Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
We assure you that we are in fact not a cat… but maybe some of us are cats. Tonight we start the show off with a discussion that probably should have happened last week but completely missed the list. Final Fantasy XIV announced its next expansion and in Endwalker we are going to the Moon. We talk about this. This sorta leads its way into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and drop in drop out grouping. We also talk a bit about how Google seems to slowly be killing Stadia but shuttering the studio that was supposed to be making first party games. Last we talk about Eli and hitting his first 12 sads out of 10 RPG ending…. which is fitting given Kodra’s propensity for finding those games.
Yesterday’s lunch did not go according to plan in the least. My goal was to pop over onto the BotchCraft server that I have been playing on occasionally. My playtime on the server is fairly intermittent between other projects that I have going and I legitimately forget sometimes what I did the last time I was playing. As such I did not remember killing a pillager in the swamp outside of my domicile which apparently put a debuff on me. When I went back to town for the purpose of starting a Minecraft video for my channel I inadvertedly started a Pillager Raid on the Village next door to the spawn. Things sorta just went downhill from there.
Unfortunately I have no screenshots from the event… because things were entirely too intense to be hitting the screenshot button. However I do have a few screenshots from the aftermath. I am guessing these are events designed for a sort of server wide defense kind of thing. If I was counting correctly, we had a total of five waves and the first wave I mostly took care of by myself. Then things sort of went off the rails and harder mob encounters started spawning in. Before long I was desperately trying to run back to my corpse to get my gear since the server has a DAoC style tombstone mod, which is awesome but unfortunately means you have to manually loot the items.
This chonky boy is a Ravager and is the stuff of nightmares. It is effectively a mounted battering ram and the Pillagers use it to start breaking down any walls that you might have. For normal Pillagers we had a neat trick of knocking out the ground block from our fence and attacking the mobs through that. Zelibeli who also happened to be on the server at the time got drafted into helping me clean up my mess. The Ravager however would slam into the wall causing an area of effect attack that would shred our health even with armor on. The desperation moment was when we realized that we had no arrows and no real way to go craft them either. It was around or about this time that Zeli remembered the mob farm and the likelihood that the chest near by would have collected a large number of arrows from random skeletons.
Unfortunately the Ravager was guarding the gate and I made a desperation play. I knew she could not get to the mob farm until someone managed to lure the beast away and I sprinted like my life depended on it… because it absolutely did. The beast took the bait with a Pillager on its back and followed me far away from the Village and out onto the fields towards a completely different Village. I am guessing that there are no leashing rules for hostile Raid mobs because it kept following me… only getting tripped up a bit when I swam out to an island and forced it out into the water… where it followed but moved considerably slower. I am super thankful that Zeli took this as the queue to go for the arrows because it was absolutely spur of the moment and there was no way I could type a message during this frantic flee.
The most damaging encounter however was probably the Evokers, which could summon a thing called a Vex. These tiny Grim Reapers could travel over top of the walls and deal stupid amounts of damage. Ultimately we needed the arrows to take them out while they were casting, which seemed to interrupt the casting animation and stop the summoning. However I probably took more deaths to this specific encounter than any of the others. Side note these are also the most annoying mobs when playing Minecraft Dungeons and I have severe hatred for them and their ability to trap you in some pillars of earth.
When we FINALLY beat the Raid… the Villagers started pelting us with random items that they were giving us. Additionally we have a buff that now allows us to get significantly better exchange rates both for getting emeralds and spending emeralds. This entire encounter was hilarious but I will now be way more cautious of when I get this debuff that triggers the raid. I am not certain but I would guess that maybe drinking milk will take it away? As annoying and occasionally frustrating as all of the deaths were, I would not change the sequence of events for the world. Super happy that Zeli happened to be on and we managed to succeed in pushing back the Pillagers.
Today at 11 am CST I will be releasing the 15th part of my “Bel Bungles Minecraft” series on YouTube, and hopefully if things go smoothly I will be recording the 16th part today which will take us to the end of the week. That said I am falling behind in the production of this thing and need to spend some time this weekend catching back up. I had this really great production cadence that allowed me to have several episodes queued and ready to go, and at one point I was three episodes ahead. I had been recording over my lunch break and then editing and queueing it up for the next week day timeslot at what I decided would be my release time of 11 am.
That sort of went off the rails this week because effectively I have been iced in since Sunday evening. This also means that my wife has been iced in and with more active human beings in the house it became a little harder to record over lunch. Similarly I have been dealing with the woes of winter in our house, which means my office is sweltering. There are some things I have done to mitigate this, but even so just from radiating heat through the wall it warms up significantly. My office is the first stop after exiting the heating unit and for some reason has two vents. This means the last place I have wanted to be after the work day is upstairs.
This is not to say that I won’t keep making Minecraft videos, because I am still enjoying myself. The pace of them might change a little bit. I am not sure if I am going to be able to keep up with five videos a week at least until I figure out a flow that works for my changing situation. I will probably be expanding what I am doing as well to more than just my single player world. I’ve been playing some on a friends server called Botchcraft, as well as a private Realm with my friend Grace. I will likely be recording some videos in both of these locations, but I will make certain to clearly state I am doing so in the video to stem some of the confusion.
Largely this is just a heads up that my flow of content may suffer a bit. Additionally I wasn’t sure what to talk about today so I figured this was as good of a topic as any. If you have not already watched any of the Minecraft series, then I will embed the playlist below. I mean it isn’t exactly compelling television, but I had fun making it and continue to enjoy my nonsense.
Yesterday I played an excessive amount of Valheim. I am still not entirely certain what it is about this game that ticks the right boxes for me, but suffice to say it does. After yesterdays post I did a bit of research and I now understand how one summons the bosses in this game. Essentially in each new area you are going to find an altar that allows you to sacrifice items to it. I didn’t fully grok how exactly this worked or what the game was trying to tell me. However near each altar will be a runestone that gives you a clue as to where to find the items needed for sacrificing. So for example the first boss in Valheim is a giant lightning deer and the clue that is given is “Hunt His Kin”.
Turns out the Deer Trophies that I had been collecting from sneaking up and “murderating” them with a knife… is the key to summoning the boss. I needed two of these and this summoned the angry stag god Eikthyr. Now the guides that I had read talked about needing a specific level of bow with specific arrows, but I opted for a more Belghast solution. I fought it with a Flint Axe and a Shield and this allowed me to block pretty much all of the incoming damage and time my attacks between blocks. It seemed way easier than I was expecting. Over lunch break yesterday I finished the first boss and moved on to the Black Forest.
This has also led me to build a brand new Chateau in a big open field near the entrance to the Black Forest. This became a necessity given that it was over a days walk between my original home and where my new hunting grounds would be for the next segment of the game. I opted for a completely different design this time, but so far my fortifications have not been needed. For whatever reason none of the hostile monsters seem to be screwing with my domicile this time. I do think I am going to make a jaunt over to the original home base and collect my bee hives because I have not had much luck in finding replacement Queen Bees to build new ones.
Truth is my second time around I made a much better home, minus the bit of floor missing… which worked out fine in the end because that is where I have my camp fires set up. I find it annoying that I now have to manage two fires given that I need one for the meat rack and the other for the cauldron. I however have so much more “room for activities” with this design as opposed to the more longhouse thing I had going on previously. Now I am very much in the mode of collect raw metal and create charcoal… which is why I left the meat on too long as an extra easy source of it. I can craft bronze which opens up a whole new world of gear that I can equip.
The one word of warning that I have is the Black Forest is a whole new world of challenge, and all of those things that you fought regularly in the lowlands seem to have a version that is much much harder to kill and attacks in packs. Gone are the Greylings that haphazardly roam into you and may or may not attack… and replaced are Grey Dwarves that attack in packs of five or six and have specialization with casters. The dungeons have been specifically challenging filled with Skeletons so I am getting much use out of my tier 3 gear and more specifically my shield.
The king of the “programmer art” creatures in this game though has to be the Troll, which looks like a giant doofy blob of humanoid playdough. They are however extremely challenging and while I have killed a few… they have taken me down to almost dead each time. Blocking helps quite a bit… but also does knocking them down which I am not entirely certain if it happens because I hit them in the junk or in the leg. When I am swinging my axe it sort of hits both at the same time. However while knocked down they seem to take considerably more damage which allows you to sorta power through with the kill.
I’ve found the altar for the next boss, and I am guessing that since I have killed a Troll I am likely ready to actually take it on. On the other hand I kinda want to finish crafting and upgrading my gear at this step in the game before moving to the next. Having a lot of fun with this game.
