... a year ago, things were beginning to take shape.
Everybody was frantically rebuilding after the second hamster died (the server had gone awol yet again for an entire weekend), and we all mucked in to help each other recover.
The first fledgling guilds had formed, and started to recruit.
Branch Offices were now available to be built, and the first tentative trades were being made. We looked towards a rudimentary trade calculator on the American forum, as an indicator to whether or not a trade seemed fair.
On there, we also found a passable combat sim, which took some of the guesswork out of what troops to send into battle.
This came into its own, when we started to hear other players complaining about some guy named 'Skunk', who was proving to be a tough nut to crack, although for a lot of us, he was still hidden by clouds.
The chat was ably run by Penny, Calen and Psychynius, and we also had frequent appearances from 4 BBs in chat.
Someone else turned the chat blue, and the dispute spilled out onto the forum, and the 1st game ban occurred, although as we were still in closed-beta, the worst 'chat nightmare' was yet to make his debut!
I got stuck for the one and only time, and made the most frequently asked question "How do you make a fish platter?" (Still the poorest quest description even now, no wonder it's still being asked to this day).
Even though I never got an answer, another conversation was mentioning buildings having tabs, so I clicked on a few, until I found the provisions house had the item I wanted, and I was back in business.
I then whiled away several interesting hours, clicking all sorts of buildings, to see what other things I could discover, so barely noticed the eternal wait for stone and planks.
Almost everyone was proud to use a generic signature, with a settlers background, where you could input your current level (plans were afoot to link this to the game to automatically update, but came to naught). But people proudly displayed "Now level 8 in their tagline).
Sid was yet to go on his first adventure, but was working hard towards it, and the legendary "Adventure Journal" was soon to be born, which really came into its own when the Christmas adventure appeared.
The server (we still only had one, Northisle was months away yet, and Americans were IP blocked from coming over here, as we were from their server) threw up even more bizarre behaviour, when clicking the blue 'Play Now' button did nothing, or took you to a white screen. 6-7 of us were still in the game, and stayed logged in for several days, passing messages back out, until the Devs finally rewrote the corrupted code and linked the button back to the game. These extra few days got me back onto the 1st page of my own friend list, as I levelled up.
Although the American server was blocked to all but the most persistent and tech-savvy, a few of us found the German servers approachable, giving us some quiet time playing, while problems were being sorted out here.
There was only 1 chat channel, and the help tab, and mostly we got by, although once the trade really took off, and then the closed beta became 'open', it was clear that this was woefully inadequate, but the new channels were yet to come.
Real Life also proved its ability to intrude into the World of Settlers (thinking of you mate, as the anniversary draws near).
There seemed to be 2 lonely marble block buffs in the Provisions House, the second one we discovered converted marble to granite, but we were all struggling to get marble at the time. A few people tried it, then basically gave away the granite, as there didn't seem to be a use for it, and it ate up valuable marble!
Some brave/foolhardy souls even clicked the bomb icon in the Mayor's House, did it reset the game, or kill your account for good? Actually, it did nothing apart from a brief lift to the spirits when annoyed, pretending to nuke the thing. Another button on the friends' list also did nothing, but seemed to hold great promise. It was labelled "Send Army", could we be able to send support to an ally, or was this the precursor to war?
All in all, this was still an exciting voyage of discovery, as more and more features became apparent.
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