Retrospectus: A Tale in the Desert's Crafting System

I had originally intended to give a rundown of my thoughts on ATiTD in one post, but then I started writing it, and the crafting section became long enough to warrant it's own post. So, here is Part I of my ATiTD Retrospectus.

Crafting:
Well it's definitely a good thing they got this part right, as the game consists of 90% crafting. But let's talk a little about what is right about it. For one thing, it is entirely possible (and actually required at the beginning of the game in order to become a citizen), to bootstrap yourself up from nothing. You can gather grass and wood with your bare hands, then dry the grass into straw, then combine the straw with mud and sand (readily available in unlimited quantities) to make bricks. Then use the bricks to make a wood plane, which can then be used to make boards, and so on.


Another amazing aspect of ATiTD crafting system is the introduction of player skill. For many productions, you don’t simply gather the necessary materials, hit the create button and then watch a little bar fill up. Certain creation processes are simplified along those lines, but many others require that you actually get your hands dirty, so to speak. For example, when making charcoal, you are presented with a little pop-up screen displaying the level of heat, oxygen, wood, water and danger, as well as a progress bar. The hotter the furnace, the faster the progress bar fills. However, if the oxygen level or heat drops to 0, your fire goes out. If the danger bar hits the top, your entire batch burns up and you have to start over. You can manipulate the bars by adding wood, adding water, and opening or closing the flue. It takes some experience to learn to operate a charcoal oven. I failed on my first 3 or 4 tries before I finally had a successful run. And then I went ~50/50 for a few runs after that before I got the hang of it. And even then you still get better, learning to use less wood as well as learning how to run it hotter (and thus closer to the danger line) to complete the task more quickly!

Let’s use blacksmithing as another example. You gather metal and place it on an anvil, choosing from a list of what you would like to try and make. You are then given a flat slab of metal and shown what shape it needs to be in. You shape the metal by choosing from one of four different tools, choosing how hard you wish to strike the metal with that tool (from 1 to 9) and then selecting where on the slab to hit. The metal slab is then deformed (in 3 dimensions) based upon your selections. The closer you can make the slab resemble the desired shape, the higher quality item you can make. I spent a few hours trying my hand at smithing, and learned how to make a halfway decent sawblade, but was never able to master anything else. Smiths who can consistently make high-quality hatchets and shovels always have a demand for their services and goods.

These little crafting interfaces are sometimes a mini-game in of themselves, and not every player can master every skill. There are no real hard-coded limits here. If you want to try your hand at blacksmithing, glassblowing, charcoal making, beetle-raising, winemaking, and everything else, you can. The odds of you being a master at more than one or two skills, however, are slim.

The thing that I find most fascinating, and a complete breath of fresh air, is the interactivity of the crafting system and the involvement required by the player. Crafting an item is not simply a number comparison; it's the player interacting with the game in a meaningful way to create useful objects. This is what MMO crafting should be like, not number-crunching in a spreadsheet.

Building a Bigger Obelisk

So it's finally done! We have completed our Very Large Obelisks in ATitD and cancelled our accounts. A good number of players in the game probably think that we're jerks for making them larger than we need to (your obelisk only has to be 1 size larger than the current largest to pass the test), but we didn't build them to please the rest of the player-base. We built them to leave our lasting mark upon the desert. It took a lot of work to gather the materials for these monstrosities. Not only the sweat and time of making thousands of bricks and hundreds of linen, but I also spent many hours negotiating trades throughout the desert to acquire all the rest. All told it took 2 canvas, 8 rope, 528 cut stone, 44 medium quartz, 624 crushed eggshells, 120 candles, 686 slate, 871 dried flax, 402 linen, 335 flint, 2184 clay, 3120 boards and 31,080 bricks to build both of these obelisks!

But, aside from the obelisks, we left no mark upon the land. All of our compounds were stripped and demolished, our copper mine made public, and we even left 4 huge chests full of thousands of unused goods open to anyone who passes by (if you're interested, they're right by the obelisks, just a short jog south of the Cradle of the Sun chariot stop, though they've likely been looted by now).

No you may wonder why people would be annoyed at us? It's because anyone else after us who wants to pass the test of the Obelisk in our region, now has to build it much bigger than they would if we had built ours the minimum size we needed, rather than going for overkill (both obelisks were size 120, and I think the cut stone one is probably the largest of its type in all of Egypt).

Since the obelisk test is determined by what region you're in, many regions have tried to implement 'obelisk queues', where everyone signs up and obediently stands in line, waiting their turn to build. This reminds me of a time way back when, in the Asheron's Call beta, when I went to a dungeon to attempt to acquire some armor (I forget if it was a quest or I had just heard about it). I fight my way into the depths, nearly avoiding death at several points, finally reaching the last room, eager and nervous about facing my foe, when lo and behold, there's a group of ~10 players standing around, waiting for the spawn. They tell me there's a line, and that I'm welcome to grab a place in it. I stand around for a bit, consider trying to just snag the armor and ignore their carefully organized plans, but, in the end, I simply left. And soon after, I quit the beta and never played Asheron's Call again. I see this sort of over-cooperativeness as one of the downfalls of ATitD, as it leads to stagnation and boredom.

In this game, there really is no conflict. And without conflict, you don't have an interesting story. There are occasional games and contests that you can play against other players, but they're only available at certain times, and often, only a few players actually participate. There's no external threat, and really, no internal threat either. The biggest problem is having people build near you and crowd your space. In other tellings, Teppy (the game designer), had a 'stranger' come into the land who brought with him various issues that created conflict. But, in this telling, this external force hasnt appeared yet, and the knowledgable player-base is simply tearing through all of the technology, completing tasks at a record pace.

Anyway, it seems that the obleisk queue system has been pretty much abandoned in every region by now. And I feel no loss. But I'm not an unreasonably mean guy. If another player had announced in regional chat that they were building a size 92 obelisk and waiting to pass their test, I wouldn't have screwed them over by building my size 120 obelisk before their test was done (your obelisk has to remain the largest in the region for an hour).

In my mind, these obelisks are both a mounument to our time spent in the desert, and a challenge to those who come after us: Build a bigger obelisk... if you can!

A Parting Desert Legacy

My girlfriend and I started playing the latest release of A Tale in the Desert a few months ago. We've built our compounds, had our fun, but our interest has waned (more on that in another post). So, we've decided to liquidate everything we own in-game and build the biggest obelisks we can. These structures never decay, and cant be torn down, so it will be our parting legacy for the world. It is unlikely our obelisks will be the biggest in the entire game world, but they will hopefully be the biggest for our region (our camp is in a sparsely populated area).

So, if anyone is currently playing ATitD and is willing to trade, we're looking to acquire the following items:

Linen
Flint
Crushed Eggshells
Cut Stone or Cuttable Stone
Medium Quartz

My character name is Mrmarbles. Check my in-game info for a list of goods I have available for trading.

Hit the Read More link for a complete list of items we have for trade.


MISC:
Barrel Tap, Bauxite, Beeswax, Cactus Sap, Canvas, Charcoal, Clay Lamp, Clay Mortars, Iron Cookpot, Copper Cookpot, Copper Pipe, Copper Sheeting, Copper Straps, Copper Wire, Crucibles, Dirt, Dried Papyrus, Firebricks, Flystone, Leather, Medium Stones, Nails, Oil, Papyrus, Papyrus Paper, Papyrus Seeds(hf), Wooden Pestle, Powdered Emerald, Pulley, quicksilver, Rope, Sail, Small Barrels
Sulfur, Tar, Saltpeter, Thorns, Wooden Peg

GEMS:
Large Diamond, Large Emerald, Large Quartz, Large Ruby, Medium Diamond, Medium Emerald, Medium Ruby, Medium Sapphire, Medium Topaz, Small Diamond, Small Emerald, Small Quartz, Small Ruby, Small Sapphire, Small Topaz

RESIN:
resin:Ash Palm, resin:Bottle Tree, resin:Cerulean Blue, resin:Chakkanut Tree, resin:Coconut Palm, resin:Cricklewood, resin:Delta Palm, resin:Fern Palm, resin:Folded Birch, resin:Giant Cricklewood, resin:Hawthorn, resin:Hokkaido, resin:Kaeshra, resin:Miniature Fern Palm, resin:Mini Palmetto, resin:Ranyahn, resin:Spindle Tree, resin:Stout Palm, resin:Towering Palm,

TOOLS:
Scythe:Quality 2000, Shovel:Quality 8143, Hatchet:Quality 3766, Hatchet:Quality 6160, Hatchet:Quality 6362, Archaeologist's Shovel:Quality 5301, Heavy Mallet, Wide Tungsten Chisel, Knife:Iron, Knife:Knife, Knife:Flint, Lead Chisel

METALS:
Aluminum, Antimony, Clinker, Copper, Iron, Lead, Platinum, Tin, Tungsten

GLASS:
Ash, Lime, Limestone, Potash, Red Sand, Soda, White Sand, Fine Glass Rods, Glass Blade, Glass Jars, Glass Rods, Test Tube:Quality 4442, Test Tube:Quality 4626, Test Tube:Quality 5729, Test Tube:Quality 6555, Thistle Tube:Quality 3152
Thistle Tube:Quality 6286, Beaker:Quality 1, Beaker:Quality 983, Florence Flask:Quality 3028, Sheet Glass

FOODSTUFFS:
Barley (Raw), Cabbage, Cabbage Juice, Cabbage Seeds, Camel Meat, Camel Milk, Carrots, Carrot Seeds, Coconuts, Dates, Garlic Seeds, Grilled Cabbage, Grilled Carrots, Grilled Fish, Grilled Onions, Honey, Leeks, Leek Seeds, Malt (Raw), Acorn's Cap Mushrooms, Bleeding Hand Mushrooms, Camels Mane Mushrooms, Cobra Hood Mushrooms, Dead Tongue Mushrooms, Dung Rot Mushrooms, Fish Hook Mushrooms, Pool Of Tranquility Mushrooms, Toad Skin Mushrooms, Mutton, Ashoka, Black Pepper Plant, Blood Root, Bluebottle Clover, Cardamom, Chaffa, Chatinabrae, Chives, Cinnamon, Common Basil, Common Rosemary, Common Sage, Covage, Crimson Clover, Dalchini, Dank Mullien, Dark Ochoa, Dewplant, Dusty Blue Sage, Dwarf Wild Lettuce, Earth Apple, Finlow, Fire Allspice, Fleabane, Garcinia, Glechoma, Houseleek, Indigo Damia, Jaiyanti,, Katako Root, King's Coin, Lemondrop, Mindanao, Miniature Bamboo, Mountain Mint, Pale Dhamasa, Pale Ochoa, Pale Russet, Primula, Purple Tintiri, Red Pepper Plant, Rhubarb, Rubia, Sagar Ghota, Shrubby Basil, Shrub Sage, Sugar Cane, Sweetflower, Sweetgrass, Tamarask, Thyme, Tiny Clover, Upright Ochoa, Weeping Patala, Wild Lettuce, Wild Onion, Wild Yam, Xanosi, Yava, Yellow Tristeria, Onions, Onion Seeds, Oil