Sandbox

Fixing Up Beltopia

by

This weekend I spent a significant chunk of time working on my bases in Valheim single player. On my original save game of Beltopia, I had been slowly migrating everything over to a new area where I had set up two buildings. One served as a sleeping quarters and portal room and the other a big crafting pavilion and storage. The above is a screenshot from this phase of development but ultimately this doesn’t really jive with my current sensibilities in game. As such I set forth to expand this into more of a vision of the type of base that I want to keep for the long run.

This is now what my base looks like while approaching from the ocean. From the outside it is a pretty nondescript wall with roofing along it and a portico that leads inside across a custom draw bridge. Essentially I have landed upon a style for my bases where I build a stone wall around the perimeter and then erect an inner sheltered area that contains all of the important bits of the base. Essentially my first step in this process was to dig a moat as far down as the game would let me and this ultimately would inform what the perimeter of my base would look like. The moat thing seems to be an ingenious way of protecting your base from raids and random monster encounters. While working on my plains farm for example I got raided by trolls and they could not figure out how to get into the base and eventually de-spawned without actually causing any damage.

So for reference this is a picture of the inner courtyard of my base. The building in the foreground is the same building in that very first picture. I’ve made some significant changes to the roofline, but structurally it is effectively the same. Instead of serving as a sort of inn with multiple beds, the top floor is now basically just my master bedroom. The ground floor is entirely dominated by portals to lots of different far off places that I found with my boat. One of which is the area where I set up my farm in the plains biome. What I did some time ago was craft a number of portals and named them after various norse gods, and then I keep a spreadsheet of what each connects to. That way when I go travelling I take portal materials with me and can craft my way back to the main spawn no matter how far I might stray.

The other building that still stands from my original structures is now the mead hall. There isn’t a whole lot of that original crafting pavilion left, but it did sort of inform the overall shape and structure of the building. While I don’t necessarily use this as a multiplayer map I did build additional beds into the attic of this building. I’ve recently started trying to switch everything over to using coal based braziers instead of torches because I personally find it way easier to renew the fuel source than to farm a copious number of Grey Dwarves for resin. What I want to do at some point is set up a Surtling farm in a swamp in the hopes of getting enough trophies to start adding those in as well for a permanent light source. There are few things more disheartening than logging in to a completely dark base and then trying to haphazardly fuel all of the light sources in the dark.

The base of course has a fully kitted out crafting area with a lot of specific dedicated storage. I wish had gone with this sort of scheme when I built my giant wall of chests in “Fort Belghast” on the multiplayer server. Honestly the hardest part was trying to come up with some generic taxonomy for the items that makes a reasonable amount of sense for storage purposes and easily finding whatever you might need. What I eventually landed on was this… which is by no means flawless but works for now.

  • Gear – storage for any spare armor or tools, most specifically things I have outgrown
  • Treasure – things that sell for gold at the vendor or things that are just more rare than others
  • Forage – tree saplings, feathers or other things largely picked up off the ground
  • Trophies – so many grey dwarf and deer heads
  • Metals – mostly finished ingots because I have another batch of chests by the smelters where I keep raw ore
  • Wood – some of each of the types of wood, but I have bulk wood storage elsewhere in the base for just mass amounts of plain wood
  • Flint and Stone – this is where I keep my flint, obsidian and stone but I have bulk stone storage as well elsewhere in the base
  • Cloth – I have a feeling that this category will expand over time but right now it is just my linen refined from my flax
  • Eyes – Yes I dedicated an area just to Grey Dwarf eyes because I end up with so freaking many
  • Bones – Skeleton bone fragments and wolf bones mostly but I end up with a lot of the former because of skeleton attacks
  • Leather – catch all for the various kinds of leather including troll hide and lox hide.

There are a few categories missing but those are actually located elsewhere in the base. For example in the Mead Hall I have two separate sets of dedicated storage with one representing anything I need to craft mead and the other any raw food for cooking. I also have storage there for finished potions/mead and cooked food. As I mentioned above I have separate storage over by the smelters for Coal and then some catch all boxes for ore that is waiting to be smelted up. Given how much time smelting takes I try my best to batch this up and then shorten the total time of smelting by sleeping.

Another tweak that I have learned over time is that I am now keeping my hives up on my roofline because it allows for them to have plenty of open space around them. You can access my roofline by the tower in the corner of my property which is cool but largely useless to actually use as a perch to fight much of anything from. For most fighting I do better just hanging out on my roofs and plinking things below with arrows.

The only things that are really missing from the main base, can be found in my outpost in the plains biome. One of the tricks of this game is that the two most valuable crops you can grow can only be grown in the Plains biome… aka Barley and Flax. As a result I have set up ALL of my farming efforts over in the Plains. I dug a similar moat around an area in a pretty safe region, not near any goblin camps and not really likely to get a lot of goblin roamers. It is right up against a mountain biome but not close enough to that to really get random wyverns or wolves either. Essentially this area exists solely for me to have a safe space to grow lots of crops. In the main courtyard I have smaller beds for each of the four crops: Flax, Barley, Carrots and Turnips.

Then beside that courtyard I have a larger farming area with just bulk crops or a place to also grow back seeds for carrots and turnips when my reserves are running a little low. I have crafting machines at this outpost, but really I am not expecting to do much here other than pop over and fiddle with crops and as such the overall footprint is much smaller. Largely I wanted to get my house in order given that I have so many bases in multiplayer but had started to lag behind in functionality of my solo bases. This way regardless of what might happen in the future with the server I plan on, I still have a stable base that I could keep playing if I want to.

Over the weekend I did a base walk through video, but at that point I was still actively working on the outpost in the plains and did not actually go there to show it off. It does however walk through all of the areas of the base that I showed off pictures above.

Optifine and Nostalgia Shaders

by

Good Morning Friends! I spent most of my evening playing Destiny, but for a little bit in the early evening I resolved to get something working that I had thought about for awhile. I do not have an RTX series graphics card and as a result I cannot play Minecraft RTX. That said my preference is the Java Client and I don’t believe the RTX shaders work for that anyway. However there are a number of community supported shader packs that provide a very similar experience. I’ve installed this sort of thing before in the past and form what I understood it was a much simpler process these days. As a result I sat down and sorted it out, and the results are phenomenally cool. I thought this morning I would share the process.

This entire adventure begins with a little utility known as Optifine. I’ve been using this for years because it greatly expands the graphical options available to Minecraft and tweaks the way that textures are applied to the blocks. For example instead of rendering glass as a bunch of individual panes, it will instead render an entire wall of glass blocks as a single seamless mass of glass. Essentially this is a JAR file that once double clicked acts as a guided installer much like that of a standard Windows wizard installer. It is going to attempt to find your Minecraft folder, which in theory should be auto populated but if not type %AppData% in the windows run prompt and double click the .Minecraft folder and then copy that entire path and paste it into the Optifine installer.

Once this has been installed successfully you should see a new profile show up in your Minecraft Launcher. For example I have three in my drop down, Optifine for 1.16.5, the latest release which will always update to the most current client, and then an older legacy edition of Forge 1.14.4 which is a similar mod manager. If you want to use Optifine or any of the shader options, then you will need to launch Minecraft under this profile. In theory it shouldn’t negatively impact any of your existing saved games but there will always be the little caution icon indicating you are playing a modified version of Minecraft from that point forward.

Next we will need to grab the Nostalgia shader, which for sake of this discussion is the RTX replacement we are going to go with. Thing is there are a bunch of different Optifine compatible shaders and if you are curious about other options check out this Rock Paper Shotgun article. I personally went with Nostalgia because it is reported to have a minimal hit to performance. Some of the shader packs will cause a dip in performance and given that the Java client already performs worse than Bedrock aka the C# client… I didn’t want to take a lot of chances. Ultimately this time you are going to download the shader zip file and hold onto it for a few minutes because you are going to drag it into a specific folder shortly.

Now you are going to launch Minecraft and make sure you have selected the Optifine profile. From there you need get into game, hit escape, choose options, choose video settings and now finally choose shaders. You should be staring at a screen that looks very similar to the one in the above screenshot. From here click the Shaders Folder button, and this is going to pop open the folder where Optifine is expecting shaders to be stored. Copy the zip you downloaded from the Nostalgia website into this folder and within a few moments it should show up in the list of selectable shaders. Select it, click done and you should now have Nostalgia shaders installed and impacting your game visuals.

The difference in how the game looks is not subtle. The world becomes significantly darker, but the lighting effects become more meaningful. You can see that were are getting realistic looking water reflections on this screenshot taken from the dock on the back of my multiplayer realms base. Additionally as I have placed torches around the perimeter, you see them all casting their own halo of light.

Similarly look around the torches in this screenshot, you can see the rain that was pouring down being illuminated in a somewhat natural manner. The game still feels like Minecraft since I have not done anything to tweak the block skins, but it feels like a more naturalistic view of the same game.

Things got really trippy when I went down into Grace’s undersea base area because we were getting block a reflection from the surface of the glass as well as a ghosting reflection from the water.

The transition between water and land represented by her waterfall entrance to the ocean from the sea base ends up looking like a portal to another world. This was taken from me standing on the sea floor staring back into the base.

This however is looking the other direction out into the ocean floor… as some of the underwater plants are now apparently flagged for bioluminescence. The ocean in general because a much more dark and foreboding place.

Finally we have the Nether which also becomes significantly more dangerous because everything is much darker. It would be SUPER easy to walk off the edge of a cliff and fall into a morass of lava in this version. I do really like the way that the lava has a glow to it however.

This mornings post is largely just show and tell and explanation of how to get to the same point yourself if you are so inclined. I’ve used these sorts of shaders before, but the install process was considerably more tedious. I already had optifine installed, so for me personally it was just a case of clicking on the folder and dragging the zip file into place. I am probably going to experiment some with other shader packs to decide which one I like the best. I do really like the warm glow that Nostalgia has.

Most of the screenshots I have included were of night time, because that is when the difference is the most dramatic. Daytime however looks very solid as well and gives you a sort of depth of field experience fuzzing out the far distance and giving you more naturalistic shadows. The one thing of note is with these sorts of shaders it becomes a bit harder to tell if something is sufficiently lit. When I am running this sort of shader I often times pop open the debug menu with F3 so I can check the actual lighting levels for the purposes of spawning monsters. I honestly think the part that I enjoy the most are the more smooth clouds, because Minecraft clouds have always bothered me.

Whelp folks that is it. I just wanted to explain how one gets shaders in Minecraft these days and that it is much easier than it used to be. On that note going to close the post and get on with my morning.

Fort Bel, Outriders and Destiny

by

Morning Friends! Surprising to no one I played an excessive amount of Valheim over the weekend. We talked a bit about it on the podcast but I am quickly realizing that for me it is just a different sort of gaming experience. Like when I have played Minecraft in the past, the adventure is fine… but at the end of the day it always ends up being about the building. So since I am slowly moving on past my first foothold in the shared server environment, I thought I would at least talk about it a bit this morning. While my foothold has evolved into something that everyone just generally refers to as “Fort Bel” the truth is it started out as me trying to stay out of everyone else’s hair since I was further progressed.

I posted a walkthrough video of Shade’s Folly aka my starter place on the island. The goal was to run down the coast and sorta do my own thing while everyone else caught up, and as a result I never really assisted much in the building of what became the main town hub for our island. What was originally the building shown on the lefthand side of the screen, I eventually added the second building… and then proceeded the erect a giant stone wall around the entire compound and build further structures directly connected to that wall. This also caused me to create a more shared crafting area and open up my storage reserves to pretty much everyone on the server.

The longer I have been here however the more stale it has gotten. There isn’t that much more I can do with my current location because I risk taking up more space and encroaching upon the territory of those who built around me. Additionally I am on the border of the nearest entrance to the Black Forest and I don’t want to “unwild” that region any more than it already is. As a result I have gone out onto the ocean in search of new areas and at some point I will probably do other walkthrough videos talking about each of them. The biggest of these is Dawn’s Rest or what folks are just mostly universally referring to as “Castle Bel”.

I also played quite a bit of the Outriders demo this weekend, and hit the level cap. I could in theory do like the YouTube community has been doing and grind their faces off against a tiny amount of content trying to farm things… or I could just stop playing. I am likely going to more or less stop playing. I’ve spent a tiny bit of time trying out the other classes but I am pretty certain that Devastator is the class for me. So far my second favorite is Trickster… but they both sorta do the same thing where they are up close and personal with targets which seems to fit my enjoyment pattern with aggressive gameplay and bad decision. Really looking forward to the launch of this game at the end of the month.

The thing that I was NOT expecting this weekend is that I ended up firing up Destiny 2 and playing some of it last night. It is amazing how much more enjoyment I get out of the game now that I know that the weapons I am earning won’t be irrelevant now that the gear Sunset has officially been called off. Unfortunately one of my favorite Auto Rifles is in the sunset, so I will be trying to find a new favorite Kinetic Auto since Steelfeather Repeater is already sunset. Anything that is not currently sunset should be fair game however, so I am hoping to get a few Shadow Price variants to see if I like that weapon. I vaguely remember it from Destiny 1, but not extremely well.

Like every weekend it went entirely too fast. Time moves extremely strangely in the time of the self imposed lockdown. What did you get up to this weekend? Did you check out Outriders? What were your thoughts.

Valheim with People

by

Yesterday was the day that Valheim reached critical mass with the AggroChat crew. This might have been achieved earlier were it not for the fact that I blogged about the game but never really talked about it on the show. We had a pretty thick roster the last few weeks of topics and as a result I didn’t feel like it was the right time to slide in a brand new game that at least then I was the only one playing. However and I were having a conversation about the game… and them this perked up Tam and Kodra who apparently tried it… and came back to evangelize the game and the rest is history. I linked my couple of blog posts on the subject as well and yesterday a server was rented and throughout the night more and more of the regulars were logging into it.

Valheim is a game that throws back to the age of renting a private server, and seemingly an entire cottage industry has sprung up around supplying these in rapid form. Granted most of the hosting provides are the same folks who have been hosting Rust and Ark servers for years, but Valheim at least is a relatively new product offering. I did what I often do and went to twitter and over the course of a few hours got not one but six recommendations for GPortal. So yesterday in a few minutes Tam set up a server and I was the guinea pig and figured out how to log in for the first time. The challenge is that so many servers have been set up in such short time that the server browser appears to be overloaded.

I took to the interwebs to glean a method for getting around this problem and encountered this write up. I am essentially doing method two that was outlined, which is comprised of setting up a custom server in Steam… something that I have apparently never done in the over decade I have been on the service. For those who don’t want to travel to another website and watch a less than amazing video… here are the steps I followed:

  1. Open Steam Client
  2. From the View menu select the Servers option
  3. Click “Add a Server” in the Server Browser Window that pops up.
  4. Copy and Past the IP Address and Port Number in the text box that is presented.
    1. For the uninitiated this should be a number that looks like this 111.222.333.444:12345 with those fake numbers representing whatever class D address and port that was assigned to your server by your hosting provider.
  5. You should now see your server in the list in the server browser. Double click the name or select the connect button.
    1. If you get a message about the server being unavailable or that there is no game present, just hit the refresh button a few times. Chances are the virtual server is spinning up if no one is actively on it.
  6. If there is a password on your server you will be prompted to enter that
  7. The game will launch and you will be asked to enter a password again
  8. Play the game

Going forward when you want to connect you open the server browser and double click the name of the server you just added and should be in relatively shortly.

Tam being the excellent host that he is, proceeded to create a massive encampment near the spawn point with lots of beds for anyone who wants to stay there. It expanded a significant amount over the night and now includes walls and a launch bay for a raft. If I remember correctly there is room for I believe six beds in there as well as some of the early crafting machines needed to function.

Being who I am however, without really meaning to… I wandered off on my own and crafted what Kodra referred to last night as Fort Belghast. Since I am further progressed than most of the folks on the server I wanted to be beside the Dark Forest biome and I happened to stumble onto it pretty early and then set up shop along the nearest coastline. I wish I had built on a coast in my single player game so I was effectively remedying this desire. Then last night I proceeded to attempt to jump start my way back to the bronze age so that I could at least repair my gear if I needed to. It took me the better part of the evening but I managed to gather enough resources to build up the crafting progression through a Tier 4 Crafting Bench and a Tier 2 Forge.

I think tonight I might craft a raft and venture across the channel to a nearby island you can see in the distance. There is a weird quirk with our server in that it seems to have a meadow biome maybe one quarter of the size of that of my single player game. It legitimately takes me at least one full day night cycle to run from the spawn to my base on the outskirts of the dark forest. On this server I can cross the meadow into either the Dark Forest or the Mountain region multiple times in the same day cycle. The challenge here is with all of us playing in the same area and the tier 1 biome being so small… we are starting to run into resource contention. I am contemplating going to my single player world and harvesting up a bunch of wood and then dropping it off in woodstack form at Tam’s communal base.

I have a very specific style of home that I like to build in this game, namely because I like having my fire inside. If you do this in a fully closed in area you will kill yourself in your sleep from carbon monoxide. So what I do instead is build a roof in such a way as to leave open eaves which allow for the venting of the smoke and exchange of fresh air, with my bed strategically placed at the opposite end of the domicile as the fire. This allows me to always stay warm and toasty during the nights, never have to deal with my fire being doused by rain and also makes for a much cooler looking inside. There however is room for a spare bed so I might go ahead and build one in case someone needs to use my outpost as a temporary save location.

I didn’t actually interact much with other players apart from chopping down a tree that apparently Neph was fond of. I just viewed it as the next tier up of wood, but I guess it was rather picturesque near her cabin. She opted for reclaiming one of the prefab damaged shacks, which honestly is a great way to start the game. I hope to maybe interact with some folks tonight as I continue this adventure. The Dark Forest is just as aggressive on this server as it is on my single player game, and as a result I spent a lot of time poking my head in for resources and then coming right back out. I’m not even sure how one would survive long enough for a proper base there. We survived the night and now have a multiplayer world, and I am sure we will be talking about it this weekend on the podcast.