The first bow

The first thing ever made in Zizeeria is a reed bow. It was made this morning, a little after six, from four reed fibre and a marsh hide, for a character nobody was playing -- because the act of crafting lives on the server, and nothing in the game can yet ask for it. That sentence has two halves and the second is the honest one. Both are worth explaining.

Crafting here is five professions -- Smith, Herbalist, Builder, Cook and Cartographer -- and one rule from the plan: the best equipment in the game is player-made, and what drops from a raid is materials and drawings, never a finished weapon. Until last week that rule was a sentence. There was not one recipe in the world, four drawings that taught nothing, and a finished reed spear dropping from a marsh predator. There are thirty-six recipes now -- thirty-one for the smith, three for the herbalist, two for the cook; the builder and the cartographer have nothing to make yet, because nothing in the catalogue is theirs, which is a gap in the catalogue rather than in the professions -- each taking its ingredients from ten materials, and nothing a profession makes drops from anything any more.

Every profession's first recipe is within reach at level one, on purpose, so that the profession is never what stops you: a reed bow is reed and a hide grip, a reed spear is a bog-iron head on a reed shaft. Each thing you make earns the profession experience, and the ladder climbs with the catalogue -- the smith's ends at a Binder's rod, thirty-three rungs up -- because a profession is meant to take as long to master as a Calling. The numbers on that ladder are guesses, and they are written down as guesses; nothing has been measured against a player yet.

A craft can fail. One attempt in ten does, today, and on a failure half of what went in comes back -- rounded down, so a single hide lost is a hide lost. The roll is drawn on the server and recorded with the attempt, and the same attempt sent twice, by a client that lost its connection and asked again, is answered with the first answer rather than rolled again. The first bow's draw was 998,600 out of a million, against a failure line at 100,000, which is to say it was never close.

Ten of the thirty-six are learned from a drawing rather than with the level. A drawing is an object in the bag; reading it burns the paper and teaches everything on it at once. The Reedwoven drawing teaches all seven pieces of the set, and it drops from the common creatures of Reedhaven one time in ten, or comes as the reward of the first quest there. The first one was read this morning, and the character who read it now knows seven recipes and can make none of them yet: the set sits one rung up the ladder, and that character is a smith of level one with ten points of experience, all of them from the bow. A drawing that teaches nothing you do not already know is refused and stays in the bag, rather than burning for nothing.

None of this can be reached from inside the game today, and it is worth being exact about why. The act runs on the server, and the client people download has no panel that asks for it. The panel is designed and being built, and it goes out with the next client -- together with the server build it needs, because the two have to change at once. Until then the only hands that can put a material in a bag are an operator's, which is how the first bow's fibre and hide got there: placed by hand, through the one route that exists for it, so the act could be watched on the real service with the real data rather than argued about from a test. And nothing in the world drops anything yet, because nothing in the world can yet die. The creatures' side of this loop is its own piece of work, and it is the next one.

The far end of the loop moved too. When a world boss is brought down for the first time, the Chronicle will say who did it -- the guild, when everybody who fought belongs to one, and otherwise every name -- and a guild that did it alone earns the naming of the region. The service that keeps the Chronicle can write that now; the zone's half of the conversation rides the next server build. Getting a zone able to speak to it at all meant a second credential on the zone host, and that was worth watching: installed last night, it was refused for seven hours because nobody had yet granted it the right to ask, and the refusal was an alert with the reason in its name rather than a file that quietly never appeared. The grant went in this morning, and the next attempt, two minutes later, cleared it.

So the plain summary is this. The crafting loop is closed on the server: a material goes into a bag, a recipe consumes it, a bow comes out, and the profession remembers. The part a player would touch -- pressing the key, waiting the three seconds a common recipe takes, seeing the bow appear in the bag -- is the next client. The part that gives the loop its real entry, a deer in the marsh that drops the fibre, is the one after that.