ATITD Catchall

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A Tale in the Desert was sold off to one of the original players. He also wrote the Linux and Mac client ports, and at one point in time was working on his own MMO using the ATITD server and client code as a basis. Tale 6 was 'beaten', (ie, all of the monuments were built) though it took 4.5 years to happen. (The original intent was for a Telling to last 6 months to a year).

Anyway, a new telling is on the way, with preorders making into the world today at noon, with the general launch occurring tomorrow.

Wow... thanks for sharing that. Believe it or not, I was checking out ATITD website a few months ago, wondering what they are up to these days.

Great to know that this pioneering game still has some legs.

Is anybody else getting into this? I loaded it up and am having surprising amount of fun with it. It's still an acquired taste of a slog, but it does feel somewhat satisfying and it does scratch the itch it was designed to do.

I've been so tempted to check this out, but I really get turned off by the idea of all the politics that may be involved. I really enjoy crafting, and don't mind a grind, as long as there's noticeable progress being displayed.

I'm in game as Hirokache.

The politics are generally optional, and perhaps more optional than usual this time around, a lot of older retired content is available again. Egypt is huge, and there are tons of good 'camp' spots in more remote areas, to make avoiding the social and political issues easier, thought its still possible to do that while remaining in more populated areas, with a bit of care.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the game, to me at least, has always been the legal system. The mechanics have changed a bit over the years, but any player who has passed the Leadership discipline initiation can write and submit a legal petition, that will be voted on by the players. Some interesting laws have been passed in the past. During one of the early betas, someone wrote an innocuous seeming law about the color of your clothing, that was designed and succeeded in the creation of a caste system. One of the early controversial laws in the first Telling was changing the name of someone from "DoucheBag" to "Flower" (ATITD has essentially no restrictions names, since the players at least theoretically have tools to all them to deal with offensive behavior, including offensive names). Pluribus recently gave a chat on how the law system works (which can be found by looking at the ENN logs here. The current batch of laws up for vote can be found here: http://www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Laws. They are not really very good examples of what can be done with the legal system, but given that the legal system had been rather neglected in the past few tellings, its not too much of a surprise that current players are not very good at utilizing it. Hopefully those will be all voted down.

Sometimesdee is around as well, as Sometimesdee. We're in River Plains for the moment ... maybe we should build out a GWJ guild!

My compound is in northern Seven Lakes. Not too far from a "helper" guild that has a bunch of public buildings. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have used their stuff.

But it would be awesome if we had a guild.

Druidpeak wrote:

I've been so tempted to check this out, but I really get turned off by the idea of all the politics that may be involved. I really enjoy crafting, and don't mind a grind, as long as there's noticeable progress being displayed.

I ignore the politics. Well, except for the actual politics (i.e., voting for demipharaoh). There is noticeable progress, because you get to learn stuff, and make more and better stuff, etc.

I played this game briefly a LONG time ago and enjoyed it. Lately I've been looking for a modern crafting-centric MMO that still had the traditional quest/adventure paths, but the best I could find was Wurm Online. The graphics and controls felt terrible with Wurm, I turned it off after 5 minutes.

So, I downloaded ATITD again for the 24hr trial. We'll see how it feels. Currently on Newbie Island

edit: arrived in northern Seven Lakes

So, absurddoctor and sometimesdee started 'Gyptians With Jobs guild in 7 Lakes, where I finally joined up with them. If more people would like to come and join us, that can be easily arranged.

Sweet, what are the coords for you guys?

Somewhat near 2570, -3039 in Seven Lakes. A little east and a lot south of the chariot stop. If you do an "/info Hirokache" you can then click on the guildname and it will show the exact coordinates. It's a bit of a hike from anything, but there are advantages to not being too close to anyone.

I'm still getting some Principles finished and thinking about starting Body tests once I figure them out - let me know if there's anything I can contribute to the camp/guild

Simple stuff is always helpful. Growing onions to feed the sheep, leeks for eventual help in glass-making, and other veggies for grilling and other cooking is always useful. With the changes made to vegetable growing this time around, growing by hand grows annoying fairly quickly, so you may want to consider a macro for that (or skipping it alltogether). Straw for camel-capturing and feeding, as well as bricks, is always really useful. As is gathering silt for firebricks, and wood for all of its uses.

There are a few beehives just north of the camp, by the pass through the dunes. If they haven't been checked within the previous four hours (they will say when they were last checked), its worth doing so. You can either leave the honey/was/royal jelly in the hives or go and stash it in our chests.

Making bricks and boards just to have around is always useful. Guild halls can store lots of bricks and boards, so best to stash them there. We have one carpentry bench up now, with a carpentry blade installed, so if you are standing nearby you can turn on auto board creation. That will stop after 50 boards, but can be useful to run if you are doing other things near the carpentry bench anyway.

Charcoal! Charcoal is always useful, and I find it mildly enjoyable to make. We have the one hearth in that small compound now, but I'm going to salvage that one and build at least three in the dirty compound to the north (probably six eventually).

A more advanced thing you may want to try is to see how much you enjoy the advanced blacksmithing stuff. That involves taking some metal to the Anvil, and using the blacksmithing tools from the nearby chest to push metal around until you get as close as possible to meeting the pattern required to create various things (carpentry blades are a good starting point, as they are relatively easy, there are some good guides available, and they wear out so we'll eventually need a bunch). One nice thing about the anvil is if you mess up, can you just scrap the project and you will get all of the metal back to try again.

And, feel free to ask any questions you have about Body tests, or any of the other tests, as the rest of us have at least some experience with many of the various tests.

Thanks, that's super helpful.

So, to put some closure on this, concerning my enjoyment. I ran through the start island, figured everything out there, then ventured to the River Plains. I walked around for about an hour, and after my experience in the tutorial, knew that I would have a good time with this game. Alas, it is something I just don't have time for, with school going on. If I make a venture back I'll definitely hit you guys up for a place to stay and work, but for now I'm not going to commit the time.

I've spent a lot of time in ATITD in previous tellings, and while I'm glad to hear they've made it to another one I'm just not prepared to make the time investment that it takes to participate in the more advanced areas of the game.

One thing I've always wished for ATITD was that they'd change up the game in some fundamental way. I've lost my taste for the whole School/University "Quest" theme of unlocking advancements, where either the super grindy guilds would do everything, or a region would remain a barren hellscape until one did. The interpersonal conflicts over the Demi-Pharoah voting and Obelisk construction became predictable and frustrating, especially since these would eventually become roadblocks to anyone who wanted to progress up the ranks further than "Subsistence Farmer". Don't get me started on camel poop.

My thought would be to keep many of the basic mechanics but put it on another planet, like Mars. Borrowing themes with the Matt Damon movie, you can work your way up from being a semi-stranded colonist building a shelter, to figuring out how to grow crops, to finally moving into the more fantastic, discovering alien artifacts, while keeping the community experience of working together to find a way home. It doesn't have to be sci-fi as all heck, but ATITD has always played fast and loose with science and history, so bending the rules a bit for the sake of the game seems to be ok.

A Tale on Red Planet... I love it!

sometimesdee wrote:

A Tale on Red Planet... I love it!

Stories Told On Red Mars - "STORM"

Even the Acronym works better

I've ignored the research stuff for a long time now, as I'm more than happy to let the super grindy people work on it while I do other things. For many of the techs, there really isn't much reason to open them in more than one place beyond people enjoying that aspect of the game ... so I do other things, then just make the occasional tech run. Its totally possible to completely ignore that portion of the game.

There has arguably been a fundamental change this time around, in that all tests that have ever existed which they can get to work again will be in the game. The level requirements for most things have been decreased greatly, and beer tokens allow you to essentially 'buy' levels if needed. For me, this means that lots of interesting things that I wanted to do which were previously gated behind things that I didn't want to do are available again, so for the most part I can stick with doing thats that interest me and skip the things that do not interest me.

On the Mars point, Pluribus (the guy that now owns the game) was previously working on a game on Mars that would use the same client and server code for ATITD as a base (I even posted about it here way back when). I suspect he still has that on the back burner, and if he can actually make any money on ATITD some of that would go towards that project.

Tale 7 is finally going to wrap up after some 3 years. The monuments will soon be released, and it will be up to the players to try to complete them in time to 'win' the game. I think February 19th is the expected last day of the telling, but I may not have the exact date correct.

Once the monuments are released, the game will be free to play until the end (mainly to incentivize canceled players to return and help build the monuments). So it might be a good time to stop by for both new and returning players.

Pluribus has sold the game to another player, who went by the name of Malard. An open beta for Tale 8 will run starting in February, with a tentative start date of February 15th. The launch date for the new telling is March 2nd. You can reserve your name at https://www.desert-nomad.com/ now (If you don't pre-order by the first day, you will lose the name reservation ... I mention this because the wording on the web-site is a bit confusing, and seems to imply that you need to pre-order now to make the reservation).

The new owner is supposedly making a number of changes, but keeping them all quiet, with the goal of giving the players the chance to discover new things. He insists the telling will be kept to 18 months ... but I'll believe that when I see it. I can't say not to ATiTD, so I'll likely be dishing out for the full-Tale pre-order anyway.

Wow, I can't believe this is still a thing. I might jump in at the end to check it out, but I think the game really needs an overhaul before it'll be something I'd pay for again.

For example, I'd probably play the hell of it out on my iPad.

Yeah, there are have been a lot of interface improvements over the years, but the 'fundamentals' could really use an overhaul. The new owner has stated that most of the changes for the new telling will be content changes. The person mainly responsible for making interface improvements over the past several years will still be around, so some improvements can still be expected, but they will probably more like 'tweaks' than major changes.

The monuments have been released, and the server is in free to play mode as of a few minutes ago.

It can’t be three years; Mini Absurd is only two years old!

I still have "fond" memories of mass producing charcoal in those finicky ovens. I got good enough at it to do two at once at one point. I might check it out again for funsies, it really is a unique game.

Need to harvest endless rows of Flax intensifies...

The official discord channel can be located at https://discord.gg/4jnhrJG. Malard is still keeping details of changes close to his chest, but some other useful tidbits can still be picked up there.

I jumped in for a few minutes last night, long enough to get off Newbie Isle. Yep, it's the same exact game that I remember playing 10 years ago, right up to the randomly starting & stopping music, getting stuck in ankle-deep water with an endless "Water is too deep!" dialog, and oddly mismatched UI elements (Why does "You harvested 1 Flax fly away?)

Where's a good place to go to find actual humans?

A '/join Egypt Today' will open up one of the microphones that can act as a moderated global chat. (Only 'remote' chat is moderated, you can walk up to the in-game microphone and chat away if you feel like it). That can be one way to find people.

If you can make your way to River Plains via the chariot stops, you can find the zFree guild just across the river from the chariot stop. Lots of public buildings there, and there are frequently people around there. The population is going to be pretty low in general though, as some people will be more interested in waiting to join Tale 8 when it starts up.

There is a config option that is named something like "Turn most popups into flyaways" or something like that, which avoids those annoying dialogue boxes.

There is also an option to turn on either WASD or the arrows keys for movement, which can help with negotiating the terrain

FWIW, there were some music changes. The login screen music was replaced for this telling (though apparently the old music will play 1% of the time just for fun). The trick/bug where the intro screen music stops if you change the size of the window still works. I don't remember when region-specific music was added, but that was all updated for the first time in a long time for Tale 7. I think that plays randomly whenever you are in a region (I don't think the hinterlands areas begion regions has any music). There is a config option for how often that plays. School and University music hasn't changed, and can play alongside the region music which can be pretty annoying. Fortunately both can be turned off.

The beta for tale 8 begins today, and is open to everyone.

Until yesterday, the new owner responded to any questions about upcoming changes with '#nospoilers', but that changed when he announced a fairly substantial change, https://wiki.desert-nomad.com/index..... ATITD was originally launched as something of a social experiment with lots of fun crafting. The social experiment aspect had mostly gone away over the years, and this looks like an attempt to bring that back to some degree.

Is there going to be a server wipe after the beta concludes?

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