So I have a question. The noman tattoo guide on the wiki suggests I wait until my next Time the Healer before creating a noman, to minimize the weeks during which I get hit with Noman’s Friend loss.
The same guide also talks about using pails of “snow” in the ToL generation progress following my creation of a noman.
However, my TtH message this week said the following: “The Neath-snow on roofs and pavements is melting. Hurrying crowds have churned it into slush. Ravens sing. Memory fades; pain departs; rewards arrive! Any Pails of So-Called Snow you possess will melt next week.”
Doesn’t this mean that my next TtH will remove all remaining pails? Which would make it impossible to follow the steps of the guide, and basically mean that waiting until next week to make my noman would be a recipe for disaster in general.
So any pails I have on me now (read: every single pail I’ve gotten this winter season from all sources) would still be wasted due to waiting until next TtH before making the noman? That kind of approach doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Or is the TtH text I got mistaken? Wiki page for TtH describes the effect as “You no longer have any of this: Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow (outside of **CHRISTMAS)”
And the “Christmas” season seems tagged to end on the 29th, so perhaps the wiki guide is correct and the system message from the game is instead misleading?
I believe that message comes twice for some players, but unfortunately the Time the Healers I was paying attention to last year came on the 30th (the pails melted), so I can’t say with confidence what the cut-off point is.
I’m reasonably sure the message you received is possible once London’s Season: Christmas = 7 which occurred at about 9:00 UT on January 20th, and the melts are possible once London’s Season: Christmas = 0 which occurred last year at about 9:00 UT on January 29th (which is also when the Wicket disappears, Urchins stop selling snow, and Noman is no longer purchasable). Given the 9 day difference, that means the Time the Healers on the 20th and 21st would get the message again on the 27th and 28th. But, I can’t seem to load my messages that far in the past to confirm if my main account got the message twice last year (on the 21st and the 28th)
Some of the steps are visible in game like: Christmas Cards are sent from 1->4, Urchins sell snow from 3->7, Wicket’s open from 6->7, that sort of thing. So I presume that the steps that don’t have visible differences have logical meaning behind the scene: 2 on Dec 2nd, 4 on Dec 25th, 7 on Jan 20th. …Well, 7 also locks you out of seasonally selling your soul, but it can be two things.
Based on inference, I think we have Time the Healer effects of:
2->3: Christmas Cards refresh to 7 with TtH (or equivalently, moving to 4 on Dec 25th stops them from refreshing)
7: Warnings about pail melts
1->7: Pails DON’T melt (which is why we keep getting the message “your pails are equal to 5!” or what have you. Maybe the better wording is that melt-rate is set to 0 when it’s usually “all”).
Snowbound might be its own thing now, because it stopped early on Jan 9th.