The Planning of Projects

The strategic sandbox nature of ATITD is quite a refreshing change from the tactical linear nature of most standard MMOs.

I find myself having a lot of fun reading up things on the wiki, plotting my next architectural conquest (er, project) and then running around in-game assembling the materials required. An inbuilt to-do list that doesn't require kill X rats and take this to Y NPC (and then bring it back.)

Come to think of it, there are no NPCs. No quests dictated by some guy who tries to tell you a story, but really, you need to kill Z boars for me. In return, I shall give you theez leet lewt. And hav sum XP while yer at it...

There are schools and universities that you approach instead. Sure, they are still going to give you a list of tasks to do. But the crucial difference is that you can wait on doing them, and still have fairly rewarding experiences.

Yes, some content, some skills, are gated by levels. You cannot choose to stay at level 1 and expect to do everything. I suspect that as you get higher up in levels, your choice decreases and you must do some things you dislike if you wish to progress further. To me, that's fair enough, since you cannot claim to be an adept, a sage of Egypt if you are only skilled in one realm of seven.

Perhaps it is the Explorer in me that thinks of Egpyt as being very large, with many areas undiscovered land. Mayhaps it is just ignorance on my part, and skilled veterans have been able to carpet sweep the entire area for resources with bots and an indepth mathematical analysis while I'm just running around doing random and occassional desultory systematic searches.

One thing that does worry me is that rarer resources may end up monopolized by reclusive guilds. If there is no access to them at all, then my interest in ATITD will wane most sharply.

In fact, success in ATITD looks to be quite a chancy thing. And I wonder if that is why it is a niche game, with many people losing interest halfway through the Telling. If there is very little to look forward to, then there is no point staying after a while.

Sometimes, the sandbox nature of the game itself can become overwhelming. My region has been so enthusiastically researching things that I'm not caught up on lots of the technology yet.

Current Goals:
1) Get myself a glass scythe and papyrus basket to cut grass with.
This involves digging up a ton of limestone and soda (get flint first), getting a lot of wood, and stoking a fire over a firepit.

The basket involves growing more papyrus, drying said papyrus, and weaving it on a loom. If I don't have enough twine, I may have to grow some more flax. Or wait for nail technology to come out. :/

2) Try mining.
Except I shall have to locate some sort of guild with a mine. The two current more or less public ones that I'm in do not have any mines that I know of yet.

Either I can try and ingratiate myself with certain private guilds, or I can embark on a great solo dowsing project to find some mines (assuming they are there to be found), or I can wait and hope that someone in my guild finds a mine they want to share with everyone.

3) Work on remaining Tests
I'm still sitting on the Initiation into Thought and the Initiation into Art and Music. Both seem to take up a large amount of materials for something that just sits there, waiting for people to look at it. Alternatively, I could wait and just solve 3 puzzles (in three weeks once they get around to pointing out where these puzzles are, across the continent), or I could rip down my sculpture, which seems a horrendous waste of materials.

Do something, get it done right and all, y'know? I'm half thinking of making some kind of Pharaoh design, but boy, it'll take a while to do.

4) Consider getting myself a small warehouse to store stuff. I seem to collect an immense amount of crap from time to time.

I have a sinking feeling this will mean lots of bricks and boards. I rather wait until I can harvest more grass first, actually.

5) Grow MOAR veggies
I could grind tons more cabbages. I could sit down in a grassy area and try to figure out how carrot waves shift with time. I could attempt another great garlic pilgrimage to solve the persistent mystery of everywhere 1 yields. My sheep eat a crapton of onions, and 5 onion patches aren't enough when I know there's such a thing as a 19 onion magic patch. :( And there's leeks, which I'm not sure what they're used for, but blah.

I could try and figure out exactly how they yield more seeds too. But it seems a little pointless because sometimes they need a male and female avatar at the same site. I'm not a couple playing ATITD, and I'm not dual-boxing just for some dumb seeds.

6) Run into the desert to set up a camel pen in the hope of catching a camel.
This is a gamble. Because the world is apparently divided up into unspecified camel regions, and the open pen with the most amount of straw in it, catches a camel at the stroke of midnight and loses all the straw. So I have to find a place that hopefully a lot of people do not go, while still being near enough that I can get to semi-conveniently to fill with tons of straw, or else my camels will starve.

Assuming that I can even catch a camel in the first place. Some places have no luck with 10k straw, some have 2k-3k straw and no camel, and some smart/lucky bugger went into the eastern desert and caught one for 500 straw, I hear.

Plans plans plans. :/