Good Morning Folks! It is another Monday and here comes another one of my semi-regular weekend recap posts. I am still in a really odd place gaming wise where I am not necessarily hardcore motivated by anything. I thought I might dive into Space Marine 2 or Final Fantasy XVI this weekend… but neither happened because I just did not feel like playing anything that “heavy”. I’m not sure how to explain it, but there are times when I don’t want to play anything that I cannot easily dip out of at a moment’s notice as my mood changes. As a result I am still playing quite a bit of Minecraft because it is easy to pop out of and return to, and one of the major things that I did is create a bunch of dog houses for all of my wolves that I have had hanging out in my base for ages. Of note… that is NOT lava in the back of their cage but instead, a shroom light to keep them warm and safe from baddies.
It has been ages since I made one of my dumb videos, and this weekend I decided to record a bit of a base tour in Minecraft. The Path of Exile league was fun, but didn’t necessarily inspire me to create any videos, similarly, Last Epoch has been more of the same but if I can ever get my build dialed in I might record one of it. This recent foray into Minecraft started by watching this video about a 14-year-old Minecraft mystery while convalescing from Covid. This then made me remember that I have videos from my very first Minecraft world over on another channel, which made me nostalgic for the game and the way in which I used to play it. It has been a lot of fun and while I have entered the “machine building” phase of the game, I am still enjoying myself because it does not ask a lot of me to play it.
Over in Last Epoch, my build is starting to come together and I have picked up a handful of really decent Legendary items. We are in a really weird state of the endgame meta for the game where you either want an item to drop with 2 or more Legendary Potential, or you want an item to drop with NO Legendary Potential so you can feed it to a Nemesis Egg and either get a Legendary or an item with hopefully 2 or more LP on it. Circle of Fortune however makes it so that most Uniques drop with at least 1LP… meaning that 99.9% of what drops for you is useless. What I find myself doing is picking up weapons off the ground and then rolling the dice with a Rune of Ascendance because it does not seem to take into account the Circle of Fortune bonuses and is way more likely to give me a raw zero LP version of the item if I luck my way into it.
There are also some weird growing pains around being in the endgame and crafting items. Last Epoch should be praised for how approachable crafting items is and how easy it is to make decent enough gear while running through the campaign. However, when you hit the endgame… it sort of stops being useful. Glyph of Envy is this really cool item that was recently introduced that lets you take a single good stat and then reroll everything else. I could see this actually being really useful for those items that have a Tier 7 roll of that one stat you care the most about. However, it does not work in this situation because you cannot use this unless an Affix can be upgraded, meaning that you cannot use this on T5, T6, or T7 items. I’ve tried this a few times and when you end up getting as a result is an item that would probably be hidden by your loot filter. There really is no way to craft perfect items in Last Epoch, meaning that after a point you just stop engaging with that system other than randomly trying to reroll a single stat on an item.
Friday while I was off my friend Ace gifted me a copy of Pesticide Not Required and I’ve had a blast playing some of it. Essentially this is a game in the same style as Vampire Survivors but instead you play a cute frog that has inherited a farm Stardew Valley style. You roam around doing chores, planting crops, watering them, and eventually growing new weapons… to help you clear out the bugs that are trying to attack you faster… so you can grow more crops and get more weapons. It has a really fun main gameplay loop and you get to throw a bunch of fun things as weapons like randomly sending lawnmowers off in various directions. Over time you get the ability to buy pets that take care of some of the tasks for you like an Elephant that waters your plants, or a Dog that retrieves loot for you. If you liked Vampire Survivors give it a go, because it is kind of stupidly fun. I do suggest you play it with a controller because originally I tried Keyboard and Mouse and completely missed that you could direct your attacks until I played with dual sticks.
Lastly, The Cure released a new single and it is brilliant. It is hard to explain how much this band means to me, and listening to this was like a visit from an old friend. Fair warning though it is 3 minutes or so into the song before the lyrics start because The Cure has reached a point where they just do not have to give a fuck about pop sensibilities. What is staggering about this track is how much like classical young Robert Smith this sounds like. Whatever he is doing to take care of his voice… it is phenomenal. If you also love The Cure and were not aware of this collaboration with Chvrches from a few years ago, I highly suggest you give it a listen as well.
Anyways! I hope you all have a most wonderful week. Mine is probably going to be busy, but I am had a great weekend.
The post Weekend Recap with Frogs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Friends… I am swimming in cooked chicken. For years when I have played Minecraft the first thing that I have done is wrangle a bunch of cows… stuff them in a hole and then feed them wheat until they pass the entity cramming limits and start dying off giving me a stable supply of leather and beef. The thing is… I don’t really need much leather… and my chicken operation has been way more productive than I thought it would be. As such I am contemplating tearing down the cow station… and sending them all to that big farm upstate… to free up room for more shenanigans. I just do not need the beef in quite the way that I thought I would and chicken appears to be a perfectly cromulent option.
Chicken solves a lot of other problems like the ability to get a quick safe experience boost to repair items. In theory, if I cared more about it I would relocate the chickens to a place where I could reasonably use them to feed the egg-throwing machine directly. I could do some nonsense with minecart hoppers and bubble elevators, but that seems like “a lot”. Also, minecarts are super noisy, and I am already dealing with the din of a thousand clucks at all hours of the day. There is something primal that I enjoy about loading up a pitching machine and watching it birth chickens into my pen. I’ve created so many lanterns for the nether tunnels that I am going to need to find a more stable source of iron. I’ve gotten most of it from hollowing out areas under my base, but I might be trying to build a Villager breeder soon… and from there an Iron Golem farm since I have Pillagers nearby.
I am still playing quite a bit of Last Epoch and one of the things about Cycle 2.5 that I have to say… is that I don’t think dungeons are quite as much of a waste of time. This is in large part because mapping content that appears in Monoliths, can now appear and does so frequently in dungeons. Better than that, each floor of the dungeon seems to count as a new map meaning that you can find a Nemesis, Treasure Chest, and Exiled Mage on each floor giving you a way to burn through Nemesis so much faster than monoliths. I’ve only really spent much time doing Temporal Sanctum trying to create legendary gear, but then again that tends to be the only dungeon that I do consistently.
I had a dry streak of eggs that I complained about on the blog, and then grouped with Ace and immediately following that have gotten an egg for almost every single Nemesis. This is allowing me to start burning through my stockpile of non-LP copies of Palarus and Firestarter. This actually makes the whole Circle of Fortune thing making it super common to get 1LP uniques a bad thing. I wish you could throw LP uniques in the Eggs and then either get it turned into a completely random legendary or upgrade to higher LP levels. As it stands right now 1LP uniques… feel sorta awful to loot. I upgraded my Palarus this morning significantly keeping the 15 Health on Hit and adding 109% Melee Damage. I will keep trying for a 3 or 4 LP version, but for the time being, I am pretty happy with it.
I have to admit though, I feel like I am starting to wind down a bit on Last Epoch. This is the phase of the game where it always loses me. I am just not motivated by completing all of the bosses, and the worst thing about Last Epoch… is that it isn’t Path of Exile. What I mean by that is POE has quite possibly the most interesting endgame with a lot of player choice in what you want to focus on mechanic-wise. If I could take the player builds from Last Epoch and copy-paste in the Atlas of Worlds and all of the other endgame systems like Heist and Delve over top of the existing endgame… it would be my ultimate experience. The worst thing about Last Epoch is that it just doesn’t have a rich and varied endgame yet. I know over time they will get there, based on what we have seen so far, but it also means for the time being… every cycle has a shelf life.
Anyways Minecraft is giving me plenty of alternative shenanigans to enjoy, and at some point, I want to dive into Final Fantasy XVI now it is on PC, and Space Marine 2. I might try both of those out either today or this weekend.
The post Unlimited Chicken appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning folks! A while back I said that I thought my Minecraft Adventures would be over for a bit when the Last Epoch cycle reset happened… but that has not turned out to be the case. It turns out that the Last Epoch Empowered Monoliths are just not “brain off” enough time for me, and I still need something that I can zone out while playing. Brain fog has been a real problem post-Covid and as a result I am climbing back into Minecraft for some comfortable tedium. One of the big things that I have done is venture forth into mod management land and beautify my experience.
Since CurseForge has turned out to be a bit problematic over the years, a number of mod authors are actively boycotting that site, which meant that I needed to find a new mod management tool. I present to you Modrinth which appears to be the community-supported alternative, with the ability to manage multiple different mod setups at the same time and freely switch back and forth between them at will. So if you wanted to create a hyper-specific loadout just for works utilizing a specific mod like Aether you can do that, and then have a different loadout of more vanilla-friendly mod packs as well. For the most part, I am not doing this and instead am only running a single map. If you are interested here is the totality of the mods that I am running.
Shader – Nostalgia v 3.0
Textures – Faithful Venom 32x
Mods
Fabric Api
Iris for Fabric
Lithium for Fabric
Sodium for Fabric
Better F3 for Fabric
Indium
Modmenu
Cloth Config
Xaeros Minimap
Falling Leaves
Make Bubbles Pop
Bobby
Reeses Sodium Options for Fabric
For most of these, I have not included a specific version number so this list can be a bit more evergreen going forward. In large part, I will just keep updating the mods as new versions are released.
One of the biggest projects that I have undertaken is making the Nether a bit more save to roam around in. I’ve created these long 3×3 Cobblestone tunnels leading from my spawner to various locations. Though honestly right now… the only real destination that matters is a specific spawner farm that I will talk about in a bit. My goal is to expand this into multiple different biomes because at some point I want to create a pigmen farm which will then fuel a barter farm. I’ve roamed quite a bit from my Nether spawn location and still have yet to encounter any of the warpwood biomes, which are super useful since warpwood can’t burn. I seem to be largely surrounded by Soulsand and Basalt biomes, but my hope is if I keep tunneling in one direction long enough I will hit warpwood.
The entire reason why I started tunneling in the first place was to create a safe approach for building a Blaze rod farm because there was a spawner down here in the nether fortress area surrounding my base. I would also like to potentially set up a Wither Skeleton farm, but everything I have looked into makes it seem like it is way more resource-intensive. The blaze rod farm is fine, but I might shift it into something that is afkable because for the moment it is really only useful if I need to repair my sword or axe via mending. Though I will be honest…. for repairing tools my stupid chicken farm is far more effective. Essentially I take one swipe with the sword and then quickly switch to the tool that needs repairing and soak in massive amounts of experience orbs.
From my time roaming around the Nether Fortress area, I have managed to pick up two Wither Skeleton Skulls, and need one more in order to summon in and fight the Wither itself. Whenever I do this I will absolutely use one of the cheese methods for killing it easily. I’ve also killed two raiding parties, and could have killed way more if I had gone out of my way to do so. Largely I only bother with them when I am doing something and they are actively annoying me. However, since I was showing off trophies that are hanging around my base I figured I might as well include those Ominous Banners. Regardless they kind of look cool to have hanging up. It is weird how close I am to a pillager outpost and how much it does not factor into my day-to-day gameplay at all unless I go over there and kick the hornet’s nest.
One of the things that I have used Xaero’s Minimap to do is be able to point out slime chunks. I have a lot of ideas for things that I want to build and several of them are going to need sticky pistons. To the best of my knowledge, there are no swamp biomes near me, and as a result that means I have to rely entirely on the fickle nature of cave slime spawns. So doing what I had done before I started hollowing out an entire chunk. While it does not show it currently…. this is the above-ground appearance of the area that I began mining down into. The plan is at some point to probably plan a crop above ground just so I can utilize the space. I was waiting for the grass to finish filling in and it seems to have done so finally.
The idea was simple enough… get down to below 40 where the slimes can start spawning… build several platforms and then … ???? Profit? The problem is… as much as I have fucked around with the formula for this farm I cannot seem to produce a reasonable amount of slimes. I’ve tried it lit, unlit, 3 blocks tall, 2 blocks tall… and in all of the variations the only thing that I can seemingly produce a lot of is spiders, zombies, and skeletons. I already have a farm for that however so it does not really help me. I am wondering if I either need to keep making it deeper or mine out the rest of the chunk to make sure nothing is spawning beneath me.
What I have instead created is a very pretty but resource-intensive and generally useless bauble for my world. I used the magma blocks only because I thought they would look cool, and I farmed up a ton of them hollowing out the nether to make my tunnels. There are times when spawns have spawned, because I have about two dozen slime balls in my collection chests, but I have made so many changes to this farm that I have no clue which configuration seemed to produce them. Most recently I have lit up the area in an attempt to stop normal spawns given that slimes can supposedly spawn from zero to seven light levels… and the entire interior of the platforms is 5-6 light levels currently. I am sort of at my wits end with this stupid waste of time, and it has me contemplating the dumber option which is to build several nether portals from the nether side in an attempt to leap frog across the map looking for swamp biomes. I could also really use a jungle biome so that I could get me a bamboo farm going.
Basically mindlessly hollowing out the world seems to be one of those things that my brain can do when it is struggling. As a result, I find myself crawling back into the comfortable numb that is Minecraft. Comfort gaming is definitely a thing that is needed occasionally and lately, I have needed it quite a bit.
The post Failure to Slime 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.
