Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the reset for the second cycle of the Last Epoch ARPG. That is a contorted mess to say, and EHG really needs to get better at naming this shit. In fact is is actually less clear than calling it Cycle 2… because EHG refers to this as Cycle 1.1 Refresh. Legitimately name things more clearly so that you can understand which Cycle/League/Season you are in with a reasonable chronology. Diablo IV just simply increments the number and Path of Exile gives every league a name and a patch version. Naming your cycles off the arbitrary versioning scheme of your game is kind of madness. Whatever the case… I opted to essentially recreate my last seasonal character to see if I could improve upon the design and as such BelBurnsBrightly now exists… I would absolutely give you a character profile link if LastEpochTools were updated. Instead, I present you BelLikesToSpin the last incarnation which I will be following pretty closely.
I’ve said before that the only thing standing in the way of EHG claiming the “Best ARPG” crown is more content. They are competing with Path of Exile for that title when it has over a decade’s worth of content that just creates this environment where there is always something interesting going on in your maps. This cycle reset introduced the addition of Loot Lizards, and I have to say… they go a long way towards making maps feel fun and exciting. Essentially these critters spawn with a pack of loot on their back and you have to chase them down and “knock the pack off” their back… giving you a lovely loot pinata explosion. They come in a bunch of different varieties but so far I have seen ones that drop Rare loot, ones that drop Idols, and ones that drop Unique items. In all cases, they drop a lot of affix shards and glyphs which go a long way to helping you get started in the new league.
They also seem to have a very high drop rate for Runes of Ascendence which is helping me out considerably in getting the uniques that I need for my build. It took me two Runes to fish for the Firestarter’s Torch which is quite possibly my favorite item in the entire game. After that I started fishing for the cast on smite sword Palarus’s Sacred Light. I think I am five runes down and have not picked that up yet, but I did get the Humming Bee which is shockingly good for this build. I am hitting extremely fast which is causing me to gain a bunch of ward while spinning through the levels adding significant survival while also increasing my elemental damage output a tiny bit. The rest of my gear is a bit of a mess bit I am leveling several weavers will items, and then using Calamity to increase my fire damage and Avarice to give me elemental leech. I did have two quicksilver coils, but I dropped one to level a WW ring to see what I might get from it.
The other major system change is the addition of a stash tab priority system… which will be familiar to you as the affinity system in Path of Exile. Thing is this goes so much further than that system ever has by adding all manner of filter parameters allowing you to get really specific about what you want to store in which tabs. Stash maintenance is one of the biggest annoyances in an ARPG and being able to dump the loot you want to keep quickly is so important to the flow in your endgame progression. So for example if I wanted to create a tab that ONLY stores Legendary Potential 3 and 4 uniques, for a specific class… I could do so extremely simply. Basically, this adds all the power of the loot filter to a stash affinity system which now officially crowns EHG the “Best ARPG Stash Tab System”. Since GGG has been spurred into action to create quality life improvements based on innovations from Last Epoch, I am hoping we see something like this in Path of Exile soon.
I am not skipping any of the content so I am slowly chewing my way through the campaign. I got through the beginning of Imperial Era Majeka last night and will pick up from there today and push through hopefully to the end. I am working on getting my survival up a bit because I know Lagon is always going to be a bit of an obstacle. I am no longer deathless because last night while hanging out on Discord with Ace, I had to get one of my cats off my PC case…. because she was clawing at the magnetic vent cover. When I looked away something wandered over and wrecked me. At least this saves me the frustration of losing my deathless stream to either Lagon or Rahyeh which are traditionally the things that kill me in other runs.
One of the persistent memes in the POE community is “Login Dude!” when there is a good patch or a quirky bug worth exploiting. So I guess this is the point where I say to you that if you played Last Epoch in the past, this weird awkward cycle reset period is a great time to return. There is plenty of meat on those bones when it comes to the addition of Loot Lizards alone, and the quality of life that the stash tab priority system adds greatly improves the quality of life. Basically, I am at the point where I really need to sit down and build my loot filter for the league so that I can start sifting through loot that is actually worth keeping and worth breaking down. It isn’t necessarily a daunting or difficult task, just one that I had been avoiding.
The post Last Epoch Cycle 2 Reset appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This is probably going to be the last day of Minecraft updates for a while, given that this afternoon the Cycle reset is happening in Last Epoch. I feel somewhat mixed about this because I have actually been enjoying myself quite a bit, and have a number of projects on the horizon that I am contemplating doing. Probably the biggest single project that I undertook last night was utilizing some of the real estate that I cleared outside of my base to set up proper fields. Right now I have pumpkin, potato, beet, and carrot farms outside of my walled area and have also taken the opportunity to move my sugarcane farm into this protected lot as well. At some point, I will probably uproot my wheat farm from inside the base and then expand out the fenced area to move it outdoors. Farms take up large amounts of room to do them properly so it just makes sense to move them outside of the closed-in area.
Other than that I started building out some more themed buildings in the main walled-in complex. I set up a proper smithy with an anvil, stonecutter, grinding wheel, smith bench, and a stack of blast furnaces. At some point, I might modify these to auto-feed fuel but before doing that I really need to set up a blaze farm in the nether. The lava buckets have been great for cooking meat, but this is not as easily repeatable for automating fuel intake into forges. Sadly the lava cauldron setup that I have does not work with either hoppers or dispensers so there is no way of feeding it into a furnace or blast furnace. I found a broken nether portal to the north of my base where I harvested a bunch of obsidian and magma blocks and then decided to use those as part of my design with some copper trap doors over them since I have so damned much copper.
The other new building that I added was a storehouse where I am consolidating all of my stuff. At some point, I plan on massively renovating the central tower and as such I am slowly migrating everything that I was storing up there down into sorted bins at ground level. I’ve incorporated a few barrels just because I like the look of them and on the left side you have spare tools, and on the right side, there are torches and arrows. Just to the far side of the building is a little troth that I set up for making obsidian, which I used to complete gathering what I needed for a nether portal. I also created a quickie infinite water source there so that I can grab it when I need it.
One of the big things that I did this morning was craft and enchant a full set of diamond armor. This means that I have officially retired my unenchanted and heavily battered set of iron armor. I figured I might as well use it as a decorative element so I set it up on an armor stand outside the smithy. I say I made a full set of diamond armor but that is a lie. I am wearing a golden armor helmet to give me immunity to piglins in the nether. While I enjoy killing them… I don’t want them to be aggro on sight. The nether is dangerous enough for me to not add additional difficulty levels. Several years ago when I started a hardcore Minecraft run, I did not know about this… and it summarily ended my run VERY quickly.
That experience has made me take the nether EXTREMELY seriously from that point forward. As a result, I have built my main portal underground and in an area closed off behind both a gate and a copper door. I’ve also been using these new copper grates in lieu of glass blocks because they are considerably more sturdy and I am not going to accidentally break them by swinging my sword to fight a stray piglin that makes it through my portal. At some point, I might fancify my portal room but for now, it works well enough. In general, I want to rethink the core of my base because it is getting extremely cumbersome to climb down the spiral staircase when I want to harvest materials from my strip mines down at bedrock. The spiral is super compact and was extremely efficient for getting down deep early on when I was still breaking the caves and such beneath my base, but the long staircase just works better for general purpose.
I’ve built the most rudimentary of shelters on the nether side, with cobblestone so that it won’t blow up easily and a copper door to wall off the portal chamber to keep it from being destroyed. Spawnwise I lucked out extremely well in that my portal is beside a Nether Fortress in the soul sand biome. This gives me access to a ton of resources and the ability to start farming Wither Skeletons as well as Blaze and the Lava Slimes. I think I might be on the boundary between biomes because a little way into the Nether Fortress it all changes over to Basalt and Black Stone. I wish I were in one of the tree biomes so that I could start farming those resources and I might need to make some expeditions out into the nether to try and find one of those.
For the moment I have limited most of my exploration to the immediate area surrounding the fortress. Last night I found a Blaze spawner really close to my portal, and as such I am probably going to set up a Blaze rod farm there. I will of course have to sort out how best to get from my portal to that area safely, which means a lot of tunneling and general construction. I will probably need to set up a more permanent base camp in the nether with chests full of non-nether materials for building tunnels. All of this is probably going to happen considerably later, and as such I am honestly glad that I have been blogging about my adventures. This will serve as a way of jogging my memory when I eventually return to this save.
Anyways! For now, I will be venturing forth into Last Epoch and starting a new cycle character. If you are so inclined for that nonsense I will hopefully see you there.
The post Nether Fortress at Home appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.
The post Egg Pitching Machine appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.
The post Egg Pitching Machine appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
