Iron Cave Chest Farm

Good Morning Folks! Lately, I have been playing an excessive amount of Enshrouded. At this point I’ve put in around 50 hours and last night I hit the current level cap of 25. I still have a ton of the map that remains in the “fog of war”, and there are still some deadly shroud areas that I cannot adventure into until I upgrade my flame altar one more time. On the building front I have been slowly working on digging underground and at this point have dug out a basement and a sub-basement. I am contemplating starting to move some of my crafters down to this area because with all the bits and bobs associated with each of them the current crafting hall is getting a bit busy. In my travels, I have happened upon a few extra crafting machines so I have been setting them up down there just so I can produce more of the time-gated crafts at one time.

I also set up a new bedroom for myself down in the first basement area. I dug a little room off to the side and have set up some stone-themed furniture down there which is capable of getting my comfort level up to 36. As I can craft more of this stone-themed set I will probably replace the bookcases and then build out some armor and weapon storage in this room. Similarly, I am contemplating digging another side chamber and moving where my magic chests are to a more sheltered area underground. Not that there are really the accouterments of setting up a proper treasure room, but it would be nice to build some sort of hidden vault since there are doors for that functionality in the game. I might swap up the entrance to this bedroom with one of the stone “secret” doors.

Last night in my travels I found a golden chest that spits out max-level gear. For the uninitiated, almost everything in the Enshrouded world respawns on a timer. Currently, that timer is 30 minutes, but if you log out and back in… it refreshes all of those timers. So when you find one of these gear chests, you can in theory farm it over and over and over… which I did. I set up a flame altar just outside of the room with the chest and then played the logout and back in the game until I ran out of lockpicks. I will likely run around today and farm up a bunch more metal scraps and then repeat the process until I have gotten the gear that I want. I am always on team… get the best gear and then finish out the adventure.

Here is a map for how to get to the cave that I found the chest in. Like I said it requires lockpicks so you will have to bring a bunch of those with you. I photoshopped two screenshots together so that I could highlight the location of the two nearest spires. Essentially there is just this cave on the side of the hill and inside there is a ton of iron. There will be a rubble-covered wall, that stands out like a sore thumb because the rest of the cave is limestone and iron nodules. Dig through the wall and the chest will be on the other side. I placed my Flame Altar just outside of the chamber where the chest spawns so that I could keep the rubble wall open and not have to dig it out every time. You are going to need to have your Flame Altar upgraded to level 5 as you will have to cross through some areas that were previously deadly shroud to me at level 4. There are some areas you will need to skirt that are still deadly shroud but I did not have to pass through any of them.

There are a whole slew of armor sets that can drop from this chest. The fancy set that I have been wearing in these screenshots is called the Gloom Monarch set, and is sort of a generic survival/melee damage sort of affair. It looks very DeathKnight-ish which I dig, and I have yet to find anything akin to a proper pure tanking set. The other set that I keep getting is something more akin to a caster set that looks kinda like the Heavensward Black Mage armor from Final Fantasy XIV. Even though this appears to be a max-level chest, all of the armor is dropping at level 23 instead of level 25.

It also has a whole slew of weapons that can drop and I think I have seen most of the loot table at this point in either Epic or Legendary qualities. Essentially my goal is to get the sword and bow in legendary quality so it will have five affixes on it. I’m keeping one of everything that looks vaguely interesting and then sharding the rest for upgrade coins. I really wish that armor could be salvaged but apparently, the only option there is to delete it… which seems wasteful. The main reason that I landed on Nova for my main weapon is that it gives off almost as much light as a torch which makes exploration that much easier since I don’t have to keep swapping to my torch so I can see. The wand also has a decent amount of illumination, but not quite as much as the sword.

Also in my travels last night, I happened upon what is apparently the best glider in the game. This thing is ridiculously fast, almost too fast to actually control your flight. It was the top of a sun temple and I had to fight a giant bird in order to get it. In theory, you could probably loot the chest without killing the bird, but since I was up there I figured might as well get some more “chicken” and feathers. I figure I will farm out the orange versions of the weapons I like the best and then start gathering up the materials needed to upgrade my flame altar all the way to level 6. After that, I think the goal will be to uncover every corner of the map that is currently veiled. Past that… I guess we enter the TRUE endgame… which is crafting some more bases and maybe taking over one of the NPC towns for myself.

Faces of Bel Revisited

Yesterday I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started simple enough with a post from Ricki Tarr who posed a question like they often do, this time about your preference for video game characters. This led to me sifting through directory after directory of screenshots compiling “evidence” and eventually making a post in the thread. The question posed is not quite as simple of an answer as you might think. Truth be told I am not exactly sure how I ended up in this situation because it wasn’t always like this. I guess I should stop stalling and just get into the meat of the discussion.

When confronted with the character creation screen of a new video game… I create the same character over and over and that character is named “Belghast”. Yesterday I assembled this collage of 28 characters that I have played in various games and how they all mostly align to the same features. Given the choice my character will be light-skinned, have jet black or at least dark hair… occasionally gray if the black shader looks goofy, either a full beard of a goatee, and some sort of facial scarring preferably over one of the eyes if that is an option. Creating this character comes as naturally as anything else at this point, and I can pretty much chip away at the system and reveal the inner “Belghast” quickly.

When a game has a fixed character but allows for customization options… I will generally speaking lean towards bringing out the inner Belghast in that character as soon as possible. For example here are two screenshots from two different games, and in both, I have adapted the character that I am forced to play into as close of a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I can. The piece that I have not really understood and continue to not… is how I landed on this particular vissage. On some level it is the idealized version of what I actually look like. I have brown hair instead of black, but I’ve always fancied black hair. There was a period in the past where I was super into The Punisher and one year for Halloween I dyed my hair black with that awful spray paint style temporary color and I think maybe I liked it enough for it to have embedded itself into my psyche.

I’ve often assumed that deep in my subconscious there is an action hero from my childhood that looked like this, and I just keep adapting my characters to that model that I imprinted upon. Thing is “bearded” punisher is a thing that did not exist during the time when I was actively reading that comic. He was a clean-shaven man of many guns… and of note, I was into Punisher in the 90s, before the facists decided to co-opt his branding. I was also really into Nick Fury, Wolverine, and Cable… so maybe this character that I landed on is a bit of an amalgam of all of those. There is also Chuck Norris but weirdly I was never into his martial arts movies in a big way. I saw more than my fair share of them as would any pre-teen/teen growing up in the 80s/90s but it wasn’t a big deal for me so I doubt it came from there.

Generally speaking my success at adapting to a video game is directly related to how good of a “Belghast” I can create in it. Sometimes I can’t and in those scenarios, I often create a female character. The thing there is that I want to be able to create something “beefy” and heavily armored. This is something I struggle with endlessly with games adapted from the Chinese or South Korean markets because they tend to feature hairless pretty boys and dainty waifs. Sometimes I just play female characters for a break and I am going to use an example from Diablo IV as the sort of character that I tend to create when given access to a character generator. I’m also highly partial to the female orc models from World of Warcraft because they are “Stronk” and battle-ready.

When none of these options really feel right… I sometimes play something inhuman. For example, when Destiny launched there was nothing available but clean-shaven characters, so instead I went for the robotic Exo. In ArcheAge I could not create a character with a decent beard, so I wound up rolling a cat person. I think more than anything that beard is probably the most important element. I get grumpy when a game has a weak beard game or the only beard options are “peach fuzz” stubble. I don’t mind a trim beard and I can get by well enough with something like that. Lately, I have created characters with pretty bushy beards in part because I kind of miss my own full beard. At some point, I switched back to a trimmed goatee/mustache combo and I keep contemplating growing back the full treatment.

This is a post that zero people asked for, but sometimes that is what happens. For those who are curious… here is a quick rundown of the games all of the collage shots came from. In a top left row by row to bottom right order:

  • Dragon Age Inquisition
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Outriders
  • Phantasy Star Online 2
  • Guild Wars 2 my Necromancer
  • Red Dead Redemption 2
  • Wildstar
  • Guild Wars 2 my Warrior
  • Elder Scrolls Online
  • Starfield
  • Final Fantasy XIV aka Lala Bel
  • New World
  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • World of Warcraft
  • City of Heroes
  • Enshrouded
  • Diablo IV
  • Dark Age of Camelot – The First Belghast
  • DC Universe Online
  • Fallout 76
  • Landmark
  • Monster Hunter World
  • Neverwinter
  • Skyforge
  • Star Wars the Old Republic
  • Secret World
  • Hellgate London
  • Fallout 4

I hope yall have a wonderful week and tomorrow I will probably post something a bit more meaningful.

Tempus GameIt

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know about my yearly tradition that I refer to as the “Years in Review” where I attempt to track the games I play in a given year. I don’t go into a ton of detail in this process, mostly it is just a hashmark of “Was this game played during this month” and it doesn’t go into much detail to quantify how much something was played. Other bloggers do similar things, and one of the more interesting versions of this is from The Ancient Gaming Noob where he has used a software tracking tool called ManicTime to log actual hours in specific games. There was a time when I briefly kicked around the notion of writing something to do this for me… all in the name of attempting to replace functionality that Raptr used to do.

Last year I learned that my friend Kevin Brill had been working on precisely this side project and had made quite a good deal of movement towards a production client. Essentially, TempusGameIt, as he calls it, is an application that you install and hangs out in your system tray and then utilizes an application detection library to log when you are playing specific games. This information gets uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers and quietly tracks the games that you are playing, matching them against its database of existing games. I had known this was a functionality that existed, but with the New Year, I decided to support this project and become an active guinea pig. So since the beginning of the year, I have been keeping the client updated and logging my gameplay.

I’ve wanted to talk about this application for a bit, but decided I should probably get permission from Kevin before diving into it and introducing my audience. Right now this is mostly an application that has been bouncing around on the Gamepad.club Mastodon server with a handful of us testing it, but I believe I am the only person who is actively running it all of the time. Essentially there is currently a Mac and a PC Client with some side discussion about potentially creating a Linux client at some point. This installs a service on your local machine and when you double-click the icon in your system tray it opens a webpage at http://localhost:45000/ that allows you to configure various options. You can publicly log your time or privately do so… which makes certain aspects of the data only available to you. You also need to configure which drives you want it to scan and identify games on. Essentially each time you install new software as it stands currently you will need to run another sweep of your drives. For me, I technically have games on three of my four drives so I have it inventorying those.

Under Catalog it will show what games have been detected. Occasionally the same game shows up multiple times, specifically if there is for example a 32-bit and a 64-bit executable. If a game does not exist currently in the known catalog of available games, there is also the option for you to add it which involves you searching for the game title and then selecting which process currently running in memory represents that game. I’ve done this for a few things that had not been seen yet like Fallout 76 and more recently City of Heroes. Once the game has been detected and is in your local Catalog, the detection from that point forward just works “automagically”. I believe there is some sort of minimum session length, as there have been a few times I have seen my sessions get ignored if I accidentally launched the wrong game for example as I occasionally do with Steam when I click the wrong listing.

From there everything pretty much takes care of itself. Your session data will begin showing up in your local interface as well as when you are logged in through the TempusGameIt server. The application has several different ways to slice the data and in truth, this is probably going to be perfect for most users. For example, this is a snapshot of a weekly view showing how much time I spent in games. Right now my data is heavily skewing the usage patterns of the application as a whole, but I am hoping as more folks start using it the global data becomes a bit more interesting. I’ve requested to have a raw export option because in truth I would rather dump my information and fiddle with it in google sheets than have reports compiled for me. At a minimum, I plan on using this information to feed into my “Years in Review” process, but I think I will be able to generate far more specific data than I have ever before.

There is a bunch of functionality that I have never touched as well. Supposedly the application can detect new screenshots from specific applications and have those uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers as well. Additionally, there is a methodology for linking to various game accounts and tracking achievements. The fact that I have my profile fairly locked down in Steam and tend to run in “show offline” mode seems to be throwing an error when it attempts to track achievements there per a discussion with Kevin last night. There are also a lot of ideas that are planned for the application and you can see where various features are on the roadmap via the Trello board. There is also a discord server for discussions and feature requests, but I think for the moment Kevin and I are the only ones who have joined it.

For the moment this is a passion project, but one that I personally think is really freaking cool. At some point, if there is ever a Patreon or something of the sort to fund development I will probably pitch into it. For the moment it is doing a functionality that has been missing since Raptr, and it will be interesting to see how this service evolves. I’ve not talked about it a ton to this point, but I figured if nothing else I would share it with my readers. For the most part it “just works” and has required little fiddling. There have been a few things I have talked back and forth with Kevin about and have helped debug a few problems but the majority of the time it quietly does what it is supposed to be doing.

Fun with Electrodes

Friends… I had a rough night. Yesterday morning when I woke up I could not catch my breath no matter how hard I tried. As a card-carrying severe asthmatic, this was a feeling that I was intimately aware of… but for some reason, this felt different. My lungs were clear and I seemed to not be having any difficulty breathing. This went away and as the day moved forward I just sort of felt a general sense of “shitty”. I was having occasional abdominal pains and side pains but never the sort of thing that you could really pin down to anything. I had a wild headache and as I went into the evening the unable to catch my breath part carried forward and was joined by what I can only term a “flutter” in my heart where it felt like it would race for a few seconds and give me a “whoa that does not feel right” feeling and then return to normal.

So around 9 pm, I decided we probably needed to go to the ER when I finally found my damned blood pressure cuff and got a reading of 155/99. This is one of those shitty wrist things so not exactly accurate but considering it was reading my wife as normal… I decided it warranted a trip. By the time I made it to the ER and was seen by their triage folks my blood pressure was 210/110 and my inability to catch my breath was pretty much a constant. So I spent my evening hooked to electrodes, with an IV in my arm, and everything angrily beeping at me. I am okay… other than the fact that I am exhausted still and also generally feel like crap. I just sort of feel like I fell down the stairs or something because everything aches.

The takeaway… inconclusive. I was in fact having some sort of very high blood pressure moment. However, there is no clear sign as to why. My blood panels came back fine as did both a COVID and Flu test. I spent the entire evening hooked up to an EKG yoke… which also came back fine and I was told by the ER doctor that for the most part things looked healthy and operating as expected. So we have this situation where I was obviously in some form of distress but there were no physiological signs for why. Their working theory is that I have some sort of viral infection because there were signs that my body was trying to fight off something. Throughout the evening they called out a handful of things that mostly blurred by as I was fading in out and out.

At some point, they gave me a cocktail of meds intravenously and the rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. They also called in a prescription for a dose pack of steroids, but we were far too out of it last night to wait for the pharmacy to fill that. So at some point today I am going to go pick that up. Essentially today I am going to try and take it easy, and get some sleep/rest. I mostly feel bad for putting my wife through all of this and giving her what is going to be a rough day after very little sleep. I feel simultaneously dumb for going to the ER and also vindicated that something was in fact going on… enough to cause my blood pressure to spike so high. I do feel a bit better though that from all signs my heart seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. My X-Rays basically showed the shit state of my lungs… but that is to be expected for a 47-year-old with severe asthma.

Anyways. This is the sort of post that I make and then do not syndicate at all. This is only for myself and my most dedicated readers. I use my blog as a way of marking major events in my life along with the normal shenanigans that I get up to. It would feel weird NOT to record this event for posterity.