Month: October 2024

Iron From Fear and Lava

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Even thought I had used Modrinth to download and install mods, I had not actually been launching the game through it all this time. I had simply been copying the mods over manually into the appdata folder for Minecraft. However, I have learned… Minecraft mods update shockingly often. As a result, I have decided to copy all of my saved games over to a Modrinth profile and migrate to launching the game through it. All in all, it has been a pretty smooth transition save for the very first time I loaded the game. I am guessing there is some process of caching in all of my stuff that had to happen all at once. After that first time though, everything has felt effectively the same as launching through the Microsoft launcher.

I have been undertaking a few massive projects over the last few days. Essentially I decided that I needed a more reliable source of iron so that I could keep building nonsense. This meant that more than anything, probably the best option was to build a villager iron farm. This however is a massive pain in the ass and there are a bunch of competing ideas about how it performs the best. So just to make sure it worked successfully I decided to build it way the hell up into the air. This meant that I needed to get 3 villagers way up there… and a zombie. The zombie is the easy part, because they will follow you without much issue. Villagers however have to be moved either by boat or by baiting them with a work bench of some sort.

Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots of this nonsense because I keep forgetting that this is what happens every single time I hit my default printscreen key instead of the F2 key. When I am in the middle of doing my nonsense, I fall back upon defaults and keep hitting the key that I hit by rote memory. It was a mess. I used a Composter since I had a few of those lying around, and took him as far away from the village by boat as I could before breaking the boat and dropping a composter… then dropping another one once they had bonded with the first one and then going back and breaking the one they were bonded with. I set the game to peaceful to make the move a bit less frustrating.

The biggest problem with all of this is the fact that the closest village to me is roughly 600 meters to the east of me… across a mountain range. I originally thought I would be making this trek no normal mode and spent some time laying down a pathway of torches… and then got the bright idea to just flip it to peaceful for the time being. I am not entirely certain how I would have dealt with the villagers constantly getting attacked, and I would have kept having to throw them in the boat to keep them from running away. Worse is that I would have had to do this three times, each time just as frustrating as the last.

For the “other side of the mountain problem” I did a bunch of pre-work and dug a straight tunnel from the Village side of the mountain to my side of the mountain, which would get the villagers close to where the Iron farm was going to live in the sky. Again I am coming in and taking screenshots after the fact so that I could have something for this blog post. Thankfully there really wasn’t anything messy in the route I randomly chose. I had to deal with a patch of gravel which is always annoying, but in large part, I could bore straight through the stone to the other side. Again I torched it off thinking that I would have to deal with mobs all along the route. If nothing else this gives me a faster path to get over to the village if I ever need to abduct more villagers.

As for the farm itself, it is the standard affair that you have likely seen dozens of internet guides on how to create. One room has 3 beds and 3 villagers, and then there is another room where you lure the zombie and set up so that the zombie can never reach them but has to have open air between the villagers and zombies so that they can see them at all times. The zombies trigger the spawning of an Iron Golem which then only has one area where it can spawn up top, covered with moving water… that pushes the Iron Golem into a pit with a block of lava that will kill it and drop the goodies into a hopper/chest system for collection. If you are wondering why I have a glass walkway… it is because the Iron Golems cannot spawn on glass making it a reasonable option for building scaffolding to check on things.

Each time you kill a Golem it drops at least four bars of iron and potentially some poppies. I have no clue at all WHY the Golem drops poppies but I guess I will never run out of red dye. It is honestly impressive how fast the farm works, and if I wanted to go through the hassle… I could set up three more of the exact same farm in the space I have set aside, but that would also involve luring 3 villagers and a zombie each time. Maybe I should have set up a Villager breeder farm first… but that sounded equally annoying. In truth I have replaced all of the iron that I used creating the farm already, so mostly I just need to spend some time AFKing in range and letting it do its work.

The placement of the Iron Farm is at least in part so that I can AFK down at the mob drop farm, and should in theory have my Slime Farm, the Mob Farm, The Iron Farm, and all of my automated crop farms running at the same time. At some point, I need to go into my drop farm and spiderproof it, which should be easy enough given that I now have access to moss carpeting from finding a lush biome during one of my nether portal adventures. I already have more string than I can ever really use, and if I need more… it would be more enjoyable to go find a mine somewhere and harvest cobwebs.

In other news, I have expanded my Bamboo Farm upwards considerably in an effort to try and speed up production. This is in large part thanks to the influx of iron I am getting from the Golem farm, allowing me to do more dumb things with hoppers. It takes a TON of hoppers to direct loot from the top two tiers down to the bottom two tiers. I might expand my Sugarcane farm, but really… I am not even sure I need that much Sugarcane. I am contemplating building a Cocoa Bean farm, but again… I am not even sure I need them, and there does not appear to be a good way to fully automate that. The best option I saw was a design where you have pistons holding back water and then letting the water harvest everything before you replant it. In my hardcore series, I did something like this for harvesting fields of crops and it worked well enough but if I am going to the trouble of building something… I want it to run on its own if possible.

Witchfire Steam Early Access

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Witchfire is a PVE guns and spells extraction shooter that I remember being somewhat interested in during Summer Games Fest 2022. It apparently has been in early access and available on the Epic Game store since last year, but being perfectly honest… a game might as well not exist for all the good launching on EGS does for me. I am not saying that Epic is a bad storefront, it is just a giant gap in my knowledge because I never go there unless I have some external reason… like someone broadcasting that some big game was being given away for free there. Witchfire released Monday before last on Steam and now it has visualization to the majority of the world. However, It still had not tripped my radar until my friend Ace shared this quote from a review.

Imagine the gunplay of Destiny. But none of the intense shame of playing Destiny.

I have so much love for the gameplay of Destiny, but I have zero love anymore for the way in which that game is released and the grind associated with the light level. I am also still super fucking bitter about losing content that I paid for because it was vaulted. So if a game can bring me the feels of Destiny, with a sweet Hexen with guns vibe I am probably on board with that. So I picked up the early access client on Steam for roughly $36 and gave it a go. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my early impressions.

In the game, you can set up multiple profiles, aka characters that have persistent progress between expeditions into the world. The first step in that process is choosing which “Preyer” you are going to be playing, which acts as your default loadout of weapons, spells, and stats. I am playing Butcher currently which is big life totals and running around with a fully automatic rifle… but nothing much else. Once you progress through gameplay you can I believe essentially unlock everything on a single character, but the Preyer sets your starting point and to some extent dictates how your early gameplay is going to progress.

From there you are dropped onto a foreboding-looking island in search of resources on an expedition, which is what the game calls its general mission map structure. Much of your progression path is focused on the acquisition of gold and a glowing red material known as Witchfire. You can get this by killing monsters or by harvesting it directly from nodes you can find in the world. The maps are all custom-built, but the spawns and objectives vary each time you set foot on it. This means you pretty quickly get a lay of the land and understand how to traverse the area effectively, but won’t actually know what dangers lay along your path.

One of the first things that you want to do upon landing on the Island of the Damned, is pop open your map. This will have various objectives marked as well as the most important items the portals that will return you to the base where you started. Witchfire is an extraction shooter, which means you want to collect as many resources as you feel like you can before making your way to a portal and exiting the level locking in your progress. If you die on the island, you lose ALL of the Witchfire that you have not spent on upgrades, not just the Witchfire that you earned in a single play session. This makes you carefully choose your engagements because it seems like the longer you stay on the map, the more likely monsters are to guard your portal out of the map.

I’ve seen this game compared to a soulslike a few times, but I feel like the depth of this comparison ends with the fact that monsters hit really freaking hard, you have very limited health pool and ability to heal yourself, and that the mobs themselves have deeply predictable attack patterns. If you are taking on a single monster it is pretty easy to avoid all of the attacks. However, if you get swarmed… it becomes MUCH harder to read all of the attacks and move out of the way of various things that can kill you. The bane of my existence is the snipers which will give you a muzzle flash/glint in your radar letting you know that they are about to fire upon you. This is pretty easy to deal with in singletons, but when you get four of them attacking you at once it is very hard to accurately dodge all of them.

Every so often upon killing a monster you will be given access to an Arcana power-up which will last for the course of the current expedition giving the game a bit of a Hades vibe. You can also fine White Raven Feathers scattered through the map in treasure chests which will allow you to unlock additional options during each unlock. I’ve seen a lot of very interesting options, like the ability to gain a random elemental damage type when you reload your weapon. I’ve also seen some boring options like just giving you more health or more stamina. These combined with the random nature of the spawns and objectives give each map a lot of replayability.

Again though your goal is to get a bunch of loot, and then duck out before the heat gets too much for you to handle. While this does not really factor in for the early maps, there is a GTA-style heat meter that shows up as “The Witch” starts to notice your presence. When this bar maxes out, it will summon some cataclysm event that seeks to kill you. I’ve not seen this, but I have heard of it and it sounds like bad news given how hard everything already hits for random goons. In the above exit screen, I killed 24 monsters and looted 10k Witchfire… which admittedly is only that high because I retrieved a pile of Witchfire off my corpse after I failed the run before. When you fail completely, you end up creating a pile on the map that represents some of what you dropped on death.

Pending you exit the level successfully you can spend your stockpile of Witchfire on upgrading your core stats at the Ascension shrine, craft additional healing potions, or unlock perks on the weapons you currently have. I did not have a screenshot of this because apparently, you cannot access the weapon upgrade UI unless you have a pending upgrade. However the game has something akin to the Masterwork weapon system from Destiny, which is probably why it draws that comparison. Weapons each have three tiers of “masterworking, ” each giving the weapon some sort of intrinsic perk. You unlock the next one by defeating a certain number of baddies or performing other actions while on the expeditions.

Starting at level seven, you get access to the research system which will unlock new gear for you to equip on your character. Instead of being tied to Witchfire, this one is tied to gold which largely comes from looting treasure chests or very rarely dropping from tougher enemies. I was hoping this would allow me to research specifically named weapons, but apparently, it gives you a random unlock from a broad family of equipment. To start out I am researching a Close Ranged Weapon and a Medium Ranged Weapon, and I believe this progresses as you complete a number of expeditions because it does not appear to be tied to real-world time.

All in all the game is pretty fun. I dig the hunt for treasure and kill the baddies aspect while slowly powering up your character over time. I am starting to get better about looking for plants to harvest and witchfire clusters to gather while in the map, while also keeping an eye out for individual treasure chests. I’ve not made it very far into the game and I am assuming there are other maps that will unlock as I progress my character. If you are interested in Destiny-style movement and gunplay combined with magic powers, interesting gun design, and Hades-style rogue-lite powerups it might be worth a gander. I will warn you… the game can be punishingly hard at times which seems to reward a careful gameplay style rather than running into a nest of monsters guns blazing. There is a lot of cover that you can use to bait enemies out into the open for you to kill them more safely.

Anyways! Thought I would talk about it this morning in case anyone else out there would be interested. They released a few more updated trailers when the game went into Steam early access. The game world is gorgeous so I can see myself playing this on the side when I am in the mood for its blend if tropes.

Not Exactly AFK Journey

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One of the things that has largely been absent from this blog for the last few years is mobile gaming. It is not necessarily that I lacked the desire to have stupid fun sleepytime nonsense gaming, but more that my hardware could no longer really support it. In 2018 I bought the Razer Phone 2, in large part because it had a ton of features and was being discounted significantly. That phone has been a trooper for me all through the peak pandemic years and finally started to show its significant age starting around 2022. I hate the entire process of upgrading devices and should have taken things like the fingerprint sensor failing on me as a sign that I should go ahead and do it. Instead, I suffered through all of 2023 and most of 2024 with a phone that would crash any time I attempted to launch a game. Recently I upgraded to a OnePlus 12R seen above, and I am pretty happy with that decision.

More importantly though it meant that I could actually indulge in various games that I had heard about for awhile, but did not have the hardware to really enjoy. AFK Journey is one of those “it” games that burned through the AggroChat crew starting in April and continuing on a bit into the summer months. Various Fedifriends have also been into the game so it was enough to make me want to download it as one of my first forays into another round of modern mobile gaming. Generally speaking, these games have a steady burn rate for me where I enjoy the first few weeks of playing… up until the point where I need to spend money to progress. At that point, I uninstalled it and moved on to the next one. What I am mostly looking for is some dumb fun busywork before sleep claims me and so far AFK Journey has excelled at that notion.

I’ve mostly been playing this on my mobile device, where I largely record fancy pulls when I think to press the awkward screenshot key combination of power and volume down. However recently I have installed the desktop client where it is so much more enjoyable to just roam around the world. Essentially the game is a combination of the usual busywork of a gacha game where you have various vents that you are expected to participate in every day in order to move the needle forward. You are rationed enough cash shop equivalent and hero pull currency in order to keep you hanging on to see if the next ten pulls get you something truly interesting.

Then there is this weirdly sprawling open world filled with optional content that you will absolutely miss if you are just clicking the auto movement button to progress you to the next quest item. This is the point where I always think what I think in these situations… that a game like this would be really freaking fun on a proper gaming device like the Nintendo Switch. I am sure I could probably figure out how to shoehorn this onto the Steam Deck… were it not for the fact that it does not appear to have controller support. Sure I could probably install something like ReWASD and map WASD and the assorted keyboard shortcuts to a controller… but that is an awful lot of work for a game that I probably won’t be playing two months from now.

I am running a full party of Graveborn, in part because those were some of the coolest champions that I pulled early on. My inner metalhead edge lord loves the trappings of darkness and death, and these all vibed with that heavily. I mean I am after all a dedicated Golgari player in Magic the Gathering, so this all seems like the right call. There was no team of Dwarves, so it was an easy pick over the assorted cute woodland furries and elves. Unfortunately, I have reached the point in the story where I find out that the Graveborn are kind of the dicks of the story… but MINE aren’t like that. They are mobile and misunderstood anti-heroes dammit!

For a game called “AFK Journey” it is shockingly interactive. Sure there is an autobattle system, and I have autobattled my way through several hundred levels of it because this ultimately gates how much you can progress your characters. This is in large part why I installed it on the PC, so that I could have it autobattling in the background without draining my phone battery. This feels like more of an upkeep chore than anything else, and I had neglected it for far too long allowing my cast of heroes to languish a bit. The actual combat is all non-interactive so I guess maybe that is where the bulk of the AFK nature comes from. You gear and choose your team comp, but after that, it just sort of plays out on its own. I am fine with this because quite honestly controlling anything on a phone is a bit fiddly for my giant sausage fingers.

I did spend $7 on the game, to unlock a cosmetic battlepass track. I figured I needed a costume with an overabundance of belts to match the edge lord nature of my undead team. I am not sure what I think about the whole open-chested nature of the outfit, but sometimes you just sort of have to accept that these things are built for folks who lust after such things. It was an improvement over the general fancy nature of the wizard outfits I had been given up to this point. Since I am effectively playing Merlin… I don’t think the game is ever going to give me proper armor to wear and I just have to accept that.

So far I am having quite a bit of fun with the game and actually enjoy roaming around the world looking for secrets to loot. I’ve yet to hit the upper ceiling where progression is ridiculously slow. I basically get to progress one character each day and they have this whole system where every 10th level up costs way more than the preceding 9 levels. So basically I zoom everyone up to a multiple of 10s, then that next level up I can do one of those each day for a week until I can zoom them again up 9 more levels. I’ve been given a shocking amount of pull currency and have had enough banked to comfortably do a ten-pull every single day on the normal banner since I started playing. The premium pulls also seem to add up and I have a 10 pull banked against the rate-up banner, but given that I have already pulled Nara I am going to hold onto that until the next banner rolls around.

It is a gacha game, and you sort of have to go into it expecting a specific set of trappings for that experience. That said… it seems to be one of the more enjoyable mobile gacha games that I have played in a while. I will forever mourn the loss of Dragalia, but for the moment this seems to be taking its place as my stable focus for the time being as I wait for sleep to claim me.