So I lied...Egyptians do that, wot?

I couldn't get brick making out of my head.

I have a little bit of a... problem when it comes to repetitive Zen-like tasks, y'know? For whatever reason, the ease and challenge level of brick making is well tuned to become an activity I enjoy.

First, you need 4 Boards for Flimsy Brick Racks. So you run around picking wood from trees for a couple minutes, accumulating 100-200 Wood.

The Wood needs to be converted into Boards using a Wood Plane. Wood Planes are set up using Slate and Stone Blades (which are made from 2 Slate). So you run around the shoreline grabbing a ton of Slate.

Then comes your wood processing mini-factory. As a newbie, I set up one. After observing people, on my second round, I went up to 2, then 3, then 4. You set all of them in motion with a hotkey over and over to chug out Boards.

Complications arise when the Stone Blades break. So you better have replacements on hand, or you end up running down the shoreline again. Therein comes the learning factor, for a certain amount of boards, you know there'll be roughly this much breakage, how much Slate should you stock up beforehand so you don't break your routine and kill productivity...

Now I have a ton of Boards, that can be set aside and stored for Brick Racks and other constructions.

Back to Bricks. The Brick recipe is 3 Mud, 2 Straw, 1 Sand. Mud and Sand is easy. Any shoreline (you did set up your compound near a shoreline with mud/sand/trees/water/maybe clay, right?) will provide an unlimited amount.

The basic Straw recipe is pick a bunch of Grass (move left and right on a grassy area, clicking the mouse button or tab button), drop on the ground and wait a couple seconds to minutes depending on how much grass was in your bundle, and it dries to Straw magically.

Now that all your ingredients are in place, here comes the mini low-budget brick factory, set up 9 or 12 Flimsy Brick Racks in a grid, and move the mouse over each, pressing B to set up your bricks like little rectangular chocolates in them.

Wait a bit, and each will draw, changing color. That's your cue to hit T over each and pick up 6 bricks for each rack.

After 5-10 uses, the Flimsy Brick Racks decays, leaving only your bricks behind. So you better have Boards stocked up to make more.

And why do I sound like such an expert on early stone-age brick making?

I found a couple articles on the ATITD wiki and forums (http://www.atitd.net/forum/showthread.php?t=9925) which explained that ATITD wasn't a utopia, unlike what most newbies expect, that there were bound to be personality clashes and disputes over the ratio of 'public good' and 'private benefit' and that fights were perfectly normal and to be expected.

After thinking it through, it seemed rather stupid to get turned off the entire game by one unreasonable insular individual, existing in a low population region of Egypt.

This week was the FREE week after all. Public Beta. Free. Trial. And I was on leave, with time to kill. Did I mention Free?

So I decided to make an entirely new character, and scout out all the regions, listening to the region chat before deciding which area to settle in. Criteria? Bigger crowds, less insularity. And which region sounded like a conglomeration of people that are most like me? (Naturally.)

There was a bit of slight disappointment that I couldn't teleport to the most crowded region ever - crowds mean that technologies get researched faster, though there's more competition for resources, of course.

I made do with the areas they allowed me to teleport to. One area, Kush, sounded quite crowded, but the defacto 'leader' (aka the noisiest individual who seemed to organize most of the activities and lead conversation) seemed more interested in his own research and talking to his fellow peers, while egging on the general community to pool resources together.

Another area, I forget now, sounded just like Freedom at our nonpeak hour. Short phrases, lack of punctuation, and the 'lol's bouncing back and forth had to be seen to be believed. I got out of there in a teensy bit of a hurry. :)

Then I found Virtue. Thank god, not the roleplaying Virtue, or I would have fallen over myself to run away.

But the presentably crowded, reasonably friendly, open to newcomers but not pushy region of Khartoum. There was nice chat to listen to over the region channel, people would stop to answer newbie questions, and no one pushy individual leader, but about 3-4 community spokespeople who treated each other like peers.

I had plans this time to be a semi-hermit. If I set up all my crap in an area where there were no neighbors on the horizon, there wouldn't be anyone to lecture me about respecting peoples' space. I already live in an Asian country where people get packed together like sardines in HDB flats, thank you. Maybe my definitions of 'enough space' are different from yours.

All I needed was to find a slightly-out-of-the-way, but still runnable-to-civilization-in-5-minutes spot.

Then I found IT. Near the shoreline, with mud/sand/water access. Wood-yielding trees about. There was even a tiny patch of clay a little ways down, and a bigger patch further down sound. No other people in sight. And a pond with pretty lilies and some diverse species of flora in the vicinity.

Sold.



Mainly by decorative features. I'm a sucker for vanity and customization. I figure it's the one thing that could give away my true gender (besides my tendency to be over-garrulous in text).

As you can see, I was a busy little bee for about 8-16 hours over two days.

The touch of prior experience helped, as I knew enough to ignore the newbie prompts (which make you reinvent the wheel and go back and forth a couple of times) and go nomadic for a while, collecting skills and tech from schools and universities, and roam until I found the perfect place to settle down.

Knowing the tech trees helped, so I didn't have to break up productivity cycles into chunks of "oh crap, this broke, I ran out of that resource, etc."

And I even manged to join in what would be the equivalent of a 'raid' elsewhere, I suspect. Something that is difficult or impossible to do solo, but easier as a big group and even easier with less people and the correct gear later on.

A 'dig.' Unfortunately, that was before I figured out the correct esoteric hotkey to take screenshots. It was hilarious, though. About 12-15 people standing around, facing off in different directions, doing nothing but a low movement wrist-raising 'dig animation' and an ever-widening and closing hole of dirt.

The idea is apparently to widen the dirt hole big enough for stones of various sizes to pop out. And one or two designated pickers run about, collecting it all. It can, apparently, last hours if you want to dig enough medium stones for an entire region's researched technology.

We only spent about 30-45 minutes (getting together and getting shovels time included) because we just settled on enough medium stones for each of us and one for the public works (so 15 or 16ish).

I overheard another region doing a dig for their research. That one took 3-4 hours because they were out to get 145 medium stones. *faints*

Definitely drama potential here, imo. You've got to seriously trust the dig organizer to aportion out everything fairly. The one that Khartoum ran seemed very reliable and inclusive, because they welcomed all newbies and were happy to distribute shovels to those who didn't have one (I had 3 already, so I was a little further advanced than some) and treated it more like a social gathering event.

It was certainly more people than I had seen for the rest of my time in ATITD. All the neighbors came over to the clambake, in a sense.

And they seemed much nicer than the ones I had met previously.

This means I now have a dilemma again. I'll fess up. I'm fascinated by the crafting systems of ATITD. I would really like to see what the later skills and technologies look like, because those are the more painstaking ones. It'll be cool if I could set myself up as a niche provider of -something- other people are not good at.

Overhearing some people discussing flax 'genomes' - aka coded strings of letters, and figuring out which codes do what (dwarf/giant varieties) blew my mind. Not something I probably would be interested in, but the whole idea that this level of sophistication can exist in a game... Well, it's like nethack, y'know? Systems built on systems, and the depth is...wow.

I'm not broke. I could afford 1-3 months of ATITD, on my December bonus alone. It's cheaper than buying a Playstation game or going out to the movies and what not (I haven't seen Kung Fu Panda, Hellboy 2 or Bolt and I'm still waiting for someone else to buy 'em :P).

I'm of two minds about the small close-knit communities. It still makes me uneasy, but an inclusive one harkens back to the nostalgia of the MUD - with all its ups and down. It's -different- from your usual MMO, for sure.

And I NEED a community that is accepting of semi-hermits and has an open Public Works facility for anyone to use, because there is no way I can get past those roadblocks on my own, without a lot of time.

The present beta Khartoum provides that. And if the same people stay on, there's nothing to suggest the real game's Khartoum will be too different. And there's plenty of room and resources in this region, plenty of hermitable areas.

HOWEVER, these people exist in EST. For the past two days, I have been doing 1am-11am stretches because I can, and I prefer the time reversal.

No such thing next week, and the months after that, once work starts again.

I'd be down to sneaking in a couple hours per day at non-peak hours (possibly at a more relaxed pace) and only overhearing what chat remains on the chat tabs when I log in. If the public works exist then, I can still make use of it, and have the whole place to myself.

It'll be weekends before I can do the time reversal and actually interact with whatever community exists.

I also have this unending stream of guilt that I have way too many games and no hope of ever completing them all. Problem is, I'm not sure that limiting them is the way to go either, because I'm bound to dabble in -something-.

Need to support CoX. I'm playing Warhammer. Try as I might, I'm just highly reluctant to drop LOTRO, and $10 a month is not that much different from the lifetime $199, I have more peace of mind paying in installments (if I ever get my salary flow cut off, then I can stop the expenditure too.)

The question is, do I want to dabble in ATITD? For a while? Until I've explored what I came to, just like with KoL?



Not bad for less than 24 hours of online time. If I space out my personal achievement and rely on the more hardcore ATITD folk to open the path for me, I could probably do a more balanced diet of 1-2 hours of ATITD to work towards some of the later techs to try out.