GLITCH SKILLS AND YOU
Dec. 15th, 2012 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keysongSo in the world of Glitch, any inhabitant could with sufficient time and dedication become a consummate polymath, able to do basically anything that could be done. Being an MMO, this was all neatly compartmentalized into a skill tree. Keysong here had completed almost the entire skill tree before the world ended.
Outside of Ur, that's kind of OP! And there are a lot of skills that are only useful in Ur. So this is a quick rundown of Keysong's skills, which ones she can still use, and what they do!
ANIMALS
This was the first area of skills Keysong studied, encompassing Animal Kinship, Fox Brushing, Animal Husbandry, Herdkeeping and Remote Herdkeeping.
- Animal Husbandry will actually do her no good in Wandering Stars, because in Ur it was the art of seasoning plain eggs so that they could hatch into caterpillars, chicks, or piglets. Yes, seasoning them. With spices and gasses and things. Plain eggs that grew on trees.
- She'll get along well with animals due to Animal Kinship. No milking butterflies or squeezing grain from chickens, though.
- She should be able to do well at keeping a herd of animals if she chooses to, but Remote Herdkeeping - the art of using butterfly milkers and meat collectors to harvest from her herds while she's away - will be absolutely useless.
- If she meets a fox, she... will be able to brush it I guess? The function of fox-brushing in Ur was to collect fiber to spin into string, and the skill made her quicker and better at it.
THE UPSHOT: Keysong will be good with animals in general; they'll trust her and she'll have a good sense of how to handle them. Also she might someday present you with a sweater that smells like fox.
GROWING
These are the farmer's skills, including the arts of Soil Appreciation, Croppery, Herbalism, Light Green Thumb, Botany, and... Nudgery. Also the arts of the Master Gardener.
- Soil Appreciation is the understanding of dirt. Basically, it makes her really good at digging, plowing, and weeding. Yep. She'll also be good at telling different types of soil apart, and at finding buried things.
- Light Green Thumb is really just a general affinity for plant care. In Ur, it enabled her to get little extra gifts from trees and gardens that she watered, but that's not going to work with trees that don't talk and can't just magically dump things into her inventory.
- Croppery is closer to what we'd actually think of as a green thumb - she'll be pretty good at farming food crops and getting large harvests from them, at least on the backyard-garden scale. The vegetables she grew in her gardens on Ur are actually no different from what you'd find in a grocery store, so this skill will actually be quite useful to her if she decides to start a vegetable garden.
- Herbalism is the art of growing, harvesting, and extracting seeds from various medicinal (and "medicinal") herbs. This may be useful too, but it'll come with a learning curve, because she's used to farming things like Rubeweed and Rookswort which don't exist here - she'll have to learn a new set of herbs.
- Botany is the plant version of Animal Husbandry. It lets her season plain beans to grow different trees with. Like the egg seasoning, this is useless to her outside of Ur.
- Nudgery allowed her to move things she'd put on her home street and backyard. Anything she'd placed. From gardens to ore chunks to full-grown trees. She could decide she didn't much like that fruit tree where it was, and just... scoot it over a few feet. I'm not sure if I should let her have this or not. IT WOULD BE SORT OF HILARIOUS IF SHE HAD IT.
- Master Gardener... sounds awesome, but it was just the ability to use a number of gardening potions that would water, harvest, or fertilize a whole plot. Keysong can't make those potions, nor does she know anyone who can, so... it's a little useless.
THE UPSHOT: If Keysong starts any kind of garden, she'll grow healthy crops with good yields and she'll know what kind of soil to use where and for what. Once she learns some more about the local herbs, she'll be good at growing those too. She may or may not also be able to move trees around.
GATHERING
And these are the forager's skills. Arborology, Jellisac Hands, Bog Specialization, Spice Milling, Fruit Changing, Bubble Tuning, and Gasmogrification are all part of this skillset.
- Arborology is all about harvesting from trees (and occasionally getting gifts from them). It won't be quite the same as it was on Ur - as discussed, the trees here can't give her things, and we're a little short on the specific types she's used to. But she should have a good eye for when fruits are ripe enough to harvest and a deft hand at doing so.
- Jellisac Hands makes her better at scooping up wild jellisacs from boggy areas. Useless because there are no jellisacs here.
- Bog Specialization could be useful - it makes her better at digging up peat.
- Spice Milling lets her use a spice mill to convert allspice into other spices, like turmeric or saffron. This will not work (much to her friend Delta's dismay when she finds out how hard it is to get saffron, no doubt) because you can't do that.
- Fruit Changing is precisely what it sounds like - turning harvested cherries into any other kind of fruit. Won't work.
- Bubble Tuning is turning harvested bubbles (yes) into other... kinds of bubbles... Won't work.
- Gasmogrification. Harvested gas from a gas plant, you probably get the idea at this point.
THE UPSHOT: Good at gathering wild fruits! She'll be a little confused as to why she can't grind allspice and get anything other than ground-up allspice, though. Or how she's supposed to cook bubble-and-squeak without any actual bubbles.
COOKING
Nothing mystical here, just food. The cooking skills in Ur included EZ Cooking, Cheffery, Grilling, Saucery, Blending, Cocktail Crafting, and Master Chef.
- EZ Cooking is the basic food-prep stuff you can do without getting a whole lot of fuss involved. Salads, cheese plates, crudites, tacos. Basic stuff.
- Cheffery is knowing your way around a frying pan.
- I bet you can't guess what Grilling is!
- Saucery is the ability to make various sauces, stocks, gravies, and jams.
- Blending is basically making juices and smoothies.
- Cocktail Crafting is blending plus alcohol.
- Master Chef conferred mastery of the "Awesome Pot" and more complicated recipes.
THE UPSHOT: There is nothing on this list Keysong can't actually do. She's a competent chef who can make herself a tasty dinner, but she's not as enthusiastic about it or good at it as Delta is.
ALCHEMY
The alchemical skillset was all about distilling and making medicines and powders and woo-woo New Age stuff. It includes the skills of Element Handling, Alchemy, Intermediate Admixing, Crystallography, Distilling, Tincturing, and Potionmaking.
- Element Handling conferred a basic understanding of the elements of the world: blue, red, green, and shiny. ... Yeah it's not that simple outside of Ur. She'll need some time with a few chemistry textbooks before she can even vaguely do this again.
- Alchemy is all about making those elements into compounds, or using them to convert plain metal into copper, tin, or molybdenum. This runs into the same chemistry-textbook problems as above - it just ain't gonna work that way.
- Intermediate Admixing took the compound-making a step further, mixing the compounds together into vaguely mystical powders. She might be able to do a form of this, but everything she actually knows how to make is based on Urthly compounds, so it'll take some more work before she can do anything useful with the skill.
- Crystallography involved the use of a "crystalmalizing chamber" to make crystals out of fireflies and talc from ground-up barnacles, and occasionally gain favor from the Giants in doing so. Absolutely no part of that is going to be even a little useful outside of Ur. The only use for the crystals was in restoring depleted ore rocks, anyway.
- Distilling WILL be useful, though. She can distill hooch from grain, potatoes, or corn! Introduce her to other fermentables and she'll probably get the hang of those too.
- Tincturing is just what it sounds like - making medicinal tinctures from alcohol and herbs. She'll need to learn her way around the local herbs to know what she can make, but once she does she'll be whipping up tinctures like a pro.
- Potionmaking is the knowledge of brewing magical potions from tinctures and other ingredients. Sadly, she knew only the most basic recipes and they all depend on tinctures from Ur. She MIGHT be able to make some potions here, but not until she's settled in a lot more and learned more about the ingredients available to her - and even then she'll have no idea what she's actually making until she tests the results. SCIENCE!
THE UPSHOT: She can make medicine! And might just become a handy potioneer with time and practice. Much of her alchemical knowledge depends on the physics and chemistry of Ur, though, so she'll have to do a lot of relearning if she wants to do any alchemy.
INDUSTRIAL
This is the nitty-gritty hard labor stuff. Mining, Refining, Smelting, Tinkering, Woodworking, Furnituremaking, Fiber Arts, Engineering, Blockmaking, Fuelmaking, and Metalworking comprise this skillset.
- Mining is something she should still be fine at - taking a pickaxe to mine up ores and gems. The only thing here will be getting used to the fact that the rocks don't regrow after you mine them down to nothing.
- Refining is the ability to grind chunks of harvested ore down to the basic red/green/blue/shiny elements. Not gonna work here.
- Smelting is, as you might think, the art of smelting metal from metal ore. She should be able to do this, and might be able to apply this knowledge to other metalworking projects if she so chose.
- Tinkering is the ability to repair and craft various tools with a bizarre all-in-one "tinkertool". She should still be able to do this, she'll just have to get used to having a lot more tools around.
- Woodworking involved using a woodworker machine to turn harvested wood into boards, beams, and posts. She should have no problem with this, and may be able to figure out how to do it manually.
- Furnituremaking is no big, just basic carpentry. Again, the only issue will be tools (and learning that screws and nails are actually two different things).
- Fiber Arts, as mentioned earlier when we discussed Fox Brushing, is just spinning fiber into thread and string, and then weaving the thread into fabric. Get her a loom and a spindle and she'll do just fine.
- Engineering conferred better tool-crafting and also the ability to build machines like the woodworker and metalworker. Given the right parts, she could do this.
- But she might run into some difficulty in powering them, because she never learned Fuelmaking, so she doesn't know how to make the fuel cells these machines run on. Oops!
- She never learned Blockmaking, either, but that's less crucial - it's just making blocks of good solid dirt for a foundation.
- Metalworking involved using the metalworker machine to make metal rods, bars, and girders. As with Woodworking, nothing actually stopping her here if she can get the parts to make a metalworker.
THE UPSHOT: Keysong is a competent miner, carpenter, smelter, and weaver. A lot of this shit was boring even in Ur, though, and when she finds out how much hard work it is when industry doesn't work on dream logic, she's likely to give it up in favor of things she finds more interesting.
INTELLECTUAL
The intellectual skill tree is the one Keysong favors most. It includes Meditative Arts, Levitation, Focused Meditation, Transcendental Radiation, Martial Imagination, Piety, Bureaucratic Arts, Penpersonship, ... Eyeballery, and Teleportation.
- Meditative Arts is the ability to meditate, with the use of a focusing orb, to restore energy and mood. The way a Glitch's body works, this can actually replace eating and drinking. Keysong can still do this, and in fact finds it a useful way to cultivate her imagination. (But she won't use it to replace eating. Because food is yummy.)
- Levitation is pretty much what it sounds like. By concentrating on her focusing orb, Keysong can actually levitate for very brief periods. I see no reason she can't still do this.
- Focused Meditation is just Meditative Arts directed at either energy or mood alone.
- Transcendental Radiation allows her to direct the benefits of her meditation outward - she can sacrifice her own health to transfer it to those around her. This could actually make her very valuable as a healer.
- Martial Imagination is where this shit gets fun. This skill allows her to use her focusing orb to actually weaponize the imagination of up to 8 Glitchen to stun enemies. This was essential in Ur for driving off the Rook, imagination-eating birds that regularly attempted to destroy the Giants' creation. It may not be as precisely targeted to the nature of opponents here in Wandering Stars, but it's still a powerful attack and could be very useful.
- Piety was the other essential component of Rook-fighting. Ur was absolutely covered in shrines to the Giants, which Glitchen often made donations to to gain favor with this or that Giant. Piety was the art of redirecting the shrine's power: once a shrine was properly primed, donations made to it would focus the aligned Giant's power in a direct attack against the Rook. This won't be any use in WS without any shrines, but maybe if they make some...
- Bureaucratic Arts is extremely boring after all that INCREDIBLE PSYCHIC POWER stuff. It is literally just knowing how to navigate an obstructive bureaucracy to get papers and permits. I HOPE KEYSONG WILL NEVER NEED THIS AGAIN.
- Penpersonship is pretty simple. She can write notes and letters. And also teleportation scrolls.
- Eyeballery... ... doesn't make any sense outside of the MMO context, really. It was simply expanding your camera range so you could take better snapshots. Keysong doesn't even need a skill for that now.
- Teleportation IS AWESOME. Keysong can spend some of her energy to teleport to almost anywhere she's been before. She can only do it a limited number of times a day unless she's teleporting to a pre-set location, though. Also, she can summon another character twice per day. It's not as necessary in WS when you can just ride SPACE MANATEES FUCK YEAH, but sometimes you wanna get somewhere fast and being able to teleport is awesome. FUCK THE POLICE
THE UPSHOT: Keysong can sustain herself with meditation, heal others by giving them her health, levitate, teleport, and stun things with her brain (and others'). She needs her focusing orb for almost all of that, though. Also she can write nice and deal with bureaucrats.
Outside of Ur, that's kind of OP! And there are a lot of skills that are only useful in Ur. So this is a quick rundown of Keysong's skills, which ones she can still use, and what they do!
ANIMALS
This was the first area of skills Keysong studied, encompassing Animal Kinship, Fox Brushing, Animal Husbandry, Herdkeeping and Remote Herdkeeping.
- Animal Husbandry will actually do her no good in Wandering Stars, because in Ur it was the art of seasoning plain eggs so that they could hatch into caterpillars, chicks, or piglets. Yes, seasoning them. With spices and gasses and things. Plain eggs that grew on trees.
- She'll get along well with animals due to Animal Kinship. No milking butterflies or squeezing grain from chickens, though.
- She should be able to do well at keeping a herd of animals if she chooses to, but Remote Herdkeeping - the art of using butterfly milkers and meat collectors to harvest from her herds while she's away - will be absolutely useless.
- If she meets a fox, she... will be able to brush it I guess? The function of fox-brushing in Ur was to collect fiber to spin into string, and the skill made her quicker and better at it.
THE UPSHOT: Keysong will be good with animals in general; they'll trust her and she'll have a good sense of how to handle them. Also she might someday present you with a sweater that smells like fox.
GROWING
These are the farmer's skills, including the arts of Soil Appreciation, Croppery, Herbalism, Light Green Thumb, Botany, and... Nudgery. Also the arts of the Master Gardener.
- Soil Appreciation is the understanding of dirt. Basically, it makes her really good at digging, plowing, and weeding. Yep. She'll also be good at telling different types of soil apart, and at finding buried things.
- Light Green Thumb is really just a general affinity for plant care. In Ur, it enabled her to get little extra gifts from trees and gardens that she watered, but that's not going to work with trees that don't talk and can't just magically dump things into her inventory.
- Croppery is closer to what we'd actually think of as a green thumb - she'll be pretty good at farming food crops and getting large harvests from them, at least on the backyard-garden scale. The vegetables she grew in her gardens on Ur are actually no different from what you'd find in a grocery store, so this skill will actually be quite useful to her if she decides to start a vegetable garden.
- Herbalism is the art of growing, harvesting, and extracting seeds from various medicinal (and "medicinal") herbs. This may be useful too, but it'll come with a learning curve, because she's used to farming things like Rubeweed and Rookswort which don't exist here - she'll have to learn a new set of herbs.
- Botany is the plant version of Animal Husbandry. It lets her season plain beans to grow different trees with. Like the egg seasoning, this is useless to her outside of Ur.
- Nudgery allowed her to move things she'd put on her home street and backyard. Anything she'd placed. From gardens to ore chunks to full-grown trees. She could decide she didn't much like that fruit tree where it was, and just... scoot it over a few feet. I'm not sure if I should let her have this or not. IT WOULD BE SORT OF HILARIOUS IF SHE HAD IT.
- Master Gardener... sounds awesome, but it was just the ability to use a number of gardening potions that would water, harvest, or fertilize a whole plot. Keysong can't make those potions, nor does she know anyone who can, so... it's a little useless.
THE UPSHOT: If Keysong starts any kind of garden, she'll grow healthy crops with good yields and she'll know what kind of soil to use where and for what. Once she learns some more about the local herbs, she'll be good at growing those too. She may or may not also be able to move trees around.
GATHERING
And these are the forager's skills. Arborology, Jellisac Hands, Bog Specialization, Spice Milling, Fruit Changing, Bubble Tuning, and Gasmogrification are all part of this skillset.
- Arborology is all about harvesting from trees (and occasionally getting gifts from them). It won't be quite the same as it was on Ur - as discussed, the trees here can't give her things, and we're a little short on the specific types she's used to. But she should have a good eye for when fruits are ripe enough to harvest and a deft hand at doing so.
- Jellisac Hands makes her better at scooping up wild jellisacs from boggy areas. Useless because there are no jellisacs here.
- Bog Specialization could be useful - it makes her better at digging up peat.
- Spice Milling lets her use a spice mill to convert allspice into other spices, like turmeric or saffron. This will not work (much to her friend Delta's dismay when she finds out how hard it is to get saffron, no doubt) because you can't do that.
- Fruit Changing is precisely what it sounds like - turning harvested cherries into any other kind of fruit. Won't work.
- Bubble Tuning is turning harvested bubbles (yes) into other... kinds of bubbles... Won't work.
- Gasmogrification. Harvested gas from a gas plant, you probably get the idea at this point.
THE UPSHOT: Good at gathering wild fruits! She'll be a little confused as to why she can't grind allspice and get anything other than ground-up allspice, though. Or how she's supposed to cook bubble-and-squeak without any actual bubbles.
COOKING
Nothing mystical here, just food. The cooking skills in Ur included EZ Cooking, Cheffery, Grilling, Saucery, Blending, Cocktail Crafting, and Master Chef.
- EZ Cooking is the basic food-prep stuff you can do without getting a whole lot of fuss involved. Salads, cheese plates, crudites, tacos. Basic stuff.
- Cheffery is knowing your way around a frying pan.
- I bet you can't guess what Grilling is!
- Saucery is the ability to make various sauces, stocks, gravies, and jams.
- Blending is basically making juices and smoothies.
- Cocktail Crafting is blending plus alcohol.
- Master Chef conferred mastery of the "Awesome Pot" and more complicated recipes.
THE UPSHOT: There is nothing on this list Keysong can't actually do. She's a competent chef who can make herself a tasty dinner, but she's not as enthusiastic about it or good at it as Delta is.
ALCHEMY
The alchemical skillset was all about distilling and making medicines and powders and woo-woo New Age stuff. It includes the skills of Element Handling, Alchemy, Intermediate Admixing, Crystallography, Distilling, Tincturing, and Potionmaking.
- Element Handling conferred a basic understanding of the elements of the world: blue, red, green, and shiny. ... Yeah it's not that simple outside of Ur. She'll need some time with a few chemistry textbooks before she can even vaguely do this again.
- Alchemy is all about making those elements into compounds, or using them to convert plain metal into copper, tin, or molybdenum. This runs into the same chemistry-textbook problems as above - it just ain't gonna work that way.
- Intermediate Admixing took the compound-making a step further, mixing the compounds together into vaguely mystical powders. She might be able to do a form of this, but everything she actually knows how to make is based on Urthly compounds, so it'll take some more work before she can do anything useful with the skill.
- Crystallography involved the use of a "crystalmalizing chamber" to make crystals out of fireflies and talc from ground-up barnacles, and occasionally gain favor from the Giants in doing so. Absolutely no part of that is going to be even a little useful outside of Ur. The only use for the crystals was in restoring depleted ore rocks, anyway.
- Distilling WILL be useful, though. She can distill hooch from grain, potatoes, or corn! Introduce her to other fermentables and she'll probably get the hang of those too.
- Tincturing is just what it sounds like - making medicinal tinctures from alcohol and herbs. She'll need to learn her way around the local herbs to know what she can make, but once she does she'll be whipping up tinctures like a pro.
- Potionmaking is the knowledge of brewing magical potions from tinctures and other ingredients. Sadly, she knew only the most basic recipes and they all depend on tinctures from Ur. She MIGHT be able to make some potions here, but not until she's settled in a lot more and learned more about the ingredients available to her - and even then she'll have no idea what she's actually making until she tests the results. SCIENCE!
THE UPSHOT: She can make medicine! And might just become a handy potioneer with time and practice. Much of her alchemical knowledge depends on the physics and chemistry of Ur, though, so she'll have to do a lot of relearning if she wants to do any alchemy.
INDUSTRIAL
This is the nitty-gritty hard labor stuff. Mining, Refining, Smelting, Tinkering, Woodworking, Furnituremaking, Fiber Arts, Engineering, Blockmaking, Fuelmaking, and Metalworking comprise this skillset.
- Mining is something she should still be fine at - taking a pickaxe to mine up ores and gems. The only thing here will be getting used to the fact that the rocks don't regrow after you mine them down to nothing.
- Refining is the ability to grind chunks of harvested ore down to the basic red/green/blue/shiny elements. Not gonna work here.
- Smelting is, as you might think, the art of smelting metal from metal ore. She should be able to do this, and might be able to apply this knowledge to other metalworking projects if she so chose.
- Tinkering is the ability to repair and craft various tools with a bizarre all-in-one "tinkertool". She should still be able to do this, she'll just have to get used to having a lot more tools around.
- Woodworking involved using a woodworker machine to turn harvested wood into boards, beams, and posts. She should have no problem with this, and may be able to figure out how to do it manually.
- Furnituremaking is no big, just basic carpentry. Again, the only issue will be tools (and learning that screws and nails are actually two different things).
- Fiber Arts, as mentioned earlier when we discussed Fox Brushing, is just spinning fiber into thread and string, and then weaving the thread into fabric. Get her a loom and a spindle and she'll do just fine.
- Engineering conferred better tool-crafting and also the ability to build machines like the woodworker and metalworker. Given the right parts, she could do this.
- But she might run into some difficulty in powering them, because she never learned Fuelmaking, so she doesn't know how to make the fuel cells these machines run on. Oops!
- She never learned Blockmaking, either, but that's less crucial - it's just making blocks of good solid dirt for a foundation.
- Metalworking involved using the metalworker machine to make metal rods, bars, and girders. As with Woodworking, nothing actually stopping her here if she can get the parts to make a metalworker.
THE UPSHOT: Keysong is a competent miner, carpenter, smelter, and weaver. A lot of this shit was boring even in Ur, though, and when she finds out how much hard work it is when industry doesn't work on dream logic, she's likely to give it up in favor of things she finds more interesting.
INTELLECTUAL
The intellectual skill tree is the one Keysong favors most. It includes Meditative Arts, Levitation, Focused Meditation, Transcendental Radiation, Martial Imagination, Piety, Bureaucratic Arts, Penpersonship, ... Eyeballery, and Teleportation.
- Meditative Arts is the ability to meditate, with the use of a focusing orb, to restore energy and mood. The way a Glitch's body works, this can actually replace eating and drinking. Keysong can still do this, and in fact finds it a useful way to cultivate her imagination. (But she won't use it to replace eating. Because food is yummy.)
- Levitation is pretty much what it sounds like. By concentrating on her focusing orb, Keysong can actually levitate for very brief periods. I see no reason she can't still do this.
- Focused Meditation is just Meditative Arts directed at either energy or mood alone.
- Transcendental Radiation allows her to direct the benefits of her meditation outward - she can sacrifice her own health to transfer it to those around her. This could actually make her very valuable as a healer.
- Martial Imagination is where this shit gets fun. This skill allows her to use her focusing orb to actually weaponize the imagination of up to 8 Glitchen to stun enemies. This was essential in Ur for driving off the Rook, imagination-eating birds that regularly attempted to destroy the Giants' creation. It may not be as precisely targeted to the nature of opponents here in Wandering Stars, but it's still a powerful attack and could be very useful.
- Piety was the other essential component of Rook-fighting. Ur was absolutely covered in shrines to the Giants, which Glitchen often made donations to to gain favor with this or that Giant. Piety was the art of redirecting the shrine's power: once a shrine was properly primed, donations made to it would focus the aligned Giant's power in a direct attack against the Rook. This won't be any use in WS without any shrines, but maybe if they make some...
- Bureaucratic Arts is extremely boring after all that INCREDIBLE PSYCHIC POWER stuff. It is literally just knowing how to navigate an obstructive bureaucracy to get papers and permits. I HOPE KEYSONG WILL NEVER NEED THIS AGAIN.
- Penpersonship is pretty simple. She can write notes and letters. And also teleportation scrolls.
- Eyeballery... ... doesn't make any sense outside of the MMO context, really. It was simply expanding your camera range so you could take better snapshots. Keysong doesn't even need a skill for that now.
- Teleportation IS AWESOME. Keysong can spend some of her energy to teleport to almost anywhere she's been before. She can only do it a limited number of times a day unless she's teleporting to a pre-set location, though. Also, she can summon another character twice per day. It's not as necessary in WS when you can just ride SPACE MANATEES FUCK YEAH, but sometimes you wanna get somewhere fast and being able to teleport is awesome. FUCK THE POLICE
THE UPSHOT: Keysong can sustain herself with meditation, heal others by giving them her health, levitate, teleport, and stun things with her brain (and others'). She needs her focusing orb for almost all of that, though. Also she can write nice and deal with bureaucrats.
