Comparative Lapidary and Other Computer-Math Trials

In Age of Conan, crafters can be gemcutters as one of two professions. In standard MMO fashion, there is apparently some kind of recipe you need (divided into level/ranks), a consumable 'gemcutting kit' per gem, and gems drop off dead mobs (also divided up into level/ranks). You pick 1 of 3 'cuts' for one handed weapon, two handed weapon or armor, click ze button...some hidden dice are rolled and a random prefix (and stat bonus) gets tagged onto your finished gem. Voila! This results in a lot of trading around of various gems and endless farming in the hope of getting the one special gem type you need to stack oodles of.

According to Google, gemcutting in places like World of Warcraft and Runescape ain't too different. You need to get the gems from somewhere, you have some kind of special level-based requirement in order to cut (a numerical indicator of gemcutting 'skill' or just plain old level), maybe a gemcutting kit (a chisel in Runescape), and voila, a cut gem.

As usual, I am agawk and aghast at ATITD's 'so you think you're a hardcore crafter?' version of gemcutting.

And also as usual, my supreme awesome newbieness at this makes me feel like a useless failure on my first few attempts at it. Highly depressing, especially after watching a pro guildie go at it. (I FRAPS'd it. Mebbe I'll post a vid later.)

I thought I was good at 3-dimensional spatial relationships... Often prided myself on good map sense, spatial 3D trivia puzzles on paper or in wooden blocks, origami and other such things. But this pwns me. Brutally. It is galling. In the extreme. And hence, it has become a challenge that my mind has sunk into like a bulldog that won't let go.

*sighs*

I know, I know, Rome wasn't built in a day. I cannot expect to encounter something new and magically take to it like I was a natural born flyer and soar.

It is true that over time and practice, I find myself becoming better at things in ATITD I had originally thought significantly challenging.

Fer instance, my first few charcoal making attempts were gruesomely laughable and immense bonfire wastes of wood. Recovery of the loss was a simple matter of running around to grab lots of wood though, so it wasn't long before I got the hang of the charcoal hearths. I'd watched a Youtube video on it, but managed to develop my own style, which stood me in good stead when the advanced charcoal ovens came along - because for some mysterious reason, different machines had lil quirks to them. I could never figure out how to use the hearths at my guild, but my own hearth was no problem. When they built the advanced oven, I found that it acted EXACTLY like my hearth at home and breezed through it, whereas some other guild members were screaming that their charcoal was burning up and there was something freaky about the oven.

Blacksmithing, the art of pounding bits of metal with tools into specific 3D shapes, seemed also a mindboggling 3D puzzle, made incomprehensible by the fact that the action of each tool was unknown and had odd results depending where you clicked. My first few attempts turned into badly mauled squished low quality results. Significant hard work and practice eventually got me acceptable standards (in my newbie mind) of 5000ish quality. Which made me bloody proud, even though everyone else could easily hit 6000-7000 and they were seeking 8500+ quality as the GOOD stuff.

Later revisits of the art have seen marked improvement. Studying the simplest guide to carpentry blade making and following it slavishly at first, and making small tweaks later... I'm touching an average of 7000 consistently, which is good enough for self-sufficiency.

Imagine my thrill when I made myself a 7100ish quality hatchet to replace my 5600 attempt, and just today, I pounded out a 6900ish quality resin wedge to replace one in the 5500s.

I don't think I'd ever get to the 8500+ level. I'm a generalist attempting to exist in a world of specialists. Stuff seems to have naturally evolved to the point that people just trade for what they want from the people who do it best. If all I wanted was the end result, I'd do it too. Except my goal in ATITD is to sample all the systems and give it my best shot, so I try to learn every damn thing I can, chanting "process", "journey" and "learning" to myself.

Before gemcutting, glassblowing has been my nemesis.

I can handle GLASSMAKING fine. (Though again, my first few attempts sent heat flying through the roof, and only close re-reads of the wiki yielded the revelation that the heat incremented in ten second ticks and I was being too damn impatient chucking in charcoal without waiting the appropriate length of time.)

Glassblowing, though, has been exceedingly tricky to practice because the materials are so hard to get. There's a long tech tree to follow in order to obtain basic glass materials to convert into advanced materials, and I fail at trading for things. It also gets used up in 60 seconds of practice time, so it's a really long way to go for short bursts of trying-to-get-the-hang-of-things.

I had to bite my tongue and ask a pro guildie for help making some thermometers because I just couldn't manage it the first time. Each also requires an ingredient (quicksilver) that takes 24 hours of real time to manufacture, so it is an extreme waste to burn it up for practice.

Lately, in the slack time, I decided to give it another go. I managed to trade for 25 quicksilver from an established friendly-to-newbies trade guild for something I found relatively effortless to produce (which is great and is the whole idea of trade after all.)

The key, I found, was exactly that. Keys. Needed to be remapped. I had hell trying to use A and S and M and N and B and Q and G in order to do anything within a short space of 60 seconds. My brain fried, bad things happened to the glass, begin vicious cycle of panic until disaster took over.

ATITD constantly amuses me by how MUDlike it is. Lots of offline thought and planning, and a happy cyborg medium is positively encouraged. Macros are allowed (but you have to attend them and be at the keyboard. If a GM finds you AFK, hello banstick. I'm sure some people push the limits, but I'm not that hardcore.) Macros are positively necessary in mining, which is an activity I loathed doing by human capability and still am bored doing it via macro. But I installed a macro program originally used for Asheron's Call called ACTools and learn about tweaking macros anyway.

So, how to remap keys? ACTools couldn't support it, but the other commonly used macro program Autohotkey did. Enter another round of downloading and figuring out the manual in order to write a simple script. Manipulating the glass no longer involved two hands and the keys A, S, M and N but one hand on the arrow keys. So much more intuitive. Leaving the other hand free to check quality, blow into the glass, and pull out the glass when done.

Again, slavishly following a wiki guide, I was amazed when I made 15 of 16 thermometers (one failed because I slipped on the keys and yanked it out too quickly without a proper check of the quality) with very little effort. Suddenly, I was one step closer to pro guildie's capability.

Now there's a ton of other things that can be made with glassblowing, and all of them are much harder than thermos, but hell, I was pleased as punch with the progress. I had begun to understand the system behind it, the rest is just lots of practice and experimentation and hard work in the future.

It is my hope that the same will eventually be true of gemcutting. I'm more than a little intimidated by the scale of it, however, and the fact that I just can't SEE it like I thought I could in a three-dimensional system. The vertices and planes throw me off quite badly and bring to mind MATH in an uncomfortably unpleasant manner.

Still, I like polygons and modular origami and crystals in general, even if I don't understand the underlying stuff behind it, so this is a chance to learn more. Again.

Why couldn't my math lessons had centered around understanding this game? I would have been so much more enthused.