☛ On March 12 Spyder, the Cyan ‘mole’ who gave the hints for the Riven easter eggs, made an appearance on Cyan’s official Discord server. A few days later, Cyan announced the long-awaited addition of Rime to the Myst remake!
☛ On February 28 the Cavern Communications Network announced the second season of the Water Cooler show, with a follow-up interview with CalumTraveler.
☛ The Cavern Communications Network announced that the upcoming episode 8 of the Water Cooler show will be an interview with DapperAndy.
☛ Bella’s memorial was postponed to Friday 24 at 20:00 12:00 KIT. Ereshkigal will provide the music.
☛ A recent Cavern Tour visited the Pod Age. Since then, Larry obtained the official translation of the missing words from the map:
Here is the summary for the 150th All Guilds Meeting, along with the raw and cleansed chatlogs! This was also the first meeting not held in Kirel, but in Fahets Highgarden.
Skyisblu presented her cooking sessions, held each month in the Guild of Caterers’ Hood and streamed on her Twitch channel in both English and French; a chance to get together, learn a new recipe and talk food. Recordings of the streams and the accompanying recipes are available on her weblog.
IwonK will draw and talk on her Twitch channel on Friday 14 at 15:00 KIT. In Cavern, the gathering will be in the Guild of Cookies’ Hood, around the Ahyoheek table.
Superabbit announced the creation of the Musicians Guild’s Hood, to promote connection between musicians in the Cavern and to promote fan-created music for fan-created Ages. Links to streams and bandcamp pages will be welcome on the left imager.
A Cavern Tour will be held on Saturday 29 at 11:00 KIT, starting in the Cavern Tour’s Hood.
Events that were streamed via Twitch have been uploaded to YouTube. For a summary of the panels, check our dedicated post.
Participants were invited to give feedback via a survey. The results say that the Meow Wolf event was appreciated, so they will look into similar locations in the future. Cavern Feud was also very well received, so if they can get more questions they might do it again next year. Finally, a number of people have asked for ASL translation, or captions; an ASL translator may be beyond the budget, but they will look into captioning.
Mysterium 2023 will be held in Spokane, WA; a precise date was not been decided yet, but could be in late June or early July. The Committee will be formed by Elliot “Taniith” Borenstein and Kelly “Rayne” Coston. Vaccination policy will likely be the same as this year, following CDC guidelines.
The Mysterium prompt for October is “Spooky”; the deadline is October 31. Winners of the “Sleep, Rest” prompt for September were Redwoodrroad, Calum Traveler, Talashar and Laughingpineapple.
The ‘Storytellers’ group held their monthly Town Hall event for players who are interested in keeping tabs on the ongoing IC story.
Calum Traveler has started to organise the “negotiations with the people of Rei’schu” via Discord, to manage scheduling conflicts between their ‘ambassadors’. The server is set up so that only ‘diplomats’ can post in the active story channels, but there are a few side channels for other people to talk and discuss.
These logs will be transcribed into a series of journals that will be brought into MOULa.
The garden Age of Eder Naybree, the ‘Prologue’ to the ‘Rei’schu arc’, was released in early September.
Shortly before the All Guilds Meeting another garden Age was released: Fahets Highgarden, by Tweek, who answered a few questions. The statues in the location were a gift from a D’ni artisan called Tommen, who was found stranded upon an Age many years ago after he fled the Fall. The statues were a thank-you gift for freeing him.
Fahets’ prime Marker, unlike most available Ages, is active but will have to be recalibrated, so coordinates will for now be unreliable.
The next Age to be released will be another garden Age, Eder Bahvahnter. As now the circle of bookstands in Chiso Preniv is full, older books will be moved to the shelves while new ones will be featured promenently on the stands.
Due to travel and work obligations, the Dev Team will combine the Q3 and Q4 updates into a single one for the end of 2022, sometime in early December, with some updates being pushed into 2023.
The Minkata Delta shard, announced at Mysterium, may still launch sometime this year, but no progress yet has been made on setting it up. There have been fires in the US, some close to Rarified’s location, so he may be unable to monitor the server for some time; background measures have been taken to ensure that the Minkata server can remain running in case of emergency.
A pre-built virtual machine snapshot of the Minkata server, that anyone could set up and easily run, has been set up on Docker; we will provide more info on that in a followup post.
Darryl Pogue announced the H’uru team’s involvement in the annual Hacktoberfest event, a month-long event that encourages people to contribute to open-source software projects; with four contributions participants can earn a free T-shirt (a real-world physical shirt … but a virtual shirt in Uru could be an idea for a contribution!).
Last year, the H’uru repositories on GitHub saw 41 contributions to Uru-related projects, including the game client and content itself, but also the Korman Blender plugin for Age building, the DirtSand server, and other tools.
If you are not a coder, you can still contribute in the form of bug reports and feature requests, or things to improve the usability and quality of life when playing Uru.
You can find help and support, including suggestions for first-time contributors, in the #code-dev channel on the OpenUru Discord.
Diranda announced that the Guild of Authors and Artists is hosting the National Novel Writing Month in the Cavern this year. The first NaNoWriMo-related meeting will be held on October 7 at 13:00 KIT in the Ae’gura Messengers Pub, so if you are interested, feel free to visit.
R’Tayrtahn gave two updates, one for the D’ni Language Classes and one for the Story Nights. Currently, there are two students taking the classes at various stages of completion.
r'Tayrtahn#1317.Story Night Europe and Original Story Night are telling the stories of the years between the kings and the story of the Fall. The story of the Fall will be told through the book Myst: The Book of Ti’ana.
R’Tayrtahn is in the process of uploading the backlog of videos from previous sessions to his YouTube channel. Be careful if you PM r’Tay during the events, as messages will be visible in the videos 😉
And that was it for this month. Please consider donating to keep the Cavern open!
September ended with the CavFunding at 96% (CavCon 3) and the reserve at 518%, with no extra expenses. Population was at 45,756 (⇑262), with 1274 unique visits.
The next All Guilds Meeting is planned for Saturday, November 5 (Leevofo 13) at 13:00 KIT.
Until then!
☛ An update to MOULa was released on July 12, bringing the avatar dance animations from Uru: CC. You can now pick the awkward dance style of your choice 😀 The new animation is activated using /retrodance .
☛ The music for Firmament will be composed by Maclaine Diemer, who previously worked on ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2, Harmonix’s Rock Band franchises, Riot Games’ League of Legends, Amazon Game Studios’ first major original title Crucible, and most recently Salt and Sacrifice from Devour Studios.
☛ As announced during the AGM, a Mysterium Concert will be held live on August 5 at 13:00 KIT, in NDG Elonin, during the Summer Festival 2022. The concert, conceived by Minasunda, will be a tour across the Myst games and the Cavern and its community.
For in-person Mysterium attendees, a special highlights video of the concert will be premiered on August 13 and shared on Facebook and Discord. For online attendees, a link to the full concert will be provided on August 14, for those unable to attend the concert live.
The concert will feature three special guests who will play live: Olivier Maurey aka Piboc, Lillo Moon Minniti aka Lyllus, and Phil Rounds aka Fil. You can find more info about the artists on Calum Traveler’s blog.
☛ A new round of special guests has been announced:
☛ There will also be a Cyan Q&A Panel; if you wish to ask any questions, please submit them via this form by August 7. It will be a general Q&A, so feel free to ask about Firmament, Venture projects, Starry Expanse, etc.
☛ The Myst Documentary crew will share an update and sneak peeks of the film progress, as well as show off the Myst Story Community Vault. There will also be a Q&A session.
☛ Proof of vaccination will be asked at the time badges will be issued, you will not need to show proof again for the rest of the weekend. The up-to-date COVID policies are available here, the Committee will avoid changing them unless necessary.
☛ The third episode of the WaterCooler Show, by the Cavern Communications Network, will be an interview to Aaron Gwynaire, developer of the upcoming Myst-style point-and-click adventure game Neyyah.
Here is the summary for the 147th All Guilds Meeting, along with the raw and cleansed chatlogs!
The first guests for this year have been announced, and several more will be announced very soon:
For those attending the Meow Wolf event, a reminder was posted to review their light and noise sensitivity warnings.
The Mysterium prompt for July is “Voltaic Age”; the deadline is July 31. Winners of the “Resilience” prompt for June were Grayson, Harley and Laughingpineapple. Winners of the “Villains” prompt for May were Grayson, Belle, Talashar and Laughingpineapple.
The “Storytellers” group recently held the first of several planned monthly Town Hall events, designed for players who are interested in keeping tabs on the ongoing RP story to be able to catch up on missed events, as well as be able to provide some input on the future. An unedited chatlog can be found on Traveler’s Cavern Log; minutes of these logs are being planned to be posted to a journal in Chiso Preniv, although not before Q3.
Explorers there voted on three items: first, Eder Naybree was chosen to be released first, with Highgarden second. A second vote was held on the restoration priorities for the Overflow Station area, and the third was on diplomatic relations with an inhabited Age.
On the storytelling front, some concerns were raised about some ambiguity of rule interactions. A formal post is being drafted for a generic ruleset to address these concerns; most of the rules will be similar to the AGM rules.
PodHopper presented the outline of the MOULa Summer Festival, which will be held on August 1–5, before the next AGM. The number of events made a five-day festival possible, with a variety of events like contests, music, a video event and a marker game.
For more information, or if you have an idea for an event that you would like to be included, feel free to contact PodHopper on Discord (PodHopper#8133) or in MOULa (#7116825). The events are also listed in our calendar.
Minasunda gave a few more details on some of the events. At the “Eternal Evergreens” event – which will take place in the stained glass windows room in Mir-o-Bot’s Elonin (PM “to NDG Elonin” to the bot to get there, KI# 32319) – Eternal Seeker will sing a few songs. A ‘guided dance’ is planned, where avatars will temporarily be taken over for a dance routine. If you do not want to be integrated in the dance, let Mina know so she can put you on the exclusion list for the duration of the event.
The second event, also taking place in Mir-o-Bot’s Elonin, is a very special, 80 min concert for this year’s Mysterium. Uncle Rebus’ large Persian carpet offers plenty of space for the attendees, so there is no need to climb on the furniture 😉
The concert is not just a music stream: the Nulp Dance Group will ‘play’ instruments live and will be supported by three backround singers. There will be pieces from Myst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, End of Ages and Uru, plus three artists well known in the Myst/Uru community will play live a few of their pieces: Olivier Maurey aka Piboc, Lillo Moon Minniti aka Lyllus, and Phil Rounds aka Fil.
A video will be recorded, and excerpts will then be released as a YouTube Premiere during the convention (because of timing constraints, the video cannot be longer than 25 min). The release date will be posted on Facebook and Discord very soon.
Doobes gave an update on what is coming for the next update to MOULa. The Chiso Preniv library will be greatly expanded, with journals and stories related to the ongoing RP fan stories. All the new content (save a few Ages planned for later release) will be available immediately after the update, but will be somewhat hidden: a hint is to look for the number 18 😉
If you would like to add a little story-related something, or even just some creative writing related to Myst/Uru for a future update, let Doobes know. Note that you may be asked by testers to work out some ‘wrinkles’ and such.
With Chiso’s updates out of the way, Doobes will focus solely on the Ae’gura Messengers Pub’s Mysterium decorations. Each of the corner alcoves and the conference room upstairs will be devoted to each Myst game in the series. The main hall and entryway will also have the tables ‘dressed up’ in cliché hotel conference room fashion, for extra authenticity and to give those that could not make it to the convention in-person the same feel as if they were there. There will also be some ‘swag’ to collect 🙂
If all goes well, the decorations (along with many other goodies and fixes) will appear soon after the update and just in time for Mysterium weekend, August 12–14. The update is planned to be released for the end of July or beginning of August.
A separate small update will be released in the coming week: an addition was needed for one of the presentations.
To keep updated on Doobes’ work, check his blog and his Facebook page.
To be a tester, you will need to open an account on the Minkata prime shard; it is highly recommended to read the Tester’s Guide to understand what is expected. To test the cutting edge additions, you can sign up for the Minkata alpha shard.
To report bugs, you can post on the OpenUru Discord server (channels #hood or #dev); on Discord you can ask to be added to the Testers role to be notified of testing requests, which sometimes need quick response in terms of hours, not days.
The Cavern Tour are back, on the fourth Saturday of the month, gathering at 11:00 KIT in the Cavern Tour’s Hood.
Larry LeDeay will reprise his role as the tour guide, r’Tayrtahn will appear as guest guide. Zeke, the original creator of the Cavern Tours, will also be back as host along Susa’n.
The Tours will use a Twitch channel for the presentation, so you will need to keep a browser or the app open in the background. Videos will be available for two weeks after the tour. The stream will be simulcasted on Facebook and Youtube.
The tours occasionally visit hard to reach places. Mir-o-Bot (KI# 32319) is often employed for special effects and long-distance travel (and to avoid stairs). If you arrive late, you can PM Susa’n (KI# 9122427) to join the in-progress tour – but do try to arrive in time!
And that was it for this month. Please consider donating to keep the Cavern open!
June ended with the CavFunding at 114% (CavCon 4.1) and the reserve at 544%, with no extra expenses. Population was at 44,967 (⇑220), with 1090 unique visits.
The next All Guilds Meeting is planned for Saturday, August 6 (Leesahn 28) at 13:00 KIT.
The role of Moderator is currently vacant, with Calum Traveler filling in for the time being; if anyone would like to take the role, it is your chance to step up 😉
Until then!
Shorah Everyone! Tyion here. Well, I have a bit of a surprise for ya’ll and a delightful one at that. The W.C or “Watercooler Show” will premier earlier than expected. The executive decision has been made to launch it separately from the main podcast! We’ve got a lot of voices in the community that we want to bring to light and well, the old saying “the sooner the better” seems to be the mindset here at C.C.N.
Thus, I am pleased to announce that Episode 1 will air this coming week on June 24th! Who is our first guest? None other then Patrick Dulebohn, aka Mr Doobes! The man behind such Ages as Chiso Preniv, Veelay Tsahvahn, and The Guild of Messengers Pub! I was so thrilled to sit down with this man. He was a delight to speak with and a wonderful start to our roster of upcoming community guests. I hope you all enjoy this interview as much as I did.
Shorah b’shemtee my friends!
~Tyion~
Greetings fellow Explorers!
This is Tyion of The Cavern Communications Network! Coming to you today, I am thrilled to announce our re-launch. C.C.N has been quiet for some time, but with a sort of “rebirth” happening in URU, we feel it is the time to turn the lights back on! You can learn more at out blog site here!
Shorah b’shemtee my friends!
~Tyion~