Gemstone characteristic that lends value to a gemstone. Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms. A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond cutter is called a diamantaire. The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between "precious" and "semi-precious"; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. In modern use the precious stones are diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, with all other gemstones being semi-precious. This distinction reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times,
GemStone IV 2015. "GemStone IV" is a text-based game built on Simutronics' proprietary engine, the IFE (Interactive Fiction Engine). This engine is capable of changing nearly any aspect of the game on the fly which allows updates without the necessity for downtime. Due to the use of the IFE, "GemStone" is rarely taken offline, giving a 24-hour uptime cycle aside from the occasional game crash. The "GemStone" interface is simply a text stream, and the game can be played with a Telnet interface after authentication. There are several official interfaces to the game, as well as several unofficial ones. The oldest interface