Sunset Six: Monumental Victory

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

At the end of a tale the final tests in each discipline become available: the building of monuments for each of the seven schools. Not only do these constructs need an obscene amount of resources, but they also require their character slots to be filled, specific to their rank in the discipline. A monument needs exactly 1 Oracle, 2 Sages, 4 Masters, 8 Scribes, 16 Journeymen, 32 Prentices and 64 Students. All up that's 127 people!

It doesn't look like much when it starts.

The monuments also hold a second purpose: they contain a player made suggestion for a future test in the next telling! Obviously there are many ideas that get put forward and after the "oracle" type players have a chat with Pharaoh Pluribus they get an idea of which ones are actually feasible to implement and from there can only pick one to go forward.

Imagine my surprise when two of my ideas made it through then: The Test of the Sculptors (Art and Music) and the Hand of Ra (Architecture)! Gotta admit, I am overjoyed that my input will potentially shape the future of the game. Those are the best types of events a player can have in an MMO right?

The Monument of Art and Music!

As my self imposed "final" quest for the telling I decided to try visit all the sites, failing only to reach the Monument of Thought in time which was the hardest to build due to lack of students in that discipline. I suppose like me, everyone was content solving puzzles instead of building them!

From top left to bottom right: Leadership, Architecture, Worship, Harmony, Thought, Body

Did I mention there are strange gods? Well there are. Just uber rare to run into them.

And so, the sun finally sets and Tale 6 comes to a close - it's time to say goodbye to my Level 54 Scribe of Two. While this is the end of my story, it is just the beginning of another chapter for Egypt and who knows, maybe next time it's you who will have A Tale in the Desert.

Thanks for reading! =)

Sunset Six: Exclusion Zone

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

We've finally come to the last two tests of Worship which I feel are the worst from an organizational stand point. In the Test of Festivals you must again sacrifice things to gods (seven this time) to make them happy, one at a time. To work out what things exactly you need a partner to perform a quick ritual at a properly prepared altar (eg. Isis requires seven glass torches to be lit nearby while Bastet needs 21 jugs of milk). Satisfying them is a percentage based on the number of players who successfully pleased the same god in the period of one in-game hour before and one in-game hour you did. If the number is less than three you gain NOTHING.

To this end there is a player made Festivals guild in game that holds scheduled festivals every weekend, one god a day sort of thing. Unfortunately due to my timezone and unwillingness to wake up at 4:55 AM to participate, I'm kinda excluded from this but it does look pretty cool.

A festival in full swing. I'm not there. :(

The final test I haven't yet talked about is the Path of the Pilgrim. In it, you must form a troop of seven and march across the land to visit the very far apart holy pilgrim shrines and give tithes to each to gain points. Good time to mention that every time I've been mentioning a number of players for the Worship tests, they are EXACT. You cannot have less or more. It's worse in this test because you need the SAME SEVEN each time you want to gain points. Changing members results in points going back to zero. Each week, the group with the most points passes. Once again, Jeromai from Why I Game has more experience running this test so I invite you to read his post.

Awesome. Now I just need six other people.

With that concludes all the tests I have access to at the moment, and  now it's time to celebrate with a glass of milk!

Clearly KebiRoz spiked it. >.<

Sunset Six: Be like Jesus

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Continuing with the tests of Worship, the Test of the Messenger, a new Worship test released at the same time as Throne of Pharaoh, is similar to the Test of Beacons. In it you must sacrifice ink and paper at an altar to receive -only- one of seven parts of a ritual. You must then work out with others the full requirements, incantations and sequence and then work as a pair to perform it at the ONE correct altar. The first seven pairs that do this advance, and everyone else is out of luck - needing to wait for the start of the next cycle. Advance five times to pass.

It's good to be the backup guy.

The Test of Leavened Bread requires you to be like Jesus. In it, you need a team of five players to see visions of what needs to be done (randomized), make beer, bake bread then share the bread with others. Specific others. Probably those not in your party. You have seven days to do that before the bread goes bad. You get points for the correct people eating the bread. Yep, give it to your enemies and it's still valid for them to just chuck it out.

Hah, I had all my required guys at the table!

Also requiring five people is the Test of the Humble Priests, in which you must form a devotional group to a particular god and sacrifice something to them in an orderly, structured manner. It's worth mentioning that all these rituals are very specific in what you are supposed to do, who is supposed to do them and what you must type. Making a mistake at any point results in a fail, wasting all those items you sacrificed. As an example in this one "Priest three must do five emotes in specific order (based on his vision)".

Please all five of your randomly chosen gods (out of twelve) to pass.

Sunset Six: Looking for Group

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

The discipline of Worship holds for me, what are hands down the hardest set of tests. While comparatively they don't need as many of the exorbitant items for constructing things they are still usually required as offerings but the real challenge is that all tests needs a group of people. Let's start with the Test of Vigil.

A favored test of pyromaniacs.

In it, you build a large fire then listen to the flames for what it wants to consume. You then have a time limit to get all the said items (which can be anything in game) and burn it. The rarity and number of items increases the longer the Vigil goes on. Failure to burn the requirements on time ends the fire. You individually gain points equal to the number of sacrifices you made multiplied by the number of sacrifices made by -other people-, meaning if you attempt to do this alone you get ZERO points. Highest scores pass the test.

If that sounds tough, you should see the Test of Beacons. Doing some random mundane activity has a chance of attracting a holy altar to spawn nearby. Once it does you have three in game minutes to anchor it to this plane of existence through meditation... by three people. Once anchored the three anchorers have thirty minutes to work out the proper ritual as it only gives each of them a fragmented piece. If you manage to do all of that seven times (including anchoring) you pass.

Anchoring fail, as we needed one more person.

Sunset Six: That's Just Lovely

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Before jumping into the last discipline I thought I'd talk about a few other things first. For example: Offline chores. Once you've manually done something enough times you can start doing it while you are offline too, which I thought is pretty cool.

Travel time is used to power chariot fast travel.

I also like the idea that players can build working ferries (which move faster than swimming) and trade posts which are the only way to actually "trade" between two players. Otherwise you either drop stuff on the floor that anyone can pick up or directly give someone something. They don't even get to say yes or no, they just get the item. I also like the notion of player built "Welcome Banners".

When creating a new character you can warp 20 times in the first four hours to any of the ones already built. Another cool thing is being able to randomly run into the Pharaoh (lead developer) himself!

Much thinner than I previously thought!

Of course there are also things I dislike, such as quarries needing two to four people to run, and balancing the temperature of a glazier's bench to form sheets of glass only to have it crack and disintegrate until your glass fabrication level increases a bit. How does it increase? Through practice and many broken sheets of glass! The last thing for this post I dislike is not really something that's difficult, just something that's yucky: making saltpeter which is used in quite a few things. Behold the secrets of its acquisition!

I'm sure it smells lovely.

Sunset Six: Here's Hoping

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

The final three Leadership tests don't involve any voting systems but the theme of "hoping people do what you want" continues to ring true. In the Test of Plantation, you are tasked with building said plantation and then growing and storing the most cocoa to pass. A tree can only be harvested once every day. The real catch is that every time you plant a tree, you are asked to name a player. From then on ONLY that player can tend the tree. You cannot name yourself.

No tending your own farm.

In the Test of Coalition you have a week to either join or create your own coalition and then edit the agenda to match the list assigned to you. If you are the sole member this is easy as you can change them at will, but if not you can only change one stance per day and will probably have other players doing the same. Coalitions with the -most- members gain points for said members, with scores varying to how closely the final agenda matched your own. The highest scoring players pass. During this late game however, this is an easy test.

Some interesting agenda ideas in there. Too bad it's blurred. :P

Finally we have the Test of the Bureaucrat which again requires highest individual points to pass. It also seems to be built for the specific purpose of trolling others and creating drama. At least it gives you fair warning with a pretty decent description when you pick it up.

Ho ho ho.

Every day you get 1 point for yourself and 1 point for each person under you, meaning the top dog gets a lot of points. If you seize control the top dog is immediately you. Too bad about anyone not under you though.

Sunset Six: Cover your Cartouche

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

The last of the Leadership tests that involves voting is a strangely named the Test of the Covered Cartouche. I also quite like that there is a warning that "Numerous people have quit the game over this test in past tales," and can see why. First of all you sign up at a University, when the test appears (which is rare) and hope enough other people did the same. If there aren't enough, or you are the odd duck out, tough luck you miss out. Once you are in a group of twelve you are tasked as a team to construct a ceremonial voting booth which requires more than a few, high end materials and cut gems.

Does it really need to look that fancy?

Once done, it's every man for himself in the alternating build and voting rounds. During a build phase, everyone is tasked with building one of the many doohickeys associated with this test, individually. You can construct it anywhere and more importantly, you can increase the size of it by however much you are willing to afford, materials wise. Whoever builds the smallest doohickey is eliminated. In case of a tie for smallest, one of them is eliminated randomly.

Some of the doohickeys.

The voting rounds is where the drama llama can really appear I think. Not so much in my experience during this late game though as people specifically sign up as fillers for others to pass, but I can see that when that drive is there to "win" you'd probably vote out the person who is building the best stuff, or has the most materials, or you simply don't like. The person with the most votes is eliminated, or in case of a tie, one is eliminated randomly.

If everyone is too nice and no one votes? EVERYONE IS ELIMINATED. Yep. No being nice here!

Unfortunately since I encountered this test early I goofed on the second build round since I didn't know how to get leather. For future reference, you nab a wild sheep, shove it in a pen where it can't escape then murderize the f*** out of it and take the loot.

Nice that some of my old MMO skills are still handy. :P

Sunset Six: Powers of Power

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Now that we have paper we can do some Leadership tests! It occurs to me that many of them also rely on a voting system so lets go with those ones first. In the Test of the Demipharaoh, players "compete" every month to earn the titular name, and the perks that go with it. Once signed up you are put into a pool of seven people and you have three or so days to convince the majority of them to vote for you. Winners advance into the next pool (pools that end in ties means everyone there loses) and so on, until only two are left at which point the whole of Egypt gets to vote on the winner. Often, there are also public debates that happen as well.

No prizes in guessing who I voted for.

A player who becomes demipharaoh gains the ability to exile (ban) seven other characters for the rest of the Tale. When you consider that this Tale has been going on for a number of years now you can see how much that can hurt. Furthermore, as long as they have at least one exile power remaining, they themselves cannot be banned. Yep, GMs don't need to do the banning around here so you need to behave! Even now during the sunset, this is one highly contested position.

Similarly there is the Test of Hegemon which involves candidates building tables across all the regions and then getting the residents of those regions (you can elect where your home region is) to vote for them. Whoever holds the most votes in the most regions wins the position of Hegemon. This one is pretty easy to win during the late game as again, there is no competition.

Still need more than zero votes though.

A Hegemon has the power to enable any one character to play the game for free for one month. Obviously with the whole thing currently (Tale 6) being free to play, there's not much of a perk there at the moment. The last test I'll talk about today is a nice one: the Test of Mentorship. To pass, you need seven people to build shrines to honor you as their mentor. Also, each player can only build one shrine (as in, ever). Definitely not going to pass this one, but it wasn't hard for me to decide whom to build a shrine to.

Too bad I couldn't build a small one for his cat.

Sunset Six: Marriage Goods

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Balance of Goods continues the theme of Harmony which is guesswork, only this time you need to construct something first: an offering vault. Once built you can then load it with items of your choice (one unit per item) which are then taken up by the gods. You get points for each, but you get more if no one else puts the same item in their vault that week. My optimum strategy? Put as much garbage in there as you can. :P

After passing the test, it also becomes an awesome storage space.

The final test of Harmony I'll talk about is the easiest to pass but one I'm definitely not going to for moral reasons: the Test of Marriage. Yep, pixel murdering is OK but pixel marriage to anyone else but my real wife (who doesn't play this game) is definitely off the table. Anyway, all you need are some pretty common items, an altar for a quick ceremony, five witnesses and boom, you are married. Egypt is also pretty progressive in that you can marry an avatar of any gender and once married you gain the ability to instantly warp to them. Pretty cool right?

There's a small catch: Once married your spouse has access to all your stuff and all your constructs. They can also log in as you. Good thing divorce in game is pretty easy huh? :P The most common solution it seems is that people simply make alts and then marry themselves! That wasn't the case in the next picture though.

Kokabeel and Kamots wedding!

Sunset Six: Guessing Games

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Time to tackle a new discipline, this time that of Harmony which is meant to involve you being in touch with the rest of your fellow Egyptians but really plays more like a guessing game half the time. Still, it is perhaps the easiest discipline to clear - especially if you are at the start of the tale (which I'm not, doh). Let's have a look at some of these tests.

In the Test of Promotion, you simply build a list of players (at the rate of one a week) and should any of them advance in rank (not level - meaning they must be passing tests), you gain points. More when they reach higher ranks. Similarly, the Test of Chains has you building a list of married couples (in game) which builds points if both spouses gain a level during the week. Slightly more complicated because if they don't they drop from the list and you cannot reuse them.

The Test of Reason and the Test of the Critic are also similar in that you must judge both puzzles (Reason) and artworks (Critic) across the land to gain points. You get more points if your view lines up with the majority of other voters and it's a pretty good method to ensure non-biased voting.

Each week you can also see how balanced you are.

The Test of the Freeman is another guessing game where you guess the percentage of votes each law will get during ballot time. Laws in Egypt are pretty interesting in that they are player made, and if enough people sign the petition for it - it makes it to the ballot draw. Should enough people then vote on it, the developers actually put in code to enforce it. That's pretty damn cool for user generated content.

Probably should have lowered my guess on Useless Law to 0%.

Sample of a petition I made.

Sunset Six: Exotic Variants

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

The final two tests for the Art and Music category are again, a little bit out of my league resources wise. The Test of the Formal Garden for example requires you to have already caught three ibis to turn their feathers into quills (on top of everything else). That's just for the Gazebo too - the actual garden is made of different plants and based on your knowledge of genetics, horticulture (for lilies) and xenobotany (for roses) to crossbreed them into more exotic variants.

So many plants!

The Test of the Windsong is the only actual "music" test and construct that I've seen in the game. Simply put, you need to make a chime tower and have it play a pleasant tune by creating correctly tuned and arranged chimes, and have seven people rate it as "good". The hardest parts for assembly here are the "cut gems" which I simply don't have practice in cutting. Also doesn't help that I don't have any. :P

Chimes with some Raeli art in the background.

Sunset Six: Up into SPACE!

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Continuing with the discipline of Art and Music, that gearbox lesson from last time was required to build the thing I am most proud of currently: my fountain for Test of Dancing Waters. Also found it cool that ants make glue! Most people have a number of basins that shoot water from one into the other but for me, I just put one basin, two el cheapo nozzles and made it shoot in one direction: up.

Up into SPACE!

Pleased with my showery design, Lazybum was kind enough to donate an explosives package ("with enough gunpowder to level River Plains") to assist me with the Test of Fireworks. In it you must design and display a fireworks show and basically be among the best to pass. It's an expensive hobby, requiring a bunch of materials to make each type of effect but thanks to the package I've got mine ready to go. Just need to be online the next time an official fireworks test is on.

Very cool to play with.

Keeping with the aerial theme, the Test of Flight has you construct a raeli glider port and build gliders from treated boards to put on pretty displays for everyone. No, you can't ride them but there are functional hot air balloon ships you can use in game. The only problem with them is that running is supposedly way faster. :P

My glider port was boring - this is a much better example.

Sunset Six: A Gearbox Lesson

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Gearboxes are required for mechanized things in game, and they look pretty damn complicated to build especially when your only guide of building one is a weird combination like "Gearbox A250-A350 D140-200 G460-560". Fortunately Balthazarr was free to give me a tutorial at the zFree laboratory on how all this works. First thing to know is that all Gearboxes start at A1 and that position always spins at 100%. By using a variety of gears, you can manipulate the speed of the next gear as shown here:

"Same, faster, slower."

You also need to take into consideration the expenses of building the gears you use - simply put bigger gears are more costly to build. Fortunately all the math for the ratios is already done on the wiki so all you need to do is look through the range you are interested (as defined by the requirement, so A has a range of 250-350) to see which sets will be the cheapest to build. The 5/3 numbers on the side there are the number of teeth per gear to achieve that speed with five being medium and three being small.

For this range, the cheapest to build would be A333 D167 G463.

This means that we want A8 rotating at 333%, D8 rotating at 167% and G8 rotating at 463%. To get to that top line, you simply need to make a snake of gears up to the desired spot like so:

Since the gears are all the same size, D8 is spinning at 100%.

That's nowhere near strong enough, which is where using the 5/3 gear combos help to boost it up. Also, the gears can be multi-levelled so you can have a big one right above a small one or one on top of a "spacer" for example. Ultimately the final box of A333 D167 G463, which obeys the initial range of "Gearbox A250-A350 D140-200 G460-560", looks like this:

Thanks for the lesson Balthazarr! :)

Just FYI - It's worse IRL. :P

Sunset Six: Test of the Bijou

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

It might surprise some people that I left this Thought test for last, seeing as it is available at level 10. For me it is an excellent teaching example which more games should do. The idea of the test itself is pretty simple. There's a cutting table and a sample of what you need to match. You then get a big green gem to spin around and hack up however you like, as many times as you like, until you match what is displayed on that player's table.

The big green mess needs to turn into a square with a diamond hole.

Apart from the test though, there are actual "cuttable gems" that you can acquire and I imagine they are pretty rare. On top of that, you need to cut them PRECISELY into specific shapes for some structures - and there are a lot of variations. Goofing up on these means trashing the gem too so you must gain proficiency in them as a player. So much so that there are gem cutting "schools" that feature actual cuts where you can practice the various forms before attempting the real thing.

Gem cutting school at Seven Lakes.

The whole idea of practice makes perfect and letting newbies goof up without consequence due to player skill (not character skill) before facing the real challenge ticks the good design box for me. If you want a more in depth look at gem cutting and bijous I recommend reading Jeromai's Tale 3 experience.

Sunset Six: Questioning Others

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Continuing with the Thought tests, the highest level one is called the Riddle of the Sphinx, which isn't asked by the Sphinx at all. The Sphinx just asks riddles made by other players! To pass the test though, not only do you need to answer riddles but you must make some of your own which are worthy enough to become "Noble" rank. To pass the evaluation stage your questions simply need to get rated "good" by others who see both the riddle and the answer.

I have a Question.

Once it progresses to a "Common" riddle, then people have to answer it "for reals" and this is where it will become a Noble rank or not. Within the first 21 responses the riddle must have 7 correct AND 7 incorrect answers to ascend. If that doesn't happen the riddle is marked as "fallen" and is out of the game. Now's a good time to mention that once a player has answered or evaluated a riddle it won't come up for him again so no cheating for balance. :P

That sounds pretty tough, but I think Pulse of the People is harder. A player creates a game station and posts some questions which people answer - just like a survey. When the survey is done, the true game begins and anyone who has not yet used that station can try answer the same questions. Points are awarded for the answers which were most popular during the survey phase.

Family Feud - Egypt Edition!

Obviously I've not been around long enough to be good at this game. :(

Sunset Six: The Discipline of Thought

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Unlike Architecture, the Discipline of Thought lets you pass the principles of all its tests by simply solving a variety of player made puzzles. To actually pass the tests requires you to build them yourself though AND to have people solve them and rate it as good, which as I mentioned before is a tough balance between not being too easy or too difficult.

Two of the simplest ones for me are the Test of the Pathmaker, which is basically a connect the dots puzzle with a few added rules of blue dots must have a straight line and red dots must be corners with straight lines directly after on each end, and the Test of the Constellation which involves covering up green stars on a "night sky" table.

Easy versions of Pathmaker and Constellation.

Test of the Hexaglyphs can be a fair bit harder. In it, you must arrange a blackboard of hexagons so that the symbols on all sides match the symbols on the glyphs next to them. While the white bordered glyphs are fixed in position, all the others can be dragged around and rotated as you like.

A very challenging Hexaglyph board.

The Test of Venery is the most fun for me, as it is basically like a player-made "treasure hunt". It could be simple and quick or extremely tricky (one I've seen is all maths with the very first clue asking for prime number coordinates >.<) or far reaching - going all across Egypt! I think I'd really enjoy making one of these. :)

Venery sample from Top's Treasure!

Sunset Six: Obscene Amounts

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Thought I'd give a run down on the remaining Architect Tests which require an obscene amount of high grade materials and/or assistance which means the chances of me getting them done are pretty slim. The highest level test is called the Test of Seven Phoenix which is not only pricey to build, you must get OTHERS to build it for you! Worst of all, you won't know -where- or -which- of the seven phoenixes (all with different build requirements) you need to construct until the hour to build them. Fast traveling during this hour negates all your efforts.

In the Test of the Megalopolis you are required to build a huge structure which is actually composed of 49 construction sites which you are supposed to allocate other people to. Once begun you have one week to complete -all- of it. It's only thanks to Balthazarr that I managed to pass this!

Management skills to the max.

The Throne of Pharaoh is a new test that came out a few weeks after I joined the game. It's actually composed of two parts: first build a plinth (which in this case is a bloody huge fortress) followed by building the chair to go on top of it. Up to seven people then need to decorate the chair and each of them get a different build requirement when signing up. They then have three hours to finish and apply their part or they fail.

Pharaoh must have a big butt.

Sunset Six: Not all the Colors

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Another Architecture test is the Test of the Funerary Temple in which you must construct a temple and glorify it with raeli tiles of many various colors. Many tiles of the same colors will not give you as many points you see. So how does one get these tiles? By chucking charcoal into raeli ovens and cooking them - the longer they bake, the darker they get with black being around one hour of burning. Ovens in different regions make different colors too, and not all are available for public use.

An oven cooking and a sample color map.

Fortunately I joined the Zemples guild who specifically exist to help people pass this test for a small fee of burning some colors for them and transporting it back to their base. They have a host of their own ovens available for use too and documented color times which is handy. In exchange, I get to use their warehouses to take 49 tiles for each of their 141 stored colors.

Adding tiles makes the temple grow!

Speaking of colors, there is are also paints you can (and in some cases must) make for things and it is tough, not only because you need the listed ingredients but because making a non standard color (like Yellow) requires experimentation. Also, much like the test of the acrobat hidden variable thing - one persons formula to make yellow is not guaranteed to work for another player.

Making yellow is bloody difficult.