User:Timm/Log

9/13/2010

Small note today, I was only on for maybe 20 minutes, and caught a gazelle! I should really get on this test, at least the easy stuff like frogs and gazelles. Maybe fennecs, too, while people are still reporting their locations.

9/12/2010

Wine compound complete, now to fill it with stuff. Went papy-ing in order to run firepits and found a plethora of pearls! One medium, one large, and two huges! Was able to help Zowee out with the huge, so now we both have +2 permanent endurance. Excellent.

Also discovered today that I can dual-client my spouse tuttenrah's account so I finally took us to finish our worship init. I'm surprised at how slowly I'm advancing this tale. I thought I was faster last tale, I don't remember any tests being released that I wasn't immediately able to start but this tale there are plenty still taunting me.

9/11/2010

Ugh. The large amount of stuff on my to-do list is having the effect of making me unproductive. It's laziness, but laziness inspired by work. The more things I know I have to do, the less I want to do them. There's my attempt at an excuse for hardly getting anything done today. I got the flax finished, which was the last material required for my wine compound, and now I just have to ship it out there over the course of the next few tends. I also got the brass plates and copper straps completed for cooperage, with a couple extra straps to get a start on the 100 barrels I'm gonna want.

9/9/2010

Tending and adding more to the compound. I didn't have as much time as I'd hoped tonight, which just means more work for the weekend. Let's see, I have to go mining and use the reactory (have I picked up that tech yet?) to get cooperage and try to get a start on the wine barrels. I need to get around to learning carving so that I can make the millions of barrel taps I'm going to need, and that means glass for the blades. While I'm at it, I should probably try getting some fine glass rods together to either purchase or attempt to make wine glasses, based on the availability of sellers. The last things left to finish the compound expansion are all flax based, so I need to get some of that done. Interspersed amongst all that, I have to keep tending those vines. I'm about 11 tends in and some of them are still ~70 vigor, so I have a lot more tending required before the end of the vintage.

I may be forgetting some things, and even if I'm not that whole list is related only to wine. I don't have anything planned for personal development (tests) or guild work... I guess I'll have to seem quite the slouch for another couple of days. But they'll all appreciate it when the wine is flowing!

I hope.

9/8/2010

Short visit, just logged to tend the vines and add a couple things to my wine compound.

9/7/2010

Tending, and tending some more. This might be more work than I originally thought. I hope it pays off.

With the number of vineyards I have to maintain, there's no way I can take the time to diagnose each vine and choose a tend method. I whipped up a spreadsheet to simulate 100 random vineyards (which I'll replace when I know the patterns of my actuals) and tried to figure out which tends give the best results. I hope that not of the vineyards are so strange (7 or 8 "musty"-s in a row) that the resulting grapes are worthless, but I guess we'll see. Contemplation is an interesting first grape... it looks to me that quality will always be very nice but it'll be like pulling teeth trying to get more than enough grapes for even 3 bottles per vine.

I've also begun work on a wine compound, that I believed I mapped out properly to hold 100 barrels and 4 tasting tables. Last tale there was a guild that hosted wine/beer parties in a sort of potluck fashion. It was Astrina's guild, and it was called Gathering of the Vines, and I really enjoyed the meetups but it fizzled only 2 or 3 times after I found it. I aspire to have a similar setup of my own this tale.

I'd forgotten that the costs of expanding a compound are in relation to the position of the initial building and since my plans are to have a long, skinny compound I almost choked when I saw the price of the planned expansion. Had to tear it down and rebuild, this time starting in the middle. Much better.

9/6/2010

Finished the last of the boards and rope, and placed the last of my vineyards. I am now the proud owner of 100 vineyards, all growing Contemplation currently. There's no way I can get them tended and bottled before the end of the vintage which is kind of a bummer, but it means I can take the next week at a relaxed pace. There's plenty to do... I need a compound nearby, at least one wine barrel to start, and hundreds of bottles.

9/5/2010

A day full of rope, nail, and board production. A guildie, MercedArkab, had been determined enough to get a cutting and begin reproducing, so I logged on to one sitting in my chest. What a stand up guy!
I've got my wine location mapped out, and enough mats for just about all the vineyards I want.

9/3/2010

Viticulture has been unlocked in Celaeno! Finally I have purpose! In a foolhardy move, I ran directly there in the hopes that someone would be willing to offer me some fish or a cutting. Poor choice. Came home after about 30 minutes and gave fishing a try. Another poor choice, but I found lots of river crab! Decided instead to spend the holiday weekend gathering mats for the grandest vineyards Egypt has ever seen! Well, at least that I've ever seen.

9/2/2010

After preparing some flax to go with yesterday's papyrus I lit up the firepits again. Much better results this time around, maybe there were fewer distractions or something. After letting the pits run for ~30 minutes I was able to pull 65 ash and 23 lime from each. That should give the glassmakers something to work with!

Wanting to relax for the rest of the night I grabbed a scythe and a basket and got to work on straw for some bricks. Picked 1200 straw without a skill increase, which is a bummer, but 3600 bricks is nothing to laugh at! I think I've got my eye on getting Mining research completed. Some day I hope to open viticulture here in Sinai, but that's a long ways away.

9/1/2010

Started with some more papyrus. I'm feeling good about my new location. I had used the same spot for three tales before the chariots shifted and made my old spot a little less desirable.

Once that was done, instead of sacrificing immediately to the fire gods, I worked on finding the guild a couple of Oyster Shell Marble quarries after which I called it a night.

To prospect reliably, I use a method published on the Tale 3 wiki by MarvL called Spiral Search which never fails to cheaply and correctly locate the marble. Take a look at it here.

8/30/2010

Spent a couple hours growing papyrus until I found a reliable location. Fortunately there was an expedition site nearby and since I had yet to find a useful location so far I snatched it up. I hope I grow enough papyrus to make the travel time worth it.

After all the work done to make sure I would get maximum ash yield out of the firepits I started them up and began to stoke. After missing stokes on two of the four only five minutes in, I checked on the result and saw that I had totally forgotten to add limestone. DRATS! I guess I'll be running for some more papyrus tomorrow night!

8/29/2010

Made the guild some hatchets. I seem to have figured out a start method that reliably gives 8600+ hatchets. A couple times I lucked into an 8800+ hatchet but I'm not sure what I did differently. I like blacksmithing, but I can't concentrate long enough to do more than 3 or 4, so I don't think I'll be getting any better than that.

I was super excited to log on today and find a running water mine. Gemcutting is one of my favorite activities. I think I'll devote the next couple of days to gathering mats for more of them. I've have available enough flax, leeks, lime, and wood to run four firepits and will spend tomorrow at work trying to convince myself to grow some papyrus in the evening.

8/25/2010

Uneventful night, not a lot of people online. Signed up for demi-pharoah, finished collecting mats for principles of worship, built a 7-height obelisk for the level, and found one pearl. The fact that we can start earning permanent endurance plus the fact that just about anyone can swim right from the start is a really great improvement on last tales, in my opinion, and I'm someone that "cheated" my way into a cicada pass last tale by using a long-range ferry to place my cages out of reach. I look forward to NOT hearing that whine until airships come out.

8/24/2010

Tonight started out as chore night. Grew some onions (4 per seed, ouch) for our ever-increasing number of sheep and picked grass for the camels. Someone was kind enough to make a glass scythe and while using it I bumped up to rhythmic strength three (so it IS possible!!)

Things took a turn for the better later in the evening as I married fellow guildmate tuttenrah! Yay me! Tut's a good guy that's interested in a lot of the same stuff as I am and he's a similarly casual player so he won't yell at me to get off my lazy rear. This union will definitely be good for a laugh or three hundred.

My real-life wife Zowee has also married a cool dude-guildmate named Bones. He's a little too into sheep farming... but every one of us has our own psychosis I guess.

The rest of the evening was spent collecting tuition for ritual item construction; my next goal is to finish the principles of worship.

8/22/2010

Holy marraiges, Batman! Vows were flying every which way today as different members of the guild were married off. Not me though, I had been too lazy and didn't have the required levels. That had to be corrected today!

Finally got my thought puzzle up, but I won't count on that level coming any time soon as I'm not really in the mood to call out for judges. It'll get there in time.

I decided today was as good as ever to finally head out of Sinai on the search for vegetable seeds in the hope that I might get a level for acro and harmony on the way. I got only onion, carrot, and cabbage seeds, with only one university untouched. Thank goodness I'm working with a group or I could be in dire straights! I sadly only found one person to acro but finished the harmony principles! Thanks to Lill, Myn, and Myna for fulfilling the tougher requirements.

Finally headed home and ran to get the marraige test. Spent another thirty minutes or so looking for a nicely placed expedition site with no luck. I hoped to find an open, undesirable and flat field to plan out my future vineyards, but it wasn't in the cards tonight. Frustrating!

8/21/2010

The guild has really been on top of keeping up with the latest techs and resources. I'm thankful for that especially because mining/dowsing has never been something I've been interested in. I owned an iron, copper, and tin mine last tale and that's it, bartering for other types of metal. I logged in today and we've already gotten one of each of those and there are plans to hunt down even more metals. Yay team!

With the influx of available iron and copper, I decided to set my sights on getting our student loom replaced by the much more desirable hand loom. Schlepped huge quantities of iron back before I realized wire required extrusion plates, not pinch rollers. Oh well. Finally got everything together and now we never need worry about breaking strings again! Huzzah!

8/20/2010

Marriage test opened up recently, and Sinai has just the luck of being the region for diamonds. Thanks to the efforts of my guildmates, we have two mines available to be worked. As soon as the rest of Egypt found out about our treasure, they came looking for gems. This resulted in an odd situation; because the cost of mines this tale is somewhat prohibitive currently and Sinai is slightly a "backwards" region (I say that lovingly), it seemed as though there were only our two mines available. We hadn't had much luck finding mediums ourselves, so I had none to offer as "loaners".

Fortunately, only a couple groups (Garden of Eden and Wampak and friends) came knocking and we were able to allow each of them time to work a mine. I'm happy to say they were successful in finding their own medium diamonds. In addition, without anything being requested of them, both groups very generously donated some of their own regions' gems for our own use.

In all of the excitement of tonight, I've gotten absolutely nothing done for myself, though I did cart about six or seven thousand ore back to camp.

8/19/2010

... or not. Mining's out and the guild finally accumulated enough leather to plop down an iron mine so I spent the night playing around with it. I appreciate that the puzzle is finally enjoyable. Yields suck at the moment, but I'm sure that is only because it's our first furnace.

I hope someone figures out gems, though. Four of us worked the mine together in an attempt to crush as many of the rocks as possible and we only ever got small diamonds. As a theory, we spent about 5 minutes looking at a certain set of rocks and trying to figure out how to crush the maximum number of them. Using five people and working some sets more than others we were able to crush 6 of the 7 rocks... and got more small diamonds. Oh well.

Maybe tomorrow night is the night I'll complete my thought puzzle?

8/17/2010

Finally decided to hunker down and try to accomplish something. Looks like the principles of thought are my target. Ran to the nearest limestone patch and chiseled the night away. I should be able to finish the puzzle during my next logon...

8/16/2010

Stumbled around camp tonight being anything but useful. I'm much too lazy to go running around until the chariots are repaired, and as such I can only really assist with menial tasks. Grew some flax, made some rope. Gathered a ton of grass to try to attract a camel and was unsuccessful. Gathered a ton more, and finally caught our third camel (the needed male) overnight.

It seems to me that my rhythmic strength is not developing. As I type this, I'm faintly remembering some sort of cap to that skill based on the quality of scythe. I hope that's the case, because it took me about 800 grass to get level 2, and it's been another 3 or 4 thousand without an additional increase. I guess I'll see what happens once glass scythes become available

8/14/2010

First dig of this new tale, depressing results. I'm just thankful someone had the foresight to bring grilled onions! It actually was a great turnout and everyone worked really hard, but it's hard to smile at the results when you remember the ease of digging after food and high quality shovels become available.

8/13/2010

An uneventful evening. Did my share of bricks, boards, and flax. I'm looking forward to mining (gasp!) to see how this new system works, and to start toying with all the things that metal unlocks (blacksmithing, vineyards).

8/10/2010

Tonight was devoted entirely to the 2k dried flax required by animal husbandry. I got everything grown and rotted, but collapsed before everything was dried, leaving it in the very capable hands of my guildies. I was happy to see the next day that animal husbandry was on the timer. Thanks everyone, what's next? An achievement in my sad, sad life: Flax, grew 7,777 after only 4 days of playing.

8/9/2010

Another 2,000 boards for animal husbandry. Still no light at the end of the tunnel. The good news is I'm now officially a member of PKURFL4X again! Laissez les bon temps roulez!

8/8/2010

More work on guild construction. Goodness I hate flax. I'm thankful for the number of people that worked together on this project. Late afternoon we finally put it on timer. I spend an hour on "me time", initiating into the school of body and picking up some skills. Close out the day with 1,000 boards for animal husbandry. I love me some camels!

8/7/2010

Once again, a fresh start! I'm looking forward to all the promise that an empty Egypt holds. Fortunately, I won't have to go it alone. Plenty of old guildmates around to start with me and I'm excited about leaving behind the life of a hermit.

The day started with the required tasks to become a citizen. Once that was completed, a home location for the guild was chosen and we started plopping down compounds, with a quick lightning zap for initiating into the school of architecture. Closed out the day with plenty of flaxing, the goal is to get guild construction unlocked as soon as possible.