Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Kammie's House Designs - Greenhouse & Shop

Here is the front of the house. Up by the blue chimes is the entrance to the only public area, which is supposed to act as a small plant shop. Where the character stands is the main planting station, with a gate leading to the pathway and some decorative plants. I'm rather proud of how this entire area turned out.
Here you can see the shop and office. I couldn't decide if I wanted to add more display tables to the shop area, but ultimately decided that I preferred the less cluttered look. I may add some sort of rug to the store floor at some point, but as is it's good. Once I set up vendors, they will be behind the counter. How I organize them, I have no clue, but as is I like the look. Behind the shop you can see the office where there's a typical desk and storage/book setup, as every good shopkeeper should have. The room with stacked benches usually has plants that are in their infant stages. It's set up for a more aesthetic than functional look. The bare green grass that leads from the shop to the nursery is there to put the plants once they mature.
Here you can see the 2nd floor of the nursery as well as the beginnings of the living quarters. Functionally I did not leave enough green grass as a place to put fully matured plants, but any more green areas and the whole house felt out of balance... or something. I don't know, hehe.
The room with the table is a rather cramped kitchen, with a guest room and bathroom right off of that. What a lovely way to wake up in the morning, smelling eggs and bacon! The stairs by the kitchen lead up to...
...The third floor, which has the master bed & bath as well as a crafting room. I'm still not sure what I should do with the porch. All I know is it looks too empty. The alchemy station will have to do for now, though.

So there you have it! A semi-functional greenhouse, living quarters, and shop, set up with roleplaying purposes in mind. I don't roleplay on UO, but I've always loved putting together house designs as if I did roleplay. This one was a pleasant challenge as it's the first house on a production house that I've fully decorated in several years.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

UOD: October 13, 2015

Bah, I wanted to post a picture of the changes I had made to the house on Test Center, as well as how I had decorated it, but the server wiped before I took the time to screenshot what I'd done. That's the downside to building on TC!
I'm not sure what I want to do with the new castle buildables. I'm still wary of putting any sort of decorations in the courtyards even though I know all of the bugs from when they added that feature in have been fixed. I'm just behind on the times. I see a lot of threads on Stratics that showcase a lot of people's creativity. I would love to try that, but on Lake Austin, the shard I have my castle on, it's very hard to come by the resources to make the building pieces. I may place a castle on TC and test out some designs, then decide if I want to go through the trouble of getting the supplies for it.
The biggest reason I play UO anymore is to decorate. That's something that every other game I play seems to lack. Even The Sims doesn't have the same character this game does when you look at a finished piece. If my old friends played I might start participating in old shenanigans, but nowadays I'm not interested in human contact.
I believe my greenhouse on Atlantic is as finished as it's ever going to be. I'll post screenshots either today or tomorrow.
It's taken me so long to finish that house I'm ready for a new design. I'm not willing to ruin that setup, though, so I'm probably going to hop on Test Center and play around there. I use that shard to decorate a lot. It takes out the worry of a lot of resources/skill needs to achieve a desired look. Also, I hope to have vendors on my houses on prodo shards, and constantly changing a house's design/layout would not fit with that.

Last time I posted I mentioned bringing in other games I play. The main game I would start posting about would be Ark: Survival Evolved.
This game is fun, put simply. I spend a lot of time either building up our base or taming hoards of dinosaurs/prehistoric creatures to call my own. My family and I play together. It's a fun pasttime :)

Besides Ark I would potentially post about World of Warcraft and The Sims, as well. As time passes I might add in other games, but those are the major ones I see myself playing right now. WoW isn't even high on that list - I have a subscription but I've not been playing since Ark made its way to my computer.
Let me know what you think about me potentially posting about other games. I still play quite a bit of UO, but it's all decorating based and I can only post so much about that!

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

UOD: September 1, 2015

With the release of the first Time of Legends patch to TC1 and some new tilesets to work with, I decided to hop on and test out the new building blocks. Also, it's maybe been a while so I figured I would update this blog with what I've done UO wise in between pictures. If I finish decorating this house I'll do a full post dedicated to just the house, but as is I'm qualifying this as a diary entry I'm not labelling it as anything related to house decorating.
So I let the plants completely die off, both on Lake Austin and Atlantic. I kept forgetting about them and eventually I'd gotten to the point where I had the same set of plants for a month with no sign of any of the plants getting better. So I called it quits and let them die off. I may or may not start growing again in the near future. It's to be decided.
All three of the main houses I have been posting about have had some headway in their decorating progress. The Luna house of LA is coming along, not that I really know what to do with it anymore. The Atlantic greenhouse is 95% done with decorating. At this point it's just small tweaks here or there but I'm very happy with it. The apartment complex doesn't have a lot in it. I stopped working on it for a bit because I reached a creative roadblock in how I was going to decorate each room without them looking too... same-y. In reality if I were to rent a room out I would let the tenant do their own decorations, anyway, but what's the harm in having a show room? All the real estate companies do it!
I'm contemplating opening up this blog to other video games besides Ultima Online. I don't mind blogging about video games at all -in fact I quite love it- and I've found that what I do in UO is rather formulaic after posting about it every other day. Besides, it's not the only game I play. Not by a long shot. I have so much to say about all these video games I play and at this point I'm not sure what I want to do anymore. I'll have to think on it.
There feels like a marked difference in the playerbase between now and when I was last consistently on, in March & April. It could be the start of school again, but I didn't think that much of the playerbase was still attending. It could just be a bad time of year. Maybe I'm just not on during the right times or going to the right places to find people. Atlantic is starting to look like Lake Austin when the LA playerbase began commenting on how dead everything was. I still refuse to let go of the game, though. There has to be a reason the developers are even bothering with putting out new content, and that reason has to be that UO is still somehow profitable, even with how low the active playerbase is. I keep holding on to hope that some day there will be a comeback. It's unrealistic, but I can hope, can I not?

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Kammie's Custom House Designs: October 2014

In October I got bitten by the UO bug and celebrated by customizing and decorating a house. This one I was able to document from start to finish, so I've included that video at the bottom. This picture is my favorite of the design because it shows the multilevel roofing I did. I'm no stranger to it, but something about this particular design makes me super happy!
The top corner, just for completion's sake.
Floor 1 - Entryway. Here you can see the outdoor walkway I'd had, as well as the 'spooky' themed decor I went with. If you look at the walls of the design as well you can see that I'd gone with the broken walls to add to the Halloween theme. In the top left you can see the beginning of my trademark runebook library, though I've yet to actually set it up. Somehow it's not as rewarding, since I know nobody will use it.
Here you can see my soulforge/crafting corner. I still love using benches to act as a shelf above my forge. Let's not pay attention to the fact that in the real world, storage above a forge would be very impractical. :)
Here you can see the library I set up for the 2nd floor, as well as the second story of the runebook library and what is intended as a vendor room and public service area, complete with portals and dye tubs.
Finally you have the master bedroom with a little reading nook outside. At this point I still use reading nooks to fill otherwise empty spaces. Outside you can see my little cooking setup. The bedroom is rather sparse, with just a bed and some chests of drawers, and the extra writing room isn't decorated very much either.
Most of the sparseness of this house is due to it not really being 'lived' in. In the screenshots of other designs, I'd fully used and decorated the house as I went about my daily business and had my adventures. Here, I don't think there will be much more to the house, so I went ahead and called it finished. As you can see there is plenty of space in front of the bed for me to add stuff, but at this point I'd reached a block in terms of decorating ideas. Part of it is the fact that it's been so long since I've done any customizing and decorating to this level. The rest is just that I know I won't really use this house. The world of UO is unfortunately dying, but I'll help it hold on until its last breath.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Customizing Your House: Roofing Ideas Ep. 1

 
Here is an expected/easy way to design your L shaped houses. This works fine with pretty much any tileset besides the ceramic or oriental style.
Here is the same tileset with just a slightly different design. I suppose you could juxtapose the two archway designs... I'm just not that creative.
 What does catch my eye and fuel my passion, however, is finding ways to make things that shouldn't work, work. 
When I work with unnatural (ie: anything that's not an easy rectangle) shapes, I love finding ways for it to work with my roof style of choice. Here you can see that I made the little rectangle look like an addon to the house. 
Here you can see I've extended the 'addon' roofset to meld with the 'main' roof. While up close it may look a little odd, in a full picture you would be none the wiser.
See? It may bug you if you look directly at it, but it's one of those things that adds to the whole design better than if you'd scrapped the roof and gone with a different type.
Anyways, this is a new tag I've made, so those looking for some inspiration for out of the norm roofing ideas have fun looking through here as I add on!

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Kammie's Customizing Tips: Starting Fresh!

Have you ever wanted to customize your house, but had to deal with random stuff in the middle of your design that you really don't want to have to move around?
See this? Some of these boxes are too heavy to easily pick up and move around! Picking it up and running with it will only exhaust your character. If you have something on the first floor that you want on the third floor, but it's 30k+ stones, you have no choice but to accept that it's staying on the first floor or you'll take three and a half years to walk it tile by tile upstairs! Right?
WRONG.
See the first picture.
While we jokingly called it a forest and a masterpiece in this screenshot, it actually had a purpose. In committing a design that had a random item (say, a huge log) in every slot that we'd previously had items on, you move everything into the moving crate. For some, that makes it measures easier to then create your actual design and start fresh in decorating it.
This also saves you the trouble of having to try and grab that one silly plant or item that's floating in the middle of the air in your new design.
Don't look at me like that. You know exactly what I'm talking about, if you spend any measure of your UO life decorating/customizing.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Kammie's House Tidbits: December 2009

This shows several things, both in decorating ideas and my personal preferences for house decorating over this timeframe.
The third floor of my house designs at this point had turned into a sort of crafting station/guild gathering area. If the layout of this particular hodgepodge helps you, so be it.
The house decorating thing I wanted to point out is the icicles. It's a nice touch, viewed in the bottom right area of the house. In the bottom left you can see that I'd replaced the grass tiles in my design with random snow tiles, and put down snow statuettes from the holiday gift boxes. I didn't want a log house, but the reddish-brown oriental style walls accompanied by the charcoal blue roof tiling serves as an appropriate substitute, yes?

Friday, March 13, 2015

Carpeting Those Difficult Floors!

So you have your beautiful design. You've decorated it and decided that there are some areas that will just look better with some carpeting, or even a bear rug! But what's this? The flooring is showing through the add-on! No problem, let's just try putting down individual tile carpets from Ter Mur...
Alas! We have the same issue! At first I thought I might have just had some issues with my own client, so I closed and started up UO again. Then I ran outside the house several times. Nope. I put some carpet tiles outside on the reddish tiled porch, and everything was back to normal. How frustrating! The specific floor tile I had chosen was causing this issue.
I wasn't willing to change the flooring of my house design (it just went together so well, in my eyes!) so I decided to try and see if raising up the carpet (or bear rug) would fix my problem.

Now anyone who messes with add-ons or carpets knows that you can't use an interior decorating tool on the item. The game will tell you 'that isn't locked down' or other mumbo jumbo that basically means 'I don't wanna' (insert child's tantrum right here).
A good way around this is to use single tile gozas!
The important thing to remember when using gozas for this is if you are using a multi-tile addon, you need an amount of gozas equivalent to the number of tiles the add-on takes up. A plain red rug will need 9 gozas to get to work. A medium stone table will need two tiles. If you are doing individually tiled carpets from Laifem the Weaver, as I am here, then you can work with as little as one goza at a time.
Place down your gozas wherever you want your carpet or rug. Using an interior decorator tool, raise each goza up by one. Once all of your gozas are raised, place your carpet/add-on items and viola! flooring issue is fixed. All that's left is destroying the gozas under your design. In the step 2. section of this image you can see that the carpet covers up most of the gozas under the middle of the carpet. I can't quite target those pesky goza tiles with ease. A good way to fix this is recall away (the point is to cross a server line so your house is no longer stored on the client cache), then come back. The gozas will be on top of the carpet and you'll be able to easily destroy them without worrying about your lovely carpet you worked so hard to place down.
Here is the final look. You get lovely carpet and you don't even notice the change in height unless you really, really scrutinize your character while you walk over it. It may be a bit time consuming if you're impatient like me, but I decided that this would be easier than redoing the entire floor of my house and there was no way I was going to let the blank spaces hang out there.
Have you ever had to change a house design because something in your head didn't quite apply to the screen very well?

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

UOD: March 10, 2015

I'm finally at a point with my greenhouse that I'm willing to share what I've done. It's still a work in progress and it'll take time for me to get the entire house to a point I'm satisfied with, but I'm happy enough right now that I'm willing to share it.
The room closest to the house sign will be the vendor shop. It'll mainly house plants and plant byproducts, with maybe one vendor selling miscellaneous goods. The room behind the counter will be my vendor storage and, for RP purposes, the 'office' of this house where my characters will do all her finances.
The room my character is in is one of the plant nurseries. I chose to set up the plants like this to force myself to limit how many plants I grow all at once. Also, it looks more practical. Right now I have 40 plants started. Even then, I think I may have planted too many given the amount of space I gave myself for putting the plants after they've matured.
Here's the 2nd floor of the nursery and some more green grass to put the matured plants on. The rest of the house is living space for my characters. The room at the top will be a bedroom. The room with the stairs will have the kitchen.
The room my character is in will be a miscellaneous crafting area. I'm sure you can figure out which room will be another bedroom. I'm not quite sure what I want to do with the porch. Maybe create a simple sitting area to enjoy the view?
When ransacking Atlantic's vendors for plant seeds, I was disappointed to find that I could not find as wide a variety as I initially thought I'd be able to. I was sure I would be able to start off with every plant, every color, every variety. Now I realize that was just wishful thinking on my part. Currently I'm growing plants that will not be cross-pollinated. I just need to build up a stock of seeds so I don't run out of a certain type while trying to cross and create new varieties of plants. I know a lot of older cross-pollination charts are outdated or useless, mainly when dealing with the cactus varieties of plants, so I'll keep an eye out on vendors for the cacti seeds.
Phew, looking at all this makes me realize that I've gotten quite a lot done in the past several days!

Friday, March 6, 2015

UOD: March 6, 2015

I'm not quite ready to show off the greenhouse yet, so instead here's a very old screenshot from TC, four and a half years ago. This was during my obsession with water and waterfalls. Nowadays I feel that they take up too much space in my design and I leave them out.
Side note: I did the series of quests that were added in as a way for Mesanna to give house spots in the Stygian Abyss. I ended up 'winning' on TC. I never claimed the house spot, though. Instead I just displayed my winning item (I don't even remember what it was you got  that signified you won) on the steps of this house spot proudly.
Now for some more memories!
Do you see how busy this place is? This is, yes, on TC during a cross-shard treasure hunt challenge. I remember they held two or three of these on Test Center before the monthly competition died off. Pity, because it was really fun to watch! Mesanna spawned a bunch of cream pies on the floor for us onlookers to use for our own shenanigans while we waited for the treasure hunt to complete.
This isn't my screenshot. I was feeling nostalgic the other day and Googled "Ultima Online 2002,"  the year I started playing. This was one of the first things that popped up and I couldn't help but laugh. This very much fits my first memories of UO - the absolute chaos that was West Brit Bank. While I wasn't personally a banksitter, I loved how alive the world felt whenever I stopped off here to do various things. WBB was actually my home bank even after AoS came out and continued to be my home until early 2009, when I'd returned after a short break due to computer issues.
The game has changed a lot since then, and if anybody wants population levels even remotely similar to these days they're forced to migrate to Atlantic. Even then it's not the same if your last memories of UO are of much higher population times.
I hope the recent announcement of a new expansion pack is good news. On one hand that should mean that the future of UO (ie: closing down the servers) isn't in jeopardy. On the other, the Stratics forums have some worries about how vague they were in their recent Dev video. My experience with any MMO forum is that the really big complainers will always be there to find the negative side of something, so I take these concerns with a grain of salt. I choose to see the positive side - that UO is going strong enough that there is still new content.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Kammie's House Tidbits: November 2009

As I go through old screenshots, I see little bits of house designs I wish I'd taken more screenshots of. This being one of them. There were two house designs before this that utilized the same wall style, but I only know that because I recognized it from very vague screenshots that did not have the actual house design intended as the subject of the screenie. The subject was more funny moments via text between me and some fellow guild members.
Here I want to partially illustrate the use of plants and decorations to help breakup the monotony of grass/flooring, as well as introduce the use of rocks to soften the edges of a river (look around the health bars and you'll get a vague idea of this).
While I've already randomly placed different grass tiles to make sure the ground doesn't look too repetitive (look around outside the house foundation for an illustration of this), that sometimes isn't enough to look good (in my opinion). While to some people the ground may look cluttered, I feel a better descriptor may be 'active.' There is a nice splattering of plants and different 'sparklies' (remember the poppy dust?). I also have some leftover spiderwebs and thanksgiving-type decorations, really showing how I was in this time transitioning from a Halloween look to a Thanksgiving look. This is the year that the Developers introduced turkeys, and my goodness those were fun to tackle!

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

UOD: March 4, 2015

On Lake Austin, I've done very little to my Luna house. The outside has some plants while the inside has very limited decorations. The best thing of yet besides the outdoors deco is my little reading/hangout nook, and even that may not stay. I wish I had more of the 'full' bookcases, but I can't simply vendor search for more. Lake Austin is a dead place for vendors. It's a wonder I'm choosing to set up a plant shop here. The plants have all finally gotten back to healthy or vibrant, and I'm starting to look at my spreadsheet to see what I can plant for my next round. Four days until my first set of plants will be picked of all resources and seeds and set to decorative. Between now and then I should do several rounds of the Naturalist quest, just so I can grow some more of them. Even if I don't sell the plants, I always enjoy growing them.
I finished my customizing of my Atlantic houses, and I'm starting to gather/make the supplies I'll need for decorating each of the houses. Yesterday I spent a large chunk of my time searching for the customizable wall signs from Christmas 2011, to set up the six rooms I made in the apartment house. I gambled on a holiday ticket (the 2011 and 2012 holiday tickets have no indicator of what year they're from on mouse-over) for 700k and won. I proceeded to buy two more at 850k from two different vendors and then lost. I was able to pick up another sign for 300k, if I remember correctly. After that I gave up on buying holiday tickets, and I was unable to find another sign besides a 'rare' dyed charcoal one that was five million. This morning I hopped on and searched for more signs and found four for 100k each. I very happily bought them all up to complete my set of six to set up the outside of the rooms.
As for the actual information on the signs, the first row will always be the Apartment number. The second row will either say "Vacant" or the name of the tenant. The third row will show the monthly/weekly rates, and I'll still work on that. I just wanted to put some basic information in for the screenshot. I don't really plan to make money on this. I want my prices to be fair. This isn't the real world; I have no need to report constant income on any adventures I take. My regular gameplay tends to bring in gold anyway.
I want to show the bare greenhouse, but I'm afraid that looking at it bare will make me forget the plans I'd had for it and decide it isn't 'greenhouse-y' enough. I'll most likely spend today decorating the both of these houses and then check back in tomorrow on whether my greenhouse idea ended up being a success.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

UOD: March 3, 2015

One of the things I've always enjoyed on my UO adventures has been an inn or pub or even a McDonald's (or other restaurant setting). Here is one of those interesting adventures I set out on with several friends at the time. The stage itself is rather crude, made entirely by gozas as opposed to using half or quarter walls plus modified stairs plus gozas. We didn't care. Part of the fun in our adventure here was decorating the place. While a nice customized build can set a great foundation the decorations are what make it really shiny. Obviously we had no intent here for there to be any real value for the establishment. We just wanted some laughs for ourselves.
In non five-year-old news, I've decided to make my secondary house the inn and recustomize the main house to be my greenhouse. I know I will want a shop area, but it'll be very very small in comparison to the rest of the house. How I'm going to make the actual greenhouse area in a realistic manner is beyond me, but I know I want more than just a 'plant house.' I'll no doubt spend several hours working on this.

Monday, March 2, 2015

UO Diary: March 2, 2015

The plants are coming along... sort of. I FUBAR'd one day and a couple of plants are still suffering from me completely forgetting to tend to them. Oops.
I'm keeping an eye out for a good deal on some more garden beds, but I'm thinking at this point I'll just have to suck it up and shell out the $20 for 3 on the Origin store. It's almost time for me to start gathering the seeds. Right now the max any plant will have is 2.
One of my palms ended up mutating, so I'm getting 8 white small palms. If I recall correctly, white plants are very popular so that's a bonus for me. This is Lake Austin, however, so that does mean this whole venture is probably not going to be profitable. That's perfectly fine with me. I just want to grow plants.
I caught myself thinking this morning while tending these plants that I'd bitten off more than I could chew in terms of how many plants I'd grown. I had to laugh at myself after that, because I've done sooo many more plants than this in one go.
This is from January of 2009, over six years ago. First off ,that's crazy that this was six years ago. Second off, when all those bowls you see ended up maturing, I took over this entire keep with plants. Everywhere. On every walkable surface. When my Dad, who had lent me the keep, tried to visit here to get some stuff he'd had in storage, he had a laughing fit that left him gasping for air. "Bite off a bit more than you can chew?" I remember him commenting. It took well over an hour for me to care for every single plant here. I didn't care, though. It was fun!
I'm thinking about starting up some plants on Atlantic. The only issue this will present is I'll have to remember to tend plants on two shard every single day. Wish me luck :)

Thursday, February 26, 2015

UO Diary: February 26, 2015

This house design turned out completely different from anything I'd originally planned for it to be. Initially I was going to make a vendor area outside in the grass with the building itself being my personal domain. If the part of the building my character is standing on looks out of place, it's because it was added as an afterthought, when I'd suddenly decided I wanted to make an inn/apartment type establishment instead. I've spent pretty much all day looking for decorations and tweaking the design until I was satisfied. After that I went shopping and built things for this design. I had all sorts of ideas in my head. A RP-friendly establishment intended to give traveling shardhoppers or someone just down on their luck a place to keep their goods. I even had and tested a way for each room to keep their goods protected from other tenants. A secured, locked chest cannot be pick-locked. A locked chest can, but secured? No.
I even decided to include my plot directly West of this one in it. This plot would be the apartment, the other would be the vendor/community area. I customized the  other house...
Here you can see the general, if unfinished idea. A public bar/restaurant. The second floor was to have vendors. The third floor would be my character's personal apartment, complete with bath area and an area for her to do her finances.
I have never spent 8+ hours on an idea working and decorating and tweaking to fruition only to wipe the slate clean, and yet that is exactly what I did today. Both of my house plots are yet again completely empty. The ideas still swim in my head, and yet I can't get it to sit right on the plots. While customizing the second plot, I decided I wanted a greenhouse as well. But if I had a greenhouse, how in the world could I afford the time and money to run an inn? Did I even want it to be an inn or did I specifically want extended-stay people here? Was it actually going to function if someone would ask about it? Or was this all going to be for show? If it was going to function, what pricing did I need? How much gold had I already sunken into the venture?
I suffered from a virtual version of reality crashing down on me. The fact of the matter is this is Atlantic, and I do not have all of my characters built up in skill like I do on Lake Austin. I do not settle when it comes to decorating, and a lot of the time I could not find that particular craftable that I wanted. Truth be told, it's been a very long time since I've worked on any sort of decorating on a production shard. I've taken to spending my time on Test Center, where I can craft any and everything I could possibly want while decorating. While the idea of limiting myself while decorating is invigorating, it's also exhausting. After figuring out what it is I want, I have to first search for the item to see if I have it already. If I don't, I have to locate the item on a vendor, with the new but helpful vendor search option. Then I have to shell out more gold than I'd like for stuff I'm normally able to craft myself. I don't even have a character with enough Tailoring to craft beds!
So now I'm back to the drawing board. I'm thinking I will make my secondary house a greenhouse with a vendor area downstairs, and my main house will remain a private dwelling. I most likely will not be decorating the private dwelling at this point. Getting a garden started, however, will be quite easy.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

UO Diary: February 25, 2015

I've been fighting the UO bug for a few months now. With nothing to do in my free time I've found myself hopping on more and more, and actually planning out stuff to do on the two shards I play on. Test Center got wiped, and I didn't get the Luna house spot I always strive for. It's probably best, seeing as all the stuff I usually set up on Test Center would hardly be used.
I'm rather proud of this house design. I hopped into customize mode and didn't have anything planned out, on paper or in my head. Instead I just started working around with different wall types, making sure not to use a typical set I've used before. I recorded myself customizing, and once (if) I finish decorating I'll put together a video as well as a post. As you can probably figure out, I'm wanting to set up some vendors. Most likely plant vendors, as that's all I ever consistently do. Other stuff I would extend to would be inscription or alchemy based. But selling resources? Not for me. I don't have enough resources to start selling them, for one.
I'm starting up growing plants again. I have an excel sheet where I can inventory what seeds I do and don't have. It's rather hard to build up what you have on Lake Austin. If I were to start growing plants on Atlantic I could easily get my hands on every single seed available. Not to mention ridiculously cheap kegs of potions already premade. On Lake Austin I either have to shell out 50k for a keg, or spend the time making the kegs myself. Whenever I'm surfing the web I tend to hop on my alchemist and have him make potions.
I plan to do several rounds of the Naturalist quest to get some seeds. I'll possibly set up a vendor or two in Luna and start selling off my plants. I've been going through all the boxes and boxes of storage in the castle and I realize that I have entirely too many plants. If they were worth more for Clean Up Britannia I might consider tossing them, but they're valued at under a point each. Not quite worth it to me.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Kammie's House Tidbits: May 2009

This is the only screenshot I have of this house, and it's a great disappointment. I was so proud of this at the time. I still vaguely remember it and am impressed with what I did.
Usually when I customize a house, I have set 'rooms' and needs that I know I have, and I build the house around those needs. Here, I did whatever fitted my fancy, making a point to purposely make weird shapes and sizes for rooms and forcing myself to think outside the box in order to decorate the house. I ended up being rather proud of what I did. I remember the 3rd floor being a crafting area, and the roof being tiles much like the design from April, but the first few floors I was very happy with, though truth be told I remember nothing of the 2nd floor. I want to say it was a very large bedroom with no doors and archways with curtains covering the entrance from the 1st floor/exit to the 3rd floor.
The area near the front door acted as a front door, heavily decorated with plants and other oriental-style decorations. The room the purple water trough is in ended up being a kitchen, with the little 2x3 room being a pantry with stacks of chests to help with the storage. The room with the blue water trough was the dining room/hallway, and the room that the green writing desk is outside of ended up being a 'pirate mappers room' of sorts. The porch that lead of off this pirates room ended up being full of plants, and served no real purpose besides being a place for me to put plants in. I love plants, as you should be able to tell in any of my designs.
The room that has the stacks of boxes ended up being a writing nook.
To fit the customization, I remade all of my furniture in a regular color. I think this was my permanent transition from dying all of my furniture to staying in a rather 'neutral'/original color palette. 
The little closet that nested in the "L" of the steps served as a hidden treasures closet. It basically had a stack of chests with rares and miscellaneous supplies.
So there this is. A vague outline of a house, left for your imagination to fill.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Kammie's House Tidbits: April 2009

This is the only good screenshot that I have of this house design. That's not to say I don't have other screenshots, but this is the best one to showcase this design with. The roof had nothing on it besides some plants and I used the first floor as a plant farm that was only accessible by walking through the waterfall. The only thing of note here is my little waterfall I had going that extended across every floor. It was usable, too! Imagine that!
This also documents before I really stepped out of my comfort zones in terms of decorating and customizing a house. Part of it was my inability at the time to really think of new and exciting designs. The most notable part of this design to this day was my fairly fluid looking waterfall.
Now let's visit some other screenshots and look at this beauty! *cough*
Yes, I do fail at life my dear. :)
This was the second floor which was meant to act as a vendor area (look at the tables on the right) and I didn't really know what else to do with the floor so I started putting my T-BOD items here (keep in mind that this was Test Center, and T-BOD items were a hot commodity!).
 I don't think I did anything with the area immediately surrounding the stairs. If I wanted to, I never had a chance to before I decided to change around the design.
 This illustrates my little plant farm I had going. This was before the days of the grow plant command for Test Center, so you had to take as much care growing plants here as you did on a production shard. The 'shelves' made out of purple benches were used to separate plants that were still in their starter pot. It made it easier for me to make sure I tended to each plant.
At  the very very bottom, right behind the waterfall, you can see my little writing nook/special storage area. I stored higher end items there as well as some nicknacks. Really things that are of low value on TC (you could use commands to get them) but I kept them just in case I needed them, or the command/item was taken out of easy circulation as has happened before. Several years before this, around 2004-2006, the Pigments of Tokuno were taken out of TC artifact box circulation while the TC at the time was kept live. As a result, PoTs experienced a great influx in trading value.