You dig at the ground, but cannot secure any clay....

[Qzzrbl]

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A bigass pit of clay [u]
   You're in a big pit. A big pit that's been dug into the ground. It's pretty damn deep.
And you're at the bottom of it. You can't see over it's edge. Even on your tippy toes.
It's a big pit that's been dug into soft clay. You're surrounded by clay. You're stepping
on clay. The walls are made of clay. You can see where people have dug clay out of the
walls, that are made of clay. You could probably dig for clay here.
[OOC: you can 'forage' for clay here to sell to that dude up there buying the stuff]


Feeling like you're about to dig up some motherfucking clay, you think:
     "A'ight, let's get this shit started."

You begin searching the area intently.

You dig at the ground, but you cannot secure any clay.

Looking down at his hands, you say in Sirihish:
    "What tha...?"

You dig at the ground, but you cannot secure any clay.

Feeling like a total idiot, you realize you don't have any motherfucking hands.

Alright.... I dunno, maybe it's a minor issue, but it's a huge gripe for me.

Think we can get a different failure echo for digging clay?

Because as it is now.... I dunno, it just doesn't make any sense.

Same with dung digging.

At least with things like salt grebbing, you can RP it as not finding anything valuable in the endless sea of common, useless white salt, but what's your excuse for not being able to dig in the mud/shit with your hands?

Anyone got suggestions?

[MeTekillot]

You're unable to find a soft enough spot to dig some clay out.

[a strange shadow]

I went digging for clay in a riverbed, once. You have to search for it in the dirt. It's not all just a solid swath of clay. That said I think the difficulty of finding it is way too high, or it was, a few years ago when I tried and promptly gave up.

[brytta.leofa]

I've never dug for clay.  But I wonder about turning the success rate up and the price down (even farther).

> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
Hold your horses, buddy.
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
Whoa, Mr. Spamalicious, that's no way to get karma.
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
You are too exhausted.

You encumbrance is VERY heavy.
> u; sell clay
The clay-sodden merchant says, jovially, in heathen-accented sirihish,
  "My, what a haul!  Let's see...yes, I think 3 obsidian coins would be fair."

Clay seems like it ought to be much easier to dig out than obsidian, but worth much less.  I guess the same reasoning applies to dungheaps: it should be almost impossible to fail at Getting Some, but you should be selling large, heavy loads of it in order to make any coin.

[Gunnerblaster]

I've never dug for clay.  But I wonder about turning the success rate up and the price down (even farther).

> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
Hold your horses, buddy.
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
Whoa, Mr. Spamalicious, that's no way to get karma.
> forage clay
You dig around and get yourself a whole bunch of clay!
> forage clay
You are too exhausted.

You encumbrance is VERY heavy.
> u; sell clay
The clay-sodden merchant says, jovially, in heathen-accented sirihish,
 "My, what a haul!  Let's see...yes, I think 3 obsidian coins would be fair."

Clay seems like it ought to be much easier to dig out than obsidian, but worth much less.  I guess the same reasoning applies to dungheaps: it should be almost impossible to fail at Getting Some, but you should be selling large, heavy loads of it in order to make any coin.

It's a game, in the end. Play to do something worth doing. I am not going to spam forage, for 70 minutes out of my life (A day, in-game), just to make 3 coins. I need to buy water (15 coins for a cup) and food (Atleast 10 for anything worthwhile).

If this was implemented, there would be no actual point in trying to dig for clay - Except to exhaust yourself into dehydration even faster - unless you could actually do something with the clay (beyond selling it for basically nothing).

[brytta.leofa]

It's a game, in the end. Play to do something worth doing. I am not going to spam forage, for 70 minutes out of my life (A day, in-game), just to make 3 coins. I need to buy water (15 coins for a cup) and food (Atleast 10 for anything worthwhile).

I kind of expressed that poorly.  I would want to keep the profit per real-life hour the same, but increase the volume of clay or dung that you wind up processing.

Instead of, say, 10 forage fails and 4 forage successes to get 10 sids worth of clay, you'd have 10 forage successes and 4 forage fails...but still only make 10 sids off your effort.

The only point is to make the failure rate more pleasing.

[Aaron Goulet]

It's a game, in the end. Play to do something worth doing. I am not going to spam forage, for 70 minutes out of my life (A day, in-game), just to make 3 coins. I need to buy water (15 coins for a cup) and food (Atleast 10 for anything worthwhile).

I kind of expressed that poorly.  I would want to keep the profit per real-life hour the same, but increase the volume of clay or dung that you wind up processing.

Instead of, say, 10 forage fails and 4 forage successes to get 10 sids worth of clay, you'd have 10 forage successes and 4 forage fails...but still only make 10 sids off your effort.

The only point is to make the failure rate more pleasing.

That would be inconsiderate to those of us who like to fail. 

I've only tried clay digging once, and the time and (in-game) effort was far too great to make it worth the reward.  I doubt I could play a full-time clay digger and survive.

[flurry]

I like the idea of having jobs like that, but I also felt like the time and spamming wasn't worth it. If clay had a bunch of crafting recipes attached to it, that might make it more worthwhile.

I look at it this way: if an activity is isolating and spammy like that, it probably needs to be somehow profitable or else interesting/amusing. I know the safety of that job is why it pays very little, but I feel like it needs a little something extra. Atmospheric echos? NPC scripts? Variety in failure/success messages? Some kind of cleaning salt mini-game type thing?

[HavokBlue]

YOU HAVEN'T SECURED ENOUGH CLAY, FRIEND.

[Qzzrbl]

YOU HAVEN'T SECURED ENOUGH CLAY, FRIEND.

That would be a common corpse late at night. o-o;

[Synthesis]

The "profit per hour" for clay-pit digging is probably calibrated with respect to somewhere near the upper end of the forage skill, assuming it actually references your skill for success/failure.  If that's the case, it's really not any wonder that it seems to be terrible when you first try it.  Salt foraging also sucks pretty badly until you get your forage skill up to par.

If you made it easier, you would start to lose the forage-skill training value of the process (again, assuming it references the skill...I haven't dug for clay in quite a while).

[Qzzrbl]

My only beef is with the fail echo....

"LOL YOU'RE IN A BIG PIT OF CLAY, YOUR HANDS JUST DISAPPEAR AND PHASE THROUGH THE BIG WALL OF CLAY!"

Thing just irks the hell out of me....

Same with dung digging.

[flurry]

The "profit per hour" for clay-pit digging is probably calibrated with respect to somewhere near the upper end of the forage skill, assuming it actually references your skill for success/failure.  If that's the case, it's really not any wonder that it seems to be terrible when you first try it.  Salt foraging also sucks pretty badly until you get your forage skill up to par.

If you made it easier, you would start to lose the forage-skill training value of the process (again, assuming it references the skill...I haven't dug for clay in quite a while).

That may be true, but in that case I question why have a grunt labor job inside the city that depends on having a skill most likely to be developed outside the city? And what about characters who may be incapable of becoming a talented forager?

I don't know. If other players are enjoying it, then who am I to criticize? My limited experience with it just felt like a break-even proposition from an IC perspective, that depended on way too much spamming my taste. I appreciate that the option is there, and the effort involved in developing it, but it's not for me.