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.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available. This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket. Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is. Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is. Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.
I guess I am digging into Enshrouded as a primary game… after saying that I was mostly casually playing it on the side. The Path of Exile league is winding down a bit, and we are a ways out from the launch of Last Epoch so I am finding myself gravitating towards this game more and more. Last night I pretty much only played it and as a result made a ton of progress. They recently added a hide HUD option in the menu, but I really wish it was something that I could hotkey quickly as the game can generate some really breathtaking vistas. That is a general comment though, because I wish ALL games had a hide UI button that was easily hotkeyed or better yet… have the ability to configure in-game screenshots that by default hide the UI. I don’t remember which game had that but I loved it.
Mostly I have been focused on collecting the various tradespeople from around the map so that I can flesh out my trade hall. At the moment I have unlocked the Blacksmith, Alchemist, Hunter, Carpenter, and Farmer… with Carpenter probably being the most difficult to get to. I’ve been using the waypoint tower that I unlocked as a way of gliding down toward various map objectives and at least getting part of the way there. I’ve also been using the fact that I could craft flame altars cheaply as a method of creating a waypoint network to get around the map quickly. Unfortunately, I seem to have reached the point where I can no longer place down any more of those. I am not sure if that number goes up as I upgrade my primary altar or if it is a fixed number of “bases” you can have around the world.
I guess I will have to reassess where I have placed them. Unfortunately, I built a bit of a base near the one furthest to the west, so that one is probably stuck where it is currently. The others are just a flame altar without anything build around them, and in theory I really need to move one of those to the north. That is the direction I need to explore now because apparently that is where I can find clay. I need clay in order to craft the Kiln that the Carpenter is requesting, which in theory should unlock additional stuff that I can craft. I also have a slew of fetch quests for the various tradespeople that I already have, and in theory, should probably focus on those now to unlock additional recipes. I also need to find a more reliable source of tar than just crafting campfires and letting them burn out.
I veered off the Tank path a bit in my character build in order to pick up some utility abilities. Double Jump is something that pretty much makes EVERY game better, and Enshrouded is not an exception to that rule. In theory, going forward I would probably rush that ability because it makes that much difference while trying to traverse dangerous areas. I think Double Jump is probably as far into the Survivor tree as I want to go for the moment and there are still a number of beefy abilities in the Tank tree that I want to pick up. I like that I can pretty easily respec my character completely by spending some of the runic coins that you get off monsters and from salvaging weapons. One of my bases is next to the spot where a legendary sword can be obtained, so in theory, if I ever get short I can just go there and keep looting that sword to salvage it.
Speaking of weapons… I’ve picked up a number of very nice items along my travels. In truth, the only one of these I can say for certain where it comes from is the Wailing Blade, which started a neat dialog with the Smith because apparently he crafted it. I found it originally because this video showed up in my YouTube feed, and in truth, it is pretty straightforward to get early on and I leaned on it heavily for some of the harder areas I have been adventuring in. I am not sure if the Wand or Bow are from fixed locations because they are named similarly to green or blue quality weapons, so I think I might have simply hit the jackpot there. One thing that I did not appreciate early on is just how good wands are in this game. They auto-target things… making them super freaking easy to kite mobs while plinking away at them. The range is really short so if you want to snipe… you still need a bow but once you equip your bow in the ranged slot you can access it from whatever weapon you have equipped currently by holding down Q.
Other than that I have been starting to do some renovations on my keep. I am trying to make it a bit less “big generic stone box” so I will likely be spending some time trying to improve the outside now. The main crafting hall works pretty well and I ended up replacing chunks of the wall with wood just to vary the appearance a bit. The little annex I built off the side was originally just a way to have an entrance on the other side of the building but I’m contemplating closing it in and opening it up to the inside and turning it into a treasure vault. I just unlocked magic boxes when I rescued the Carpenter and those allow you to draw from those boxes automagically when you are crafting in your base. So in theory I am going to want a room with nothing but a ton of boxes in there, potentially one box for every item type. Having it off the room where I spawn into the keep would be extra handy because it would mean depositing loot is pretty straightforward.
I’ve also spent a bit of time trying to craft out some living quarters and something resembling a proper bedroom. Most of this was to get my comfort buff up a bit, but also because it felt like I needed something down here. I am looking forward to whenever I can craft some bookcases or something like that. I just unlocked the ability to make rugs so I am probably going to focus on getting one of those which I think will bump up that buff a bit more. All in all I find myself going through phases of serious crafting and other phases where I am adventuring. I need to figure out where best to park some of my flame altars to make farming resources a bit easier.
The post Rescuing Tradesfolk appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I’ve been cycling through a lot of games lately… namely because I am in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for Friday’s Path of Exile event to begin. I’ve also been working through a number of books in audio form, which means I can’t really juggle story content while also listening and enjoying a book. As a result, I have been playing through a number of mechanically enjoyable games where I either don’t need to see the story… or I don’t really care about the story. I apologize to all of the narrative team that I am certain is doing some amazing work New World… but I really do not care about what is going on with the story of that game. For me it is a big fun sandboxy crafting MMORPG nonsense fest and as a result it has been in this limited rotation of games that I have been spending time playing. I realized this morning that I had not really talked much about it.
The first cool thing that I want to talk about is that the game has an extremely robust appearance system, where you can essentially take any item you loot and convert it into an item skin that you can then apply to items freely. While I had a pretty large collection of skins from various Twitch drops and a handful of store purchases… there is one appearance that I really wanted. I hate the highest tiers of the Syndicate armor, because it is just some boring assed robes. However, I loved the mid-tier design that was just a nice simple armor with a purple Syndicate tabard over it. I liked this vibe so much that even though it was not the gear that I was wearing at the time, I had Ammo draw my character wearing it when I added New World to the site masthead. I can now run around in the game with something pretty close to this appearance permanently.
The only negative of the system is that you pretty much have to buy these from the in-game shop. It is roughly $2.50 for a single transmog token, which then can be used to convert a single item into a skin. I vaguely remembered them talking about these dropping out in the world as well when the system was first introduced, but so far the only two tokens I have found came from the free track of the battle pass system. This means that If you really want to convert large swaths of items into appearances you are probably going to be shelling out $20 at a time to pick up 10 tokens at the cheapest conversion rate. I’ve not been running dungeons, so maybe they are dropping there and I have just not encountered them. That said I have even gone to some elite areas and looted a few of those chests and gotten bubkis.
I’ve played through most of the content in the new area, but the piece that I have been focused on lately is trying to get all of my gathering abilities up high enough to be able to partake in the new resource nodes when I find them. Essentially everything in the game has been raised a tier so that you can take your character up to level 65… you can also raise all of your professions by another 50 points. The combat leveling was super straightforward and I blew past those levels well before finishing the campaign. The profession leveling has bit considerably slower and I need to get everything up 5 points to 205 to harvest the new stuff. For example, the above screenshot shows some Mythril nodes that I was way too low level to harvest… which made me sad. Skinning of course levels super fast because it is fueled by murder, but I have been roaming around some of my old world haunts to push up the rest of the professions.
I really like the new weapon type that was added to the game and have mostly been running around with Flail and Greatsword. I can’t say it does anywhere near as much damage as Greatsword does, but it is still fairly fun. I seem to have a One Handed Weapon and Shield Fetish when it comes to combat in games, and the Flail of course just furthers that fantasy. I still need many levels with the weapon but I have taken it up to 14 and unlocked a lot of the goodness. I opted to go down the tanking tree which should shock zero people who have read this blog for any period of time. I might at some point respec and play around with the cleric tree though as supposedly it gives you some ranged attacks.
The biggest improvement that I have seen has been in itemization and loot drops. What I would have considered previously to be “great gear” has been dropping like candy. I’ve seen many in world legendary drops and a ton of “named” item drops that come with fixed stats. All of the gear that I had previously was taken up to at least level 600 when the patch dropped, and now I am very regularly seeing upwards of 680 gear dropping. A new Artifact rarity tier of gear was added to the game and I’ve managed to pick one piece up from completing steps in the campaign, and another piece because I happened upon a group of a dozen folks farming a boss. Any time you see a cluster like that you might as well stick around and farm too… which netted a light armor chest. I do not fully understand how artifact gear works, but it appears that it can be configured at least somewhat by the players.
I think my focus in the short term is going to be to push my trade skills up a bit so that I can start crafting some nice upgrades. When I last played the game I was capped on Armorcrafting, and I would like to get it up there again so that I can maybe craft some artifact gear. After that, I really want to push up Engineering so I can make a new set of harvesting tools. The prices on the market in the game are insane… and item level 700 gathering tools are around 30-100k gold which seems like complete and total nonsense. Since I enjoy the crafting system I might as well push my trades up and craft them myself and then sell the botched crafts.
I doubt that I will ever go back to playing New World as a mainline game, but I am enjoying poking at it from time to time. The community surrounding the game is still not really my crowd. It is entirely too PVP-focused and the player base tends to make some interesting decisions… like this mess of a house, I took a screenshot of this morning. I admit it sort of makes me wish there was a roleplaying server as those servers tend to just have a higher caliber of player when it comes to community interactions. While not a roleplayer myself in the game, I’ve always flocked to those servers as they seemed to be more my speed.
If you have New World in your game library, you might patch it up and give it a shot. The game has improved massively since launch and I have been enjoying myself.
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