The Test Of Khefre's Children

You must breed the most strange and beautiful scarab beetle that you can. After encountering some beetles in the wild, you can capture them and raise them in a terrarium. You must exhibit your beetle at one of Khefre's gardens, and be judged.

Breeding Beetles

Beetles may be found randomly wandering about the wilderness. There are three types of wild beetles: plains, burrowing, and speckled.

Beetles are bred in terrariums. Beetles can stud; one male beetle will produce children from any number of females in the same terrarium. Thus the breeding rate is higher with a higher percentage of females. If a terrarium runs out of cabbage or becomes overcrowded (more than 15 beetles), the beetles will begin to die.

Beetle genetics are not well-understood, but appear to be based on Mendelian principles. New beetles will reflect a cross between the genetic characteristics of their parents, modified by a certain amount of mutation.

Each beetle may be owned by one or more people. Wild beetles are unowned, and become the property of whoever first places them into a terrarium. The ownership of a new beetle will be roughly proportional to the combined ownership of the parent beetles. A beetle must be at least 90% owned by the person who exhibits it in a competition.

There are two main strategies for producing competition beetles: Collect wild beetles and breed them for desirable traits, or acquire quality beetles from breeders and breed them for ownership. A rapid process for increasing ownership while maintaining desirable traits is to breed high percentage females with lower percentage males or high percentage males with lower percentage females, while continuously pruning out the least desirable beetles. About 4 generations are required to go from 0% to over 90%.

Competition

Build a statue of a beetle in a beetle garden to exhibit it against other competitors (Note that you can submit a beetle only once per week). (There is a list of beetle garden locations.) There are three levels of garden; you must win in a level-1 garden in order to exhibit in a level-2 garden, and win in a level-2 garden to exhibit in a level-3 garden. Win in a level-3 garden to pass the test.

The exact materials required to build a statue will vary from beetle to beetle, and may be viewed while examining a beetle in a terrarium.

You may enter a statue in a beetle garden no more often than once a week. There is nothing preventing a person from entering several statues in one garden; this is, however, not a good idea. (See the section on scoring below for why.)

A beetle garden has space for seven statues. Once all slots have filled, judging will begin. Any person who is not exhibiting in that garden may vote for the one beetle they find the most attractive. Judging will last for 48 hours or until at least 49 people have voted, whichever comes last. The order of winners is determined by the number of votes each entry receives.

Once voting has completed in a garden, the winners will be indicated by a brilliant glowing light. After a 24 hour exhibition period, competitors have an additional 24 hours to salvage their statues; after that time, any person may salvage the remaining statues.

Scoring

To win level-1 and receive a level-1 beetle certificate, your beetle needs to get a higher score than the beetles of four other players. Note that this is different than beating four beetles, since it is possible for one player to have two or more beetles entered in the same garden. Recently the beetle garden in DoN only had two winners, so someone must have entered two beetles in that garden.

When you win level-1, you will receive a beetle certificate. This beetle cert contains hidden information that will effect the scoring in the next level. This hidden information is the list of players that your beetle beat. So if you had the highest score, your cert would contain 6 names. The 2nd place winner would have a cert that contains 5 names, and the 3rd place winner has a cert with 4 names.

In order to enter a level-2 competition, you will need to present one of your level-1 certificates. If you have more than one level-1 cert, which cert you use can effect the outcome, because they will all have different names on them, and they may have different numbers of names too, depending on how you placed in the various level-1 competitions.

When the voting is completed, the beetles are ordered by the number of votes they got. Each beetle is given a list of names, consisting of the names of all the players they beat, and the list of names from the beaten player's beetle cert. All duplicate names are removed from the list, and anyone with 20 (?) or more unique names gets a level-2 beetle certificate. The level-2 beetle certificate contains the names of the people you beat, and all the people they beat in level-1, with any duplicate names removed.

What this all means is that it will be possible for a beetle competition at level-2 to have 0-4 winners. Typically there will be 3 winners per competition, just as we see with level-1. 0 and 1 should only occur when a small group is trying to game the test. 2 winners will occur occasionally when the group is unlucky and has some overlap on their name lists. 4 winners will occur when you have a bunch of first place level-1 winners with unique name lists competing against each other.

...although this doesn't seem to be the case. To date, every level-2 garden has completed with 5 winners. - not true...the last OE rank 2 finished with 4 winners.

Some other fun facts:

• You can use a level-1 cert to enter the level-2 contests as many times as you want. You don't need to go back and win level-1 again if you lose level-2.

• If you have more than one level-1 cert, it may matter for the scoring which one you use. However since you can't tell what names are on it, or even how many names, there is really no way for you to choose which beetle cert would be best for which competition.

• For best results, you want to be sure that you are competing at level-2 with other people who have not beat the same people in level-1 that you did.

• You must go to your Tests menu and look under Khefre's Children to examine your certificate before you can learn any skills related to your new level.

(See also: tests)