So I am still on my Minecraft nonsense, and priority one for yesterday was to lure some helpless animals into my custody. We are not going to talk about the deeply disturbing things that I am going to put them through… or at least not until later. The biggest challenge was trying to separate the cows from the sheep because both of them were lured with wheat. It was pretty hilarious me slowly backing towards my base with a mob of five sheep and four cows. I created an impromptu dirt bridge across the pond outside of my base to make it a little easier and was impressed that none of them fell in the water. I did make it three blocks wide which seems to have helped in this case.
I also went out into the world and tamed a bunch of doggos. It is pretty wild playing this game while being trailed by six wolves. It ends up making the entire experience feel a bit more like a World of Warcraft Hunter. I plink something with an arrow and then before the mob can get anywhere near me my team of expert “goodest boys” has wrecked it completely. The only negative is that they won’t seem to attack creepers, which is one of my larger problems honestly. They completely destroy Pillagers though, and they are the sole reason why I was able to rain the nearby outpost and get myself a shiny new crossbow. I have no clue how to destroy said outpost, because by the time I was leaving everything was respawning in full again.
I did have to put my sweet babbos in timeout though, because digging tight tunnels while followed by six wolves… is complete madness. The best part about these kiddos though is that they eat zombie meat and seem to think it is good… which means I get to save all of the steak for myself and heal them up with otherwise useless junk. I specifically parked them under the shelter of my base because it felt awful to have them sitting out in the rain and weather. I have no clue why I am suddenly personifying these puppers, but it is a thing that is happening. This is hilarious considering the sheer animal cruelty that I am committing just across the courtyard from these “goodest boys”.
Since I did not have access to much Redstone, I have opted to instead make a traditional “meat hole” with my chickens. There is a fried chicken machine that works much better but it requires me to have way more resources than I currently have. My hope is that at some point I can convert the current machine over to the automated version at a later date. Essentially both the Chicken and Cow machines work based around the concept of entity cramming, where only 24 entities can occupy the same square of space and when a new entity is created… the oldest entity is killed off creating drops… which get whisked into a chest via a hopper system. So essentially I hop up on the top of the machine and feed the chickens grass seed, which creates baby chickens, which kills off older chickens, and drops feathers and meat into the chest. Additionally, the hopper collects more eggs than I can ever use… most of which I am throwing at the ground to try and spawn additional chickens and then eventually manually killing them. Cows work so much better than Chickens for this purpose… because the drop rates of chicken meat and feathers is much lower than beef/leather.
The sheep are suffering a significantly less dire fate because shears exist and I can just corral them in a small space and then hop down into the pen and harvest all the wool easily. Most of the food that I am using comes from the cows, and the chicken farm exists only to serve as a way of getting feathers to replenish my arrow supply. Were it not for the fact that sheep end up being “bycatch” from my act of trying to lure cows into my base… I would not even have messed with collecting any. Once you have made a bed… there isn’t much use for sheep in general. Sure they drop meat, but they are overall a way less efficient animal. Similarly, I did not even mess with collecting any pigs. However since this batch of sheep so willingly entered my den of horrors… I figured I might as well keep them penned up in case I need more wool in the future.
The other part of the arrow-making routine has involved creating giant towers of gravel and then harvesting it down hoping for flint. I really wish they would add a crafting machine recipe for turning gravel into flint, because honestly… this is a bit maddening to keep harvesting the same gravel over and over hoping for that rare drop. The only real positive is that you get to see some nice above shots of my base while I am up on my tower of nonsense. You can see that I am farming sugarcane out by the water to build up a proper enchanting shack. I think the next big renovation phase is going to be trying to make my base look a little less shit. I also am contemplating expanding out a bit more and doing a land grab to get more “safe” territory. I’ve contemplated moving the entire from of my base out over top of the waterfront so that I can move my sugarcane farm indoors.
In other news, I have finished my spiral staircase down to bedrock, and in doing so found my very first diamond block. Legitimately it was just a single node, which is a bit infuriating but once I got down to bedrock I set up the standard strip mining operation. This quickly yielded enough diamonds to make myself a set of tools. Right now I have Iron Armor, and it will probably be quite a long time before I can get enough diamonds to make a full set of armor out of that material. I found some pointed dripstone and I think one of my next projects is going to be building a renewable lava setup. This will be useful for a few reasons… the primary that I will be able to start using lava buckets instead of coal for cooking the assorted meat that I am gathering. After that, I can start using it for farming obsidian to eventually build a nether portal.
So at this point, I have a Diamond Pick, Diamond Axe, and Diamond Sword. I am too cheap usually to make shovels, but at some point, I am sure I will. I still mostly use stone tools because I don’t have tons of diamonds yet. I am just too cheap to waste diamonds right now. I am sure tonight I will probably spend a bit more time down in the mines because there are still a lot of resources that I have not found. At some point, I plan on building a nether portal and start trying to gather some of the resources there. However, I do not want to set foot into the nether without at least some gold armor, because I do not want to deal with massive pigman aggro. I have found exactly zero gold so far, so I am probably going to set up a few different branch mines off my spiral staircase at different levels looking for various resources.
The post Luring Defenseless Animals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’m still testing positive for COVID-19 some two weeks after my initial test, and honesty… I still feel fairly awful. Every day is a little bit better, but it is a battle waged in inches rather than feet. While I am actually getting decent enough sleep now, which is a huge positive… my game time is still rather fraught and unfocused. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of my time in Minecraft. It seems like this is my “sick” game because over the years I have faded back into it whenever I was not feeling myself. I never really stick around terribly long, but it is sort of the experience I can completely shut my brain off for and just build and explore.
This recent bout of Minecraft nostalgia is brought to you by the fact that I remembered that I have videos that I shot eons ago… in deeply potato quality of my very first Minecraft world. I explored with a sense of wonder, in part because I was still figuring out the rules of world creation back then. I didn’t know with certainty where I could strip mine to get diamonds, nor did I really understand how to find key resources like coal or iron, and I just sort of freeform built wherever things seemed cool. I think in some part I wanted to maybe rekindle a bit of that with a new world. There is part of me that wishes that I still had these original files… and quite honestly I thought I had backed them up because prior to us getting a multiplayer server Rylacus and I used to swap our worlds back and forth so we could see what the other was building.
Right now I am very much in the “ugly but efficient” phase of the world where I am building out of whatever materials I happen across. For the moment I have this awkward-looking tower that is nice and safe from all of the monsters that spawn around it. I have no clue how tall I am going to make it, but given my penchant for building Skyroads, I will probably keep building upwards over time. For the moment only one floor is really very active with my bed and crafting machines, but I expect to add in some other stuff at least for storage purposes.
Beneath the tower, I started digging straight down and then began to do my more recent spiral staircase style of digging. Digging straight down is entirely too dangerous, so if you start digging around a central column, with each step going deeper you usually have enough time to react to any danger you might encounter but also it does not take a ton of space. I used to always dig a stairwell down, but it always felt like I was wasting a lot of space in doing so. I’ve not hit bedrock yet, but I did tunnel down into a geode. I spent enough time down there to torch off a large section to make it a bit safer. I similarly hit a natural cave on the way down that had quite a bit of iron, which I have similarly torched off to make it safe.
The tower is technically the first place I attempted to settle in this world. While I was running from the spawn point I built this makeshift bridge and then started digging into the side of a mountain. Given my natural dwarven tendencies, my first bases tend to be similar areas. The big problem here however is that I dug into a very active cave system with a zombie spawner. I was quickly overwhelmed and forced to run back from the spawn. This of course meant that my next priority was to get enough wool to be able to make a bed. However, I did come back to the cave system farm it down, and eventually torch off the zombie spawner so that I could make it a bit more reasonable. This is just around the corner from my tower and I might at some point try and connect the two areas with an underground tunnel.
While it is not the most efficient thing in the world right now, I did set up a very rudimentary zombie spawner farm so that I can come back here when I need experience for enchanting. I am sure I will improve this a bit over time to make it work more efficiently. It works well enough for now and if I need to shut it off I can easily throw a torch inside there to make it safe enough to work on. Right now the zombies have a bad habit of getting caught in the blind corner to the right, so at some point I will optimize this to make it work a bit better. If I ever get a silk touch pick, I might pick the spawner up and move it to someplace a bit closer to my base. Thought like I said above it might be fun to connect the two areas up via a safe underground tunnel.
For the moment I am planning on expanding out the walled-off area to add a bit of a farm, and maybe starting to pen off some animals. Once I get a reliable crop of grain, I am probably going to lure some cows into a “meat hole” which is a truly disturbing contraption that essentially has you feed cows until they overpopulate the number of spawns that can appear on a single block… and then kill off the older entities creating meat and leather. Sheep on the other hand I can just harvest like normal with shears, and potentially I might build a lava-based chicken farm to get eggs and feathers. Essentially I need to build up some reliable sources of food… because for the moment I am running on whatever I have lucked into farming out in the world and some bread that I found in chests.
However, I am somewhat hesitant to go wild on building a bunch of automated farms… because on some level that destroys the simplicity of the game.
The post Block-Based Nostalgia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Two days ago Sony unveiled its technical presentation for the upcoming release of the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro, and it has not been well received by the gaming populace and media. Largely the key sticking point seems to be the price point of $700 for the digital-only version, which becomes around $850 by the time you add in the optional disc drive attachment and vertical stand. That is starting to get into gaming computer territory when it comes to pricing and seems to be out of band with the current pricing for all other consoles on the market. You can pick up a PS5 Slim, which is capable of playing all of the same games currently for $440, making this product almost double the price given that the slim model I just priced comes with the disc drive.
The key complaint that I have seen about the digital-only focus, is that it essentially locks players into always paying the highest possible price for a given game. Sony is notoriously stingy when it comes to sales. Just a quick example Spider-Man 2 at this point is a year old roughly and you can pick it up pretty reliably for $50 new in disc form if not cheaper whereas on the Sony store, this is still a $70 title. Console players already pay a roughly $10 premium over PC Gamers for their titles, so I get why folks would want to buy the disc version of games so they can get a bit of a price break. There is also the fear of digital titles disappearing, for example, the ill-fated Concord recently was removed from players’ inventories, and I remember something similar happening with the Scott Pilgrim game during the PS3 era that if you did not have it downloaded it just poofed from your library without a refund.
All of that said… I think something else is at work here. Right now the most popular console of this generation is the Nintendo Switch with some 143 Million units sold. This is compared to the PS5 which currently just crossed 60 million units. The Nintendo Switch has arguably the worst hardware and output quality of ANY console on the market currently. However, its focus on having really fun gameplay and bringing interesting experiences to the players has made it a bit of a media darling. Almost everyone owns a Switch regardless of where they land on the Xbox vs PS5 vs PC tribal debate. The games that it plays well, it plays really well and as a result, it becomes this amazing Swiss army knife of a device that you can take with you or dock to get maximum usability. Basically, my theory is that players care way more about the gameplay than they do about graphical fidelity.
We’ve been in this cycle for decades of hardware manufacturers telling us that we want the new hotness just on the horizon. 4k was the big thing, now it is high refresh and 8k resolutions, but the truth is… I don’t think most gamers really care about these things that much. I bought into 4k gaming pretty early on with a 1080 Ti and later “downgraded” to 144 hz 1440p displays because it fit what I actually wanted a bit better. Similarly, the above image is pulled from the Steam Hardware Survey and shows that the “average gamer” is still playing games in 1080p. While the most popular video card right now is the RTX 3060, most of the games that are being played don’t actually even support Raytracing. The cycle of constant hardware sales has been more about padding corporate bottom lines and fueling AI and Crypto growth, and less about what the players really wanted.
I think the biggest “L” of the Sony Presentation is that they didn’t really bring out any jaw-dropping definitive proof of what players would be getting for that hefty price tag. Instead of showing new games that can only really be achieved because of the technology of that upgraded console… they showed a bunch of older titles with marginal improvements. During the presentation, they stated that 2/3rds of all PlayStation gamers choose to play games in performance mode, rather than in fidelity mode. That feels extremely damning proof that players mostly care about the gameplay rather than the pretty graphics, because in truth… the graphics have been “good enough” since we got to the 1080p era. Basically, I feel like we have entered this era of diminishing returns, where the amount of extra money you pour into an experience is not equivalent to the extra amount of enjoyment that you gain from it.
I feel like another example of function over form, is the general popularity of the Steam Deck. This is effectively a gaming PC that runs at Nintendo Switch resolutions. The Steam Deck reportedly hit 3 million units sold in 2023, which is somewhat impressive considering how strained the available units were through the end of that year. Essentially the Steam Deck provides the performance of a budget laptop with integrated graphics, and folks are eating it up. It feels like it is way more about the polished nature of the Linux Steam OS distribution and the “consolification” of the entire PC Gaming ecosystem, than anything related to performance. There is also a massive amount of fun to be had in games that run at relatively low resolutions and with relatively few bells and whistles. Not to mention how much of a Console Emulation powerhouse the platform has become.
I also think there is a certain amount of hubris at play for Sony. They have been able to successfully raise the price of the PlayStation 5 in the Japanese market three times. This is the first time we are seeing what is an equivalent price hike hitting the North American and European markets. With the 60 million units sold of PS5, I feel like maybe Sony has been believing their own hype a bit recently. I am not sure if the negative reaction from the North American market will make any real changes. This combined with the colossal failure of Concord recently, should be a few shots across the bow that maybe players are not just going to take things as status quo anymore. It feels like a weird gamble considering during the presentation they stated that only around 15% of the total PlayStation 4 installed user base was on the Pro model during that generation. Maybe this console really is only for the bleeding-edge gamers who have to have the best of everything. However, I figured those users would have long since migrated to the PC platform where they can easily pour money into performance.
All of this said… I am clearly not the target demographic for this device. I spent 99.9% of my gaming time on the PC either on my gaming desktop or my gaming laptop. While I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X… they both spend more time collecting dust than they do actually serving as a gaming device. Most of the folks that I knew who were big into the PlayStation 4 Pro, were Destiny players… and when the PC Version of that game was released the majority of those migrated there for better performance. I am sure folks will buy this thing, but I am not sure how many will be actual players and how many will be scalpers trying to make a profit. Time will tell how this shakes out in the long run, but for the moment… I am seeing nothing but hatred about this announcement in my social feeds. I really do think we have reached a point where graphically things are “good enough” and instead folks would rather see a focus on gameplay than on shinier baubles. Of course… I might be entirely clueless here.
The post Diminishing Returns appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So it is no longer morning… but also feels really weird not to start a post with “Morning Folks”. I am still on the mend and struggling a bit, and Covid brain fog claimed me this morning and kept me from making a post. Instead, I thought I would do a bit of storytime because I find this funny. Shortly after the release of Dawntrail, my friend Ace and I started baby characters on the Kraken Dynamis Server. The new Path of Exile League came out which caused me to want to take a break, but at some point, I am sure we will return and pick up where we left off at the end of Heavensward. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and weirdly… it was weirdly enjoyable to actually be playing on a server where everyone was newbies either by new accounts or by fresh transfers.
Moments after logging into my character for the very first time on that server, I got an invite to sign a Free Company Charter. I thought sure… I have been that person trying to get my guild started before and would help out with this process. I half assumed that the moment it got started, I would get kicked out… but that was not what happened. Instead, I was promoted to an officer and later drug Ace into the madness just for funsies. We did not really have any plans to make a Free Company for our shenanigans, but having a few genuine new players around was rather charming. Based on our interactions… it was VERY clear we were the wizened elders of this group, but it was still fun to hang out while we were pushing the content through its paces.
We got busy doing other things, some of them on our mains… others in other games. The thing is, I kept logging in periodically when I thought about it to do the daily MGP grind just to get a reasonable base of currency built up on that character. While I was not actively playing, I was actively checking in on how things were going. There were a lot of fresh recruits that eventually left the Free Company leaving us down to just me and Ace who were logging in regularly, and then a trio including the originator of the FC that had not logged in within two months. I didn’t think much about this because Free Companies come and go in membership. Even our primary Greysky Armada goes through large blocks of time when Sol is pretty much the only person reliably logging in.
Late last week I logged in and saw a message that I had been promoted to the leader of the Free Company. So I guess I have now inherited Darkwraith… a super edgy named FC to keep up and running. I made a few tweaks… firstly I renamed the primary role to Leader, because “Master” squicks me out something fierce. I went with a Leader > Officer > Veteran > Memeber > Recruit naming scheme for the ranks because it felt less awkward and also sort of clearly delineated what each role was for. The only other thing that I am contemplating is shifting the Allegiance from Order of the Twin Adder to Maelstrom… because who the fuck ever wants to be part of team piss yellow? Mostly I plan on keeping the lights on and even inviting anyone else who wants to play on Dynamis. This is still 100% an alt project that I am never going to give my full attention to, but it is weird how this FC that I didn’t even intend on joining fell into my lap.
I am not going to lie… there is at least a large chunk of me that wants to rename this to something involving “Robosquids” given that Free Company renaming is a thing you can do easily. I am pretty sure the original owner of the Free Company is “gonezo”, given that he largely popped over to the server to get housing… and has also long since had that demolished. So at this point, the Free Company is essentially what we make of it. If you have alts on Kraken hit me up, because apparently, I lead a Free Company now. I have another group of friends who randomly ended up on the server so I might snag them to at least get the guild leveling at a decent pace.
The post Accidental Free Company appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
