with the insults “Yo momma so fat, you could hide cicada cages in her rolls.” Nearly a couple dozen of things like that. The crowd loved it and I won hands down. The prize: a deben of grass! (“Cory, could I get that grass in small, unmarked blades?”) Well, and a huge quartz...but the real prize was having an entertained audience.

Once back on the ground and back at camp, I stared miserably at my acid baths. The Goods has been unreliable for over a month (Robare went on hiatus and tellers are a rare breed) and I was sorely in need of acid. I stopped myself there and said “Get off your butt and do something about it.” To make acid myself, I needed the Desiccation 3 skill—which required a huge topaz. I had a topaz. I had a few hours. Right!

I hit the mine and mined till it collapsed. I repaired and rebuilt it a total of nine times, sometimes tearing it down completely trying to get a better gem yield. In the end, I got my huge topaz and finally I can make my own acid!

After making a ton of salt and acid, I changed out the acid baths and started dissolving new metals in the baths for the first time in a long while.

Time to rock pyro.