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#### Tea Steeping, Drinking, Ceremony-Hosting achievement

@Tifa and I were chatting over IM about tea-drinking. Given the focus on cocktail crafting and meditation skills, the benefits of tea drinking and ceremony hosting seems...Glitch-ready as a skill tree addition.
Plus a Tea Ceremony would be a cool use of the Party chat mode.

Posted 2 years ago by tiff | Permalink

### Replies

- +1
  Posted 2 years ago by Ixirim | Permalink
- good idea. tea steeping would be a natural extension of the cooking skill tree.
  i think you should flesh out the idea, tiff.
  certain things are obvious .. like harvesting tea leaves from a tea plant and using a kettle as a tool for making the tea. milk and sugar as possible ingredients for certain types of tea.
  but by flesh out i mean - would the tea plant be a garden thing or a tree patch thing? what tool could prepare the raw leaves to be mixed with other ingredients in the kettle? what benefit could the tea deliver that would differentiate it from cocktails?
  that sort of stuff. i'm curious to read your further thoughts!
  Posted 2 years ago by striatic | Permalink
- tea steeping should be an extension of the meditation skill, not the cooking skill. On the other hand, creating teas for tea ceremonies could fall under cooking.
  without suggesting that we should ape RL, tea would be grown in just a few areas or just one region, but the roasting process would yield many kinds of tea.
  Tools you would purchase to use would be drying mats and leaf rollers, or just yer all purpose Glitchian tea seasoner and they would combine harvested tea with other ingredients for different kinds of tea. It would great fun for the writers to come up with different tea names and recipes! Essential oils could be used as ingredients too, and those could be made via alchemy or cooking. Bergamot oil, cinnamon, etc. oils would be ingredients for different flavored teas. Animal essential oils would be great too, for pig, chicken and butterfly tea. Drinking batterfly tea would clearly be the equivalent of licking a psychotropic frog in terms of the effects on the user.
  Making tea is a process of fermenting and drying leaves at different rates for white through black teas, so that could be a skill. Rolling tea could be a skill, some of it is curled in lovely tiny balls when it's done, it's not always loose leaves. Plus there could be a use for broken leaf ends that are a byproduct of the process.
  Tea ceremony--absolutely a meditation ceremony, but not just some semi-japanese looking thing. Plus how to animate that?
  One achievement could be to invite three other players over to your house for a tea ceremony (hesitate to use the phrase tea party anymore).
  I love this idea, can you tell?!
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- +bump
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- As a dedicated tea-drinker +1
  Posted 2 years ago by bluto | Permalink
- "Tea ceremony--absolutely a meditation ceremony, but not just some semi-japanese looking thing. Plus how to animate that?"
  so a tea ceremony would be sort of like everyone radiating each other, but maybe with a little XP gained in addition to mood and energy?
  i like that. certainly would differentiate it from cocktail crafting.
  maybe if generally food=energy and drinks=mood, then perhaps the key stat for tea could be XP. the more overlap, the more confusing it is for players to decide which skills to learn - so having an easily remembered key differentiator is, i think, key.
  Posted 2 years ago by striatic | Permalink
- I really appreciate how you tie the descriptive aspects back into the mechanics of the game, stri, you really help me see it in more analytically. Not that I can then apply my pebbly brain in an especially analytical way, but thanks for the inspiration.
  Tea is a drink and therefore mostly mood enhancer, so it seems obvious for it to have similar properties to bubble tea in enhancing meditation. But the crafting of it...maybe should be cooking after all.
  I wouldn't want to get too precious with the whole tea ceremony thing; it's a bit ripe for gentle satire as it is. But if you decided to do a tea ceremony on a street with some other players, and chose butterfy tea as your beverage of choice, it would be great to see all the nearby butterflies flock to you. I can think of a few jumping questers who would love that.
  Batterfly tea imbibing could lead to character levitation and teleportation or other practical superpowers, but with some kind of horrible side effect (not quite dying though). Maybe your avatar would have to wear a horrible expression and have really bad bed head for several Glitch days.
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- Oh, wow, what great suggestions. "Glitchian tea seasoner" made me giggle.
  I like the idea of tea as an XP-gathering skill tree and a tea ceremony aligned with meditation. The fact it could also draw on Cooking and Gardening. I also like the ideas of using Houses and party-mode, particularly since there's not much do socially in a house right now. Inviting others over for tea would be cool. Taking that a step further, having a Tea Tree in a pot in my House would also be a fun addition to storage, trophies and what I'm up to in my Yard. On the flip side, having to travel to find tea trees in the Spice levels (and repot a cutting back home?) would be a natural.
  Thinking about when tea was used as a currency, there could be room to use blocks of teas for Projects, like Loam and Earth.
  I'm going to post this reply before I lose it. Will follow up with more thinking this evening.
  Posted 2 years ago by tiff | Permalink
- I look forward to boiling my tea leaves with milk, ginger, cardamom, and honey to make a nice pot of chai. ( :
  Posted 2 years ago by Amy Pond | Permalink
- Love it! I don't have much to add other than that I especially like the idea of drawing several skills together to create a tea ceremony including a meditation based skill, cooking skills, gardening skills, etc. Perhaps at the lower levels of these tea related skills you'd practice them in a tea house and when you reach a higher level, you could create your own tea house in your back yard.
  Posted 2 years ago by FrankenPaula | Permalink
- Haha, a cute name for an achievement of this would be 'Tea Sipper'.
  Posted 2 years ago by Hburger | Permalink
- okay .. so let me try to sum this up and add a couple twists.
  there'd be tea-making, which would be part of the cooking skill set, akin to cocktail crafting. different teas would gives bonuses to mood and XP, and perhaps other status effects largely focused on XP. like a tea that would add an extra 5 XP every time you gained XP in the next minute [that would interact very well with sitting at a shrine, drinking tea and donating to the giants .. very meditative].
  then there'd be tea-steeping, which would be part of the meditation skill set. you'd use your focusing orb to go into tea drinking mode, where you'd take extra time to really savour your tea and the innate benefits of the tea would be enhanced. like double the rewards or something.
  finally, there'd be a tea-party-hosting skill, which would let you host a tea party in your house. you'd need an item called a "tea service" to do this. the tea service would sit inside a room where everyone could access it. you'd need to "load" the service with teas in order for it to work. there'd be different styles of tea service. victorian style, art-deco, oriental and so on.
  players coming into your house would enter, click on the tea service and select "join party". then their avatar would be locked in place for a little bit, and all they could do is talk and sip their teas.
  tea parties would slowly boost energy, mood and XP. each additional player [up to a maximum of 5] participating in the party would increase the energy, mood and XP boost. so the best possible party would involve inviting 4 friends over and participating all at once.
  FINALLY, you wouldn't want to people to just stay inside all the time, gathering XP as tea-drinking zombies. so there'd be a "tea time cooldown timer" which would reset each game day so you could only participate in one tea party every four hours.
  i think almost everything related to tea should have a cooldown timer. it seems against the theme to drink a tea, grind XP, drink a tea, do more hard-charging xp grinding ad nauseum.
  Posted 2 years ago by striatic | Permalink
- maybe rather than victorian/oriental/art deco styles of tea services: groddlian, simla mirchian, uralian...
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- Wow, way to rock out the idea, @striatic. I like all of that, particularly the cool-down option to rule out tea-abuse. The tea service is a nice twist on the feeders/milkers from the Animal skills, in the sense that it is loaded and left in place. Tea-leaf roasting could work into that set-up—a little roasting phase on the side.
  What if you could load up a themos of tea to keep with you as you travel around, whereupon you could share a cup with the Shrines? I'd like that. Oftentimes I have little to donate but would like to show support. "Supplicate" wasn't an option for the Shrines this last test, that I found.
  @Nanookie Nackhouse (great name, btw), I just went through my breadbox—where I keep my teas at home—looking for Uralian tea before I realized you meant the levels in Glitch. It sounded so familiar....
  Posted 2 years ago by tiff | Permalink
- Teas have such cool names, they do sound a lot like Glitch places: Tippy Yunnan, Uva Highlands, Risheeat Second Flush....
  I like the idea of sharing a cup with the shrines. I wonder which giant particularly favors tea? Or which ones.
  triple yays for tiff and tifa for coming up with this idea!
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- maybe Tii likes Tea.
  Posted 2 years ago by striatic | Permalink
- I am probably wrong, but I always think of Tii with a long i.
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- Pervert
  Posted 2 years ago by shhexy corin | Permalink
- no, that would be a hard i.
  Posted 2 years ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- I can't believe you guys actually got me to read the phrase "tea party" without wincing. Going to make myself a celebratory cuppa now :)
  Posted 2 years ago by EgIantine | Permalink
- Applying paddles to this thread in the hopes of getting some sweet FS support for it.
  Posted 21 months ago by Nanookie | Permalink
- Love it! ++1
  Posted 21 months ago by Bob Apple | Permalink
- That'd be fun and go along w/ Soy's old Cafe thread :D
  Posted 21 months ago by RM | Permalink
- I'm always ready to go along with anything that involves tea drinking - its a British thing :) Actually I was really impressed by the details you came up with, you've really thought it all out. I'd love to see this incorporated sometime if the devs haven't already got something planned.
  Posted 21 months ago by Twoodle | Permalink
- Altho I'm not a tea drinker irl (I'm the oddball in my family :P ) this idea sounds awesome!!
  Posted 21 months ago by sgjo | Permalink
- I'm not British or Japanese, but here in rural America we have a long-standing tradition of drinking iced tea on a front or back porch, surrounded by friends.
  I heartily approve this idea.
  Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink
- @Doc Does that mean we need both sweet and unsweet tea? Or even sun tea, but the health department tends to frown on that. Something about standing water.
  Posted 21 months ago by Riversong | Permalink
- Variety is the spice of life. Sun tea I don't recommend though - stagnant, sun-warmed water makes for god-awful tea, and I don't see what appeal anyone sees in that stuff. Blech.
  Posted 21 months ago by Doc Oblongata | Permalink
- It's actually more caffeinated than a simple high temperature steeping. Without the build-up of bitterness you'd get if you really did that.
  Posted 21 months ago by Riversong | Permalink
- I really love the tea ceremony idea. Perhaps each glitch that attends would be responsible for a certain contribution to the ceremony. I'd like to see some favor points acquired as a nod to the spiritual quality of the quest.
  Posted 20 months ago by Riverwalker | Permalink
- I like both loose leaf teas (vanilla chai, and vintage chinese red tea current favourites) and a regular cuppa (Tetleys, not PG Tips) (and yes, I am British - Scottish actually), so I'd also like the tea ceremony idea, the chance to grow tea yourself and also the option just to invite people over and put the kettle on. Afternoon tea maybe. Scones optional :)
  Posted 14 months ago by Molly Bloom | Permalink
- Great idea!
  Of course, the mention of scones makes me wonder about a baking skill tier. Cookies, breads, and other yummy treats ...
  Posted 14 months ago by TK-855 | Permalink
- +1
  As someone who has taken classes on how to do Japanese Tea Ceremony, I am all for this. It would be really awesome to add cultural elements to the game. If more things like this were added, it wouldn't just be fun it would also then become a cultural learning experience!
  Posted 14 months ago by Zxion | Permalink