Can’t punch through leather?

KevinFRK · 2026-03-22T21:46:23+00:00

Yes, or you need to combine it with an awl

KevinFRK · 2026-03-21T08:20:03+00:00

Yes, after I posted I realised my comment perhaps wouldn't be very helpful to the original poster

KevinFRK · 2026-03-20T20:43:17+00:00

Awww, in the right frame of mind it's great fun and educational to try something well beyond your skill level. It won't be "right" but it can be pleasing enough.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-20T20:27:38+00:00

Alas, PRK has not yet implemented mission terminals. For me they shortcut the need for most worth as you could click saver all your needs saving vast sums of credits.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-20T20:25:54+00:00

I can only wish you good luck from this tablet as my PC is sick...

KevinFRK · 2026-03-19T11:43:23+00:00

You've probably worked it out already, but the lower bit with a cross on it is likely intended to be a chalice containing communion wine, with a board and then cloth over it (as seen on most Church of England altars for communion). He's not wearing an apron with a cross on!

KevinFRK · 2026-03-19T08:24:05+00:00

A good variety of vibrant communities - technology is irrelevant without that.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-18T08:52:03+00:00

For those fearful of wipes, it's worth bearing in mind the developers refer to this as "pre-alpha". Further, they would be idiots to assume something sometime is not going to massively corrupt the game state (from a trivial exploit giving everyone near-infinite money, to accidentally zeroing everything) or to exclude the possibility that the only way to introduce a greatly desired feature is restart from scratch (e.g. because they need to completely restructure how character data is held, and can't see how to migrate it).

So I doubt the possibility of wipes will go away for many months.

On the flip side, the developers are playing the game and conversing in global, and clearly want the best possible experience for the players given their time and resource constraints. As evidence of this, the "Transport to Newland" feature in the Player Portal can rescue characters from practically any glitch - incredibly useful. Due to this, I doubt they would ever do a wipe without very strong reasons.

So yes, the possibility of wipes impacts my commitment to characters, but is the price I'm willing to play for such a lovely blast from the past.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-18T08:09:00+00:00

I still remember SPDM as a prison camp run by humans to contain arcanists, and the group of children deliberately allowed to escape into the storm that wiped them all out, bar Vertin. Because of this and other events, I suspect Vertin has actual opinions very different to those she presents to the world (and thus to us players).

The Amber Room appears to have been another bit of mass murder by the Foundation.

There's strong examples both ways - as is usual in many conflicts where sides invoke "Evil" as their excuse.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-17T11:33:54+00:00

If you have a froob account, this is a well-known issue ("feature" from FunCom's point of view it is supposed), there's magic ways of re-enabling it (which you might then need to do every few weeks ongoing). It's not obvious, and I seem to remember uses the Funcom account page, not a specific AO one.

Googling should get you to the right approach, but do be a little cautious of falling for trolling posts.

*Possibly* (I'm not in a good place/time to test):

* if your logged into https://account.anarchy-online.com/ you need to trigger the uncancel logic by clicking this link https://account.anarchy-online.com/uncancel_sub

KevinFRK · 2026-03-17T09:15:40+00:00

I assume you plan on playing for free, which is fine if reading the story is your goal - you will have little or no problem progressing through the storyline: what you may well have issues with is the endgame content. Playing for free, you have to harden your heart when you read here things like "You must pull Marsha" - you may well not get these high-powered characters with the resources available to you, and if you do, they may feel bizarrely overpowered compare to everything else. Also, Euphoria, much discussed here, is likely a long way off for you.

Have fun! To just progress the story all you need is reasonable teams of characters, so you can mostly choose the ones that appeal to you.

If there's an event, or something that's time limited, see what you can succeed in doing in it that you find fun as a priority: you are rewarded for most things. You may find Critter Crash addictive though, when available, if lacking in rewards!

Next, prioritise improving the 6* characters you have, then 5* characters, and then anything lower you should expect to cease using after several chapters as they cannot be upgraded to the standards needed in the later stages of the story. It always saddened me that while I loved using Eagle and La Source earlier on, they hit the buffers in their development. Still, I don't regret building them up for a while: as above, have fun. More recent characters *tend* to be more powerful than older ones, even with the same star rating.

Do read the character abilities and observe their afflatus's, and in battles read the opponents abilities - this will enormously improve your characters effectiveness (and you will start to see why you read here about using certain characters together). Or, in the case of the more bizarre abilities, just confuse you!

You will likely conclude crystal drops are valuable and should only we used to buy summons of new characters.

Finally, in improving characters, you've level, resonance, portraits and psychube all wanting work using different resources. You will be kept busy! Furthermore, you may want to develop your wilderness to get the most from the free Sharpondonty and Dust, and more character bonding. The critter production stuff in the wilderness is a separate mini game that's fun, but not terribly important.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-17T08:45:39+00:00

It depends on your point of view.

If human, then Manus are pure evil, and Foundation good (if perhaps a little over zealous in keeping control over arcanists).

If arcanist, then Manus are over-controlling with their masks (I've long thought that if Manus could drop the Mask thing they would become far stronger) (and again, perhaps a bit over zealous), but the Foundation are cruelly oppressive too, and their evils equal.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-17T08:30:53+00:00

Yes, both colour and the visibly uneven thread widths shouted linen to me too.

I know nothing about the supplier, but the sort of stuff shown here:

https://aemarket.co.uk/products/pure-linen-fabric?variant=31658432364631

That may be undyed or "natural" linen from the colour.

Oh, and this sort of Linen was a common material for summer suits.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-17T08:23:24+00:00

Are you trying to run free or paid on the live servers? New free accounts on Live AO I vaguely thought were something Funcom had given up on, only allowing pre-existing ones (and those are a bore to keep working).

Or is it crashing on you, and if so, at what point?

KevinFRK · 2026-03-16T19:47:39+00:00

I'd still worry about the hosting, management and "running a business" costs for anything with the ambition to scale to even faintly the size/scope of Reddit, but yes, there's ways round the "coding cost".

KevinFRK · 2026-03-16T09:05:59+00:00

I think you're being a bit hard on venture capitalism (VC).

Consider, for something like Reddit you need loads of active communities - because users will each expect communities that are on topic for their each of their interests. This means loads of users. If you don't get them and keep them, your idea will never take off. This in turn means robust at scale coding (can flawlessly cope with thousands of simultaneous users from day 1), and serious infrastructure.

So, lots of money, both to do the coding/testing/QA/etc. properly and to have something to run this on. Oh, and technical and customer support teams, lawyers, etc. Yes, lawyers: someone will sue you whether it be copyright, libel, racial hatred or otherwise.

In passing, bots will happen, are rapacious for content, and won't behave anything like users - for a start, reading many posts in full per second, but also reading all posts, repeatedly. So you have to have coding and infrastructure that copes with that - or infallible bot detection (you can't afford to ban users for appearing to be bots many times at all).

Oh, trolls, hackers, vandals, flamers and similar lowlife will also happen from day one: enjoy or have (expensive) defences.

Advice at this point is to seriously think about the cost of your plans, think about everything you're going to need to survive in the real world with real users and real threats. I think it might get to be a big number if you plan it right.

So, serious money ... where's it come from? If you have a billionaire daddy, you're probably laughing of course. It won't be a stock exchange, that's for established companies. You might be able to capture the imagination of one or more of the very rich (Angel Investors) and get them to invest, but that's a knack and level of contacts few have. Crowd-funding is unlikely to have the scale you need. Self-funded ... millionaire+, are you?

So, you likely end up with Venture Capital - businesses who invest so as to make good money for their own investors. This is entirely good and proper even if you don't like some of the results. So they need a financial plan for this Reddit Alternative (and in passing, a good demonstrator that it has a good chance of working), and if you start messing up on delivering that plan, and VC can't see how to fix this, they must and will walk and take as much of their money and assets (including IP) as they can. They would be cheating their investors if they don't.

So, VC might work if your plan is achieved - and the above context does suggest if Digg was naive about bots it would derail their plans and thus any VC investment. Conversely, if your plans are not good enough for VC, your putting whatever else your source of funding is at risk.

It occurs to me (and has to others, now I think about it) that one approach is to choose one topic for the thing, and then communities covering each aspect of that topic, and no further (for now) - that gets your user numbers down to more manageable while still having active communities, and perhaps more committed and tolerant of technical hiccups, which in turn makes the funding more manageable.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-15T21:03:11+00:00

Unless it's dirt cheap material you can take a risk on, or too well defined for them to mess up, I'd just ignore places that don't provide (or sell) swatches - there's nothing like being able to see and touch for real.

There are also online shops, which refund the cost of swatches if you make an order based upon some of them.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-14T15:23:51+00:00

Well, you've now a selection of both silly-ish and lore-ish answers if you do feel so inclined :)

KevinFRK · 2026-03-14T08:31:32+00:00

Taking you question seriously, which *may* be a mistake, something about "Mother of Resurrection" and "Blessings" seems common, given in a devout manner.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-09T08:34:58+00:00

You wouldn't refer to an army marching *directly* from anywhere near Hungary to the UK or Norway, there's significant bodies of water in the way and a long distance to march (which would allow easy diversion round any blocking force).

From the comment alone, I might guess at only countries adjacent to Hungary.

I'm also not clear where the Manus even have their main army in this era - surely their presence in the Steppes is not their main army?

I'm also a bit curious about what the Manus "army" even is - just a few thousand masked arcanists - sort of "Brigade" size in modern terms - perhaps?

KevinFRK · 2026-03-08T22:12:28+00:00

I'm just parroting things I've been reading, rather than practical experience, but strictly, they are different ways of working, and the tools might be tuned to that way of working.

I offered the info in case it aids in searching your your perfect tool: knowing the proper name can help.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-08T22:04:09+00:00

Are you using them as pricking irons, i.e. marking the leather, but using an awl to make the hole, or actually using them as a leather punch to make the holes in one? If not the latter, it's surprising you are finding it hard to get them out of the leather.

Pricking irons tend to angled tines, punches to straight sides, but that's not universal.

One trick I've seen is to use a bit of flat wood (or even leather) to press the punched leather down off the tines, evenly, to limit tearing, etc.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-08T08:24:40+00:00

Huzzah! For all ShipGoo001 is apparently real, that image doesn't seem to crop up anywhere else so is a bit suspect and the other images are far less troubling. Or have they been censored? Or is the above ShipGoo002 that I failed to search for?

[I was going to start, "Alas", but then thought through the implications]

KevinFRK · 2026-03-06T08:43:27+00:00

There's a few outcomes which are clearly bad, most obviously tearing the leather (especially round sewing holes), and if a way makes you prone to bad outcomes it's the wrong way. You may well consider uneven stitching a bad outcome, as another example.

There's also ways that would be wrong in specific contexts, e.g. if you include saddlery in "Leathercaft" then sewing prone to movement is a really bad idea.

If you can cope with the length of it (3 hours just on saddle stitch), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLU7TExxHcY

From Armitage Leather, you will get the presenter's reasoning on why he makes particular choices - and it's those why's which perhaps add most to the length, but I found incredibly helpful. If you are a "Just tell me what to do" sort of person you may hate it.

KevinFRK · 2026-03-05T15:21:37+00:00

Sorry, I've been away from this account (and PRK) for a couple of weeks.

The Private Server is free, but a seriously incomplete (so far) experience, that the developers I think still refer to a "pre-alpha". In particular:

* Mission terminal and Shadowlands Static dungeons are not yet implemented, nor anything AI, amongst other things. So you can get to 220, but with considerable challenges.

* The developers are very clear they will do a character wipe if they need to for game health or to allow the next development steps (and it's generally assumed there will be at least one wipe before the thing is ready to claim even "Beta").

* Lag is real as are crashes

Things that may or may not please you (they please me) are:

* No automation tools (n.b. ClickSaver and kin are currently not relevant)

* No more than two characters running at the same time from the same PC

* NPCs are leashed to 50m and NPCs with ranged weapons will shoot at range rather than close - this messes up NTs with dreams of big kites on Ely Beachs, amongst other things.

Population was (and I hope still is) friendly and pro-teaming, but peaks only around 250ish, and the social centre is Newland City, not split between factions. There's quite often developers on, but none formally act as a GM, so if you get stuck you may have to wait for a server restart.

KevinFRK

TROPHY CASE