User:Sefet/June2009

06/01/09 Pump, pump for your love!

The weekend started off innocuously enough with resource gathering for next weekend’s Vigil. I gathered enough ‘extra’ supplies to ensure many, many sacrifices and volunteered for a couple of shifts ‘calling’ the fire. Spent a couple of hours just moving boatloads of miscellaneous things down to my warehouse by the fire.

Late Friday, word went out that Pyramid Lakes got their aqueduct up. This didn’t come as a surprise to any of us: their members included the two major raeli cartels. We were secure knowing that they’d only get a week’s head start. It would hurt, insomuch as they’d get 2-3 weeks of passes before we would be able to start getting enough points to compete without SERIOUS veggie growing. We still decided to Get Serious and knock out everything that was not tiles.

I desperately needed cut stones for the vigil, and was happy to hear of a local effort to perform a dig, but five minutes before my shovel hit the ground, I got a chat from one of the Waterworks elders noting that they were going to do a 6-man dig for the aqueduct cuttables and wanted to know if I was interested. None of the stones would be for personal use. I didn’t even hesitate and in an hour we dug over 1200 rocks for the project, finishing off that part of it. Aplus donated several quarries (quarreys? quarrys?) to the Cause and on Saturday diania and Daniels worked them like demons.

Bear in mind, the entire weekend I was fighting to keep my 6th place spot in the tower queue. I made it my goal to claim 5th place and kept the tiles coming any way I could, raiding public ovens and my own at every opportunity. Inkoaten held fifth place with an iron fist, but I was gaining rapidly. While I was doing this, diania was fighting just as hard to take first place from Catlyn, who had garnered a massive lead before I joined the guild, due to a gross overvaluation of the 45000 treated boards needed by the project. Diania’s obsession meant to me that Inkoaten would have fewer opportunities to grow his lead over me.

Saturday afternoon everything changed. I was attending a Rabble-hosted dig for cuttables in hated Saqqarah (made out like a bandit) and after it was over I asked him how their aqueduct project was going. Their wiki showed they were probably a week or two behind us, but I keep my cards close to my chest. Rabble confirmed my worst fears: they had all of their materials together and were moving them to warehouses at that moment. Crap. At best our aqueduct would come in third. I warned the rest of the WW crew. That night we buckled in and ground out all the materials we could as cheers went up across Saqqarah: their aqueduct was up.

By Sunday morning, we were down to 35k tiles to go and everyone scraped the bottoms of their ovens to get the materials together for the balance. The afternoon was spent double checking, cross checking, and possibly double crossing as we moved things down to the River. The points were tallied and the top 7 were: diania, Catlyn, Cali, Aplus, myself, Inkoaten, and Numaris. It took a lot of time and coordination, but after another hour, the tiles and supplies were shuffled to the river and the Pump was constructed!

Sunday passes came and went. Once again, my venery was a runner up, but we had two surprises! First, Diania passed Temple with a mere 35k points, due to the cartels dumping into their aqueduct. This frees up her ovens, hopefully. Secondly, although I did not pass Prophecy, I came only 2 points under the lowest scorer, with 4 passes saved for next week. To quote Google, “I’m feeling lucky.”

After the pump was up, our next major hurdle was to raise that sucker by 350 feet. This meant the creation of 35 gearboxes...not an easy accomplishment, but one that was tended to by Aplus, Inky, Daniels, and Numaris. I can do gearboxes, but my designs tend to be inefficient and slow. This part took hours and into well past my bedtime. We were starting to hit the exhaustion point: sleep deprivation caused Aplus to screw up a number of gearboxes and we had to scramble to gather more gears as the original count was too low.

Add to this we were being hassled in regional chat by Shuofthefieryheat, who was miffed that we built the pump in his backyard (read: barely in sight range of his compound) and didn’t send him a personal invitation to join the first constructors. Bear in mind, at no point has our project been secret. His name had been kicked around as one of the region’s locals that we’d considered soliciting to join the ‘next 20’, but after his major hissy fit, he pretty much ruled himself out of it. Some people just can’t hints or direct statements. His loss.

But at long last the pump was raised and the towers started going up! When mine finally went up on the rocky hill, I said my good nights and crashed hard. I’ll pass principles of life by growing veggies another time.

06/02/09

Overnight the chain grew and well over a dozen towers are chained up. Due o our build locations, only a handful will allow vegetables to be grown nearby...and even then only peppers. This is going to cause us to probably not pass for a couple of weeks until we get the rest of the towers online and down to long stretches of flat grass with the second group of 20. I did take advantage of the one tower we have that gives bonuses to pepper harvests. While growing there, pepper output is tripled and after a while I had harvested some 3k peppers. Growing 60 at a time from each seed, this wasn’t as dreadful as it may sound. The peppers got traded in at The Goods for store credit and I went on with the rest of my evening.

The scoring for life is based on how many harvests are made at your tower or any other tower further down the line. Being one of first seven builders in Shabbat means I’m pretty much done at this point. I don’t really have to assist with the growing of veggies, but it’s good form to pitch in.

A new waterworks group has decided to build along the SA/SW border: read ‘over Mandisa’s house’. They don’t look very organized, but their guildhouse is right beside her compound and I can already anticipate the warehouse farm that will grow nearby. Mandisa has encouraged me to carpetflax the area, but that goes against my general principles. I chatted with the head of the group (of 2 presently), Augusta, and apparently the ‘master vision’ is to connect the Red Sea with the Nile. I commended the plan’s brilliance and encouraged starting from the Red Sea end. I don’t think they will have the resources to do this for months, but we’ll see.

Spent the rest of the evening playing around with wiki design and tweaking my Temple up a little. http://atitd.org/wiki/tale4/User:Sefet/Temple will be keeping track of what tiles I have in there. I’m sitting at a little over 18k glory, which is a little better than I was expecting by now. I’m also trying to get a tile trading page up (http://atitd.org/wiki/tale4/User:Sefet/Raeli ), but I managed to screw that up by losing the sheet of scratch paper that has the colors the second oven produces. Was running short on time, so I’ll do a full burn on that Raeli Wednesday or Thursday. No rush, really.

06/08/09 To everything...burn, burn, burn....

The latter half of the week was devoted to last minute Vigil prep work: ferrying things around, acquiring a few items, and mostly chillaxing in the plex, burning a couple of ovens and the like. I had signed up for a two-hour fire calling shift Friday night (10pm-midnight) and a four hour shift beginning at noon on Saturday. For a lark, I decided to build the bonfire myself and give it to the guild, so I knocked out 1k firebricks and a silver bowl to supplement a ton of wood and oil I have on hand and threw everything together in Meroe, a solid 12 hours expedition travel away, and gave it over to Korrin, the event organizer.

I popped in Friday evening early to see how things were going and the ‘vigil-antes’ had a nice little party in progress. The fire had been lit at 1pm and by 8 or so, the requests were coming once every 10 minutes. As there was not much action, we put sacrificers on a rotation and chit-chatted, knocked back beer, and had a grand ol’ time while the bonfire merrily burned.

By the time my shift was in swing, the fire was down to 5 minutes per request and we kept the rotation going. The fire ran me out of dried flax in a particularly large request and a couple of hastily thrown together flax hammocks helped provided the rest of the ‘sac’. As luck would have it, my relief was 30 minutes late, but otherwise Friday night went smoothly.

Saturday morning I popped in to see how it was going. The blaze was in full steam, requests coming once a minute. Three people were tending the thing, plus the caller. Rotas were a thing of the past and it became a race to keep the fire fueled. The caller on duty basically doesn’t get to sacrifice, so no points there. This was bad, as I was counting on racking up during my four hour stint without too much loitering around elsewhere. Still we handled what we could, but the odd request kept throwing one or two of us out of the picture for a while (“386 boards!” “14 nail moulds!”) while we got them manufactured.

With Mandisa parked at the fire as a free waypoint and my expedition travel chariot a block from home, I was able to raid supplies at the ‘Plex a couple of times and hit up the Goods once without draining my travel time like one poor soul from Shabbat (AbuTaid) did.

My shift started and ended pretty much on time Saturday—for a while it was only zowee and myself guarding the fire, so I wound up chucking a few things into the fire anyway. The only serious curveball pitched was a request for “a wine with a sugar level of at least 50”. Neither zowee nor I had wine on hand, but her RL & game husband Timm did ‘on the vine’. Timm had the graveyard shift on the fire, so zowee had to wake him up to harvest grapes! It got chucked in and everyone (including Timm!) was happy.

I hung around afterwards trying to score what points I could, tossing worthless things and vast fortunes in with equal abandon.

I checked in again later that night and the fire was in full “screw them over” mode: it was calling for rare cut gems that few people could make. I was able to provide a number of them, due to my foresight on bringing some lucky cuts with me, but for several we had to resort to putting out public help cries. It was close a couple of times, but by the time I logged, the fire was safe and I had some 144 sacrifices made.

Sunday morning, I check and have my expectations confirmed: the fire was dead and gone. It was killed around five in the morning by a particularly nasty cut request, but my point totals came to 175k (including some 22k or so I had going into the night).

Spent time during the day cleaning out the ovens and polishing the temple. It’s up to 23k points and about 95 colors or so.

Sunday passes came while I was offline. My venery was passed...over again for the 6th time as a runner up. It’s a little disheartening, but I’ll keep the faith. It just seems longer. The Test of Life passes went to....Team Saqqarah! Sigh. Checking my points, we scored about 1/3rd of theirs. Although, it’s almost impossible for me not to pass that one eventually so, again, the dude abides.

I was feeling confident on Prophesy having so narrowly missed last week. This time, I weighed in with 49 points. The winners had 51 and 50 points...with 4 passes saved for next week. Apparently, I am part of a more-than-four-way tie. Maybe next week, eh?

The winning Vigil scores were posted and I passed! I had been fretting all day that I was going to be shy, and in true me-fashion, it turned out to be complete overkill: Egypt recognizes F:Korrin (179119), M:Sefet (175669), F:zowee (132908), M:Timm (132908), F:Anyolina (124142), F:SaiCoSis (123550), M:Djoser (81548) for passing The Test of the Vigil.

06/09/09

“My Temple shall be glorious!” has become my battlecry, and I have begun active tracking down missing colors and amassing extras for trading. I had hoped to make a beneficial trade with a local Guild named Field and Stream who advertised their need for tiles in the trading channel, but the trade fell through as they finished negotiating with someone else for all of the colors they needed that I had.

Not to be deterred, I have an outstanding trade with fellow Pilgrim, lilac, that should plug several holes in my wall o’ missing colors, including some light coral and silver tiles.

I met up with Lill and we arranged for a bargain of 3 colors each way. Curiously, she wanted precisely 243 tiles of each color. The request meant I had to hit and burn at two ovens, but fortunately they were light colors (bisque and light steel blue) and didn’t require too long of a burn to generate. The 243 intrigued me, but not enough to question it as everyone has their own strategy for tiles. For the curious, 243 tiles going into a temple would yield 382.287 points. 49 = 300 points, 343 = 400 points. I’m content with 49 of colors I can’t generate, so the rest goes into the trade bucket to maximize my chances of trading with someone who has needed colors.

Bear in mind I haven’t advertised that I trade tiles, aside from having it posted on the wiki and mentioned in passing in my /info. Out of the blue, I was contacted by nourbese of the Shabbaticals for a trade proposition to be determined later. We exchanged wiki links and she logged for bed. I’m guessing she’s a European player, given the relative early hour (for me) we chatted. They have a goodly supply of tiles I could use and I to them. It wouldn’t surprise me if our eventual trade will involve numbers that will allow nourbese to split tiles between multiple temples.

Presently, I’m up to 99 colors in the temple. It shall be glorious!

06/10/09

And Dark Blue makes 100. Burned some khaki tiles for nourbese; she left her order with me overnight and it’ll mean four colors each way, if we can ever get online at the same time. Still need to catch up to lilac and re-visit Lill now that I have a few more colors in my trading stock.

I stopped by the Goods and made a flat-out purchase of gold, gold ore, gold wire, and some cuttable turquoise, all of which are for various Mechanics tuitions. I took the cuttable gems (along with dozens of others) down to SThought and bought Mechanics level 5.

Returning home, I finally tuned the flax gin! Trying a second time failed and I’ll need to come up with either 1000 gold wire or a huge sapphire and miscellaneous other gems. In the long haul, the Sapphire may be cheaper. I’ll need to see what Simon, our most prominent gem broker, will charge for one.

Burned enough black tiles to finally finish the Acoustics Laboratory. This will let me make wind chimes, but the more structural ‘upgrades’ I install, the easier it will be to discover the notes I will want. Some of the upgrades are cheap (20 cactus sap) and some are much, much worse (1000 concrete). I went ahead and knocked out a couple that were on the lower end of the scale. I can see already I’m going to need to make a lot more jugs, as the Vigil toasted my reserves and I’m going to need hundreds for these upgrades. The lab will be an ongoing low-priority project for a while.

Finally, I ran out to the boonies with Mandisa and captured her a short-haired fennic, completing her Principles of Safari!

06/11/09

Finally completed the trade with nourbese and after burning another oven, I’m up to 105 colors and just shy of 26k points—my temple will be glorious! I’ll probably need around 50-60k to actually ‘win’ this one, but it’s keeping me occupied.

I checked out Simon’s pricing for huge gems and they weren’t as scary as they could’ve been: 11k wood or 5k charcoal or 800 gravel. Pretty expensive, but not sell-a-kidney bad.

I’ve found that smacking medium stones into gravel is a great time-killer while waiting for ovens to get to toast tiles and have amassed closed to 700 gravel as a result of a need for a dark blue.

Between my ongoing wood accumulation (party cloudy with chances of late afternoon wood chips) and general need to punish trees, I have some 11k wood on hand. With relatively little effort, tonight I could have enough to purchase both a huge sapphire and a huge topaz, for mechanics and dessication skills respectively. Dessication 3 would give me the ability to make acid from salt and sulfurous water.

The big problem is Simon lives in Meroe and that’s a lot of hauling and would take several trips. I think what I’ll do is hire McArine or Trillian to convert the wood to charcoal, then mix up food that’ll let me carry some extra weight and bulk and do it like that.

Otherwise, I’m building up a small stockpile of goodies to get to Rabble for trading. I’m torn between building another oven, because at heart I’m a masochist, and getting marble for various projects and acoustic lab upgrades. I found a few debens of a particulary rare herb he’s after and will be able to throw in a few seeds as a gift. Picked up a couple hundred slate and bought a basket at the Goods before I noticed I had 400 papyrus left over from the Vigil. That’s fine: papyrus always makes for good trading stock.

Picked a few grass to keep the camels happy and worked my rhythmic strength up to a skill of 4. I now get at least two grass every time I pick, with chances of three. Why bother picking grass if I have greenhouses? Speed. 20 minutes to generate grass in the greenhouses versus a few minutes bending at the knees. I don’t do it very often, but it doesn’t hurt to supplement the camels’ food supply.

My lazy Prophesy picks haven’t earned a single point this week so far, but I’m hopeful for Sunday passes. I get to make another pick tonight and I’m certain BooBoo will pass Vigil.

06/12/09

Traded 10k wood to Trillian for 5k charcoal and smacked rocks around until I had enough gravel to give Simon a call. I failed to make working carry food, so I passed on buying the huge topaz instead settling on just buying a large emerald and huge sapphire, giving me the last bits of tuition that I needed for Mechanics 6.

I bought the skill and returned home. Failed to tune the flax gin. Ugh. The last level of mechanics will take 1k gold wire and gold is very expensive. Organized a trade at the Goods for most of the remaining gold and some extra gravel and sold back some of the things I had gotten solely for Vigil prepatory work. Tried to tune Robare’s flax gin... failed.

Made a few thermometers and a few hundred gunpowder to sell for the rest of the gold I’m going to need. I’ll conclude that trade next week. It’s going to take a long time to make all of the needed wire at a rate of 1/minute.

Carried a ton of slate and some herbs down to drop off at Rabble’s camp in Saqqarah. While passing through Meroe, someone reported that Nefertari’s Crown mushroom were found in Saqqarah. Excited, I burned more travel time to check it out. I still needed to eat seven of them for the first list of mushrooms given to me for Test of Darkest Night and my attempts to find them had gone poorly.

Arriving in Saqqarah, I asked regional for any sightings and in less than 30 seconds I had been given confirmation, with coordinates by none other than Rabble himself. They were apparently near his camp, which worked out well for me.

I came upon the bountiful mushroom patch. There were dozens! I ate the first muchroom—and the rest vanished; I had arrived just as they despawned. Argh! Made a waypoint, then wandered over to Rabble’s camp and failed to tune his flax gin. Left an order for some marble, burned some more tiles from the oven by his house, and warped home. Fired up the forge and made a hundred or so of the wire before calling it a night.

Logged on in the morning to prune animals and warped over to the mushroom field—as luck would have it, the timing was perfect for mushroom gathering. I was rewarded with a number of mushrooms to eat, leaving me with just Duelling Serpents on list one.

06/15/09 Wire! (huh! Good god, y’all!) What is it good for?

Logged on late Saturday following a beach adventure and concluded a trade at the Goods for the last of the gold I would need for Mechanics 7 tuition. I was already salivating over the possibility of getting my flax gin tuned to peak performance as a consolation prize for missing Prophesy yet again. Of all my Prophesy picks, only one person passed a single Test last week. I had picked BooBoo to pass Vigil, but found out Friday another group was running another Vigil, so there was no way my ‘ace-in-the-hole’ was going to pull off a Sunday pass, damn it.

Anyway, I also picked up a ton of saltpeter as I’m getting back into pyro and a ton of expensive mushrooms and things to further Mandisa along on Towers. There was a Night Tower coming up on Sunday and I was sure I’d get at least 20-25%. The last time this Hour came, one person built –one single tower- and got 100%. I’m never that lucky, but I’ll take a chunk where I can.

Rabble came by to visit and dropped off the marble I had bought. I upgraded the ol’ acoustics lab with a cold water bath and a quicksilver basin after making another hundred jugs and losing a couple of kilns in the process.

At some point in the middle of this, I realized that Mandisa lacked the skill to build the medium construction site for her Tower later in the evening. Sigh. This led to a side trip to pick up project management level 2 for her and pottery, just ‘cause I was in the area...and expedition travel!

Meanwhile, I’m mushroom hunting with Sefet in the deep reaches of the great eastern desert. Found a couple of Duelling Serpent mushrooms and that’s got me pretty close to finishing 1/5th of the Darkest Night Test. Just need two more and I’ve been hunting off and on, just fruitlessly (or mushroomlessly, really).

Spent the bulk of the day Sunday engaged in the incredibly boring task of making gold wire. I needed 1k wire. With my awesome 1 forge equipped with an extrusion plate, I’m cranking out 10 wire every 10 teppy minutes. A number of hours in, I decided to spend a chunk of charcoal and fired up two more forges in the public works, running those as Sefet and the one back home as Mandisa, logging back and forth, thereby tripling my create time. After an insane number of hours spent arduously working the forges (well, actually reading Stephen King’s The Wastelands in between the occasional relog and click forges), my task was done!

I boogied down to the school, bought mechanics 7, and crowed my triumph. I warped home, mocked the flax gin, attempted to tune it, and failed. I was stunned. I literally just sat there a moment wondering WTF before I griped about it in regional chat. That’s when I received an education from another player on how Mechanics really works.

Apparently there are 7 ways a machine can be tuned. For each level of mechanics, you learn a new way to tune a machine. When you try to tune, you effectively roll a die and if it matches the machine’s requirement, it gets tuned. So, level 7 mechanics means you will ALWAYS possess the ability to tune a machine, but you still have only a 1 in 7 chance ON ANY ATTEMPT to be successful. In practical terms, I can expect to try 10-20 times to tune any machine....with a 20 minute timer each time. That sucks a little, but it’s a lot better than having mechanics 6 and rolling a 1d6 every tune attempt, never knowing that you needed to roll a ‘7’ to successfully tune the machine.

Late Sunday night came and passes did not come. We assumed that Teppy forgot about us. By 10:20pm, two things were happening fairly close together: the Hour of Towers and time for those mushrooms to spawn! I had navigated Sefet and Mandisa to their respective starting points when the time hit and the Hour begun. Mandisa built her Tower and it was a beauty! Reflections played off the smooth marble surface. This was easily the most expensive tower to build, but it had captured 35% or so. I blinked. The tower had dropped to 18%. Damn it! 11.5%! This left me feeling vaguely bitter. Still, I consoled myself by reminding myself Mandisa would pass Tower principles if nothing else, putting her at level 20. There would be other Hours. I flipped over to Sefet.

I was still a bit early for my particular mushrooms to spawn, so I sat down and picked up my book again, reading a few pages across the room from the screen. After a few minutes, my attention was diverted back to the screen as a dialogue box appeared. Ah, I thought. This will be the ‘The Hour of Towers is now over. Your score will be updated in a moment and displayed in Main’ message. I figured I’d bite the bullet and see how Mandisa did. The dialogue box actually said. “You are now known as Sefet, Level 33 Journeyman of Body”.

I was ALREADY a level 33, Journeyman of Body...but this dialogue box could only mean one thing! Sunday passes! I passed something! Excitedly, I dropped my book and I quickly flipped over to the System channel, trying to pick my name out of the screen of winners and runners up. Venery! I had passed Venery! After six weeks of being a runner up, The Sum of the Parts was now recognized as the best Venery in Egypt (that had not already passed)! Elated, I no longer cared that mushroom time had come and there were no mushrooms to be had.

I continued to read and, sure enough, BooBoo didn’t make Vigil...it looked like PLIT’s aqueduct got another pass... I looked to see the scores for Prophesy to see how far behind I was. They hadn’t posted yet. I held my breath and started looking again through the names who had passed...diania for Vigil, lill for Life, Aplus for Pilgrimage. I was still scanning desperately when lightning struck! I passed Prophesy and am now Sefet, Level 33 Journeyman of Two.

06/16/09

Two projects I’m running presently: Towers and explosives. Hmmm...that sounds more like a project for mid-September. (Too soon?)

I login as Mandisa with 15 minutes to go before the Tower of New Life Hour begins. I hastily double check the project chests to find that I forgot to unload a few critical components off Sefet from the previous night’s trades. A couple of relogs and inventory shuffles later, I’m leaving camp just as the Hour begins. Terrific.

I hit the chariot stop and warp to Khmun and then to Meroe. I’m about to continue on to Queen’s Retreat, when a name catches my eye: EvilSnowman. He had ‘won’ the last Hour hands down and if he had a Meroe Tower, it would slaughter the Tower I had planned in QR. Right. He crossed the bridge to the east of the Chariot and hung around a compound for a minute or so, while I trundled east, then broke south to feint down a road. Once I was nearly out of sight, he left the compound, heading north. I immediately double back, heading northeast, passing the Vigil spot by a few hundred yards. Confident I was now east of EvilSnowman’s building spot, I threw down the Tower and warped back to Sefet. 11 minutes left.

Four minutes to run back down to the chariot and I got a break with a free warp to Nomad’s Paradise. I wander a short distance from the chariot, build the construction site, and pause. I get a bad feeling and tear the site back down. I’ve learned to trust my instincts. Hitting the chariot again, I warp to Cat’s Claw Ridge and start building with a couple of minutes left in the hour. I finish it up handily and warp back to camp. Relogged Sefet just as the scores came in.

Mandisa picked up 25% towards completion with just two Towers built. I grinned with delight and booked a trade that would get me enough materials to drop a couple more Towers tonight.

Otherwise, the bulk of the evening was spent in the occupation of firework design. I had forgotten how fun and time-consuming it is. I now have five tubs in constant operation, converting tons of dung into useful saltpeter. I’m going to need thousands of debens of gunpowder. It’ll be another week or two before I have a show-worthy firework. I’ll be damned if I’m going in with anything less than 500 stars in it and lasts than 20 seconds. I played around with making a new type of star called “The Tickler”, but it turned out to be a disappointing thin line of no real use to me. I’ll need to see what other stars are available now at the universities to increase the variety of the colors in my Boom!

I’m putting the Temple on back-burner. The last pass was nearly double my own Temple’s glory and I have a feeling I’m not going to be able to seriously compete with the raeli cartels until a number of their members have passed and tiles are open for bulk sale. Disappointing, but true. I just don’t have the drive to build 12 more ovens to pass the one Test.

Our aqueduct is coming along nicely. Group ‘B’ and another 20 towers are scheduled to go on-line in another week. Now that I’ve passed Prophesy, I don’t have the whole Sunday-pass anxiety thing anymore and if it takes a few weeks to pass Life, so be it. Hopefully this batch of towers will give us multipliers to something useful to grow. Cabbage or carrots would be nice, onions would be ideal, as those can be macro’d. And yes, one system out there has a garlic tower, which means that combined with pyramid bonuses, you get 24 garlic each harvest.

We’ve expanded our cistern to hold 700k water and a few of us pumped it until it was full. Good times, good times.

06/17/09

Logged on for a pleasant jaunt: had to position Mandisa in Meroe for her Tower spot and raced Sefet out to the deserts between Shabbat and Nomad’s Paradise to the west in the hopes of finding the last two dueling serpents for part one of Darkest Night before logging for dinner.

Mushroom time came an hour before Towers, so I checked the spot suggested by Shroomdar (the mushroom tracking utility people log mushroom finds to) and sure enough: no mushrooms. Annoyed, but not surprised, I began a spiral sweep of the area, crossing over a small river and into Nomad’s Paradise proper. In the distance, I saw a pair of specks. Could it be? I dashed closer and my heart cried out with joy! It was! It was a pair of dueling serpents! I ate them and warped to Mandisa in Meroe.

I turned in my completed list to Meroe’s UBody and received another list and 2 constitution points. Nice. This lists contains nothing godawful (I think), so I’ll be working it over the next week or two. Made Sefet’s way to CCR where Mandisa would be dropping her second tower.

The Hour began, Mandisa dropped a New Life tower, warped home to grab more bricks, then spouse warped to Sefet and built the second tower. I hadn’t bothered to check the first tower’s score: scores in the first minute only lead to dashed expectations come score time. I did, however take a look at the second. 4.88%. Nuts. Still, between the two I might just pull in 10% and I must’ve gotten lucky the night before.

I checked in after a while and my jaw dropped: Mandisa claimed 40.35% using 2 towers.

This now puts her in at 75% completed. There’s one more New Life hour coming up tonight a little after midnight and I’m thinking about hitting it to get what I can from it. Probably not, though. Mandisa’s test passages are more of a ‘whenever’ thing for me. Otherwise, Sunday 7:00am is the next ‘practical’ Hour, but it’s a much more common Tower.

Finally, I lost a couple of neighbors last night: Biker and Sweetnothing, who were just south of The French, have quit the game to play Lord of the Rings Online. Bit of a pity—they were good neighbors, kept the grass plucked and the trees nicked. Any homeowner’s association would be glad to have them. That gives me a brilliant idea! I’m going to engage in a little Art and put a Satellite Dish on top of the guildhall. Just need a clay dome a glass rod and a few things for the ‘mounting’. Muahahaha!

06/18/09 Don’t know much about ecology...

Woke up in Egypt to find it was early evening. Still a few hours before the mushrooms are out and not that much to do. After finishing up camp chores (you know, failing to tune the flax gin and starving the camels a little less), I meandered over to my remote oven in Khmun and kicked it off. Tiles kind of accumulate when you ignore an oven for the better part of a week, so I baked about 1600 of color I should have no trouble trading: yellow green.

I had just finished when I noticed an ad from someone trading tiles: Tedra, of flax seed crossbreeding fame. As luck would have it, she needed some dark green and a major chunk of yellow greens. Sweet. I arranged to meet her between SA and Saqqarah and burned some silver tiles in one of Rabble’s ovens there while waiting for her to finish up a burn of her own. I walked away with a tasty pile of powder blue and peru and it was nearing ‘shroom time.

This list contains the following: Acorn’s Cap (stupidly common), Camel’s Mane (not terribly bad), Sun Star (I’ve never seen them), Pool of Tranquility (very uncommon), and Dung Rot (the ‘oh, crap’ of the list, pun unintended).

Sun Stars are ‘daytime’ mushrooms that apparently only grow in the western deserts of Queen’s Retreat, so that would be another day.

The Dung Rots scare me. I’ve only seen a couple in my months of wandering. Supposedly they spawn in areas with soil acidity levels of 32,000+. That’s an arbitrary number, but it is large. This is the equivalent of mulching your garden with the contents of a dozen car batteries. In theory, if I can figure how to pollute the ground properly, I can make them spawn. Although no one has ever done this before, I’m not easily dissuaded from my virtual pseudo-science! I have five rarely-used levels of ecology and can test for heavy metal pollution, soot, soil phosphor levels, ground water levels and soil acidity. Ecology supposedly plays a major part of our ecosystem, but no one has quite figured out the mechanics behind it yet, due to it being so...cryptic.

That left the other three and I figured the rarest were the Pools of Tranquility, henceforth PoTs, so I checked Shroomdar to see when and where they have been sighted.

As luck would have it, PoTs have been found recently in Stillwater, not too far from the chariot. I loped over, climbed a rocky ridge, and when shroom time came, one popped up next to me! I surveyed the landscape for others. I realized with dawning horror that I wasn’t alone on the ridge: another fungus forager was darting around, devouring mushrooms! He was on the other side of the caldera-like ridge, so I scooted around and found several more on my ‘side’, near the base of the slope. When all of the mushrooms were gone, I had nommed five of the seven PoTs I needed. I made a mental note to return tonight.

Mushrooms typically last about 30 ‘real’ minutes before despawning and different ‘flavors’ spawn at different times after midnight. Checking Shroomdar, I still had 10 minutes before Came’s Mane spawned and they had been sighted in Saqqarah.

I scootched on down, getting lucky on the chariots and not wasting much travel time. Fortune smiled, and I came across a large spawn of them on my way to where they were seen and ate all seven in a single spawn!

I became greedy and asked in a Mushroom Hunter guild channel if anyone had seen any Acorn’s Cap. Time was growing short on those, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. No one had, but the general suggestion was ‘Stillwater’, a little north of the Chariot. I’d try it. I warped back to Mandisa, whom I had left in the backyard, guarding the temple... and saw an Acorn’s Cap right by the Nile! And another....and another... In short order, I had eaten my fill of those as well.

In one night I had knocked out over half my list!

I performed some basic acidity level testing both before and after burning a firepit...no change and no pollution. I’ll try glazier’s benches next.

Mandisa’s hour of Towers came...and I was blissfully slumbering by choice. I’m not going to let the desert rob me of sleep again. *grin*

06/19/09 Keep a-pumpin’, growin’...

Logged on to find I had –just- missed mushroom time, so that Pool of Tranquility and the elusive dung rots would have to wait for another time. I decided to occupy myself until I could go hunting for the Sun Stars which spawn at precisely noon and a diversion was quickly located: more of the SA Aqueduct had come online overnight, including a cabbage tower!

I made my way down to the tower to gawp at its usefulness, seeds in hand. This may not draw people from distant regions, but it’ll keep the locals from going abroad to grow beetle chow! I grew a cabbage plant to see. 33 cabbage from one planting. Yeehaw!

In short order, I grew over 1500 cabbage and had it stashed away in the terrarium. All we really need now is an onion tower and we’re set.

Meandered my way down to Meroe , near the western map border in the hopes those delightful mushrooms would appear. Mandisa joined in the fun as well, warping in whenever a cicada cage was discovered.

At long last I arrived with plenty of time to spare.Chilled out and when the noon hour came, sure enough: mushrooms on the horizon. These grow in pairs, it seems, with another pair in sight distance if lucky. In a few moments, I had eaten my seven and had one left over that I pocketed as a momento.

All I have left now for this page is one PoT and those damnable Dung Rots.

Ecological update: I tried generating soil acidity again, this time with glazier benches, but no luck.

06/22/09

Not much desert activity to report this past weekend-- much of it was occupied with my eldest’s birthday party and a Torchwood marathon

The aqueduct finally hit sand and I’ve started growing onions to pad up our score. Due to the ease of growing the suckers, I can run 13 beds simultaneously and it’s a bit of shame we were never able to find an onion tower. In the end, diania and Daniels built literally a dozen extra towers in a fractal pattern trying to desperately find a carrot or onion grow spot. When all was said and done, when passes came, the winners were the ones with scores in excess of 9800 harvests. Ours were around 5600. I’m going to need to grow a lot more veggies.

Continued working Darkest Night. The Pools of Tranquility were precisely where they should’ve been and were cheerfully devoured without fuss. Otherwise, despite hitting the mushroom spawn points several times, I’m still six Dung Rots from finishing that page.

Tiles, tiles, tiles! I burned all of my ovens, a couple of Rabble’s, one of the public ones and brought the temple up to 30k glory! Unfortunately, the pass went to a Temple with a score just shy of 45k. It’s hard not to get discouraged sometimes.

06/23/09

Another night, another failure to find Dung Rots. I swear Darkest Night is contending with Temple for ‘most annoying Test’. Apparently I am nowhere near alone in my frustrations: complaints about recent changes to mushroom spawn size and frequency have made the test nigh impossible for some. I’ll keep plugging at it off and on, but I’m going to turn back to Temple for now.

Traded tiles with Arame and picked up some light blue and light sky blue tiles. Temple is now weighing in at 31k glory and I noticed AlexisBelle has several brownish colors I could use. I’ll try to trade with her later this week and add another 1k to the score. Sigh—so many colors needed. I’m going to have to face facts and start gathering resources for a fifth personal oven. On the plus side, resin is a lot easier to get now that most people are ‘done’ with ovens: it isn’t that unusual for me to get 4 or more resin from a single tree. My personal record is 12 hawthorn from one scraggly shrub.

I should go ahead and start getting the stuff together this week. I know a couple of good spots in Heaven’s Gate and Queen’s Retreat to build.

On the tech front, Advanced Chemistry has been released and put on timer in under hour. This technology will give us crematories, which is a more expedient (supposedly) method for generating ash.

Also, they had a miniature “role-play event” this past Sunday (it was gods-awful), but resulted in wheat being released. I haven’t gotten ahold of any yet, but as I understand it, there are a number of different strains that will only grow during certain times of the year and they take a long long time grow, in some cases up to 15 minutes. I’m not exactly knocking myself out to get any just yet.

06/24/09

As mentioned yesterday, I’ve come to accept I’m going to need another oven. I’ve been gathering resin when I think about it over the last couple of weeks and have enough now if I traded hawthorn for folded birch. I’m going to need a lot more iron, some brass, and a few thousand clay bricks...again. I’ve placed an order with Rabble for 200 more moonsteel and 20 brass and will pay with a goodly chunk of gravel and linen. I expect to spend one night mining and another forging. We’ll see how enthused I am when the time comes.

Tile trades are coming along nicely. I traded herb seeds to Pascalito for a couple of colors I was missing entirely (light slate gray and moccasin) and have enough spare seeds to make a couple more similar trades should the right colors come along.

The largest pending trade I have right now is with AlexisBelle, which will take about a week to complete, but wipe 8 colors off my ‘to get’ list, mostly browns that have been eluding me. Add to that lilac owes me some crimson tiles and RosieRazor has expressed some interest in trading and I’m coming along on the temple nicely. With the addition of some indian red I burned last night, the Temple is just under 32k.

I think tonight will see me gathering clay in Khmun while I burn some Dark Goldenrod tiles.

06/25/09

...And for once, I’ve done exactly what I set out to do! Gathered a couple thousand clay while burning dark goldrod tiles, then came back and used the SACFAR facilities to turn those into wet bricks. As a side note, Numaris has been replacing the kilns that wear out at SACFAR, but I find it a little tacky to use those personally when I’ve got 20-something kilns at home.

Rabble dropped in and delivered the metals I ordered and I paid him with a ton of gravel and some linen.

On tile trades: Contacted Rosie and she’s still getting her list of tiles together, haven’t heard from lilac, Alexis is dutifully burning towards our trade of 7 colors, Inkoaten has not been online but I hear he has an orange-red oven that would give me a few wonderful colors—I must find him, and then there’s Numaris.

I finally kenned onto a good idea to pick up the pace with my trades. Instead of contacting people who have been advertising, I read the wiki user pages of the people who built aqueduct towers locally and stalk them! This is how I found out about Inkoaten’s oranges and Numaris’ aquas and turquoises. Got in touch with Numaris and he was very glad to make some trades. I set up a nice deal and after a while I was able to add Cornflower Blue, Medium Turquoise, and Aquamarine to my temple in bulk. My glorious temple’s score is now 32,886 and I’m expecting this week’s pass to be in the 46k range.

In between trades, I baked all 3k bricks for the next oven, gathered the last resin needed and started working the metal goods. That’s going to keep me occupied until sometime this weekend, I’m certain and I still need to mine more iron.

06/26/09

Part of the ‘win conditions’ for Tale in the Desert is that Egyptians must design new Tests for the next Tale: one for each discipline. Unpopular and sucky Tests are thus retired to make way for new, and hopefully more interesting propositions. For the first time in just over two months, a new Test has been released, and the first of the ones designed by Tale 3 players: The Test of the Hexaglyph. This Thought Test involves gods-know-what, but the creation of one requires a ton of exotic metal wire, mandibular glue (finally, a real use for ants!), miscellaneous oddities, and a 100 orange paint.

To my delight, I found that my orange paint recipe isn’t that bad: some clay, a lot of carrots, a little lead and saltpeter. With my upgraded paint lab, I can knock out 100 units of paint in a few seconds. A lot of people don’t fool with paint, because working out recipes is extremely ‘fiddly’, but I’m ‘ok’ with much of it. Being the type of person I am, I made some for Rabble and have a standing offer for my local Shabbat Abanians (Shabbats? Shabbatanites? Shabbanists? Abholes?”) to mix paint free if they bring the components.

Principles will involve building and tearing down, getting 7 ‘good ratings’ on one left up, or beating three that have passed. Aside from Venery, Thought doesn’t appeal to me, so I’ll likely wind up just playing the three a few weeks from now.

The evening found me burning a few ovens (A, B, and C) to shore up a few colors in the temple and adding to trade stocks slightly. Made a couple of papy runs and traded 150 to diania for 50 cadet blue tiles. Given that she’s the only person in Egypt with this color of tile, I consider it papy well spent. All total, only added another 550 glory or so to the Temple.

Forged ahead, making most of the moonsteel sheeting for the next oven. Got really annoyed with myself when I found a few hundred 'extra' folded birch resin I had thrown in a random chest one day. It could've saved me a little hunting a few days ago-- not that resin is particularly rough to obtain now; the trees in my camp yielded the unheard of 6 each yesterday. Still putting off mining iron-- I'll have to tonight if I want to drop the oven on Sunday evening.

Added Aplus (Cali’s husband and Goods teller) to the list of quit players. Although we have a census of paid accounts, I wish we had a count of active accounts—logged in at least once in the past two weeks, for example. If I had to guess, discounting mules, I’d put the number around 450. Interestingly although probably not surprising, the ‘survivors’ are forming a tighter community, at least in Shabbat Ab. I’ve heard reports that Meroe is ‘dead’ and Heaven’s Gate only has literally a handful of active players. Shabbat Ab stays ‘bustling’ with pass through traffic as well as regular chatter in regional, but I think we’re more of the exception than the average.

We seriously need more Tests available to keep player retention higher.

06/29/09

Friday night became “Build Another Oven Night” as I realized with some surprise that I had enough iron and iron ore to cover all of the miscellania that the oven required, except for the 2 pinch rollers. I traded a basket at the Goods for a pair when all of the smithing was done and by midnight I had an oven-in-a-box.

This left me with the unfortunate task of finding a good place to build it. I really wanted some of the more exotic colors, but Falcon Bay and Nomad’s Paradise are carpeted with Raelis already, leaving a dearth of pristine clay. I expressed my concerns to the Pilgrimage and AlexisBelle came to the rescue—she knew of a possible spot near the east map border. A quick confirmation later, I was on the way! The patch was located next to large campsite, abandoned now and Alexis’ only stipulation was that she claim the campsite when the salvage laws permitted. I readily agreed and the oven went up. Once a tile was dredged, I spent a couple of hours testing the colors.

This oven produced a number of blues and sea-greens. All in all, it produced nine colors I could not before! Rather a pity I had all of them already in my temple due to trades. Still, more diversity is good and it will add to my trade stocks in the coming weeks.

The next morning was...a bit of a departure from my normal universe. I had a number of people randomly chat me to trade for tiles. Meeting each in turns, I cleared out a surprising volume of stocked tiles. I only got one or two new colors out of the deals, but wound up with thousands added to my temple score. I knew it wasn’t going to be enough come Sunday, but I was curious to see how close it fared. Answer: pretty poorly. The pass went at 45.3k or so, about 8k more than my temple. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’re rapidly getting to the point where it will take thousands of tiles to add each 100 to my score.

Played around with hexaglyphs—there’s been a handful built in SA and I set myself to beating a couple. Rabble noted he had built one and tore it down for the principle pass and was going to give me glue, cut gems, and metalblue from his leftover salvage so I could build my own. I thanked him and beat the ones I played, making internal notes of the strategies the designers employed.

I attended a dig of Rabble’s and spent an hour picking up rocks in return for 150 cuttables and 30 medium stones or so. We’ve come a long, long way from when I was happy to get 15 and 2 respectively. I also note with some mild amusement that I now wind up being a picker at nearly every single dig I attend.

I successfully spent the weekend not growing wheat. There were a couple of wheat-growing contests that didn’t interest me, so I was happy to let others tend to their crops while I burned ovens and gathered herbs.

Sunday passes came and went. Still 3k off passing the Test of Life and I have covered the Temple already. The big surprise came from Numaris, who passed 3 single pass Tests at once: Pathmaker, Hexaglyph, and Bijou. As a result of Numaris’ victories, Rabble passed Prophesy.

Time for me to build my own hexaglyph! I devoted myself to mining a pile of iron (after repairing a collapsed mine) and burning my last 1k charcoal to run the ten student forges in SACFAR, knocking out 25 iron bars, 400 nails, and a number of iron straps in record time. I already had 100 linen and orange paint on hand and in the end, I assembled my chalkboard in my trade building near the chariot stop and designed it with what I hope is a challenging puzzle.

Now, the waiting begins!

06/30/09

Logged on to mild disappointment: no one had played my hexaglyph in the past day, so the only vote it had was Numaris’. I played Numaris’ hexaglyph again the previous day and found that it was bugged: successful completion didn’t advance my principles tab. I had reported the bug, but they had not yet fixed it. Teppy had spent the day addressing the in-game lag and everything is working much better, so I have no complaints at all there. Besides, it’s moot if I can pass the Test myself...

I advertised my puzzle a bit and went on with my plan to burn a few more tiles. I’ve long since run out of ‘new’ colors I can burn, so what I’m doing is rotating ovens 2-3 one day, the others the following day, picking the color that has the least amount in the temple already and divvying up the results between the temple and my trade stock.

I started my “A” oven, leaving Mandisa and her 3k offline onions to guard it, then hit the road. After hitting up one of Rabble’s ovens, I jogged over to Khmun and tapped my “B” oven. Home again to wrap up that oven then a quick resin run before jogging out to the fartherest corner of Heaven’s Gate to bake at Rabble’s oven there. I needed some more indigo, so I let it burn while I wandered away from the keyboard for a bit.

When I got back, I had a pleasant surprise: the oven was showing purple! I didn’t know the oven could produce that one and I only had a single tile of that ‘flavor’ in my temple already, so I hastily stopped the burn. Indigo can wait!

After returning home, I sorted the piles and filed the tiles. Current glory score: 38,147.

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