Datarats Untie!

This week, and the next, and probably the week after that (unsoweiter), I have decided to delve into the part of ATITD which caters to the datarats (or datahounds, whatever you call 'em) and meticulous record-takers.

To my immense surprise, I'm finding the longer term aspects of the game quite tolerable. This is a considerable shock, based on my past history of gaming that tends to seek out the short-term excitement factor and that pushes to achieve and see as much of everything as possible.

(I mean, even in KoL, I ended up resorting to "Real Money"TM in order to gallop through normal Ascensions faster and get all the skills quicker to muck around with, until I got tired at about the 23rd repeat + them nerfing everything and making it harder still.

And I still can't see myself playing spreadsheets in space, aka Eve. Perhaps the trading aspect is not a personal pull factor, I've very little interest in trading stuff for the sake of advancing a number behind the dollar sign, accumulation of wealth tends to be, for me, a means to an end, aka a grind. Calculating DPS based on a whole bunch of weaponry data is not my idea of a good time either, nor watching a ship fly (aka hang near motionless) for eons across pretty colored clouds and empty (we hope) black space in order to get anywhere. Plus, there's the whole 'everyone's out to gank each other' mentality which I don't care for.)

But for a change, I find myself quite happy to make one text or excel file after another, and scribble in a million notebooks and pieces of paper (bearing the goodwill that they may make it into a file or notebook eventually, some day) various bits of ATITD trivia.

It's kind of oldschool nostalgic. And it really makes a difference to the Explorer in me that the data is new, unique, different and my own.

In KoL, there was plenty of data. But it all got filed away into a nice wiki really quickly by the Spades there, and after that, it was a case of just following in already trodden footsteps. Already trodden, REALLY far away footsteps.

Yes, there are things that are the same from Telling to Telling. The vets know it and race through those. But you never really know for sure. So they cross-check constantly.

And ATITD has systems which aren't the same, or are avatar-unique, or are so huge that a hundred people could work on it and not fill in all the blanks - not entirely, though you could hope to narrow down the majority of the algorithms and write programs to calculate it (for those datarats so inclined.)

Bug-wrangling is one of them, of course. All those colors and pixel variations can lead to a lot of people having room for unique expression. There are enough predictable patterns that offer stability, but lots of room for being completely different as well.

It's not reliably repeatable though.

There's cooking, which mostly is. And is an example of a system so huge that the possibilities are endless. Cooking Skill 1 lets you mix one base and one additive. A base being a majority of one ingredient and an additive being the minority of another ingredient. Total them up to 7 gives you one meal, 14 two, 21 three, and so on. And there are literally hundreds of food ingredients - herbs, mushrooms and meat/veggies.

The nearer the two ingredients are as recorded on some kind of cooking reaction chart, the better the chances of a meal being formed as compared to getting nothing. Some other bunches of archaic formulas determine the stats given, and possibly duration of the buff. The rarer the ingredients are (in Egypt entire), the higher the potency (higher buff numbers for stats). I think. Haven't delved into it.

Oh, and there is Cooking Skill 1-5. You get to mix TWO bases and TWO additives with a skill of 2, unsoweiter. I'll leave a math geek to calculate the total number of possibilities. Me, I'll settle for the answer of A LOT.

Recipes also have some kind of chance of being Masterpieces, unique to each avatar. Consuming which are in turn necessary for other things, like producing more leek seeds, for Gastronomy points which lead to permanent stat points, and for a future Test apparently.

*pants* *files it away as to-do in the future* (Mostly because cooking skill 3 and up requires a rare ingredient of a Huge Jewel to unlock - which is in turn gained from lots of mining and a good deal of luck, or trading.)

There's paint mixing. Which I want to do some time soon. Besides the initial cost of setting up the paint mixing lab and getting enough stock of the 11 ingredients and 4 catalysts (most of which my hardcore guild has done already), every person has unique paint reaction values that control the amount of R, G, B is added to the paint. So one has to figure out cheap, efficient recipes for getting a TON of colors. There's trial and error and notetaking which does work, and there's also the systematic approach of getting a color picker and a calculator to work out exact paint reaction values so that everything is known for sure.

Um, but those are short term things. Add ingredients, click a button, get a product.

My next two latest crazes are learning about viticulture and the art of the brew.

Yes, WINE and BEER.

Over the course of several days, and under the context of getting other things achieved, I found myself with the necessary ingredients to pay for the bottleneck skill of Cooperage.

Proudly, I took off to learn the skill from the nearest School of Body, prepped my boards and copper straps and ran full tilt towards my guild's barrel vice to make my first small barrel. Which I promptly burnt up in a bonfire of uncontrolled heat. (After a false start of 60 pieces of wood wasted at maintaining a low, useless level of heat.)

Oops.

The second attempt went off considerably better. And Cooperage skill leveled to 2 as well. Yay. (Only 5 more skill points to go.)

Chalk up another day to preparing alloys of brass and casting said brass in a big charcoal-guzzling Master's Casting Box, and I had brass pots ready for Beer Kettles. Add another hour of making copper sheeting (while growing barley for future-malt) and I was READY.

Ready, stoked, and hyped for my first ever YEAST TEST.

See, every coordinate in Egypt can apparently attract a whole morass of microbes. 100 yeasts, lactobacillus, acetobacter and molds. Each. In various succession at different times.

You only want the yeast to make beer. Everything else is BAD. (What a shame. Every time I see the word lactobacillus, I think of cheese and yogurt. Maybe a future feature. :P)

So first you select a spot for thy beer kettle. (And diligently note down the coords.)

Then you sacrifice a bunch of wood and some water to the Microbe Gods. *ahem* I mean, "boil it." The beer kettle cover is then left open for 2400 seconds to attract whatever manner of microbial life may be hanging around in that exact pinpoint area. (It may be sealed at any time.)

The first test, you leave it open for the full 2400 seconds to see the complete pattern of microbes. I was happy to see Yeast-90 and Yeast-98 heading the list, along with other things.

Then it's time to experiment with sealing times, trying to trap that first yeast, and nothing icky like the other microbes which would probably leave you sour or vinegar-y non-beer.

I'm still paused on this step. Will be working on it over the next few days. Brewing in turn means throwing in a bunch of different kinds of malted barley and honey at certain set times (which have to be worked out first via trial and error, and later meticulous data entry might lead to calculators). I have no clue what's going to happen at this point, haven't read up on it yet.

Beer is also apparently a lot faster than wine.

Which, after I saw how time-consuming it was going to be, gave me a kick in the pants to at least get started growing grapes.

Happily, by now, all the necessary components for vineyards are easily obtainable. I lifted some vine cuttings from my guild's warehouse, being hardcore and all, they had already 50+ free for the taking - and started my own mini-orchard of 4 different types of grape vines.

Judging by what others are doing, I suspect one needs a lot more vineyards to brew serious wines, but me, I'm just doing this for fun, as a little moonshine type of hobby.

Again, vineyards at different coordinates produce different flavors. (Brain explodes.) Me, I just put the things outside my compound in a pretty-to-look-at location and I'll find out later if the soil near my house makes my grapes taste like mud.

Vineyards are tended once per hour. (Fortunately, they also hold in perfect stasis if you -don't- tend them, so there is no need to log on like an addict just to maintain some bloody grapes. Though some crazies do, no doubt.)

Tending them is a very interesting strategic affair. There seem to be 7 possible states for the vineyard to be in (leaves wilting, grapes shimmering with moisture, etc), and 7 (or was it more) options for tending them. (Aerate the soil, trim the leaves, etc.)

Most of the wording reflects very little on the state of the grapes. But each is like a secret key that adds and subtracts a set number from a whole bunch of conditions like Acidity, Color, Number of Grapes, Quality, Skin, etc.

Most of the tables have been placed up on the wiki, so there's no need to retrace those numbers, though some are still unconfirmed and there's more grape cuttings (and potential crossbreeds) as yet unlocked - so there's room for interested datarats to find a niche.

The trick is...there's no one optimal solution. Which is like one of my wet dreams. Seriously. Is it so hard for MMO designers to grasp? If there is one best path, people gravitate toward it as the path of least resistance, grind or no grind. If all paths involve tradeoffs, then you have strategy.

If you add to acidity, color, quality (all having some kind of effect on the futurewine, no doubt), the number of grapes may decrease and so on.

What you want to do, dictates the choice you make. Want lots of grapes? Then something else has got to give. Push too hard for quality, and you may end up with zero grapes. And you can't mess with the vines forever, because every move you select, you lose some Vigor. Hit zero Vigor and the vine dies. Gone. Grapes nada. And yeah, harvest any time you like.

So apparently some growers will mess with 'em until all possible moves = vine death before harvesting. Some will just let vigor drop halfway before settling for whatever they've got, etc.

21 grapes in a wine barrel leads to 1 bottle of futurewine (you hope). Leaving it to ferment for at least 1 RL week, if not more, helps the grapes go from juice into alcohol through a bunch of obtuse mostly-solved-in-the-last-Telling formulas. There's vintages too. They start out the first week once the technology was unlocked as vintage 1 and increments per week from there. I think.

Bottom line, that wine bottle you produce is pretty much one-of-a-kind. Unless you made more with the exact same type of grape and barreled them at the exact same time.

(And yes, wine has its uses and demand for certain types will be high at some future point.)

It seriously blows the mind. Me, I'm just gonna tinker with it a bit because I don't have that kind of dedication. Not yet, anyway.

I guess one of the reasons why it's easy to tolerate this sort of stuff in ATITD is because it's not the only minigame in town. You do it by choice. You can do shorter term stuff. You can be a trading meister. You can chat and swim in drama (and listening to chat channels makes the hours pass easily, which is reason number 2.)

On shorter term, skill-based news: I gave blacksmithing another go now that I have loads of copper metal in my desperate mining attempt for a Huge Quartz (see Cooking.)

I can proudly announce that I can produce 7000ish quality Carpentry Blades (which isn't spectacular, good is 8000+, great is 9000+, uber is 9500+) but is a whole lot better than my sorry early attempts of 5000 and 6000.

It was also great because my carpentry bench blades started giving up the ghost shortly after, and I was able to install the better quality ones.

I am also the joyful owner of a 7100+ quality hatchet for mutilating trees for wood, again, a far sight better than my first struggling attempt at 6247 quality.

I doubt whether I'll ever become a master blacksmith, but at least I'm getting better, and to me, it's more special when you're using a tool you made yourself - rather than just buying the best quality one for 40 metal. Which is reasonably cheap when you can't make it yourself, but dulls the significance.