Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have a bit of a long show because we wound up cramming a few games that we missed in the first show into this list. We round out our yearly tradition with the second part of our Games of the Year show. I am once again so glad that we decided a few years ago to start doing these on multiple nights because this year would have been a four-hour-long epic marathon of recording.
Good Morning Folks! We’ve had a bit of a snowpocalpyse here in Oklahoma. We handle icy roads pretty well, but when you give us a bunch of inches of snow at once… pretty much all of our infrastructure breaks down. I had already taken the day off because we were supposed to go do something… which has essentially been cancelled. So instead of cancelling my leave and working today… I am just going to chill out. The above image is from my Dad’s backyard staring out of his shop and I figured I would share it because of how pretty all of the trees look. We technically got more snow, but his yard looks way cooler.
I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II, though admittedly at this point I am pretty ready for another game to come along and distract me. I’ve largely been chasing Citadels and it is awesome when you get two spawn near each other. For example this one screen was worth 6 divines as the Copper Citadel fragments go for the most on the currency exchange. I have no clue why I am attempting to accumulate wealth because my Minions build is effectively as geared as I can probably get it without going to mirror tier perfectly rolled items. Now that Kripparian has made a video about the fart boots, I do have some concern that they will be nerfed. Thankfully I am only using them as additive damage and not the core of that build.
I’ve been knocking out a few of the things like getting my 8th set of bossing atlas points. It is shocking how hard it is to find a boss map node that is both Corrupted and Irradiated, because in order to get that 8th point you need both of those in place and to run a map that has corrupted and upgraded into a t16. I had been sitting on one of those in my bank for a bit looking for a node that met all of the criteria so I could get those two points. My last two points in the bossing tree will require me to actually use the fragments I am farming and go after The Arbiter. I am not sure I really care that much about this, especially given that I only have one shot at that fight, and the accumulated tokens to do one attempt are worth roughly 5 Divines in total.
That said I did finally gather up the 300 splinters required to take on the Breach boss Xesht. I was expecting this to be way tougher than it actually was and in truth it was pretty similar to your average map boss, just with a lot more mechanics. This was of course a Xesht zero difficulty, and I am sure as you scale up the fight it gets considerably more spicy. I did not get anything really good from the encounter, but it was interesting enough that I could see doing this again whenever I organically gather up enough splinters. The node that I chose makes it so Breaches open and close 30% slower, which honestly… GREATLY improves the quality of life of doing Breaches on a Minion build.
I’ve got an Iron Citadel that I have been sitting on, that I will probably take a run at today. My hope is that it drops multiple fragments, because honestly otherwise it isn’t really worth much to run it. Copper Citadels are the real money right now, but they also appear to be the hardest to find. That said the further I get away from the origin the more often I seem to be finding both Citadel spawns and Unique map spawns. This seems to mimic Delve in that the deeper there that you went the more often rare nodes would spawn.
I’ve found exactly one Moment of Zen, which is a unique map that spawns the Nameless Seer. He did not really have anything terribly interesting in the way of the uniques he was offering, but I am very thankful that this node is impossible to miss on the tree. Honestly I really appreciate that EVERY map has a unique appearance on the map, so that once you know what you are looking for you can pretty much tell which map it is before even mousing over it. I do hope that there is either a favorite map slot system eventually or something that at least allows us to ban the maps that we cannot stand. People seem to hate Augury but that one does not really bug me much… it is maps like Vaal Factory with a bajillion doors that sap my joy.
I got a grocery delivery yesterday morning, well before all of the snow started. So for the most part I am going to hunker down and snuggle with some kitties and forget that the outside exists for the moment. I am hoping we get enough melt over the course of the day so I can go out and do my habitual donut run in the morning without much hassle. I hope you have wonderful weekend and thoughts go out to my friends in California dealing with the wildfires.
The post Moment of Zen appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I guess I might still be taking a bit of a break given that I did not blog yesterday. I am mostly spending my evenings chilling out mapping in Path of Exile II while listening to the latest book in the Divide series by J.S. Dewes. However there is another game that I have been exploring a bit. One of my friend tipped me off to Vintage Story, which is a game that attempts to bring back the confusion and fear that was playing Minecraft back in Alpha when we did not have all of the patterns and progression trees memorized. This game has apparently been out since 2016, and started its life as a mod of the same name. However mechanically it feels fairly similar to Minecraft in that you punch blocks to harvest them, place them with the right mouse button, and open your inventory with E.
The similarities however go careening off a cliff pretty quickly. In Minecraft you punch a few trees, get some resources to craft some basic tools and then rapidly start progressing your way up through the skill tree as you immediately dive into being able to mine resources properly. In Vintage Story… you go through the Stone Age first. Essentially in that first day you are looking for a few resources, the first being flint, which shows up occasionally in these stone piles scattered around the surface of the world. In the above image there is a stonepile in the middle of the screen, and flint will show up as a slightly darker colored rock in those piles.
When you have at least two pieces of flint you can create your first tools by the process of knapping, which is a legitimate thing that our ancestors used to create effectively the first known tools. Essentially in the real world, you use one rock to flake off pieces of another rock until you have shaped it into the manner that you wanted. In Vintage Story you place down the stone on the ground and then slowly knock out pieces of rock until you have freed the shape of the toolhead that you are trying to create. Initially you are going to create a Knife which then can be used to harvest plants, because you will need grass and reeds to progress further.
Once you have a toolhead you can place it in your crafting inventory along with a stick, which you can either pick up off the ground, or get from punching bushes rarely. You can also create an Axe with flint that allows you to start felling trees… and then taking those logs and splitting them into firewood. When combined with dry grass you can create your first campfire. You have to use dry grass and sticks to create a firestarter though… which has a seemingly random chance of lighting something on fire as it loses durability.
Once you have your trusty flint knife, you can wander around and find bodies of water… which often have cattails growing beside them. You can now harvest these and then use them as reeds for the creation of wicker goods. Namely you want to create hand basket which allow you to expand your meager inventory beyond the tool hotbar slots. You can also use these to create more permanent chests that will be helpful once you settle down and build shelter.
I built a relatively simple shelter… that is honestly quite ugly… but I don’t know how to make decent looking building blocks. Essentially the game has a day/night cycle that is 45 minutes in length. In the default survival mode when night falls, a monster type called creeps spawn and hunt you down. You have to be inside in order to really survive this. Similarly wolves are another massive problem in survival mode as they will aggro you from quite a long distance away and chase you for a good ways before giving up. You can also customize your difficulty level, and for the time being I am playing on a custom mode that delays the nighttime spawns for several days and makes wolves neutral. I am essentially trying to get my feet under me before I deal with chain deaths.
I’ve reached the point where I am beginning to move into the metal age, and with this I need clay in order to form molds and crucibles. Essentially once you have a shovel you can seek out clay deposits and then similar to knapping, you form the clay into specific shapes building up several layers of blocks until you have reached the final shape. Here I was creating four crucibles where I had to create the base for each and then build up several layers of walls before finally adding the top to the container.
However your clay doesn’t become usable until you have fired it in a kiln. The cool thing about this is… so far everything that I am doing in this game mirrors the real world practices. So the simplest form of a kiln is a pit kiln, where you effectively dig a whole… surround the raw dry clay vessels by material that burns, and then layer on things that will burn more slowly above that… finally lighting the whole mess and letting it burn and cool on its own. Weirdly enough I have actually fired clay bowls in the real world with a version of this… in essentially a metal trashcan. In the game version you dig a single block hole, place your vessels on the ground, layer up 5 layers of dry grass, then 2 layers of sticks, and finally place 4 pieces of firewood on top before lighting the whole thing. It takes 24 in-game hours to complete the process at which point you will have your fired pottery waiting on you at the bottom of the pit. These however catch EVERYTHING on fire… so make sure you surround the pit with some sort of non-flammable retaining wall. Definitely DO NOT do this in a wooden home.
There are a lot of random spawns out in the world, including traders that will buy things from you and sell other things back to you for the gears currency that they trade in. There are various ruins of buildings, that occasionally will have chests that you can loot with resources that you might not yet be able to create on your own. When I last stopped playing I was firing a hammer mold and a pick mold, and was roaming around the world looking for surface deposits of copper. The next step is to go through the process of smelting that copper in a crucible and then pouring the molten copper into the two molds. From there I will need to create a pair of tongs so that I can take the toolheads once cooled and go quench them in a nearby body of water.
One of the things that I really appreciate about the game is that it has a very robust mapping system. You can right click on the map and add waypoints noting various things that you find in your travels. I’ve heard that finding copper deposits on the surface also indicates that there should be nearby copper once you are capable of mining below the ground. So I’ve marked all of these with a copper colored pickaxe with the goal of eventually going back once I have the necessary tool to go exploring further. Similarly if you find clay, you can mark it on the map so you can go back later and harvest more of it given that there always seems to be a lot of it when it spawns.
The game is definitely interesting, but I am not sure if it is the sort of thing I will play with any frequency. I play games not necessarily to mirror the difficulty of how you might do the same thing in the real world, and while I appreciate the level of “sim” built into this survival Minecraft clone… it might be a bit too cumbersome for me personally for the long run. Especially given how quickly your tools break down, forcing you to create new ones. The level of nonsense that I am going through to create my first copper tools… is not something I want to do on a daily basis. In theory once you move on to smithing, things get a bit easier… but still the amount of resources needed to do only the most basic things seems a bit on the extreme side.
If you are the sort of person who likes to run Minecraft with the super simulation heavy mods installed, it might be worth checking out Vintage Story. One thing of note… this is not on Steam but is instead on Humble Bundle, Itch.io, or directly from the developer. I picked my copy up from Humble mostly because I already have a bunch of games on that platform.
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Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.
I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.
Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.
For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.
Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.
As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.
I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`
The post Failed Goals: The Books of 2024 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
