Good Morning Folks! For those of you who are off for it or celebrate it, Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it… by stacking up a bunch of appointments and then trying to speed run my way through them. So essentially I will be out and about this morning but I wanted to sit down and do my normal Monday morning summary blog post of the shenanigans that I got up to this weekend. It has become a bit of a tradition for myself, Ace, and Ammo to get together Sunday mornings and run whatever strongholds we have unlocked for the week in Destiny Rising. Sometimes if there is time we run whatever event happens to be going on. For example we knocked out a 5 key run of Morgran’s Hunt which is active currently. I enjoy these little group interludes greatly, and any time I can group with Ace and Ammo it is a joy.
In other Destiny Rising news, I have fully unlocked the Jade Rabbit exotic Scout Rifle on all three accounts. Since there are now several Scout Rifle specific characters in the game, this really goes a long way into making them feel more beneficial. Slapping this puppy on Umeko or Kabr 2.0 immediately makes them feel much more solid for group content. I do wish there was a way to change the element of these weapons, but alas that is not really a thing. Basically there is an event running currently that through doing daily content you can unlock this exotic and a skin for it, and if you have not played Destiny Rising in awhile you probably should pop in to get this while it is available. I am not sure if this is going to end up on the exotic shop or not, but at least on my free to play characters it is a massive pain in the ass to gain enough currency through the black market to buy any of these weapons.
I also spent quite a bit of time this weekend in Path of Exile 1. Essentially I am trying to grind out two more of the league challenges so that I can get the same 34 point totem pole that I have for the last several leagues. Essentially I set the focus on grinding out as many Originator influenced maps as I could because you need to run essentially 200 affixes worth of content divided up in as many different ways as possible. If I were doing this with maximum efficiency, I would have made sure I was running only eight mod maps… but I did not do this thing. So a lot of the maps I ran were somewhere in the five or six mod territory making it take significantly more maps in total to grind this out. Essentially I just put my head down and ground until I came out the other end. I did have to snap up some maps off the market and it seems like the going rate for originator influenced anything is around 5-10 chaos each.
Now that I have completed that difficult grind, I am back to just running maps as fast as I can and have chosen to do so on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, The character is a heck of a lot of fun, and does a much better job at dealing with the Breach Fortress maps than Righteous Fire did, because I am blowing up most of the screen at all times and also freezing it. Essentially the grind I am working towards is Quality Quandry and I am sitting at 39886 or 50000. Basically going forward I need to run max quality on my maps, which then combines with 15% from the tree, and 20% from running four sacrifice fragments. Regardless…. it is going to just require grinding out a bunch of maps and is honestly the perfect idle activity while listening to an audiobook, podcast, or youtube video. There is the additional side benefit of throwing levels on my elementalist while doing it.
One of the things that I learned this weekend is that you can right click your world and edit it after having created it. This grants access to a few things, for example you can slow down or speed up the day/night cycle. More importantly you can completely disable falling damage and completely disable the death penalty that causes you to lose items on death. I absolutely did these things because I was dying an awful lot and it was annoying me to lose so much stuff in the process. There is one thing that is extremely overpowered in this game, and that is any kind of monster that can poison you. Your health just plummets almost instantly from the damage over time effect. So I figured by disabling the item penalties I am way more free to roam around and run amok. I don’t play games for the challenge of them, I play games for the fun… and not losing shit on death makes things more enjoyable to me personally.
I’ve started on some semblance of a permanent base. There is a floating rock not too far from my original spawn point and I built a staircase up the side of it and then began flattening the top so that I could build a platform. This is essentially going to be my resource sink for awhile as I keep dragging rock of various sorts up here to start building away at a final creation. Probably the most important aspect is creating an optimized crafting area so that I have a bunch of storage chests that are all accessible by each of the machines. I wish the game had some sort of automated filtering system when it comes to chests, or at least some way of labeling each chest for a specific purpose. There might be mods that do this thing, as there are a staggering number of mods already available. For example I installed one that gives you the name of any item your cursor is pointed at, and another one that creates lucky mining streaks for ore so that it will produce additional ore nodes near the one you are mining when it procs.
Not having to worry about losing everything on death, has made the entire process of exploring the world so much more enjoyable. Firstly I want to now hop down every hole that I see because I can’t take falling damage, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get ported back to my spawn point. Secondly the entire process of pushing myself deeper under the earth in search of resources is just a way more fun way to play the game than trying to be careful all the time. Combat is always a bit of a battle of attrition and in spite of using your abilities to the fullest, you are always going to take some damage which compounds the longer you are exploring. I think for me this is the ideal way to play, but your mileage may vary if you care about challenge. I also really like the fact that I can just kill myself anytime I get bored of exploring an area and go back to base… rather than having to painstakingly make my way back to the surface.
I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What did you get it up? Have you been playing Hytale as well? Drop me a line below.
The post Death Portal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Good Morning Folks! We are running things a bit differently this year. Due to unforeseen reasons, Thalen could not join us this week. As such, we paused our games of the year show to record a brief intermission show. This week, we talked about Star Citizen, Pokémon Legends Z-A, Hytale, OrcaCon, Starfinder, Void Miner, the Amazing World of Retro Handhelds, and Kodra finally enjoying Path of Exile II. We ran a bit longer than normal and, as such, cut the show a bit more abruptly than usual. Pretty packed show for being something we pulled together on the spur of the moment, and also bumped a bunch of topics for our show after we wrap the games of the year.
Good Morning Folks! If you are floating around social media this week, you have most certainly seen chatter about a new building/survival Minecraft-like called Hytale. If you have no clue where this game came from, then I will attempt to explain. Essentially back in Minecraft proper, there was a group that ran a series of servers called Hypixel, largely known for the quantity and variety of mini-games that they offered. In 2020 Riot Games acquired Hypixel Studios with the purpose of publishing their game idea called Hytale, but that deal ultimately fell apart in June 2025 with the halting of development on the game. In November 2025, Hypixel Studios and with it Hytale was bought back by the original co-founders and since then we have had a rapid series of updates to the game to prepare it for its launch earlier this week. What you ahve not is a traditional early access model with the ability to buy into testing at various price points with the cheapest being around $20.
The real question however being that is Hytale good, and is it worth buying into? One of the challenges that I have with Minecraft is that I can almost never play the game in its original vanilla un-modified state. When I do play I use a tool called Modrinth to install and keep updated over twenty three mods that make the game feel better to play. Hytale out of the box… feels like a deeply modded Minecraft experience. It has slightly more modern combat, better graphics, and way more system depth in that the baseline feels like playing Minecraft with some sort of a technology pack addon. There are so many simple tweaks that just improve your quality of life, like the ablity to carry a torch in your offhand along with your tool or weapon in your mainhand. This makes exploring the dark depths of the world so much more palatable because really… you don’t NEED to torch off every inch of the world when you are down there only for the purpose of seeking resources.
Probably my single favorite thing that Hytale is doing is that it solves the “night one problem”. When you start a new Minecraft world you essentially have a very short period of time that you need to gather certain things. Firstly you need to craft some sort of a shelter, progress through the most basic tools, and locate either a large source of wood to turn into charcoal… or have some luck with surface coal so you can make torches, and spend some time lighting up an area of the world in order to prepare for the coming night. In Hytale you start off in an abandoned structure that quite honestly does an amazing job of serving as your first base. Once you clean it up a bit you have plenty of room to build all of the early progression, and have a safe hidey hole that you can duck into every night.
That is the other big takeaway that I have so far, is that the Night itself does not feel like as bit of an obstacle as it is in Minecraft. You can pretty much roam around freely at night, and so far almost every dangerous thing that I have come across… has some sort of significant glow effect going on. The Skeletons have glowing eyes and are often carrying a torch, and the weird void touched creatures all have some sort of green glow to them. So essentially if you have your head on a swivel, it is very unlikely you will ever be caught off guard by a random mob roaming up to you. There are these weird flying masses of tentacles that I have not tangled with, but look really ominous. You can barely see it in the above screenshot as it flys above the treeline. I have zero clue what these things are but they seem like they are bad mojo, but I was able to get relatively close to them without it aggroing.
One of the most interesting things about the game is that it has way more intentional creation than Minecraft does. This is a bit of a double edged sword. You are going to spend way more time roaming around the world looking for specific types of structures from the surface, than you are digging down and trying to find things. For example right outside of my first spawn point, is a cave system that goes all the way down to the lava layer, which is essentially what spawns in this game right above bedrock or the bottom of the world. You can in theory find all of the resources you need to get started, in one of these first holes. However as you roam around, different biomes have different resources, or at least certain resources might be more readily available. There was a badlands biome that I found that was loaded with surface iron deposts for example, and a swamp region that had these witches hut looking structures that had loot chests in them.
As a result you are going to be spending a lot more of your time roaming around the world looking for specific things. One of the benefits of exploring at night, is that a lot of the enemy camps have fires and lights, and can be seen easily at a distance. For example one of the first nights that I went roaming I stumbled across a troll village of sorts and thought I was doing really well… until I fell into a spiked pit and realized that there was a whole underground warren that I was not prepared to take on. I’ve found Mineshafts, forgotten villages filled with Skeletons, and entire cave systems full of all manner of poisonous creatures… that will ruin your day if you let them hit you. Essentially it feels like Hytale is delivering on the sort of promises that Cubeworld made, of having a really interesting world filled with meaningful drops. I’ve picked up several pieces of armor in my travels that are way better than anything I can currently craft, and dropped with decent stat bonuses on them. Loot feels like it actually matters in the game, and that alone will make the Minecraft experience so much more interesting.
So far at least, much of the early gameplay seems to be around building out your tech tree and trying to acquire specific resources. Copper Ore for example seen above, dominates the early things that you can build and allowing you to kit out your character in a full set of armor and items. Right now I am in a phase where I desperately need Iron Ore, which is pushing me to go out further and explore more dangerous places… which often leads to my untimely demise. One of the cool things about this game is that unlike Minecraft you don’t teleport back to your spawn point empty handed. You will lose a lot of the resources that you have found… but will at least keep a small percentage of stuff so that you never end up in a situation where a single death makes the game suddenly unplayable. So while I have lost countless chunks of iron down in the depths, I still managed to limp back home with enough of it to upgrade my workbench, and now am working towards upgrading my backpack size and storage limits.
If there was anything that was lacking in Hytale… I would say that it wouild be some sort of overarching quest structure to guide the player through progression. At least based on the original design for the game, it felt like this was going to be more of a feature than it actually is. Right now we have a really solid Minecraft clone, that feels like playing a really good modded server. However I feel like there could be so much more more, and there are lots of things that could be expanded upon. The look and feel of exploring the depths, and all of the cute and interesing critters that you stumble upon in your journey is pretty great. For example I found this amazing underground lake while exploring yet another cave system, and I was almost afraid to hop into the water for fear that it was acid or something. Turns out that no it was just lighting effects and normal water.
One of the few quests that exists in the game revolves around finding a portal to a forgotten temple, which then teleports you to what is likely going to be a social hub at some point in the game’s lifespan. Inside here are all sorts of cute NPCs that really do not do much of anything at the moment. There are a ton of WIP signs, but there are at least a couple of NPCs that allow you to barter life essence for general useful materials. Sadly they did not have any Iron Ore for me, but if I wanted to skip some steps in progression and buy spices for cooking I could do that easy enough. I would like to see more of this sort of content in the game. Let me stumble across traders out in the wilds that what me to collect region specific resources that I can then trade for interesting stuff. Given that so much of the game is about exploration, I am really hoping that there is some sort of waypoint system that allows me to fast travel between areas so I can build a bunch of forward bases as I explore.
I guess I should talk a bit about crafting. Essentially the earliest progression resolves around setting up basic crafting benches that do different things. For example you want to create a Campfire that will consume wood or charcoal and then produce cooked food. You can dump disparate resources into the input slots so that you can cook up multiple items at the same time. Most of the crafting benches will work like this, and they are capable of drawing resources automatically from chests that are stored within the vicinity of the crafting machine. I believe I read somewhere that this is an eight block radius, which means that you are going to want to optimize the placement of your crafting machines around maybe central column of chests. So far the starter building seems to be a good place for dumping these crafting machines and I’ve yet to encounter not being able to draw resources from the banks of chests that I have created there.
All in all I am pretty happy with what I have seen so far of the game. It is way more baked than I was expecting it to be for this point in its development cycle. Combat feels solid, and there is a ton of stuff to explore and find. Thinking back and comparing this to other Minecraft-likes that I played in early access… I would say that this is way more feature complete than Trove, Vintage Story, Boundless, Creativerse, or Nightingale was when I first played each of those. It is clear that this is standing on the backs of the progression systems built into the Minecraft modding scene, but I think that is okay. Setting up a fully modded Minecraft is only now a simple process, and there are many folks who have never gotten to experience what that came can be with enough effort. Hytale is a pretty great start on that experience. I am swapping it up to try third person mode to see if that makes exploration feel a bit less claustophobic.
Like I hinted at in one of the above paragraphs, I tried to pay the game like Minecraft and dig one of my shafts to bedrock and did not quite get there. In all of my way digging down I did not encounter anything terribly useful apart from some ore spawns. I am hoping at some point this is a viable means of playing the game, but right now it feels like you are supposed to be looking for features above ground, rather than spending all of your time digging around underneath it. There are some cave systems near my base that I really want to spend some time properly exploring and torching them off so that I can know where I have been before. I am not really sure if torches prevent spawns in the same way as they do in Minecraft, but that is half the fun of a brand new game like this. There are new rules about the world to learn and understand. For example in Minecraft I can drop into that game and have diamond weapons within the hour. At some point… I hope to reach that level of progression in Hytale.
Have you spent any time playing Hytale? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Hytale Is Another Minecraft appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
The post Goodbye Anthem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
