User:Sefet/February2009

02/02/09 – I saw the vine and it opened up my eyes....

Cicada’d muchly and ended the weekend with 6 speed points, virtually no score, and 1 cage sitting on a small island in the middle of nowhere. Very close to finishing the Test and I’m tempted to just ‘cruise’ for now.

A few diversions this weekend, including several Sevenblade practices and a tournament. I sat out the tournament itself to attend a dig (70 more cuttables, woo!), but I heard the winners took home extra cornerstones. I probably should have played the tourney, given that I made it to ‘rank 2’ during the practice session I played. That means I won 7 more games than I lost against equal ranked players. Got spanked hard in the second round though. Left with a ‘practice prize’ of 1 steel. Heh!

Sevenblades itself is Liar’s Poker, but instead of a dollar bill with a serial number, you’ve got a 7-headed weapon that might have (for example) a couple of tridents, a couple of axe heads, a dagger, a mace head, and a sword blade on it. Different weapon types are different values (2 swords is a higher bid than 2 maces, for example). The idea is to bid up until someone’s bluff is called, both blades are revealed, and someone wins.

Sampled my first beer at the dig: a bold concoction with a heavy date flavor. Got a point of ‘Beer Tasting’ and am happy. Apparently all of the gluttony vices (wine tasting, beer sampling, fumeology, gastronomy) lead to increased perception. That’s a good thing.

Newbies have started encroaching on what I consider ‘my’ land. I find this irritating. It’s due to the Test of Mentorship. Used to newbies would only spawn at certain starting areas and Shabbat Ab was free of them. Now all newbies start off on a Welcoming Island and when they have finished Citizenship, they can teleport to welcome banners that players create to begin their life in Egypt proper. Don’t get me wrong; I like new players a lot. I just don’t want them in my backyard.

Net result? 1 unpaid account directly across the river from me, 1 on the other side of the clay patch, and 1 who had the audacity to build within range of my beehives. Someone else built a hideous sculpture, but tore it down after getting more eyesores than positive votes. I tried to make nice with my closest new neighbor, giving him a bit of rope and a carpentry blade to get a carp shop going. Didn’t even get a ‘hello’ from him. At least I can take small comfort in knowing that in another month and change I can probably rip down his compound.

The encroachment into my garden spot was concerning, so I worked a little at beefing up my presence. Saqqarah had researched viticulture, and I went to a-learnin’.

Placed a second fruit tree (greenish lemons), built 5 vineyards, and expanded the ‘Plex to maximum size and seriously upgraded Fort K-b-t-s. The costs to expand the plex were nothing short of horrible. A thousand bricks, a couple hundred flax, rotten flax, and tow each among other things went into it, but it looks pimpin’ and I’m ready to call in the world builders to finish the camp decor.

The vineyards are host to a strain of grapes called ‘Balance’ and tending them is....complex. Very complex. Grapes suffer from constant problems, it seems. Once an hour you can tend to them a number of different ways and your actions versus the problem of the minute affects the resulting acidity / color / quantity / quality / skin / sugar content and probably something else I’m forgetting. Each time you tend, the vitality (hit points) of the vine drops a bit, so you can’t play the game forever, but the idea is to get a high quality cluster of probably 21 or more grapes (enough for a bottle of wine), then seal them in a small barrel. The more sugar, the higher alcohol your eventual wine will be. The mechanics behind all of it is amazingly complex and looks like what I’ll play with between Test pursuits. Picked up a barrel for 50 leather—our neighbor Daniels over at the Jawa place is a cooper—and I’m anticipating my first harvest tonight or tomorrow.

Sunday, the buzz on E! was that Teppy had promised to release a couple of Tests this weekend. Knowing our tech tree, we decided that one was going to be Pyrotechnics and the other....maybe Tomb of the Immortal, Towers, or Safari! Pyro is stupidly expensive and not many people will be pursuing it.

The afternoon pressed on, and finally Wahim took the stage. He announced the release of Pyro (nobody was shocked) and that he had “gotten some advanced Raeli tiles from the scientists at the University” and released both the Test of the Funerary Temple and the Test of the Raeli Mosaic. I was livid. I knew Teppy would be watching E! to see how Egyptians reacted, so I lit into Wahim:

Sefet: Ok. Wahim’s a jerk! Safari? No. Towers? No. Let's give them a Test that'll take a month for the tech to be available for. Taemon: Maybe we are lucky and it takes six months! Or a year or something. Sefet: Or we'll find trees that erupt in a GEYSER of resin.

A few minute later, Wahim responds...

Wahim: And finally, a Test for those that pursue the Discipline of the Human Body. Show that you know, not just the barren land, but its fauna. Ibis, Fennec, Falcon, Desert Rat, Bullfrog, Otter and Gazelle all roam our land. Your task is simple, Disciples of the Human Body - find four of each, to pass The Test of the Safari!

RAHR!

The only problems so far: no one had any female rabbits to open the Test, and once they were finally obtained, they turned to sand when you dropped them, so no one can hunt falcons. Heh.

So Safari is open and we can say good bye to cheap speed passes on Cicadas, but we can look forward to increasing our carrying capacity muchly.

02/03/09 –

Logged on to find that Mandisa and my cages had crumbled. I mean Mandisa’s cage had crumbled, not Mandisa herself. Damn, damn, and double damn. Well, damn about the cages—I rather like Mandisa in a non-crumbled state. Just 1700 points, 2 bugs in pocket, no cages, and I can’t cruise for a few days for the last point to pass the Test. Damn!

Grabbed 80 boards, a half dozen linen and a ton of canvas from the shed and ran down to the University of Body to start the Test of the Safari and check on the current cage costs: five. Safari requires level 12 to start (which I’m thankfully overqualified), so Mandisa can’t get it going quite yet. Each of the 7 Safari animals require a different method to capture, from rat and fennec traps to boards to block otter holes, so I’m travelling a bit more encumbered than usual. I need not have bothered... didn’t find any animals on my trek, aside for the usual random sheep spawns.

Rather than hit my usual cicada haunts, I hit down to the sw quadrant of the world, sweeping through Meroe and Queen’s Retreat. As seems to be usual, I only found a tiny handful of bugs in several hours, none worth very many points. With five total and out of time for the night, I warped back home without picking up and placing a replacement cage.

I had a few minutes before leaving for work, so I culled sheep and nipped down to UBody to ‘spend’ my cicadas and the cage costs had changed overnight. They had dropped to 4, the minimum! It certainly goes a way to explain why I’ve been having such poor luck as of late: there just aren’t that many cages out there to find! I gleefully bought a fresh new cage for both Mandisa (who had precisely 4 cicadas) and myself.

I already have a couple of better cicada hiding spots picked out, so I’ll head out there tonight to hide our prizes.

02/04/09 –

I’m on the Cicada home stretch and it is feeling good! Mandisa and Sefet ran around collecting more bugs. I now have two placed and she has one. Her point total is higher (around 6k), but I’ll be gaining points twice as quickly as long as they don’t crumble. I’m sitting around 4k right now and speed should cost around 10k today, if my predictions are correct.

The problem with cicadas presently is Safari. As mentioned previously, many people are now running around the deep desert looking for critters and tripping over what were previously well-hidden cicada cages. Add to that, fennec traps. To catch a fennec, you have to build a trap and check back on it the next day. There’s a little more to it than just that, but that’s the gist. The traps last many weeks, so what you have is typically people setting up large grids of public traps every hundred coordinates or so where once only cicada hunters roamed. Placing a cage in the middle of a trap array is begging to have your cage to crumble in hours, so cicada hiding places drop considerably. The arrays are being built currently and I came across a number of traps in my wanderings.

While exploring coastlines, my speakers (which are kept at ‘max’ for cicada reasons) issued forth a blaring RIBBIT! A frog! Perhaps I would get Safari off to a hopping start? Frogs are only found at nighttime and you can only track them by their sound. They ribbit once a minute or so and the volume indicates how close they are and left/right speaker indicates direction. When you get to where you think the frog is, you can pounce. Failing gives you a bit of a timer before you can try again. I settled down to where I thought was the right spot...and missed. Several times, in fact. In the end, Marie helped confirm the sound was coming from the right side. I scootched over, pounced.... and caught my first bullfrog! Happy, I went on my way.

During the Great Bullfrog Roundup, others in a neighboring zone had spied and captured a gazelle and another griped that the ‘otter maze’ was too hard and had eaten a hundred boards without being captured. I’m looking forward to matching wits with an otter warren.

I also got to see something I’d only heard of in legend: rat tracks. I had been secretly worried they weren’t able to be displayed by my video card, due to the fact I had NEVER seen any...ever. There they were though, clear as day and looking like tiny pawprints in the sand. There were large gaps between the sets where the sand had reclaimed them. Rats have a nasty tendency to disappear after a while and if one is captured, the tracks stay until the sand covers them all, so I raced to track the rat.

The tracks looped. They doubled back. At one point I lost them altogether, only to pick them back up again as I jogged away in disgust. The tracks began getting fresher. I could tell because they were closer together. Finally I dashed to where the front of the tracks should be... built a rat trap... and I caught my first rat!

I may not have planted a single flax or built the first brick last night, but I’m now halfway to my first strength point.

Finally, ‘Sami’ unveiled a new compound type. Everyone who has seen it has commented that it looks incredible, bordering on majestic. Sami notes the construction costs are ‘reasonable’, they can be built up to 80-something size (a little larger than Tale 3’s ‘Plex), but... you have to have a special blueprint in your inventory to construct it. The blueprints are tradable, but you need to have it to construct, expand, or to load materials into the building being built or expanded. This horked off a lot of people. I’ll spare you the drama that came from trying to decide who should get the blueprints.

It was eventually decided that one would be given as a lottery, one to the winner of a Conflict tournament this weekend, one will be an Easter egg hunt (“I’ve hidden it in a towering palm somewhere in Egypt. You’ll find it when you gather wood from it!”), and the last will be held as a future prize.

I haven’t seen the building myself yet, but it would take a LOT to make me want to tear down the ‘Plex after what I’ve invested in it. Actually, I don’t care how snazzy it looks: there’s no Plex like home.

02/05/09 –

Began the day by looting and pillaging. Well, I should clarify. The Departed Player’s Cleanup Act (aka DPCA, DARPA, DPPCA, DAOMGWTFBBQCA) allows people to claim property left abandoned by players who have quit the game for a month or longer. I’ve had my eye on Ovid since he quit... 31 days ago. Feeling as though justice is finally done, I claimed the mine he had built on my tin spot. I now have tin! I then went over a small hill and claimed a copper mine in need of some repairs....and the small compound hugging it. Nothing of real value in it, just a small bullet furnace, so I’ll likely tear it down....or leave it up as a small landmark. Then I got greedy.

Knowing Ovid lived locally, but not knowing precisely where, I wandered from building to building looking for property to claim. I never did find his home, but I did lay claim to another. Rifling through the chest within, I came up with a handful of ‘treasures’: some camel milk, nearly 2k thread, a couple hundred clay and slate, a little copper and canvas. Honestly, it felt like I was robbing Goodwill. Tearing down the structures within yielded a few extra boards and bricks. Tearing down the compound itself yielded no materials, as it had been sitting in a state of total disrepair for a number of days. Leaving the trash on the ground for ‘the sweeper’ to clean up in an hour, I returned home, wove a few linen to replace my depleted supply, and plotted my next activity.

I traded some steel sheeting at the Goods for some concrete and gold wire: when I eventually get a beetle pretty enough to show, I’ll only require some marble to build the statue now.

Night was falling, so I decided to work on frogs. Hugging the coastline of the Red Sea, I made my way south, listening for a telltale croak. As I made my way south, MouseD gives me a chat. MouseD is hardcore Cicada-hunter Prime and wanted to know if I had passed yet. I checked my points....both cages were still up and advised him that I had not, but if all went well, it would be just a couple more days. This pleased him, as he was looking for a person to pick for a Prophecy. Heh. He brought me up to speed (if you’ll pardon the expression) on Teppy’s modifications (read: nerfage) of speed awards. MouseD currently sitting at 10 speed points or so (should be 14, but Teppy changed the way speed is award past 7-8 points this time, in an effort to slow us down, literally. I had wanted to get to 21 eventually, but I think I’ll stop at 7 and if I get more, that’s just gravy. Travel is already much less painful.

Suddenly, a croak! I turned to the coast, walked a few steps, and pounced while waiting for the next croak to help me get my bearings. Surprise! I caught the frog on the first go. Now one animal shy for +1 strength (and an additional 500 carry), I cut across the land, hoping to find otters, rat tracks, or maybe even a cicada! No such luck, so I decided to start breeding rabbits to catch falcons.

I’ve found that my life usually runs like this: I make plans, I execute plans, they go horribly awry, something really neat happens instead, everything works out. Rabbits were, of course, no exception.

By an incredibly happy coincidence, when I returned to Shabbat Ab, I found an entirely random announcement that a local guild The Wanderers had set up a large amount of public structures, including a vault kiln and pottery deck: exactly what I needed to make a clay dome for a rabbit hutch! The deck takes 2 hours to make and then another hour to cook. To alleviate some aggravation, they have a good set up: normally there should be a ready to go dome in the kiln. Just take it, move the wet one from the deck to the kiln, start a new one spinning. I get there and one is baking and one is spinning. There’s no way of knowing how long it’s going to take, but I’ve got 250 clay on me from the House of the Fallen earlier so I decide to hang out for a few minutes. Happily, I had to wait less than three minutes. Both machines stopped at about the same time. I happily took a new dome, moved the wet over to bake, went to make a new one... and found it takes 400 clay. Crap! I had no jugs on me, the wife was parked at the Harmony gazebo, I was too close to the Chariot stop to expedition travel....I as going to have to run home. I gave hasty apologies to the wondering Wanderers wandering about and dashed home to get more clay.

On the way home, there was a cry on E! that a gazelle had been spied in Saqqarah and they were mobilizing a group to tag it. Argh! I had to ignore the call...there will be other gazelles, I reminded myself, and Debts Must Be Paid. Hitting the ‘plex...I had no clay on hand: it had all been made into bricks. Sigh. I grabbed a few dozen jugs and hit the clay at full force, scooping with a mad abandon. Halfway through my labors, another gazelle call was made...in our regional channel! Kfir had found one just north of SBody, by the Chariot Stop. Finishing quickly, I ‘ported to Mandisa, then warped to the Wanderers, started the dome spinning, and rushed to join the tiny mob converging on the hapless gazelle.

We kept this to ourselves to make the capture quick and a dozen or so locals surrounded the beast. Robare led the charge, and we tightened the circle... the gazelle broke free and we chased it down to a steep slope. It quickly darted in various directions, only to find one of us in its path. Backed against the cliff, it tried one last lunge for freedom, only to find me blocking it. It lowered its head in mute submission and we all tagged it. Yay! We congratulated each other, then dispersed.

Returning home, I built the hutch and filled it with the hundred of carrots that had been sitting for weeks. I put out a request on E! for a breeding pair of bunnies and seconds later, I received an offer to “come and get ‘em!”. It was only a chariot hop away, so I burned a little travel time, and in a few minutes I had my own pair of bunbuns. I gave Vowya a couple of linen for her kindness (I believe in rewarding those who ask for nothing.) and returned home, exhausted and happy.

Tonight I will see what a couple of rabbits can do in the better part of a day.

02/06/09

Apparently, they’ll make about 10 babies and eat 400 carrots (YIPES!). I cleared out the hutch, popped a breeding pair back in with 130 carrots and made my way to the center of the world: map coordinates 0,0 in the corner of Saqqarah at the Khmun border.

Tracking falcons, one drops a bunny on the ground and waits. After a couple of minutes, it will be snatched up by a hungry birdie (not shown), and fly off in a direction (north, northeast, etc...) to roost in a “nearby” tree. The nearby tree can be hundreds of coordinates and ‘tree’ is really anything that gives wood, including pointy bushes. By triangulation, one can eliminate most of Egypt using a handful of bunnies. Searching a tree kicks off a two minute timer, so it isn’t practical to just start randomly scouring a copse of trees.

When all was said and done, I caught 3 falcons, but the last eluded me and remained safe in its nest, devouring my last bunbun. I nipped home to restock the bunny supply. I was fortunate enough to catch a carrot wave (a time when planting can yield up to 15 carrots per seed) and I can tend 6 plants at a go without failing miserably. After a while, I earned the ‘grown 777’ carrots achievement and filled the hutch to about 600 carrots. That’ll keep ‘em crunching til I get home tonight.

Cicadas are very promising: both Mandisa and I have around 8500 points each and there’s a good chance she’ll get her first point today or tomorrow and I’ll finish the Test in the same time. Here’s hoping. The weekend is here and that means cicada hunters everywhere.

02/10/09

Spent the weekend sick as all, but managed to eke in playtime between NyQuil-induced lapses of consciousness. This has been a poor year for health, but I digress...

Friday speed was awarded... and I missed it by under 200 points! ARGH! With one surviving cage, it would be a break even chance that I’d pass on Saturday. I hit the coastline and caught more frogs, closing those out. A random encounter along the way with an acrobat gave me my 16th move and my 4th dexterity point.

Late Friday, someone found Ibis in a remote corner of Sinai and the race was on. There’s only 21 or so birdies and a LOT of people who want to tag one. Five hours of travel time burned and 25 minutes of cross country running, and I get there with three other people as the last two ibis are standing and a dozen and a half people are standing around acro-ing. The only ibis I could see was standing in the middle of a small construction project. The hell? I figured either the person was trying to draw attention to it to keep the acroers from being disturbed or they were trying to ‘save’ it for someone. I yoinked it—seriously pissing off TabiaSiti, who claimed she was saving it “for her dear husband who has yet to do anything in the game” and “this was to be his first” whatever.

If I had thought about it, I would’ve pointed out that (a) Safari requires level 12 so ‘dear husband’ must’ve done something before now and (b) he could’ve spousewarped in 0 seconds. Instead, I decided to downplay and apologized. She decided that she would enact vengeance upon me in the worst way imaginable: by following me around so I couldn’t acro with anyone. I shrugged and spousewarped home. Afterwards, I noted to myself she was a perfect student of mine and could’ve picked up a large number of facets if she had accepted my apology, but all is fair in love and ibis.

Saturday came and I took to the desert with bunnies, boards, canvas, linen... a full Safari hunting pack. On the way to drop my rabbits, I encountered a cicada cage worth nearly a thousand points. Checking my score, I noted that speed would have to jump a LOT for me not to pass.

The fourth falcon was caught with rabbits and a few minutes, then it was off to the eastern desert to track fennecs. Caught another rat along the way. The day was looking good!

There weren’t a lot of public traps set up yet: just enough to freak out cicada cage placers and to give me the rough idea of where along the X-axis a particular subspecies of fennec may lie. I ran around, hedging my bets and placed a dozen traps in likely spots. 4:00am came and I checked the traps. No fennecs, but a lot of them had ‘signs of a fennec’ showing. I stared at the grid I had drawn on a piece of paper wondering how I had failed, when suddenly it dawned on me: I was reading the ranges incorrectly! Previously the fennecs were showing at traps along 3600, but not 3800 on the X axis...now they weren’t showing at 3600....they were westward moving, but between 2600 and 2800...where no traps were. Using my traps on the Y axis I was able to pinpoint where the furry, sharp-toothed, short-haired, ruddy bastards were and planted cages in anticipation of the next dawn. They would move again, but by planting cages 250 coordinates away from the center point in each cardinal direction would guarantee a hit.

By sheer luck, while planting those traps, I found a fennec of a type I WASN’T hunting in a public trap. Two fennec packs were travelling in close proximity, it seemed.

It’s common courtesy to call out when a fennec is captured and I took full advantage of that, planting cages around a second called out spot...this time in Saqqarah. I hurried over to plant my cages, dropping the last by 3:30am. I checked all of my cages and caught two more fennecs.

Returning home triumphant, I would not tarry long, as a gazelle was spotted in Meroe and I joined a circle to tag it. It was shortly thereafter I was struck by lightning....having passed the Test of the Singing Cicada!

Rat tracks were found crossing a road in Shabbat Ab and another rat added to my collection, followed in quick succession by more gazelles. Trying to tag my fourth was more challenging than it should’ve been. Two gazelle circles I ran to failed to allow me a tag. I reported the bug, but never heard back from a GM—the only blemish in an otherwise perfect Safari. It would not be until Monday night that I would get a tag that counted.

All total for my Safari progress: 4 fennecs, 4 falcons, 4 frogs, 4 gazelles, 3 rats, 1 ibis, 0 otters (I think they are a myth). I now can carry 3000 weight, 2500 bulk. (“Is that a flock in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” “Can’t it be both?”)

On the tech front, hated Saqqarah unlocked all 7 Pyramid Construction technologies...AT THE SAME TIME. To put this in perspective, each technology required 700 or so linen and 100 pieces of marble, in addition to many other materials. People are now starting to seek out limestone blocks with which to build pyramids. This is done by boring glass rods into the desert. It’s a bit complicated and I’ll go into detail some other time.

Other regions are now getting angry at Saqqarah, as they seem to be researching out of spite. The thing is, you now have a group of probably 20 or so people dictating the pace of the game, based on what technologies they choose to unlock and how quickly.

Adn unlocked Advanced Charcoal Production and it goes off timer today. In anticipation, I mined 5k copper ore and smelted it down to 300 copper, then in turn processed most of it into copper sheets and straps. The sheets will go to 2 ovens, the straps...I’m not sure. I made 27 or so, which is enough for a wood treatment tank, or half of what I’d need for cooperage tuition. Decisions, decisions....

In other news, my pilgrim shrine is finally starting to pay for itself: over the weekend pilgrims gave me 21 sheetglass. Huzzah! I may build a greenhouse this week.

02/11/09

Trekked to Adn for advanced charcoal production and returned home after sampling some free beer and masterpiece meals that were in the process of spoiling. Even in the condition the food was, it raised my gastronomy skill a few points. I may have to visit bortox’s kitchens to buy a few good meals for the permanent perception bump.

Headed back home and redecorated the ‘Plex. The oven is smaller than a hearth and as efficient as two of them, so I tore down the hearths for space, moved the flax hammock outside, and started construction of the oven. It took all the copper I was expecting, but it required 600 clay bricks. Sigh. By a happy coincidence, this was precisely the number I had set aside for the eventual Raeli. I figure it’ll be at least another month before the tech for that comes online, so I’m now ok with spending my reserves.

Hit the coastline with Safari Pack in hand hoping to find the ibis. After nearly two hours and covering the coasts of Shabbat Ab, Stillwater, and Adn, I called off the hunt. Along the way, I picked up another 100 debens of various herbs, so it wasn’t a total wash. Even encumbered as I was, I stopped to pick up a flock of six sheep before warping home.

Arriving back in Shabbat Ab, regional chat warned me that a Goods teller (read: trader) would be on call shortly. I perused their inventory and compared notes in the shed and quickly decided on a couple of projects to work on: beetle breeding and that greenhouse. I was sitting at only 5 sheetglass shy of completing that project, aside from the 500 dirt which would take a while to dig up.

Looking over the exchange rates, I quickly discover I can make a profit on certain finished goods for raw goods and capitalize on both my abundance of leather and carrots. All total, in exchange for carrots and 250 leather (a dent in the stockpile), I left with another 30 concrete, 2 pieces of mud granite marble, 500 cabbage, 250 dirt, a half dozen canvas, 20 lint, and made a free and clear profit of some cuttable and medium stones. I was almost ready to submit my buy order to include 7 or so sheetglass when the price suddenly octupled. That’s the problem with dynamic inventory/pricing....it’s dynamic!

After gathering my goods, I turned my attention to my projects. A couple of choice beetles went into the tank with the cabbage and were quickly forgotten. Time to make some sheetglass! I had plenty of potash and lime on hand from some papyrus-plucking and ashing I had done over the weekend, so it was time to bite the bullet and finish up my glaziering skills. 5 successes in a row, then 2 breakages with skillups, so I now have 7/7 for sheetglass manufacturing. This means I will never fail with making glass and I can now make mirrors if I have silver powder in massive quantities. Mirrors are now in high demand due to a new obelisk type: metal.

I continued cranking a few extra glass out, because I could and they make great trade bait. When I was satisfied, I let the bench cool and built a greenhouse on the KbtS side of the ‘Plex. It looks pretty freakin’ sweet.

02/12/09

Very little play time— was out late taking The Little Boy to doctor’s and with a new episode of Lost... yeah, I’m one of those people.

I am absolutely in love with the greenhouse—someday I may try for a camel out of spite.

Logged on, slapped a couple of slate gray speckled beetles in the tank, carved a wooden handle for a person who needed one, and burned some of my papy to make ash. Tonight’s goal was to knock out most of the materials for the paint lab: 30 glass jars, a dozen copper sheeting, and a half dozen fine glass rods. The fine glass rods will require white sand, which I don’t have and another bench, which is more of a pain than it’s worth, so I’ll just trade for them later.

I decided that for the time I had, I was going to need a bit more than my 3 kettles to process ash to potash, so I jogged down to the public works. I seem to have an obsession with losing jugs, having expended dozens in the greenhouse construction. I replaced them, then made use of the public kettles, firing up all ten in a massive potash making frenzy. It takes around 15 minutes to process a kettle, so doing them all at once was an incredible time-saver.

Returning home, I fired up the bench and strapped myself in for a jar making bonanza! 90 seconds for each jar—30 jars total, with one wasted deben of glass when my concentration slipped near the end and I added more fuel too early.

The copper only took a few minutes and as I shut down the glassworks I checked in on the beetles: no more bugs yet. It’s very random how quickly they reproduce, but it’ll be a hundred generations before I have something ‘show-worthy’, I think.

Besides—I still need to figure how what materials I need to make what colored paint!

02/13/09

Traded away my last 5 sheetglass in return for 6 fine glass rods, and enough potash, ash, and lime to make...5 sheetglass. Muahahaha! Spent some time waffling between building a wood treatment tank or not, but ended up deciding that I didn’t feel like making 30 more glass pipes for a building I honestly don’t need. (Yet)

Poked around with color sampling. I’ll start the formal experiments and color mapping later, but always like throwing stuff together at first and seeing what comes out. Paint is peculiar—to make one deben of paint, it takes ten tenths of a reagent. Reagents include such wonderful things as carrots, copper, silver powder, cabbage juice, mushrooms and catalysts like lime, potash, sulfur and saltpeter. Fractional components are leftover in the pigment lab, so you don’t have much waste except when you’re playing around like I am.

The order the components are added matter almost as much as the components themselves in determining the final color generated. Add to this that everyone has a personal variation thrown in as well, so the recipe to make, for example, sky blue paint may vary wildly between Mandisa and Sefet.

After my vacation next week, I’ll be playing catchup and will try to fit in a full paint map, with the exception of several rare components I don’t have ready access to (Earth Light mushrooms, lead, and silver powder).

I haven’t been feeling particularly compelled to run all over Egypt looking for otters when I’ve had such limited time as of late—I may put Safari on hold for a bit until some of the “OMG! IBIS!!111” rush wears down a little in a month. I’m about 3/4ths done and I’ve got the strength I need to do most of whatever I want now, so there’s really no pressure to finish up. Safari is one of those tests that gets easier with time, so I’m ok with taking a break.

02/16/09

Came across an otter hole on Friday and this tickled me pink. I finished Principles of the Safari and got one animal closer to completion. Otters are insanely fun...there's a dozen holes linked underground. Click the otter and he goes to one of the holes linked to the current hole. Map it and find which hole only has three links, block those three with boards and catch the otter. You can pick up boards afterwards, so I caught my otter using up no boards whatsoever and my 'travel kit' now only contains a handful. Spent a number of hours unsuccessfully hunting ibis-- the one time they were found, I burned far too much travel time and real time running to get there too late. Joined the Stillwater Safari Guild to hopefully get those done a little faster. They're nice people and I've been sharing tips on the other critters, so it works out well.

Zaniac's been trying to 'update the base point of the cooking coordinates' which is an alien concept to me. I think the theory is if they waste a lot of common food in cooking, the better foods become more potent. Call it what you will, I call it a free meal. Zaniac cooked a number of free masterpieces and there was a little beer on hand, so I walked away stuffed with my first permanent perception point. I can now 'critically evaluate' dishes...that is to say, I can look at a kitchen and tell the duration and stat changes of the meal before I chow down. That rocks. Now I need to find a little more beer and I can bump that another point up.

I was stoked on the perception point and I vowed to get another. As luck would have it, dwaynedibley was in the market to sell hookahs. Burned all of my canvas (14) as well as some of my potash reserve, but I traded for a decent quality hookah (6400-something). It will allow around 20 or so tokes on an herb before it burns out. Spent a long hour puffing away and updating my Users page on the wiki to keep track of what's been smoked. Each herb will allow one point of fumeology ever after a random number of puffs, but it's up to you to keep track of what you've smoked before. After I go through the stockpile, I can try more complex blends of two or even three herbs at a go, but that's going to be a while from now.

Finally got 49 Fumeology, which is good for another perception point. It's now like I'm permanently on grilled carrots, which means I can dowse for iron, copper, or tin with no problems and mine a little faster, since I have the strength points to back it up.

Played around with beetles until I had one that wasn't going to be a total embarrassment. I'll be surprised if it wins, but I really wanted the Principles for that completed and off my screen. Built a pigment laboratory and played around with it until I had all of the paints I needed for the sculpture. Shabbat Ab's beetle garden was full, so I built mine in Khmun. I might be able to reclaim the marble after the judging, but I'm not overly hopeful since I'll be out of town most of the week. Discovered to my horror that building the beetle statue wasn't enough-- I still had to mix yellowish paint.

Ground up some silver powder and gathered my other reagents and went on a mixing binge. It was a disaster. Through random luck I was able to pull off 'goldenrod' and 'gold', but they weren't good enough for the "Mix yellowish paint" requirement. I bit the bullet and started calculating the personal reactionary values for the various pairs with the aid of a R/G/B tool. Yes, I realize this is where it starts getting...complicated. I'll try to keep it simple: a number of reagents react with each other in a specific way so the color of a carrot added to lead is not the simple average of their red/green/blue values. Some combinations will shift one or ALL of those values more or less than expected by a value that is avatar-dependant. In order to get a number of paint colors, it is necessary to work out what your individual reaction value is for many of the pairings, then calculate the necessary values that your goal is, then work towards it.

Long story short, after several hours, I had enough of my values quickly determined that I could mix some "Light Golden Rod Yellow" and finish the Principles of Scarabs.

My current demi-pharaoh group is stupidly quiet. Only one other person has even said anything the entire time. I voted for him since I'll be on vacation-- and the next election next month will let me get Kingmaker off my screen. I'm really looking forward to that.

Built a Glory Hole in Ft. K-b-t-s and knocked out 3 thermometers in as many minutes. It felt really good to do so and I'm looking forward to making more as needed for trades. A little bit after I finished, I hit the Goods to see what I could buy with the therms...and I was shocked. Happy fun shopping time for Sefet! I traded 200 dried papyrus (instead of making it into a basket) for a basket for a little extra credit (weird how that works sometimes), kicked in the three therms and in return I got: 20 soda (enough to make pipes for 10 therms), 5 ash, 11 linen, and 100 aluminum ore.

After witnessing the test launching of a few pyrotechnic stars from a portable lab someone had, I felt inspired to start working towards the Test of Pyrotechnics. I'll never pass that one, but since my main goal is to pass all of the Principles, I'd have to build a shell eventually! I traded some steel sheeting for marble and canvas, then went back home to build a Star Rack and an acid bath. Later, I stopped by a public chem lab and whipped up a ton of gunpowder. Rahr!

Ended with another unsuccessful ibis hunt. I'll get 'em next time.

02/23/09

Back from vacation for a weekend in the desert. While I was gone more technologies were unlocked: gearbox assembly, thistle gardening, another obelisk type, gyration cell technology, and possibly something else. It’s getting pretty hard to keep up with the Jones’—then I realized that to many soloers, I –am- the Jones’. As Rorsarch would say: hurm. Ran to Saqqarah and picked up all of the tech I was missing.

Planted a third fruit tree with a couple dozen linen I got from tearing down sculptures of expired players. Every compound I had flagged as ‘claimable’ had already been snatched up by other players. Such is life.

My primary goal was to get a gyration cell online over the weekend and that was a pretty tall order in and of itself: the project requires 50 moonsteel and 250 concrete for starters. Add to that a dozen crucibles, 20 glass pipes, a dozen pulleys, 50 copper sheeting (each one costs 6 copper to manufacture) and 20-something tin sheeting, and a thousand boards (literally) and my work was cut out for me. The payoffs would be fantastic: instead of getting 54 metal from 1000 ore, I’d be pulling 100...with no pollution whatsoever.

Moonsteel would be my biggest bane, I figured. I’ll also need to stockpile it for the eventual Raeli. Providence smiled when I found out our own local metalsmiths in Shabbat Ab Ironworks was selling the alloy at 5 Copper a unit. Woo! I went on a wild mining and refining spree that would be visited and re-visited several times over the weekend. I secured access to Field & Stream’s gyros on a temporary basis and provided a quantity of herbs for the extended hospitality. They have two and with Mandisa collecting the returns, no clinker is generated.

After a while, I had accumulated some 900 copper and had worn one of my copper mines out several times from the digging. I traded 500 of the metal to SAIW for 100 moonsteel and was extremely happy. They are working towards a deepwell and I may look at buying in this week so I can have access to petroleum, which will be needed for advanced machinery in the coming months.

I cranked out a couple thousand charcoal to cover all of the smelting and for trade—the gyro’s will process up to 1500 ore at once, but require 50cc to fire. A bit pricier than the other furnaces, but you will not hear me complain!

Carrying hundreds of copper and tin down to public works, I cranked up all four of the forges with pinch rollers and spent an hour squeezing out all of the metal sheeting. With some spare iron, I made a hundred-odd nails and planed quite a lot of boards waiting for my metal.

I hit the Goods so often, I think Robare is getting sick of seeing me. I traded spare thermometers (no failures yet!) for more glassmaking supplies and a few glass rods and the last crucible I needed. The biggest problem turned out to be the concrete: couldn’t find a trader, so had to rely on the Goods and the price was...horrific. I mitigated the cost a –bit- by trading 2000 dung for 100 of the concrete, but the balance cleared me of a lot of my spare goodies. Everything from copper to wire, glass rods, 1000 charcoal, a hundred quartz, and more went into getting the rest.

Back home, I turned my attention to the glazier’s benches and made several dozen pipes. After they cooled, I completed the gyration cell and celebrated by capturing an ibis in Adn! (A very lucky turn of events and the bird was announced in the Safari guild channel and NOT on E!) Six animals to go.

With all of the extra materials I had left over from my manufacturing binge, I built both a Gear Assembly Table and a Wood Treatment Tank in Fort Kbts (Ft. Kibitz, as I affectionately call it)

Wood treatment is one of those ‘complex topics’ I’ll go into detail with at some future date, but special boards will be needed for thistle farms and I’ll need to figure out what my individual recipes are to make wood of various qualities like ‘blonde, termite-resistant, fireproof’ and the like. Read: more than I wanted to screw with at the moment.

May be joining a pilgrimage for a few weekends to do that principle and maybe earn a test pass. I have a nasty feeling I’m going to need to grow a lot of barley for the tithes. My own shrine coughed out 7 more sheetglass, so I think in another 14-21, I’ll consider it as ‘having broken even’ and we can milk it for a free 200 points on our own pilgrimage.

I’m also making progress in Pyrotechnics—picked up a little acid and started my first batch of aluminum salts. Metallic salts are honestly kinda neat and I’m looking forward to ‘harvesting’ my salts tonight.

Finally, got a couple of medium stones and smacked them into gravel. Fun, but I wouldn’t want to do it everyday.

02/24/09

Less than productive night, I think. Car accident and cold left me loaded up on muscle relaxants and NyQuil—not a good combination for trying to stay awake.

Decided that the night’s goal would be to progress Principles of Pyrotechnics. Collected 29 salts of aluminum after letting it sit in the bath for a full day. Turned around and made them into 30 or so ‘squat canary’ stars. Couldn’t make a firework yet—needed paper. Paper requires papyrus, but not dried papyrus. Ran over to the public works after doing a papy run and made enough paper to last me a while.

Could not find that barrel grinder again for anything, so my ‘grind aluminum for powder’ box remains unchecked.

Played with the firework design tool and came to the conclusion that it is very hard to make something that looks decently without a LOT of time and a LOT of resources. I finalized a really crappy firework named ‘Sefet Passes Principles’ and signed up to show it off to a jeering crowd midnight on Saturday in Pyramid Lake.

Ore Extraction 4 & 5 are now learnable from SArch for the cost of 7 large quartz and 1 huge quartz respectively, so I picked up OE 4 for the cost of some trash sitting in some of my mines. I waypointed back to my least trashed copper mine to start searching for another huge and three seconds after I arrived an announcement of 6 ibis found in Saqqarah was broadcast on my Safari guild’s channel. I wouldn’t be able to use chariot travel time for ten minutes...argh!

I started running south, not very hopeful, and was probably 8 minutes in when I realized the Ibis was close to their Chariot Stop. Double argh! Still, no one had scooped the last few ibis, so I returned home by spouse warp and ran down to the Chariot and burned 14 hours in travel time in 20 seconds. Checking the Saqqarah regional chat, I was stunned—no one had breathed a word about the birds. A few minutes later, I had my 3rd ibis plume!

I returned home and mined until I passed out. When I feel more productive this week, I’ll start stockpiling what I think will be the Raeli 2.0 resources. I’m gonna need a ton of moonsteel.

02/25/09

Mined, smelted, and added to my finished metals stockpile. I currently have around 650 iron and 300 copper. Started some silver salts—I may play around with the firework design tool a bit more before the show and upgrade the Principle Passer from ‘Outright Embarrassment’ to ‘Kinda Lame’, just as a matter of personal pride. We only have three different stars to choose from now, so the winner is going to likely be whoever makes the biggest bang.

02/26/09 – I got my mind on my macro and my macro in my mine

Caught Eldar of SA Ironworks (hereafter forever as SAIW) a bit early in the evening as I did my daily camp chores...culling sheep, gathering wax, etc. I was ready to start hoarding moonsteel for the Raeli! My worst case estimate is that it’ll require 50 sheeting...which will take 400 metal. I have 50 on hand already, so...hmmm... I chat Eldar up and see if he can handle an order of 350 debens of the rare metal. There’s an extended pause and then a ‘Yes’, but it may take some time. Cool. It would cost me a total of 1750 –refined- metal to come up with that cost, and I had a little more than half of that onhand. He said he’d likely be able to get it tomorrow, subject to being able to get enough resin to cover the manufacturing.

I hit the ground running—I’d started the gyro earlier, but still needed a metric crapton of ore. Copper is the fastest and most reliable, so I hit those mines and drove them into breaking several times. The mining macro is godly, affording much faster work and more consistant accuracy than I can accomplish manually. It’ll usually take me a couple of tries to get it started ‘correctly’, so it is checking the right spot on the gems for color saturations, but the results are well worth it.

Copper repairs are starting to get pricey now that each have been repaired 4 times or so each—I may have to go dowsing for a new vein sooner than later unless I want to spend a ton of leather over the next couple of months in escalating repair bills.

By 10pm and another mine crash, I checked in on things just as Eldar chatted me that he was more successful than he thought and my moon steel was ready. Crap! I did math based on the ore I had accumulated...another 10k or so and let him know I had everything, but refinement was going to take a bit. He advised that it was ok, as he could process the ore in his Hades furnace and even get a slightly better ratio than what I could. This works out great for both of us and I ferry over 7000 ore to complement the 1050 refined metal. I threw in 250 or so charcoal as a sweetner.

If I planned this right, he’ll want to rush his Deep Well project now and the price he’ll be willing to pay for rope, wax, and leather should jump markedly in the next couple of days, allowing me to get a few things on the cheap.

My purchase did pique his curiousity. “What do you need all of this moon steel for anyway?” “A golem.” He didn’t get the joke, which was a bit of a pity, so I went on to explain my Raeli Theory and my desire to stay a step ahead of Teppy. He noted it was a bold bet, but I’d be able to sell off any extra moon steel at a nice profit, getting it as cheap as I did (which is very true!), as regardless people will still need it for gyration cells.

I stashed the precious metal in the Raeli project chest and gathered a few hundred clay for more clay bricks. I’ve got around 2k saved, but I have no idea how many I’m going to need. I’m guessing 4k, because it is both a pleasantly obscene round number and it is the exact number of firebricks that were required last time. I figure that if I horribly over judge the resources required, I can either apply the overage to a second oven or sell them to someone. We’ll see, but it is certainly exciting!

Next, I’m going to need more copper for wire and another waypoint and a few medium stones for crucibles.

02/27/09

Logged in to a giant replica of the Washington monument covered in heiroglyphs looming over the Sefetplex. My initial thoughts were “WTF is that?” and “Who built it in my camp...and why?!?” After the initial shock wore off and I examined it I discovered it was my own desert obelisk! It had received an art upgrade and apparently been force fed a year’s supply of Viagra.

They’ve been changing out the art on buildings slowly...I’d log in one day to find kettles had changed or the annoying flags gone from the glazier benches. I’m hoping the acid baths get a cool look soon. They presently look like a shrunken copy of basic/sturdy tubs.

I’m having a little too much fun with the pyro tool. I fiddled around and made an ‘ok’-looking firework, but what I REALLY want to try will require a ton more resources. When I finalize my boomer tonight, I’ll make a note of the complete cost for a single 6 second shot of glory and likely shake my head in disbelief. My ‘ok’ version requires 100 gunpowder and a similar amount of charcoal, cactus sap, and half that in metallic salts. It’d make a ‘serious’ pyro enthusiast laugh, but for me it’s a lot for a little return.

Went to replace a tub that crumbled and was surprised to find that I had finally managed to run out of canvas. Bear in mind, I haven’t flaxxed for like a month or so and now I usually trade for whatever finished flax goods I need. Traded 100 copper 50 tin and the 152 gravel at the Goods for a bunch of miscellaneous things: 5 crucibles and 15 cement for the raeli box (I’m getting excited!), 6 canvas and 17 linen for another tree (How Sefet got his grove back!) and stockpiling purposes, 50 saltpeter and 10 sulfur for more gunpowdery goodness, and a few miscellaneous items, just cause I wanted them: a little acid, 10 salt, and 5 gold.

Need to get more metal this weekend. Gonna need iron this time. :)

At some point I’m going to need to self-evaluate why I’m so obsessed with the Raeli. It’s not like I’m pursuing the Tests that need tiles.