I must admit to mixed feelings about A Tale in the Desert at this point. It's clearly a work of genius, on many levels, but I'm increasingly wondering if I'm good enough for it, which is an odd place to find myself.
One of the other Hemlock Beach residents came up with a quite astute theory, as we were chatting over the brick racks. ATitD attracts two sorts of people, the Gamers, and the Simers. I suppose we might identify those as Achievers and Socialisers, in Bartlespeak.
When the Telling starts, both come to have a go at it all. The Gamers, of course, hit the ground hard, and really go for it. To them, the tech tree and Principles, and Tests are the point if it all - a score perhaps; content. They'll go for it, pursuing the goals set before them with zestful abandon, completing a lot of them, getting quite far. Many will 'win', whatever that means in each individual case. The Simers also start off on this great collaborative journey, making friends, communities, even a Nation, but at a more leisurely pace.
Much like the Hare and the Tortoise, the Gamers either get what they wanted out of the game quite early, or get bored and move on, while the Simers pace themselves, working together and indeed, thriving on the very Socialiser bias that the game has by design, and so stick at it for a much longer span than the Gamers, and at this late stage, are probably most of the remaining population of the game. The Gamers have mostly all moved on by now, leaving only buildings and monuments behind (Which I'm out there crowbaring for resources!)
I'm not sure where this leaves me, to be honest. I'm a Bartle Explorer, and I'm not sure where I fit in all the above. I'm quite fascinated by the tinkering of it all, but am not especially driven to tick off all the boxes, and at the same time, am not the sort of person who throws themselves into a whole new Community with a view to power, or indeed participation. The whole business with The Hole has put a bit of a dampener on things for me really, (Needs 12+ people working together to make further progress 'as intended') and I've given up on the 'getting there under my own steam' plan entirely. Wikis and spoilers ahoy!
So I've cracked open the stash of looted materials that I can't actually gather myself yet, giving me a bit of a shortcut into further elements of gameplay, and I'm glad I did, because the Blacksmithing is nothing short of brilliant, and I'd have never seen it otherwise.
While in most games, making a blade is at most, a matter of finding some metal, clicking a menu and selecting 'Make Longsword!', in ATitD, things are characteristically much more involved, and in a somewhat abstract way, requires you to actually be good at shaping metal, after a fashion.
To do it, you need to make an Anvil, various hammers, and then scrounge up some metal. You place the metal on the anvil and select what to make. Then things get really complex:
Once a project is selected, the slab of metal shows up in world on the anvil. The above is the starting point for a Carpentry Blade, a useful object that helps automate the Board making process.
Then, you select a hammer, select how much force to put into the blow, and then click the metal itself. The metal slab is deformable, and will dent at the vertex where you clicked, by the amount set in the Force menu, like so:
Boink! A Force 9 hit on the nearest corner with a Ball Peen Hammer. The Ball Peen seems to cause a pointed dent, the Round Hammer a rounded dent, and the Shaping Mallet acts to flatten the area around the vertex clicked. There's also a Tungsten Chisel I can't make yet with the swag we've liberated so far... not sure what that does!
Clicky clicky clicky!
Any time while working, you can show the Goal Display, which changes the slab to show you what a perfectly beaten item should look like, and the object of the minigame is to hit the slab enough times, with the right force in the right places to make the working piece resemble the Goal Display as closely as possible. As you work, you can show the current Quality, which gives you a score, out of 9999 I think, based on how close you are to the Goal shape. It also shows you how many whacks you have left. Using Copper, you get 160 'hits', before the slab can't take anymore, and you have to finish. Presumably more durable metals can take more of a beating before you have to give up.
When that happens, (or before, if you choose Complete), your final Quality score determines the quality of the finished item, which impacts on how durable, or useful the item is. Real craftsmanship required!
Here's how I did, on the left and what it should look like, on the right.
I thought that was quite close, but there is an incredible level of subtlety involved in the art, as this hamfisted attempt only scored an adequate 5530, out of 9999 or more. The blade is still useful in my Carpentry Shop of course, (3000+ for that) but is likely to break much sooner than a more finessed masterwork.
Other items to be made have different shapes to aim for, and different quantities of metal to make up the initial slab, including the elusive 9999+ Shovels, which when used with Super +40 Endurance Cooking foods, may possibly mean I can dig a hole all by myself!
The Hole remains important, because without the stones it provides, I can't learn to mine my own metals, and am dependent on finding rickety equipment with no witnesses nearby, and without a renewable supply of metals, I can't play this fascinating minigame for very much longer. But despite the necessity behind it, I find myself distracted by the sheer novelty of this extremely nifty and very elaborate take on the usual MMO staple of 'Blacksmithing', one in which real skill is a critical element, one that can be learned and perfected.