Guides/Dear Ariella New Player Guide


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Dear Ariella, What do we do?

This is the dilemma of the new player often referred to as a "Newbie". After four tales of playing I will attempt to give some helpful hints to get started and continue in your everyday life. Good luck my fellow Egyptian as this is a wonderfully complicated game and enjoyable socially. Our Egyptian slang will be in ().

Love thy neighbor is a good virtue and keeps you from getting poked with sharpened sticks.

One word about Test of the Obelisk. Each region has a queue to sign up for building obelisks to pass this test. Check the wiki and get signed up. You will also need to pass principles for Test of the Obelisk. When you build an obelisk to complete the list of principles you only need to build a size 7 obelisk (the size 7 obelisk may be torn down afterwards and the mats recovered). The message is not very clear about what size is needed to pass principles only! PLEASE BUILD A SIZE 7 OBELISK TO PASS PRINCIPLES ONLY or it could be construed as jumping the queue in that region. For Test of the Obelisk a player builds the biggest obelisk in that area (you lose all mats if you tear down your obelisk if you have passed this test). As the game progresses more types of obelisks are able to be built. In other words, if the current type of obelisk in that area reaches too ridiculous a size for you to easily pass the test, just wait for another type of obelisk to be unlocked.

In Egyptian society there are a few things that are not polite. Please do not take resin from trees without Nicking with a Resin Wedge. It's difficult for new players to know that resin does not respawn like coconuts and wood if you take the former. A tool called a Resin Wedge must be used to Nick the trees for them to produce more resin.

I need help! And I need it now!

Are you in distress and need a helping hand or found a possible bug in code? Click yourself -> Special -> Call a Game Master.

Game Masters (GMs) - General distress call. Your call disappears if you log out.
Developers (Devs) - For a potential bug or serious issue. Your call stays in line after you log out.
World Builders (WB) - Terrain problems.

Miscellaneous Tips to make you look savvy

Put up your F3 map right away. You can stretch it and move it all over.
/cmd or click Self -> Utility -> Information -> Show the Command List
/afk to show yourself as... AFK
/chat <whomever>
/clockloc to turn on your Current Year and Month/clock/present location or Self -> Options -> Little window -> Clock/changes to Clockloc so click again.
/ignore <whomever> or /silentignore <whomever> or /squelch <whomever>
/info <whomever> to see that avatar's information box.
/tell <whomever>.....to talk to someone in Main, but beware that most don't notice!
/join <channel tab>
- New Channel Tab names to come
For Current Events Calendar....Click Self or hit Escape -> Utility -> Show Calendar.
To minimize Items/Skills/Principles Tabs, click on the active tab.
Camera views F5 - F8. F7 is most commonly used. F8 has two settings, hit once (not used often) and then twice. This second view is great for prospecting and for camp decoration. Click self -> Utility -> Camera.
Hit F11 to bring up the Friends List. Hit F11 to reduce Friends List to only those friends online. Hit F11 a third time to make it go away. Click bottom field box where it says "Enter Player Name" and type a player name to enter it or delete one you already have.
To change your appearance...click Self -> Appearance.
Guilds. You are not limited to only one guild. They are like social clubs, learning and regional clubs, test clubs and skill clubs. The Goods guild is excellent to do trading.
How to dig a hole. Have a shovel on you. Make sure the dirt icon appears, usually in the upper left. Click yourself -> Skills -> Dig a Hole.
Pick up your winebook at any School of Body. Before you drink wine, please ask your host which quality wineglasses are best to get points from his particular wine instead of randomly grabbing glasses. One to Two glasses of wine is considered a polite amount since wine bottles give only 7 glass fulls. The host may say otherwise. Three glasses of beer per person is fine because beer kettles give 21 glasses each time.
When eating food, put up a chat with your alt or spouse as a notepad and record the duration of time so you know when the stat boost will wear off.
Iron pots for machines are made in Master Casting Boxes (600 Charcoal to fire) for 20 Iron and 20 beeswax in 10 minutes while Iron COOKpots with 3 Iron and 3 beeswax for Kitchens are made in a Student's Casting Box (100 Charcoal to fire).
Consider paying for a year at once and getting free camp decoration (do a World Builder ticket), a sheep(male or female at School of Worship) papyrus seeds and fireworks(at School of Art), a medium stone (at School of Architecture), and 4 cornerstones(put immediately in your inventory).
A good browser function is Ctrl+F to bring up a Search tool to use when you have a Foraging page up.
Macros are wonderful to use but BEWARE! If you do not respond to a chat and are macroing you can be thrown in game jail.

Critter Care

Camels stud...1 male 4 female (Max camels in pen is 10). Lure a camel into the pen by loading straw. Make sure the door is open (click the pen, should say 'Close the door'). 'Check the pen for wild camels' and if it says 'They even nibbled at your straw' so you're getting closer to the amount needed.

Sheep in pairs...3 male 3 female is best.

Rabbits breed...like rabbits. They do not stud. Keep 2-3 of each sex in a hutch with about 300-500 carrots. ALWAYS remove your rabbits from your hutch at night or they may multiply too much, eat all the carrots and escape!

Beetles are good at 2 males and 4 or more females.

Get Hens from Examining Pale Pampas Grass and Roosters (but rarer) from Dark Pampas Grass. Building 4 Chicken Coops is a good idea. Put Hens in one (roosters eat too much and are not needed to make eggs) and then move eggs to hatch in the other 3 coops. Eggs are hatched and Hens lay at 6 o'clock so check then and remove the live cheekins from the 3 egg coops so they don't munch all the food.

Where shall I live?

Take your time! Don't rush into building your home at the first place you land. Yes, everyone is hurrying around doing things like busy little bees. But patience is a virtue also.

Egypt is divided into regions (each tale the number changes). There are 3 faction areas: Kush (south), Hyksos (central), and Meshwesh (north). Each faction has a capitol city with a chariot stop and all 7 types of Schools. Universities are scattered around the map with one set of the 7 in each faction area.

A polite citizen of Egypt will ask the current residents if it will be encroaching into their camp to live there. Please never build right next to anyone or crowd others already there. Leave plenty of space (your own whole green area) for yourself to expand with more compounds, warehouses, flowers, etc coming later into the tale. Always clean up the 'Newbie' beginner machines like your small distaff, brick racks, flax combs.

Chariot Stops (cs) are not up and running at the beginning of the game. There is a University Tech that will need donations so we citizens can repair them. They are the transportation network in the game, instantly transporting you to different regions. So building decently near a chariot stop saves a huge amount of play time in the game.

Consider that papyrus planting (pappy) must be done along the Nile. This makes living by or near the Nile a good choice for compound (cp) building.

Good components for your home sweet home... Quite a few higher wood-giving trees (Bottle Trees give 5 wood each for example), water (for kettles), mud/sand (for bricks), silt (for firebricks) nearby. Put up your F3 map (you can stretch it way out from the bottom right corner). Look for large green grass areas.

If you speak a language other than English there are communities that gather that speak mainly one language like French or German that might be handy to live in or join their guild for ease of play.

What's the best way to set up camp?

Time saving building ideas below.

Build one compound right up against water. Why? You will be building many machines inside your compound. Before building a compound, stand where the fish or water icon appears in the top left(have a jug and/or fishing pole in your inventory). Build kettles and toxin kitchens near water so you can stand without moving and use those machines without running back and forth to a water source. Leave room to build at least one warehouse for grabbing and then storing the mats needed to run these machines. Building like that allows you to overload yourself and cook away in your kettles or your toxin kitchens.

Build another compound so it is over mud and sand where you can stand and see both those icons at once. Permanent brick racks are best built where you can stand in one spot, grab mud and sand and also straw from your camel pen and be overloaded. Overloading yourself is a time saving feature. Then build a camel pen up against that side of your compound within reach of that mud/sand standing point (camel pens must be built on sand). Camel pens are straw storage (consider keeping an empty one for this purpose). Build 4 warehouses(wh) within reach of this mud/sand spot. One wh is to store silt for firebricks, second wh to store bricks, third to store clay for making clay bricks and the last wh to store the clay and fire bricks. Build your flax hammocks around the sides of your camel pen. Eventually build your greenhouses within standing reach of your flax hammocks to be able to harvest grass from greenhouses, dry that grass into straw on your flax hammocks and then stuff the straw into your camel pen for bricks. You will be building brick racks to make tons and tons of bricks and firebricks (fb).

Build your Glazier Benches over sand so you will not have to move to use those machines. Maybe in the same cp as your permanent brick racks.

When building beehives (apiaries) and serpentariums (cobra pits) try using /crowd to check to see the crowding percentage. The less crowding percentage the better for a queen bee to settle in or cobras to slither in. Try for 1% crowding which is a good 30 coords from any other buildings. Crowding also affects how quickly beeswax and honey production renews. You must take the honey and beeswax out for it to renew again. Higher Speed on your avatar keeps less bees from escaping. These facts are another reason not to build compounds (your camp) too closely to others.

Build forges together with carpentry benches, pottery wheels, rock saws, mason benches, and flax machines. Forging takes time, so while you wait between batches if you have other machines nearby you can get other things made like boards, jugs, stone products and flax chores. Again, arrange warehouses within reach for supplies. You can build a Bonfire (only built outside of your compound) within reach of your carpentry benches to grab wood to make boards.

Build a compound for parties! It could have several wine tables in the center, lots of kitchens near the outer walls and lots of chests for supplies.