Before I played this game, I had no idea such a word existed. And to be honest, I only looked up the definition when writing this post.
bi·jou [bee-zhoo, bee-zhoo]
noun, plural bi·joux
1. a jewel.
2. something small, delicate, and exquisitely wrought.
Etymology: 1660s, from Fr. bijou, from Breton bizou “(jeweled) ring,” from bez “finger” (cf. Cornish bisou “finger-ring,” 13c.)
Welp, learn something new every day.
Despite my ignorance of many things French, the Test of the Bijou produces one of my favorite minigame puzzles to play in A Tale in the Desert.
You are presented with a target gem cut to achieve (top left, on the sticks.) A cuboidal gem sits on the Scholar’s Gem Cutting Table. Your job? Cut the gem to match the target gem cut.
Essentially, bijous (the player-created puzzles) are like training wheels for the skill of gem-cutting.
Similar to blacksmithing in ATITD, which involves actually hammering polygons towards a target shape and allows for true player skill development (unlike typical wussy progress-bar increment blacksmithing in most MMOs – I’ll cover blacksmithing in a future post, in the meantime, you can check out Van Hemlock’s old old post about it which first got me involved with the game), gem-cutting involves cutting (or subtracting) away at polygons until you reach the desired shape.
I find gem-cutting slightly easier than blacksmithing, in the sense that the cuts are more predictable and less pixel-finicky.
What’s less fun is that mistakes cannot be taken back. If you cut wrongly, that’s it, you’ve screwed up, and you’re one cuttable gem down.
Cuttable gems are obtained by waiting around for a water mine to spit one up every ~4-20 minutes (definitely on the longer side most of the time) and there are seven types (that the mine appears to rolls randomly from) so waiting for the exact type you want can be an exercise in significant patience and time.
Gem cutting is also reliant somewhat on luck. The cuttable gem you start out with has a defined set of flaws, and certain gem cuts must have flaws in some pattern to achieve. If the gem you placed on the table didn’t have those flaws, tough luck, you can’t cut that gem, go look for another best possible gem cut to make with the existing gem and try again with the next gem.
Bijous shortcut all that. You’re guaranteed that the gem it presents you with is one that you can achieve the solution at the end. And you don’t need a cuttable gem to start a bijou puzzle, nor do you get any product from it. All you get is some satisfaction and a little better at gem-cutting.
The best guide to gem-cutting that I’ve found so far is on the Tale 3 wiki page here. (This may not be obvious to many new players, but the later wikis Tale 4-6 sometimes take shortcuts with explanations because the veterans are already quite familiar. I find browsing back to the Tale 2 and 3 wikis can sometimes provide a clearer explanation to newbies just gettingthe hang of things.) There was even a school in Tale 3 that set up a bunch of bijou tables to teach gem-cutting to people, which makes me wish I was clued into ATITD a lot sooner.
But well, we do the best with what we have. Some day, I’ll work through that immense list of gem cuts. For now, I’ve just about progressed to the point of being halfway competent at basic cuts and able to solve bijous like these.
First off, orientation. People normally stand facing Disc 1 like so. There are three discs. Disc 1 does a complete horizontal or vertical slice in the same plane as the saw disc showing.
Disc 2 does a kind of diagonal slice. And disc 3 does the other kind of “angled” diagonal slice.
(The technical wiki explanation for those who find it more helpful: Each disc will remove all the outermost vertices along a plane. Disc 1 removes the left side of the gem. Disc 2 removes the diagonal plane touching on the upper and front sides of the gem. Disc 3 removes the diagonal plane touching on the upper, front, and right sides of the gem. )
Me, I just got turned around by the wiki after a while. You have to try it to get the feel of it.
Rotating the gem is also a “by feel” thing for me. The J and K keys rotate the gem left and right. Technically, this is “rotating the gem along the Z axis” as pictured by my cruddy diagramming above.
U and I rotate the gem up and down, or ahem, “rotating the gem along the Y axis.”
The last set of keys O and L rotate the gem left and right along the unseen faces in the picture above (or “along the X axis” for those more comfortable with 3d modelling terminology.)
Now that we can move the gem around, we can get to cutting:
Step 1 – Find the flaw that matches the target gem cut
The target gem cut as pictured above has that particular shaped flaw. Rotate the cube about looking for it.
Here I’ve already sped things along by showing it in the picture… except it doesn’t quite match up. There’s some other ugly flaws in the way.
This calls for a straight slice from Disc 1.
Tada! That looks a lot more like it. Just um, upside down.
We can fix that. Rotate rotate.
Step 2 – Cut away excess layers to approach the target shape
We don’t need the other stuff in the way, so disc 1 to the rescue again, keep rotating the gem to face unwanted planes to the saw and trim it down to the appropriate size.
Wheeee! Done?
No, I lied. I didn’t show you the other camera angle yet.
This target gem cut actually has 4 symmetrical “angled diagonal” faces behind.
Step 3 – Choose the correct blade and trim the other faces to match.
This always throws me off, I’m just about getting better at it, choosing between disc 2 and disc 3. In this case, I made a guess that disc 3 would be the appropriate one and did a hail mary cut.
Phew. It was the right blade. Now that face matches.
From here, it was a matter of rotating and using the same blade to clean up the other three sides.
In similar vein to the other thought tests, I won’t show the final steps, but it’s quite easy from here. I’ve also gone into a bit more detail with showing you all this bijou ‘solution’ because frankly, it’s a lot easier described than done. A good part of the challenge is in the gem manipulation, managing camera angles, and the not accidentally over-cutting 🙂
Here’s a peek at another bijou:
See the flaws and the shape of where the target gem cut should lie?
Trust me, it’s easier when I show the correct face to you here, rotating to look for it from six possible faces is a bit less easy. 🙂
What disc(s) should be used to chop it to its super duper thinness?
Disc 1 was the correct answer, getting rid of all the stuff behind it essentially. Now which other disc to clear the remaining junk?
That would be last disc we haven’t used in this post as yet.
And soon after that… done.
One more recognized bijou, and one more level.
Why I Game 