Yesterday was the day that Valheim reached critical mass with the AggroChat crew. This might have been achieved earlier were it not for the fact that I blogged about the game but never really talked about it on the show. We had a pretty thick roster the last few weeks of topics and as a result I didn’t feel like it was the right time to slide in a brand new game that at least then I was the only one playing. However and I were having a conversation about the game… and them this perked up Tam and Kodra who apparently tried it… and came back to evangelize the game and the rest is history. I linked my couple of blog posts on the subject as well and yesterday a server was rented and throughout the night more and more of the regulars were logging into it.
Valheim is a game that throws back to the age of renting a private server, and seemingly an entire cottage industry has sprung up around supplying these in rapid form. Granted most of the hosting provides are the same folks who have been hosting Rust and Ark servers for years, but Valheim at least is a relatively new product offering. I did what I often do and went to twitter and over the course of a few hours got not one but six recommendations for GPortal. So yesterday in a few minutes Tam set up a server and I was the guinea pig and figured out how to log in for the first time. The challenge is that so many servers have been set up in such short time that the server browser appears to be overloaded.
I took to the interwebs to glean a method for getting around this problem and encountered this write up. I am essentially doing method two that was outlined, which is comprised of setting up a custom server in Steam… something that I have apparently never done in the over decade I have been on the service. For those who don’t want to travel to another website and watch a less than amazing video… here are the steps I followed:
Open Steam Client
From the View menu select the Servers option
Click “Add a Server” in the Server Browser Window that pops up.
Copy and Past the IP Address and Port Number in the text box that is presented.
For the uninitiated this should be a number that looks like this 111.222.333.444:12345 with those fake numbers representing whatever class D address and port that was assigned to your server by your hosting provider.
You should now see your server in the list in the server browser. Double click the name or select the connect button.
If you get a message about the server being unavailable or that there is no game present, just hit the refresh button a few times. Chances are the virtual server is spinning up if no one is actively on it.
If there is a password on your server you will be prompted to enter that
The game will launch and you will be asked to enter a password again
Play the game
Going forward when you want to connect you open the server browser and double click the name of the server you just added and should be in relatively shortly.
Tam being the excellent host that he is, proceeded to create a massive encampment near the spawn point with lots of beds for anyone who wants to stay there. It expanded a significant amount over the night and now includes walls and a launch bay for a raft. If I remember correctly there is room for I believe six beds in there as well as some of the early crafting machines needed to function.
Being who I am however, without really meaning to… I wandered off on my own and crafted what Kodra referred to last night as Fort Belghast. Since I am further progressed than most of the folks on the server I wanted to be beside the Dark Forest biome and I happened to stumble onto it pretty early and then set up shop along the nearest coastline. I wish I had built on a coast in my single player game so I was effectively remedying this desire. Then last night I proceeded to attempt to jump start my way back to the bronze age so that I could at least repair my gear if I needed to. It took me the better part of the evening but I managed to gather enough resources to build up the crafting progression through a Tier 4 Crafting Bench and a Tier 2 Forge.
I think tonight I might craft a raft and venture across the channel to a nearby island you can see in the distance. There is a weird quirk with our server in that it seems to have a meadow biome maybe one quarter of the size of that of my single player game. It legitimately takes me at least one full day night cycle to run from the spawn to my base on the outskirts of the dark forest. On this server I can cross the meadow into either the Dark Forest or the Mountain region multiple times in the same day cycle. The challenge here is with all of us playing in the same area and the tier 1 biome being so small… we are starting to run into resource contention. I am contemplating going to my single player world and harvesting up a bunch of wood and then dropping it off in woodstack form at Tam’s communal base.
I have a very specific style of home that I like to build in this game, namely because I like having my fire inside. If you do this in a fully closed in area you will kill yourself in your sleep from carbon monoxide. So what I do instead is build a roof in such a way as to leave open eaves which allow for the venting of the smoke and exchange of fresh air, with my bed strategically placed at the opposite end of the domicile as the fire. This allows me to always stay warm and toasty during the nights, never have to deal with my fire being doused by rain and also makes for a much cooler looking inside. There however is room for a spare bed so I might go ahead and build one in case someone needs to use my outpost as a temporary save location.
I didn’t actually interact much with other players apart from chopping down a tree that apparently Neph was fond of. I just viewed it as the next tier up of wood, but I guess it was rather picturesque near her cabin. She opted for reclaiming one of the prefab damaged shacks, which honestly is a great way to start the game. I hope to maybe interact with some folks tonight as I continue this adventure. The Dark Forest is just as aggressive on this server as it is on my single player game, and as a result I spent a lot of time poking my head in for resources and then coming right back out. I’m not even sure how one would survive long enough for a proper base there. We survived the night and now have a multiplayer world, and I am sure we will be talking about it this weekend on the podcast.
The post Valheim with People appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the day that Valheim reached critical mass with the AggroChat crew. This might have been achieved earlier were it not for the fact that I blogged about the game but never really talked about it on the show. We had a pretty thick roster the last few weeks of topics and as a result I didn’t feel like it was the right time to slide in a brand new game that at least then I was the only one playing. However and I were having a conversation about the game… and them this perked up Tam and Kodra who apparently tried it… and came back to evangelize the game and the rest is history. I linked my couple of blog posts on the subject as well and yesterday a server was rented and throughout the night more and more of the regulars were logging into it.
Valheim is a game that throws back to the age of renting a private server, and seemingly an entire cottage industry has sprung up around supplying these in rapid form. Granted most of the hosting provides are the same folks who have been hosting Rust and Ark servers for years, but Valheim at least is a relatively new product offering. I did what I often do and went to twitter and over the course of a few hours got not one but six recommendations for GPortal. So yesterday in a few minutes Tam set up a server and I was the guinea pig and figured out how to log in for the first time. The challenge is that so many servers have been set up in such short time that the server browser appears to be overloaded.
I took to the interwebs to glean a method for getting around this problem and encountered this write up. I am essentially doing method two that was outlined, which is comprised of setting up a custom server in Steam… something that I have apparently never done in the over decade I have been on the service. For those who don’t want to travel to another website and watch a less than amazing video… here are the steps I followed:
Open Steam Client
From the View menu select the Servers option
Click “Add a Server” in the Server Browser Window that pops up.
Copy and Past the IP Address and Port Number in the text box that is presented.
For the uninitiated this should be a number that looks like this 111.222.333.444:12345 with those fake numbers representing whatever class D address and port that was assigned to your server by your hosting provider.
You should now see your server in the list in the server browser. Double click the name or select the connect button.
If you get a message about the server being unavailable or that there is no game present, just hit the refresh button a few times. Chances are the virtual server is spinning up if no one is actively on it.
If there is a password on your server you will be prompted to enter that
The game will launch and you will be asked to enter a password again
Play the game
Going forward when you want to connect you open the server browser and double click the name of the server you just added and should be in relatively shortly.
Tam being the excellent host that he is, proceeded to create a massive encampment near the spawn point with lots of beds for anyone who wants to stay there. It expanded a significant amount over the night and now includes walls and a launch bay for a raft. If I remember correctly there is room for I believe six beds in there as well as some of the early crafting machines needed to function.
Being who I am however, without really meaning to… I wandered off on my own and crafted what Kodra referred to last night as Fort Belghast. Since I am further progressed than most of the folks on the server I wanted to be beside the Dark Forest biome and I happened to stumble onto it pretty early and then set up shop along the nearest coastline. I wish I had built on a coast in my single player game so I was effectively remedying this desire. Then last night I proceeded to attempt to jump start my way back to the bronze age so that I could at least repair my gear if I needed to. It took me the better part of the evening but I managed to gather enough resources to build up the crafting progression through a Tier 4 Crafting Bench and a Tier 2 Forge.
I think tonight I might craft a raft and venture across the channel to a nearby island you can see in the distance. There is a weird quirk with our server in that it seems to have a meadow biome maybe one quarter of the size of that of my single player game. It legitimately takes me at least one full day night cycle to run from the spawn to my base on the outskirts of the dark forest. On this server I can cross the meadow into either the Dark Forest or the Mountain region multiple times in the same day cycle. The challenge here is with all of us playing in the same area and the tier 1 biome being so small… we are starting to run into resource contention. I am contemplating going to my single player world and harvesting up a bunch of wood and then dropping it off in woodstack form at Tam’s communal base.
I have a very specific style of home that I like to build in this game, namely because I like having my fire inside. If you do this in a fully closed in area you will kill yourself in your sleep from carbon monoxide. So what I do instead is build a roof in such a way as to leave open eaves which allow for the venting of the smoke and exchange of fresh air, with my bed strategically placed at the opposite end of the domicile as the fire. This allows me to always stay warm and toasty during the nights, never have to deal with my fire being doused by rain and also makes for a much cooler looking inside. There however is room for a spare bed so I might go ahead and build one in case someone needs to use my outpost as a temporary save location.
I didn’t actually interact much with other players apart from chopping down a tree that apparently Neph was fond of. I just viewed it as the next tier up of wood, but I guess it was rather picturesque near her cabin. She opted for reclaiming one of the prefab damaged shacks, which honestly is a great way to start the game. I hope to maybe interact with some folks tonight as I continue this adventure. The Dark Forest is just as aggressive on this server as it is on my single player game, and as a result I spent a lot of time poking my head in for resources and then coming right back out. I’m not even sure how one would survive long enough for a proper base there. We survived the night and now have a multiplayer world, and I am sure we will be talking about it this weekend on the podcast.
The post Valheim with People appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The northern expansion of the Realms server began last night, and most of the evening was spent building a sky road in an attempt to link up with the Taiga Village that I found earlier. I have no clue WHY I have this desire to keep pushing forward into new areas and opening up new possibilities but it is apparently a thing. The skyroads serve a few purposes, not the least of which is safe passage to wherever I am wanting to go. The second is it serves as a nice landmark for me to use while exploring because I have a mighty tendency for getting completely lost. Like in games I struggle until I am able to build a sort of 3D map of where things are and how they relate to others and building these roads helps me do this thing.
I know there are a few deserts that I would like to link up with as well but I think the next big thing that I am going to do is venture forth into the Nether. I think I am mentally prepared for that nonsense and can hopefully get some new resources. I think that might be the side benefit of all of the expansion on the surface, is that it might be useful for linking up portals through the nether given that many of these little outposts are far enough away that they might link to new biomes inside the Nether.
Another thing that I am wanting to return to soon is Valheim. I was really enjoying the flow of this game and I am super happy that it seems to be blowing up right now. More attention means that likely we will see improvements to the game as a result. I’ve still yet to take down the second boss and I should do that thing. While not as fulfilling as Minecraft in the building gameplay, I am enjoying the adventuring quite a bit. I think more than anything I want to get back in and harvest enough metal resources to start building into those weapons.
Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I realized that I had several game test invites sitting in my spam folder. So even though I had been watching and searching for one of these… the key words I was searching on did not apparently resurrect it from my spam folder. The problem with both of these games is that they are also bound by an NDA. So as a result we break out a generic Game Under NDA image and not say much detail. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time playing one of these and I am super happy that the world still feels extremely good to be exploring it. It is something I have tested in the past but I don’t want to go into much more detail than that. Suffice to say some improvements have been made and I am super down with what has evolved while I have been gone from it. Unfortunately this talking around in circles about something doesn’t exactly make for compelling content.
Another thing that I think bears some discussion is that I am not certain how much longer I am going to be able to keep up the YouTube thing AND the blog thing. I am starting to experience some deep conflicts about these competing activities. I am finding myself NOT wanting to talk about certain things on the blog because maybe there is a video queued up that has yet to be released where that thing happens. Even worse however I am finding myself not wanting to do something in Game, because I am not necessarily in the mood to record it and I think that maybe just maybe it is something that should be recorded. Essentially I am not designed for the YouTube style content and I think maybe after this week I might officially let it drop. I proved to myself that I could do something like this, but it has also taught me that I can’t do that and this blog and you know work and life and those sort of things.
It isn’t like I am trying to do any of this for a living, so there are no serious ramifications of any of these decisions. I just personally find I enjoy sharing content more in the pattern of blogging… where I do a bunch of stuff and then talk about it, rather than staging a bunch of video content and then letting it come out slowly. Conceptually I enjoy YouTube videos… but really I am learning that there is not enough creativity in me to make that work in addition to the blogging and podcasting that I don’t want to give up in the process. It was a fun experiment nonetheless.
The post Northern Expansion and NDA appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! Welcome to the snowpocalpyse! I realize that you fine folks in Northern climates will snicker but we here in Oklahoma were not built for this nonsense. Nor do we have anything resembling the infrastructure required to remove said snow accumulation. Around this point we are somewhere in the vicinity of ten inches of total snowfall with another system coming in tonight and dumping more snow on us. The snow itself isn’t that bad were it not for the icing we had gotten starting Sunday of last week. Thankfully we are fairly well stocked and have no real reason to leave the house given that we are both working remote at this very moment. I have been for the better part of a year and my wife’s school transitioned to distance learning when the weather started. The snow is super powdery which means that in some places that are some massive snowdrifts that have accumulated.
If you have read this blog for any length of time, you have probably encountered me talking about Kenzie my tortie cat that is pretty much my constant partner in nonsense. In fact as I sit here typing this she is laying on “her box” beside me which is a cardboard box that my current computer case came in that I taped back up because she liked laying on it. So it should come as no surprise that when I was able to get cats in Minecraft this weekend, and finally found a nametag down in a Mine… that the first thing I did was name one of the calicos Kenzie. This was easily the highlight of my weekend, and I spent a lot of time roaming around with Kenzie at my side as she scared away creepers. Unfortunately… Grace had a mishap with one of her cats and it accidentally fell in some lava while she was spelunking and as a result… I have been reluctant to take Kenzie out adventuring much. So she is sitting here with my other two cats waiting on me. It feels real bad when the meow at me… but now I am scared I will lose them.
Today’s Minecraft video which should release at 11 am CST, will feature a walk through of the World I have been spending a lot of time playing in. Towards the end of last week I investigated the product offering called Minecraft Realms, and ended up creating one that my friend Grace and I could run around in. Shockingly she had never played Minecraft until recently and after spending some time in a solo world it seemed the time to start experimenting with multiplayer gaming. Effectively this is our base camp, because I happened to turn around this corner from where the spawn dropped us and noticed this mostly clear valley with a mountain at the far end. I dug into the side and the rest was history and have slowly been both hollowing out that mountain and expanding via tunnel and sky road.
Behind our base we have a pond, and it seems like this pond is a magnet for Baby Zombies doing mischief. A few days ago I went out to the back dock because I heard a Zombie groan and encountered this sight. That is in fact a baby zombie trying to use the boat that we have at the end of the pier.
Then yesterday I go out to the dock because once again I hear a baby zombie…. and this time it is one of the rarest natural spawns in the game which is a Baby Zombie riding a Chicken. The Zombie in the boat was more than happy to sit there doing nothing, but this time the chicken Zombie absolutely made a beeline for me… so I unfortunately had to end it.
The other side project that I was super invested in yesterday was setting up a Bee farm. I love these doofy little buzzers in Minecraft and as soon as I was able to enchant a pick with Silk Touch, I ventured out into the wild to try and find a hive that I could transplant. If you look hard enough you can see one hive that doesn’t look like the others, and that is the original wild hive. From that I used it to harvest honey comb and make more bee habitat and finally breed the hell out of them until I have a veritable armada of flying cuteness buzzing in and out of base. The side effect is that everything here grows much faster so our crops mature crazy fast thanks to the influence of my Bee friends. Hammond the pig seems to be completely oblivious to their existence. I have a row of campfires underneath so that I can safely light them and harvest either honey or honeycomb whenever I need… but I leave them unlit during other times as to not risk damaging the bees.
And that’s it friends. I have been spending most of my time on this multiplayer world and I am not sure how much time I will actually be spending in single player from this point forward. I mean I could have in theory uploaded my single player world to Realms, but I opted instead for a fresh start and this world has been VERY good to us given how many rare resources we have been able to pull from it.
