Test of the Vigil

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The Test of the Vigil is one of the tests in the discipline of Worship.

Overview

Conduct a Vigil at a Sacrificial Bonfire. Visions will come to those around the bonfire, illuminating the required offerings. Scoring is based on the length of the Vigil, and your participation.

Principles

• Locate a Common Altar
• Gather Wood from a tree
• Make Firebricks using a Box Kiln (NOTE: can be done in a True Kiln)
• Crush Flax Seeds for Oil at a Kitchen
• Make a Silver Bowl using a Casting Box
• Build a Sacrificial Bonfire
• Make a Sacrifice (this is the ONLY required step)

NOTE: You only need to make a sacrifice to pass. Doing so before the other items listed displays the message "Making a Sacrifice allowed you to skip some steps in Principles of The Vigil - smart move!

Demonstrating the Principle

What it takes to unlock the test for Egypt.

• 1 Baskets
• 1 Dried Flax
• 1 Linen
• 1 Flint
• 1 Clay Mortars
• 1 Slate Shovel
• 1 Jugs
• 1 Crucible
• 1 Nail Mould
• 1 Pulley
• 1 Charcoal
• 1 Ash
• 1 Grilled Fish
• 1 Honey
• 1 Saltpeter
• 1 Sulfur
• 1 Gold
• 1 Limestone
• 1 Lime
• 1 Dirt
• 1 Medium Diamond

Demonstrated by [[User:]] Phoenixwcu

Details

Description

Conduct a Vigil at a Sacrificial Bonfire. Visions will come to those around the bonfire, illuminating the required offerings. Scoring is based on the length of the Vigil, and your participation.

Sacrificial Bonfire

The sacrificial bonfire is built from a Small Construction site, and must be near a common altar.

   * 2500 Wood
   * 250 oil
   * 1000 firebricks
   * 1 Silver Bowl 

The Silver Bowl is created in a Student's Casting Box with 2 silver and 2 beeswax. The option will only be available once you have started the test at a University of Worship.

Caution

• The vigil starts off extremely slowly and only calls for a sacrifice every 15 teppy minutes.

What is a Vigil, really?

A Vigil is, in essence, a large scavenger hunt. Clicking on the sacrificial bonfire gives you a list of items you must scavenge and the time limit for each item. The Vigil will continue until the participants fail to turn in an item in time. Vigils look complicated, but are great fun, especially as the hour grows late and people desperately struggle to find rare items to continue their Vigil. Vigil participants have been known to disassemble and salvage valuable buildings to keep it running long after they have achieved a passing score.

• Principle seekers: All you have to do is show up at the vigil and make one sac. That is it. Ignore all the other stuff on your tab. Just go to the vigil, take papy, slate, or anything else on this list: http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3/VigilSupplies in any reasonable quantity you can spare, and ask for a turn.

• If you want to do a Vigil in earnest - if you're trying to do a one-shot pass, for example - you NEED to do the following:

1. Have a processing compound VERY close to the Vigil site. By, "processing," I mean, all of the buildings that turn one basic resource into another - Hackling Rakes, Distaffs, Rock Saws, and so on.
2. Have large quantities of raw materials (such as cuttable stone, papyrus, flax, and so on) on-hand before you even start, so that you can either sacrifice the raws, or process and sacrifice the advanced materials, depending on what the Vigil calls for.
3. Have one person dedicated to being the Caller, and announcing Sacrifices as they show up (and assigning them, if you're doing a firm turn-based system). Feel free to trade out callers as the Vigil goes on, but make sure you transition smoothly.
4. Keep a log of what has been called, what has been sacrificed, and what's still open. While you can check the Vigil fire any time to see what Sacrifices are open, as the Vigil wears on, the list can become VERY long (up to 120 items, theoretically). This log will help future Vigils prepare more carefully.
5. Keep an emergency stash of materials, in case someone can't make their sacrifice, so you can toss things in when an open Sacrifice gets down to the 5-minute mark.

• Note: it will ask for your seeds.
• Note: Vigils are asking for complex items, such as 5k+ quality Shovels, this time around. (During the Venerate Vigil, a 9k+ Quality shovel was asked for. Sariel

How to Prepare for a Vigil

One suggested method of preparation is to gather the following...

• Five or six chests on-site
• Facilities for flax, boards, and bricks on-site
• Seeds of every type, jugs, and water on-site
• An ample supply of medium and small gems of each type (5-10 each), as well as knowledge of nearby public mines
• An ample supply of the rarer metal ores. (20-30 each), as well as knowledge of nearby public mines
• An ample supply of Papyrus (~1000), and an established method for getting more
• Baskets
• An ample supply of each type of fish (~500 for common types, ~60 for rare types), and knowledge of nearby bands?
• Two or three administrators or 'callers' who are committed to staying in shifts until the thing ends
• An established, understood, and agreed-upon system for accepting new participants, and putting them in order
• A nearby compound with all advanced facilities (saws, rakes, etc.) kept current, to which you have access
• Access to cuttable gemstones, as well as a variety of specialty cuts
• Mandibular glue
• Wines of varying sugar content, age, and percentage of alcohol
• The best shovels and hatchets you can find
• Unless your participants are already in the same guild, strongly consider making (or coopting) a guild just for vigil communications. Becoming a team, even just for the vigil, is a BIG boost to both productivity and morale (not to mention being able to coordinate who sacrifices next).

All of the above amounts are very speculative, based on how long you intend to keep the fire going. Lots of everything is a very valid strategy.

A solid recommendation would be to review the Vigil preparation lists provided by prominent Worship-themed guilds.

What to do

• Build your chests, stash your goods. Make everything viewable to the public and stashable by the public.
• The admins should be in the same guild if possible. If so guild the chests. If not, understand clearly who the "lead" admin is at any given time. That person will stay at the fire, call out sacs, and hand out supplies to the person whose turn it is. When the lead changes due to fatigue or injury ;), the lead gives all the chests to the new lead.
• When a new participant arrives, there are a number of ways of engaging them. An up-front donation works, as does delaying their spot in line for one round, to see how they work. Unfortunately once your fire is public it is not really possible to enforce anything. People can sacrifice out of turn if they want to, and it is undetectable. For this reason it is best not to go -too- public with your vigil. I trusted pretty much everyone in Egypt until my most recent Vigil. In my experience, ten smart people, admins included in that number, can keep a Vigil going almost to 200. If the need is dire, tell everyone to move back from the fire unless making a sacrifice. This offers some hope of at least shaming/outing a lurking sac-stealer
• Basically everyone who is in line should be working on someone's donation at all times. If there is a complete lull, Papyrus, flaxing, fishing, and digging are a never-ending source of amusement, as well as future relief.
• As Bortoas points out, it starts slow. Only the admins will be needed for perhaps the first 3-5 hours. Do not burn travel time during this period, and do not spend your stores. It will really peak after about 12, so the best time to start a vigil is in the middle of the night.

Additional Input - Myremi

• I had 1 caller, 2 people to ferry stuff over, 1 person recording actual sacs on wiki (he tracks this according to what the caller says). Towards the end, the caller updated the wiki as well but to ferry the stuff, best to assign 2 people to do the job. Always have backup for each duty in case things go wrong.
• Caller announces the person to do the sac AND next person in the queue.
• Chests were placed quite a bit back from the altar so that traffic (refilling chests/removing stuff) is easier.
• If there are 11 people present at start of vigil, can start digging for stones, even without food. Need a lot of cuttable stones.
• Make sure everyone understands the system in place and get a few people to act as backups in case leader(s) disconnect from system.
• May be a good idea to have some experienced folks nearby in case you need help.
• Be flexible in case you have to make changes to the system.

Points and Passing

When a Vigil completes, the points for it are distributed as follows: Each player gets points equal to the number of their own sacrifices multiplied by the number of sacrifices made by other people at this Vigil. So if somebody did a Vigil all on their own, they would receive 0 points for it. An example with 20 total sacrifices with 3 participants, if A, B and C made sacrifices.. A=10, B=8, C=2.. points would be A=100, B=96, C=36.

Points accumulate over time, so if you participate in several Vigils, the points for each are added to your score.

Every Sunday, the 7 players with the highest points pass the test. Everyone who does not pass keeps their score and can continue accumulating points for later weeks.

Notes

A sacrifice will be listed as (in order):

• Longer Than 1 Hour
• Within 1 Hour
• Within 20 Minutes
• Within 5 Minutes
• Within 1 MINUTE

The first sacrifice of the vigil can now be made for up to 2 hours. If you fail to make a sacrifice after its 1 MINUTE warning, the bonfire will disappear and the Vigil will end.

To calculate your score, take the total number of sacrifices made, subtract the number of sacrifices you made yourself (both numbers are shown to you every time you make a sacrifice), then multiply the result by the number of sacrifices made yourself. So, if there are 200 sacrifices made in total, and you did 50 of them, your score is (200 - 50) * 50 which is 7500. Or, in other words, your score is the number of sacrifices you made multiplied by the number of sacrifices everybody else made.

Known Sacrifice Materials

• My guess is that Vigils request resources based on some in-game metric of how available they are, together with a small random factor. This would fit Teppy's usual idea of whether something is possible. If there are 2000 medium stones currently in Egypt then surely those conducting the vigil can find 10 of them... If the theory is correct we should see this reflected in the popularity of certain sacrifices over the coming weeks. For example sacrifices of Baskets should rise as more people make them for use in harvesting grass. -- Tialaramex

• I wonder if the "availability" is less of how many there are in Egypt at any one time, but rather if the tech is currently available at all. I.e. There was a time when we couldn't create alloys, so they would not be asked by the Gods in a Vigil. As they can now be created, irrespective of how much alloy exists in the world, they will be asked for in a Vigil. Actually, alloys (or one of their products, like gears or scythes) might be a good thing to use to check the theory as I don't believe there are many around. Or candles? They have little use beyond Worship tests and tuition, so likely there are few "available for use" in Vigils. -- Mathir

• Perhaps each vigil over X sacrifices adds 1 new item to the list of things that are available. Chicken meat started at a large one in meroe i think, and now vigils are asking for 6%+ wine. Both of these are much less common than alloys that aren't required at the moment. --FadenRa 16:28, 14 February 2009 (EST)

Passes

See Test Pass History.