chattius

I think the closest we could do is to give some statistics: so people could see the results. As far as I know we don't even know how stats effect the damage. An approach would be: Step1: Eleminating stat points from the equitation take a naked character without tactic lore with a white weapon write down the base damage, the shown damage and the damage modifier from stats Now add armour which just adds x% damage. Plot the function for each weapon. Try to find weapons with same base damage but different stat modifiers. try to find out if stat damage modifiers is: base damage (like damage x-x rings) or direct damage multiplier (what we guess for direct damage) or x% damage modifier(like tactics lore) Step2: plotting a function using several damage x-x rings Once we know how stat damage is put in the formula we could take a weapon with direct damage multiplier. But this time we would not change the x% damage part but the damage x-x part. If a weapon would have 20% direct damage and adding a damage x-x ring would have 1.2 times the effect then on a weapon without direct damage we could quite sure that direct damage is as we guess. Will be a hell of numbers to play with and my main sacred testers are both real life busy for some more weeks to come. So to prevent wasting too much time, perhaps we should do the scientific approach: doing a theory, trying to find an experiment which would confirm the theory. Currently we are at discussing how the experiment should look. To make all this worse: I think there is a damage multiplicator which depends on difficulty. And this modifier could either be applied direct to the base damage or to the final damage.

A weaponless dryad needs a lot of 'damage x-x' rings with a good second modifier. It is definitive no easy starter character and my daughters played it with 2 kungfu dryads where one was the shopper and the other a more robust tank.

If I would start a thread if there is one item in Ice and Blood which is powerful enough to design a build around it then it is probably Kira's Shield. Block chance melee and ranged, both scaling with shield lore... So with taking shield lore and bringing it to mastery only(?) combat arts are a danger to the character. So a dragon mage with Kira shield and shield lore mastery and Runes of protection blocking 50+% of combat arts... This character would leave some room to socket reflect combat arts. But this reflect thing is still only a chance, with bad luck all 6 demon eyes ignore the reflect chance and hit you with their life steals. Since there is always a chance that Murphy's rule may kick in I never tried to push a reflect chance as close to 100% as possible. So in the case of the dragon mage I try to get as much hitpoints and damage mitigation as possible which hopefully kicks in when Murphy strikes.

I wonder if we should put options.txt and optionsCustom.txt on an extra page: it is more doing game settings than actually modding. Changes still allow you to play closed, in difference to most mods. options.txt optionsCustom.txt are discussed in this thread, a skeleton for a wiki page would be in post 10 in below thread. http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=18393

Not an easteregg but I couldn't resist to post it: One of the unsolved riddles in game is who is producing the Llama8's_Infamous_Electric_Poo. As we all know the poo looks like a moebius knot. Something which hasn't a start or an end. So the beast producing it must be a strange animal with an even stranger digesting system. Could it be that it is a programmer? Programmer (n): An organism that can turn caffeine into code. Now we do all this in german: Programmierer- Ein Organismus der Koffein in Kode verwandelt. Now if we don't read it but speak it, Kode sounds same as Kot. And suddenly we are at the latest t-shirt of our 12 year old who is at hospital. Her god-mother (having a swedish mother), who does web illustrations, gave her her old Palm Pre for playing and phoning while she is tied to the machines which do muscle rebuilding. Watching our daughter to play on the palm and how she hammered the keys while doing quick games it must have been more a torturing of the palm. Torturing is Martern in german, Marder is german for a polecat, ... So her god-mother quickly did a nice picture of a striped polecat hammering on a palm and named it Palmmarter (palm torturing, same sounding palmmarder would be palm polecat). Then her got-mother remembered that Palmmard (palm polecat) is the swedish word for the Asian Palm Civet. And guess what asian palm civets are doing: they eat coffee peas, or in other words: they are an organism that can turn caffeine into feces. But in german the words for feces(Kot) and code(Kode) sound the same. So she T-shirt has a big written Palmmarder top, then the anime/comic picture of the polecat hammering a palm below, and below the picture it is written in german Lautschrift (phonetical not alphabetical writing): Programmierer- Ein Organismus der Koffein in Kode verwandelt. So it would have both possible translations: Programmer: an organism that can turn caffeine into code Programmer: an organism that can turn caffeine into feces For some software companies the two meanings are actually the same. The asian palm civets eats coffee peas but can't digest them. They are fermented while in the digesting system. People collect these fermented coffee in the feces and sell it to gourmets: up to 600dollar the pound.

Thanks for the pictures. I think the difference between a Grundofen (ground oven) and a masonry heater is that the Grundofen is designed as part of the building, not easily removable. Metal Mesh Screen @Schot: With little kids (twins are just 3) in house a heat resistant glas cover will be it. But since it is easily removable, I had a mesh screen as a winter/party solution in my mind. I plan to attach the glass/mesh screens wih just 4 nicely decorated wingnuts. No tools needed to open them for cleaning, exchanging. The mesh screen demands some calculation, it is a slightly change of the heat flow. I have to show both screens to the official chimney sweep who has to do a savety okay. I always hated it, when my parents said: don't sit on the cold staircase, you may get a cold. With this heated staircase this is another problem solved Room painting This is tricky. The only part of the walls which can be painted is the wooden frame. And the frame is painted ancient brown. Same colour as it was painted for hundreded of years. Not easy to change the colour: old century old paint layers would have to be removed till the original wood would be reached. So the painting of the wooden part is more a 'cleaning and re-oiling the paint' work. The fillings between the wood is: first some halved beech twigs bowed/pressed into the oaken frame elements, then elastic willow twigs woven around, then all covered with a mix of clay, horse apples, fine cut stray and hay. Only this filling is then painted white with lime mortar(?). If you use the wrong colour or even worse: cover such a wall with a dry wall, the wooden parts may start to rot. 4 of my cousins earns their money with repairing historical wooden patchwork houses:

My current project is to repair/re-do the staircase in our house. The house was build even before the Napoleon wars and close to what could be called a Dreiständerhaus (three-posted farmhouse), the middle house in below picture: When it was built the higher mid sector was used to store hay, stray and other food for the animals, the right side was stall, and the double floors left people rooms. The left side of our house is a bit build into the hill and the right side pointing towards the main storm direction. The high middle sector is used as eating room, kitchen, party room, playroom (high enough for ballon defense at table tennis), ... The house got a quite new heating system, based on wood gases used to run an engine which produces electric power and the engine heat used to heat water for shower. We want a second heating system which could be used in addition to the existing one or as a reserve at a failure of the existing one. The idea is to use a wood-fired Grundofen (don't know the english word): The idea of a Grundofen is to lead the heat of the oven around plates to head chamotte stones. The oven would be heated just one time a day and store the heat for a whole day. It is a more natural heat feeling, you heat at full power when you leave the house, highest heat level would be 8 hours later short before you return home and evening to night it slowly cools down so you have a better sleep. Inspired by a picture from a discussion forum for wooden houses I am currently calculating heat flow, exhaust gases, material to build such an oven below the stair case I have to repair. I like the idea to give the staircase a double using: the steps would be build from chamotte to store heat. Just a few changes needed, our staircase has 2 90 degree turns.

There are mods which don't allow closed-net playing and others (like editing optionsCustom.txt) will. Should we classify them ?

I think I promised to do a list of useful options for handicapped people. But while doing it I thought why not make a whole page and just marking the options useful for handicapped people. I am not playing the english version and knowing where files are placed there. Also I do a bit hard with english if I am languages swapping every 5 minutes. So perhaps someone can use this as a skeleton to add an optionsCustom.txt page to wiki: optionsCustom.txt This file is none of the standard Sacred2-files. You have to create it using for example a text-editor in following folders: list of english folder names for diffrent windows should be added Any settings you put in this file will overwrite settings which are already in options.txt. The big advantage is that no game files are changed and you can still play close-net with a created/modified optionsCustom.txt. An entry in optionsCustom.txt looks like options.bigHeadMode=1. First is the group a variable belongs too, then a ., then the variable followed by a = and the value you wanted for it. The normal way to overwrite a setting already in options.txt is to search it in options.txt. For example we don't want the battle-music played: If we find something like: sound = { ... volume_group02 = 01 ... } in options.txt, then the entry in optionsCustom.txt should look like: sound.volume_group02=0 Or the other way around (not recommended): If you read a tipp saying sound.volume_group02=0 in optionsCustom.txt will turn off battle music, then the entry in options.txt following sound={ should have just a line with volume_group02=0 in it. List of useful entries(testing needed which versions allow the settings) Giving every monster, NPC and player big funny heads, also more easier to detect some small enemies: options.bigHeadMode=1 No videos played at game start: render.videos=0 Switch on displaying sector borders (nice for map exploring): render.d_sectorBorders=1 Switching off fine details like gras (faster graphics, more easy to detect rats in high gras): render.d_minis=0 Switching off water effects (faster graphics) render.d_water=0 Switching of trees (faster graphics, easier to detect enemies): render.d_trees=0 No battle-music played, if you prefer your own music on hifi system, also less memory used: sound.volume_group02=0 Turning of the shaking camera at shadow warrior two-handed hammer critical (meteor showers too?)- Epilepsy suffering people should consider it. camera.cameraShake=0 Doing server settings (old example) network.lobby_name = "YOUR ACCOUNT NAME" network.lobby_password = "YOUR PASSWORD" network.lobby_ip = "us.sacred2.net" network.lobby_port = 6900 indicates that the option may be useful for handicapped people: bad eye-sight, epilepsy, ... I was hoping for a red cross or a nurse in the emoticons, at the current ones I found the heart most fitting.

Normally I used Autoit at roleplay games to detect if a certain point of the screen is green or red. This certain point is normally in the health bar This auto health potions were a great help when new to the game and having eye and hand surgeries, later builds were robust enough to be played even without autoit doing the healing. Remember Autoit is disliked by some anti virus tools and by some game companies. You could do great robots for Diablo2 with it. Using only pre-defined maps, having torches at fixed places, so the standard trick was to replace the torches by ugly pink rectangles and use autoit to detect the pink places to have some like GPS coordinates, the torches being the satellites. But since my Diablo2 times were when we had no internet in our area noone was harmed.

I do a bit hard with screen shots on my ancient beast, this is how the big-head mode would look. Dead skelelons, dragon mage and the rats in left background: all have bigger heads. The difference between options.txt and optionsCustom.txt is mainly that options.txt reads like options ={ bigHeadMode=1 ... } In optionsCustom.txt you have to type the parameter in front of {-brakets then a dot and then the parametres insidse the brakets: options.bigHeadMode=1 This way optionsCustom.txt will 'overwrite' settings in options.txt without changing options.txt. The above picture was done with just options.bigHeadMode=1 in it. When I had my eye surgery I was also removing gras, trees, gore with similiar settings. Also I don't want the videos at the start of the game, Also I turn the battle-music off normally.

Pan seasoning: As I use the pan every second day, I just use a beverage coaster (I recycle used ones from paper quadratic with rounded corners) to clean the pan as long it is still warm. The paper thing is hard enough to remove food remains, but won't harm the thin oil layer. The few germs which may remain are killed as soon the pan is heated next time. The dirty beverage coasters are then put on the compost heap. Washing a cast iron pan is removing the oil layer, not needed at all. Cutting boards: There is a lot of discussion about wood or plastic. I have my own philosophy: I have one big butcher board and 3 smaller cutting boards. Normally one of them is dry (not soaked from water). My niece is studying medicine, mainly allergic reactions, and showed me a research that wood would be far better than platic if the right wood is used and some basic usage rules are applied. Plastic is more fool proof. if you are intrested at a german food page an link to an english page was added which does the whole discussion wood or plastic and mentions that newest researches favour wood, but american laws demand no-wood for restaurants. http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/cutting_board.htm

Hop sprouts tastes best if still white. Beer brewing Beer brewing without producing alcohol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malzbier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamalz It is more complex, needs more technique, but you can do something which has nearly no alcohol. Do the beer brewing below 1 Celcius. At this temperature the yeast is developing taste, producing Vitamin B but not producing alcohol. A local brewery does a variant which is not so sweet as Vitamalz and has more hop. It is the favourite drink of my daughters after sport classes. Thread about what people drink while playing sacred: http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=14896

I did a comparing between a fist-weapon dryad and a weapon-less kungfu dryad at a very early CM-patch version. To my surprise the kungfu-dryad was better late game. The fist-weapons were way better early on but as soon better and better 'damage x-x' popped up in niobium the double-hits of the kung-fu and the better protection turned it. From this experience I would take a guess: In relation damage x-x rings climb faster in damage than weapons. Add that smaller but quicker attacks will trigger deathblow more often in the last strikes of a series. Fist weapons will probably play perfectly in late game if the equipment is designed for this.

As I mentioned a few posts earlier: I feared that this 'guide' stopped writing new special guides for the dragon mage. The time the dragon mage came out most people had already lot of experience in Sacred2 so a short explaining how to play the diffrent dragon mages was enough for them. But now many people bought the gold version and start with a dragon mage as one of their first characters. The overview article may be having too few guideline for them. I am not the best guide writer for super-power characters, never had english classes, I was never interested in quick level climbing. So my guides started mainly just as a descriptiopn how I designed a character which fitted best for the playstyle I was looking for. My last dragon mage is a dragon-magic dragon-mage which I did mainly to research the usefull of items with half-regeneration time and if a dragon mage with only having a lore in dragon magic can be plaqyed. So it is a test-bed for comparing regeneration per hit builds like the sohei with more pure dragon mage approaches who use half-reg time items. The character is apple to do both, but being able to do both he is not so effective as a high specialized character. For me it is more fun to play if I can do diffrent playstyle in a single character.

My last tries in optionsustom was when I had my eye surgery: so I did big bubble-heads for characters and enemies, I added no gras where small rats and fen fire could be ovelooked, no trees, ... This modding resulted also in a speed gain because I have a very outdated computer. So my question would be, should we do pictures to show the effects: unmodified/modified? You can also remove the display of all characters so you can do nice landscape-photos. If there would be interest I could write up something like optionscustom for handicapped people, some options modding and characters who use auto-targetted allow a lot of people to play sacred2 who never thought they could. Writing will take 3-4 weeks since currently both game notebooks are out of house (one daughter in hospital, the other is doing a 'learning at job' practica for her school in another state.

Hop What are you doing with it? Beer brewing? Liqueur? Drugs (sleepless)?, ... Wild hop is a mainly not wanted plant in my area, killing trees. But young hop sprouts do a tasty salade, as in the linked recipe from worldwide gourmet. We have 3 Totholzinseln in the forest. A Tot(dead)holz(wood)insel(island) would be an area with dead or almost dead trees in a sea of healthy trees. It is kept this way so that rare animals and plants have a place to live. Also researches say that tree parasites are less likely if doing such islands. If I see too many young hop plants growing outside the corse wood islands I pull most out the ground and do a salade. They taste like a mix of broccoli and asparagus. Preperation would be close to asparagus. Hopfenspargel(hop asparagus): in my area the underground roots of wild hop Hopfensprossen(hop sprouts): in my area the out of ground below 1 foot in length sprouts of wild hop Several farmers who cultivate hop for beer brewing cut away all but 3 sprouts of a plant. So all the strength of the plants goes into fewer but stronger stems (last picture below). The cut away sprouts they call Hopfenspargel or Hopfensprossen, most of them not making a diffrence, since they are not used to remove a whole plant. If you buy them at a market, don't get shocked: it is way harder to harvest and smaller than asparagus and therefor way more expensive. 2 pounds need more than 1 hour to be cut.

This morning: Radio said that european community will have to save money and forbids not english speaking countries to use accents (â,à,á), Umlaute (Ä,Ö,Ü), sharp-s(ß), ... The money saved by unified keyboards, wordprocessing software and lower to pay secretaries could save enough money to double the number of politicians in the parliament and same time paying them 20% more. The increased number of politicians is needed to help fighting the next financial crisis to the european parlament. Newspaper read that government will try to help people who would suffer from closing garnisons because germany is no longer drafting into army. The garnisons and the drill sergeants will change into boot-camps so every kid not having at least 12 points (a B+) in sport classes will have to go there in summer breaks. The hope is to reduce overweight in near future and reducing costs for health insurances. Newspaper: german train company is trying to keep their trains running even after all nuclear plants would be called to stop. Braking at a railway station is normaly a waste of energy. So all trains would be re-equipped with electromagnetic brakes and so energy will be produced at braking and sold to the energy market. European community did a stop, because the using train tracks as power-lines would be a monopole and an unfair advantage to other companies producing energy. TV said that E10-fuel would be free of taxes for a year to boost its usage.... ... 1st of april again

Shutting down all nuclear power plants might be as dangerous as keep them running. In average every 200 years a big vulcano does more than 5 cubic kilometres of ash into the atmossphere. Like 1816 which lead to years without summer, the harvest rotting on the fields, snow whole summer and even frozen lakes, big floodings when all melded, thousands dying of lungue infections because of bad air, ... So in this not so unprobable case (who thought that a 9.0 could happen): no photo-voltaic, no water energy, no bio-fuel, ... Probably even wind rotors may be affected because the vulcanic dust may do damage to the gears, or damage the aluminium so that sulphure acid in the air (there will be if a is a sulpfuric outbreak) can destroy the aluminium rotors. But even if not, maintainace will be nearly impossible if there are metres of snow as was in 1816. Even way smaller vulcanoes like in 1783 can do lot of damage. So even with peak-uran I am not the opinion that all nuclear power plants should be stopped. We should keep some in reserve for scenarios we could not change, but reduce there number to the absolute minimum. Also they wouldn't be for profit but as a kind of last resort, so 10 times the money than now can be put into their savety. I don't see a quick solution to keep energy safe in case of big vulcanoes. Fusion won't work in the next 20 years. If I had this idea first I will sell it to hollywood, nice disaster scenario.

I was confronted yesterday evening by the question of my oldest daughter if countries would have to change their laws/constitutions because of this. Nearly every country has something like a national disaster law, which allows a country to use national guard, army to fight it and even privat property can be taken away as long as it happens in country. But what if the disaster is not happening in our country: is it possible that the governments worldwide can force to stop all flying and sending the planes to Japan if a mass evacuation is needed? Can they claim land to put the evacuated people there? On a way smaller scale: the concrete pump which is used at reactor 4. It was sold already to another place and nobody knows who will take the costs, production delay at the building site it was planed for, radiated and not usable again pump, ... Yesterday it was said in TV that 4 more pumps are flown to Japan. 2 of them already sold to USA and being there and that a company flying really big Antonow planes is transporting the 4 pumps. But it seems all this took weeks before a decision was made. http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1629892.php/Germany-sends-giant-pump-to-help-cool-Fukushima-reactor So do we need international disaster laws which can be activated by an United Nations call, do we need an international quick response unit?

Salzmantel, Salzkruste I would translate it as salt coat(ing), salt crust. Normally low fat fish and meat is done this way, prepared without oil in its own juice. My main question is: Is there a difference between salt coating and salt-crusted? In my area the thickness of the salt is different. Salzmantel would be like dough plates wrapped around and have to be opened with brute force with a hammer at the kitchen, while Salzkruste is thinner and opened on the plate on table. Rote Beete in Salzkruste I found an english recipe and a picture which is close to what my family did for generations: Salt-Crusted Beets with Horseradish Crème Fraîche Our century old version of the recipe: This saturday the local baking house is heated and all citizens are free to use it. I wanted to show to my kids how their grandgrandfather was fighting the german tax system. There was a high tax on salt. However there was no tax on salt which was used for cows and other animals licking it. But this salt was painted red and a bitter taste of fresh gras was added. If you know the people in our area: never throw anything away, all can be re-used in unplaned ways.... Take red beets with the outer scale unharmed. Do a mix of salt, thyme, the white from eggs and water, coat the beats with this mix, and lay it in the baking house while the people bake their bread. After more than 2 hours the beets are really soft, juicy and tasty inside the crust. The crust however is hard as concrete. So these salt coated red beets were used as a food, eaten when doing forest works. Using the broad side of the axe to open it, and throwing the salt to the Salzlecke (Salt licking, a place where the forest cows and pigs moved to lick salt from the ground). The outer scale of the beets normally stuck to the crust, the red paint and taste of the animal salt were not reaching the beets, and the salt was really cheap and its final usage was that as it was taxed: animal salt. My grandgrandfather died aged 91, so the strange usage of animal salt was not doing any harm. He also did salt crusted fish, boar, doe, ...at sundays. So the main difference to the recipe on the link is: Outer scale undamaged -> more juicy but the spices from the coating do hard to reach the inside, but same is for the salt: less risc to have too salty beets. Outer scale damaged/removed: some juice is sucked up by the salt, but spices reach the inside. If the beets are too small: too much salt may reach the inside. I prefer our variant, because I am used to it and it is hard to add juice, but you can add spices when you serve the red beets dis-mantled. Also if the beets are too little and damaged: you get a dry and salty beet. Now the salt tax has gone, but I still do one of these salt crust recipes (with big crystal butchering salt nowadays) whenever the salt licking place has to be refilled (I hate to throw food away). It is kinda funny that nowadays even restaurants serve red beets this way.

Teddy bears Next time you see a teddybear on street: do full braking and look if it is an original Steiff. Some model/year combinations do thousands of euro at an auction. http://www.germanbears.com/index.html My old steiff teddy would be around 350 euro collectors price nowadays. My mother kept all my toys all the years and it was only around 12 german marks back then for the teddy. The history club in her village did a 1960ties exhibition and my mom added some toys. A toy collector said she should watch for them, the teddy would be around 350, and the doll of my sister around 250, being a Bild Lilli Doll (american visitors to germany copied it and named it Barbie) ... Toys are expensive if they have high quality, but as long I have room in a barn to keep the ones of our kids I will do it. Perhaps in future a single doll will be enough to buy Microsoft Weather First rain for weeks today. We had only 13% of the rain compared to normal years. Monday I planed to do some garden work and stopped. The spade wasn't reaching wet ground with more than half of the blade in. Soccer training for our third was cancelled because the red sand field was producing red sand storms when playing. No watering allowed because water reservoir is low, and this in an area which is famous for storm and rain. So the whole team did bicycle tours. It is hard to go into spring feelings if the gras is not growing and is rather grey than fresh green all around you. Luckily the flowers with onions have enough water in them to add some colour. Hope I see fresh green at weekend.

I read it as: it is better than nothing but hard to work with, because for optimal use you have to know windows interna. In my eyes a crashing Adobe reader is better than an Adobe reader which opens the calculator unwanted. Because at a dangerous attack it wouldn't be the calculator which would be opened by an attack. The problems seem to be that EMET seems to block if you call Adobe reader directly, but not if it is called as a plugin. So you would have to add more files to EMET than just the reader and the author is not knowing which ones. Thats why I was hoping for a person who knows some Windows interna. Another interest was if I could do a savety shell around old games with memory leaks so only the games but not windows would stop.

I do not know if it is typical german. It may be local to the place I live. I think it is because of our century (milleniums?) old local history of Hauberg using. Hard to describe what a Hauberg is. It is like groups of people owning a forest and the nearby iron mines together. It was discussed in a democratic way which forest area was chopped for charcoal for the smiths, the bark used for the tanners, in summer all worked as farmers, harvesting plants which grew between the young trees. Cows and not carriages were used to pull plows and carriages, so you had milk and flesh if needed. In winter most of the farmers worked as smiths, tanners, wood workers (my family tree),... It all started when the local iron production was running out of charcoal often. By using coppicing technique the same area could produce more charcoal, have buckwheat and rye between the little trees, using bark for tanning, forest pigs and cows who could fed from leaves, ... So it was like a little hard working self-sufficient community. The small hilly area with all its storms fed more people than most areas 50 times bigger in other places in europe that time (before Liebig invented the fertilizer at my old university). We live in the southeastern part of the area using haubergs which belongs already to the german state Hessen. I do hard to find an english page decribing it: http://homepage.mac.com/wkfisher1/Genealogical_Glean/Germana.html In the english page there is also the saga that Wayland the smith had his smithy in our area. A village is named Wielandsdorf in old papers, now Willnsdorf. Another english page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A448571 A russian soldier in 1946 called the people here surviving specialists: even the hauberg traditions was stopped under the Nazis when cheaper iron ore could be imported to the big iron producing towns it repopped after second world war again when germany suffered from big mis-harvests in the after war years. So the people remembered what they did for centuries and were producing leather, iron, charcoal and food again, but now supporting 4 times their number with all the fugitives from east germany (which became poland, slovakia, czech after the war). The full hauberg using was continued till the 1950ties and now tradition keeping clubs teach the technique to next generations. I think my parents and grandparents and the generations before learned the hard way to get as much from forest as possible while still keeping it intact for the next generations. And even I never starved or fell real hunger, I have sucked up too much of the: don't throw anything away which can be used for something else philosophy.

Schichtsalat Our oldest is invited to a party this weekend and she was asked to bring something to eat or to drink to the party. So knowing teenagers and their organisation from my own youth (everyone appeared with alcohol, and we had to order pizza) I told her that I would prepare a Schichtsalat for the party if she would help. Schicht is german for a layer. So the idea of a Schichtsalat is to have several layers of diffrent stuff in a bowl, all covered with a layer of cream. So the salade is fresh for hours and looks nice in a glass bowl. Before eating it is mixed. I think a picture explains it best. For better mixing the bowl shouldn't be this full You can even do some ornaments on the cream, like doing a big 18 with powdered ret beet. Since the party is saturday evening our daughter could add some leafs of fresh sour dough bread from the village owned baking oven. So the big question is: will the party people like it and how is it named in english? And should I do a variant with herings to fight alcohol better