Stardew Landmark Crossing

Good Morning Folks! August is turning out to be exceptionally busy with me doing some build testing ahead of the 3.22 League in Path of Exile, the Launch of Baldurs Gate 3, and in the midst of all of this I finally got my email inviting me to Palia. For those who have not been following this game, it has been billed in the media as coming from former Blizzard and Riot employees, but frankly… given the colossal turnover at both companies, you would be hard-pressed to point at ANY game without being able to say that. It does have a graphical style that reminds me of an amalgam of World of Warcraft, Wildstar, and Free Realms.

What the game promises is an interesting concept, a hangout MMO without combat. What this feels like in practice is Stardew Valley the MMORPG. More than that I also get Landmark vibes when it comes to hunting down rare resources, and even a bit of Animal Crossing. Essentially you are teleported to this world and given an instanced plot of land and some resources to be able to harvest and craft your way into making it a home.

The character creation system is “aggressively fine” but that opinion might be coming from the fact that I also created my character in Baldur’s Gate 3 within a few hours of each other… and that creation system is phenomenal. My key complaint is the lack of beards, which is often a complaint I have with various games. However one of my friends came to the rescue to inform me that this is on the roadmap. Other than being clean-shaven, I was able to create a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I often appear in various games. I would never wear skinny jeans, but I am going to blame some non-GenX artists for that one as they were the most non-descript black pants option I had. I assume over time more clothing options will open up. It would also be cool to have some different body options given that I am a very large man and I would absolutely give my avatar a belly.

Just like in StarDew Valley you are given an area of the map that is littered with volunteer trees, stones, assorted collectibles, and the remnants of a broken down fence and housing foundation. My OCD required that I harvest EVERYTHING within the boundary of my fence line. So now I also have a bulging storage shed filled with basic resources, which should hold me for a little bit when it comes to crafting.

The initial objectives were to build a tent, a workbench, and a storage bin and then the game sent me into town to meet a bunch of town folk. This in turn gave me a whole slew of other objectives. I’ve also learned how to hunt and fish. Hunting… I am extremely bad at it as it involves trying to slowly fire a bow as woodland creatures scurry around the map. Fishing… I got the hang of it pretty quickly once I figured out that I needed to move my mouse from side to side to keep up with the bobber. I’ve yet to learn how to actually go to sleep, or even if I need to but I have a way larger than I expected tent filled with nothing at the moment.

The game is charming as heck and I look forward to watching as it progresses. It definitely fills that Stardew Valley with friends vibe, and I want to see what grouping up while harvesting does. Landmark used to have this mode where if you grouped up and then gathered resources, everyone in the party got a copy of everything that was looted. I could see something like that going really well here. I would also love to see this game implement some sort of large-town project system. In Horizon/Istaria, there were these massive crafting projects that involved building bridges to new areas or building out towns, that essentially required the entire community to pool resources. This sort of experience would fit this game especially given that there is no combat.

I figure most everyone that is interested in this game has already signed up, but if you have not… please feel free to use my Referal Code. As far as I know, it does nothing to expedite your access to the beta but does give me sweet stuff for signing people up, and I believe you get a care package when you first log into the game. I know I had stuff waiting on me from the code I got from Scopique when I finally got access yesterday. All in all, this looks like a really cool game to watch as it develops into a chill game for nights when you just can’t handle anything too terribly complex. I am of course Belghast in the game, so feel free to friend me if you are already there.

Gone Fishin

Sometimes my brain latches onto something and just won’t let it go… until I have obsessed my way through completing it. For this particular obsession, I am going to blame my friend PlayerVsHobbies. When she joined New World not too long ago… she sorta made a beeline straight for the fishing system and as a result, ended up in some areas of the game that her level range was not quite prepared for. I know Vernie at one point helped her I think with a run through some dangerous areas and the other day I happened to be on when she was attempting to sneak to a fishing hole in Shattered Mountain. For those unfamiliar with this game, Shattered Mountain is a deeply scary place with monsters well above the maximum level cap of players… so if you are not well geared and max level, you are probably going to struggle out there. So I played guard duty as we made our way to the fishing hole and then farmed Dryad Wolves for Wyrdwood while she managed to get the fish that was required for that step in the chain.

This all planted in my head that I too have been on this quest chain for a while, and never actually completed it on my original server Valhalla. I’ve admittedly never spent that much time fishing in New World, though of my limited experience of MMO fishing systems it seemed to be about the best. So for whatever reason, this flipped some bits in my brain and made it so that this became my all-consuming mission in life… to complete the fishing chain and walk away with a shiny legendary fishing pole. So other than farming my daily Gypsum, this has been the task I set forth in front of myself… and I have to say it was relaxing as hell. There is something extremely chill about fishing in these beautiful locations for the amount of time needed to complete the quest. I’ve never been most of a fisherman in other games, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Another huge benefit of this quest chain is that you pretty much walk away with a full set of Tier 4 and Tier 5 fishing gear, which only serves to help you out as the requests get a bit rare. The only time that I had to rely on bait was when trying to catch fish over 30 lbs, but thankfully what I needed was cheap enough to stock up before heading out into the field. I had always just chucked bait into the bank and in truth, I had quite a good stockpile of various sorts which I now am carrying around on me at all times. I guess I have been bit by the bug because I have found myself flipping over to my fishing set, hitting F3, and doing this while waiting on things to spawn.

I completed the quest chain and you get a random box that includes a level 600 Legendary Fishing Pole. I think PvH got one that was Angry-Earth-themed, and the one I pulled was Ancient-themed. It appears that the stats are largely randomized, which means that in truth… I think the one I crafted and happened to pull 4 tier 3 stats on is maybe a bit better as a daily driver. I know I will be spending a lot more time crafting fishing poles as that seems to be my best option for leveling Engineering, so I might even pull an even better quad/three in my next flurry of crafting. I think if I manage to get geared up enough to start crafting for item level 600 fishing poles, there is the rare chance that I could make my own version of a 5-stat.

What I found somewhat weird though… is that the quest chain only required me to get to level 100 in Fishing, and not 200 which is the maximum before you start getting into aptitude levels. So I also now have the title “Fishing Legend” which I don’t feel like is really something I should equip until I ultimately cap out that skill. It is a fun and relaxing way to pass the time, especially while watching a YouTube video or something like that. So I guess I am thankful to my good friend PvH for getting me started down this path. I wonder what other enjoyable grinds are out there that I have been avoiding.

Warrior Milestone

Tired of Selfies

Wow-64 2015-03-16 06-13-12-31 This weekend while out running around in Joplin I kept myself entertained thanks to my twitter feed.  Among the constant stream of updates was a series of posts from Alternative Chat, where she attempted to tell a story through twitter and succeeded beautifully.  The only problem is that in the weeks since the release of 6.1 I have developed a knee jerk negative reaction to seeing a wow selfie posted in my twitter feed.  It was a real struggle for me to look past the medium of the pictures to peer at the underlying story.  Largely my problem with selfies is that they are this distorted caricature of what our avatars actually look like.  The angles are all distorted, and it is impossible to control your facial expressions as they go through a series of seemingly random contortions.  Like I had said before I thought that with time folks would get bored with them, and move on… but as the weeks continue it only seems to be more prevalent.

Wow-64 2015-03-16 06-12-59-40 Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, because I still love taking photos of my characters.  I just prefer the picture above to the selfie I lead off the first paragraph with.  There is just something much more visually appealing to being able to see more of your character than simply your face, torso and part of your arms.  The biggest problem I have with selfies is the fact that it becomes hard to take in the entire picture.  During Alt’s twitter story, it was as much about the places she was at rather than her character.  I struggled to see enough of the elements in the background to immediately indentify where she was actually standing to take the picture.  I realize that for the purpose of that story it was in an almost travelogue format, but the times when she broke from it and took a traditional screenshot were my favorite segments of the story.  Not that I expect this to change anyone’s practices, but I am just saying now that I have a major preference towards traditional screenshots as compared to the distorted version that is a selfie.

Warrior Milestone

ffxiv 2015-03-16 06-29-15-12 This weekend I did not manage to get nearly as much playtime in as I had hoped.  Saturday we spent pretty much the entire day until about thirty minutes before podcast time running around.  We ended up having to go visit my Mother-In-Law and made a day trip of it meandering our way there and to Joplin through a series of small towns.  My wife and I both have this thing where we like to go hunting for interesting items on clearance, and I have managed to pick up quite a few awesome Lego sets for less than of their original price.  This weekend however, I found a ton of sets… but nothing that I really could not live without.  Ultimately my vice is Star Wars and Space/Futuristic themed sets.  My most recent find was three of the sets from the “Agents” line at a local target for slightly less than half off the original price.  Needless to say I did not really get much play time in Saturday.  Sunday until 4pm I ended up helping my wife with a few things around the house, namely putting together a large cubical storage unit and a smaller bakers rack unit for our closet.

So by the time I finally got logged in downstairs and was able to play Final Fantasy XIV I felt under the gun to help make up some ground.  At this point I am sitting at 254 poetics out of 450 for the week… and all I have is tonight to somehow manage to cap.  I don’t have a feeling that I am going to make it, because we have a raid.  However when I get home from work I am going to try my damnedest to get it through a combination of duty roulettes.  I did however manage to run through the three Crystal Tower instances and get another Carbontwine allowing me to upgrade my Helm from 120 to 130.  Similarly I managed to get enough Poetics to buy another piece of jewelry, so that I could use one of the Carboncoats I had laying around.  This took me to 120 ilevel which for me at least is somewhat of a mental milestone.  There is something about breaking another 10s barrier in my gear score.  I am now sitting at just over 11,000 hit points, which is only going to serve to make my healers complain more strongly about my health pool when I am fully buffed.  It makes me feel useful though the more gear that I can manage to pile on.

Foraging Slowly

ffxiv 2015-03-16 06-27-56-61 One of my hopes this weekend was to spend a good deal of time on the sofa watching television and working on my Botany.  This never actually happened, for various reasons.  I spent a bit of time  yesterday morning watching a movie and importing by hand 48 episodes of Aggrochat into the new Aggrochat.com website.  I did however manage to work on botany some during the recording of this weeks AggroChat, and at this point I am level 16.  The brute force leveling is finally starting to slow down, but I keep telling myself that every level that I can gain in this fashion is going to let my level allowance build back up so I can push through the levels more quickly later.  When I pushed mining I managed to drop down to 30 leves left, and over the last few days it has managed to regenerate back up to 65, so when it caps I will begin pushing Botany a bit harder.

I had honestly wondered about stopping Botany for a bit to get fishing up to 15 as well.  That way I can start getting rid of all of this gathering gear that I have clogging my banks.  Since I only have Fishing and Botany left, my hope is that I can maybe stair step them both up together pushing it up 5 levels at a time so I can shed a bunch of gathering gear in the process.  That really seems to be the ideal way to level classes in general.  I have four retainers and they are all full of gear that I think I will use at some point.  I turned in a bunch of the Syrcus Tower dragoon gear last night for company seals,  and I need to really spend an afternoon identifying the stuff that I want to keep and sorting it out from the stuff I don’t want to keep.  All of the Scylla’s healing gear for example is prime territory for giving away… considering I am slowly replacing it with soldiery items to help burn down my tomestones.  Honestly as soon as I have Soldiery equivalents all of the gear from Syrcus Tower is suspect because I consider every single set “ugly”.