Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a Grace this week and start off with what seems like a reasonable list of topics… that we immediately have to bump half of because the night ran long. Thalen starts off with a bit of a rebuttal to our Eurovision topic as he shares his thoughts about Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente. From there, we talk about the death of Marathon and potentially Bungie as things keep getting worse for that game and its studio. Speaking of angry crowds… we also talk a bit about the self-own of Star Citizen’s recent round of pay-to-win allegations. Steam OS is officially available for devices that are not the Steam Deck, and we share our thoughts about an eventual future where we are running this on desktops. Somewhere in the midst of the show, we have this entire unintended conversation about how making PVP work for non-PVPers would mean needing to make losing feel enjoyable. Finally, Tam shares his thoughts about what he has played of Dune Awakening so far, and it is probably enough to rope several of us into trying the game on release.
Good Morning Folks. Last night I finished getting the wizard chore currency to buy the last of the three pieces available of the Ward Knight’s Armor set. One of the things I dig about this set is that the appearance works regardless of the armor class, which means I can be running around in leather armor but looking like I am wearing plate. This of course required me to dye several pieces of my set, which led to me changing up a bunch of things about the outfit while still keeping to my traditional red, green, and black color palette. Unfortunately the infusion I am using kind of muddies the waters when it comes to appearance, and everything is a bit more hazy than I want it to be. I could remove the infusion… but then I would just end up needing ANOTHER one that grants some buffs.
Last night was the second outing of what I am currently referring to as Fractals with Friends. I am sure we will vary that activity at some point… but we made it through five fractals before running out of time. Technically in a few weeks when the Street Fighter 2 collaboration happens in Monster Hunter Wilds we will be spending the evening doing that content and taking a break from Guild Wars 2. Additionally there are a bunch of dungeons that I think we want to run as well, so we will probably be weaving those in from time to time. However Fractals with Friends just has the magical power of alliteration so it is what I am using. This whole thing reminds me of how much more enjoyable it is to fail with friends, than execute perfectly with strangers.
I’ve taken a bit of a break from the whole Vision questline and started working on filling every Janthir region renown heart each day. At some point I would like to finish the Janthir Mastery quests, which I believe are a prerequisite for the Legendary Spear. It does not hurt that Janthir is quite possibly my favorite area of the map currently. The Janthir Syntri meta is still butts… and a bit too tight on timing. I was with a team that executed pretty much perfectly and we still only managed to down the encounter with roughly a minute to spare. I am hoping that when the next expansion goes in, that they water down this bit of content at least for the open world variant. I think the tryhard players are probably mostly doing this as a convergence instead of joining in the open world shenanigans. I only do it if I happen to be in zone at the time it is firing off… and only then if we have decent support on both bosses. Last night just happened to be a perfect storm and we got it finished.
The best of the Renown Hearts is the Journeykin Outpost, which is what the Bearfolk call the Warclaws. Sure there is a World of Warcraft poop quest where you gather the scat and take it to the composter… but most of your time is spent petting the big cats and feeding them. The whole thing is delightful, and I would happily take care of my big kitty friends every single day. Janthir is so fucking charming. It has Grizzly Hills vibes and even the later maps are pretty nice. Guild Wars 2 usually has this problem where the early maps are a lot of fun… but some of the later maps are pure hell. I am looking at you Nayos, Desolation, etc. So far all of the Janthir maps feel fairly charming, even though you start dealing with my absolutely least favorite mob type… Bloodstone Elementals.
I did the reset Taco as usual, and there was a point where I was hanging out on voice but cracking up at the fight. Someone decided to take their fishing boat and ram it repeatedly into Tequatl. The above screenshot was taken right before they decided to desummon it and start fighting legitimately. There is just something balancing about doing the server reset Tequatl fight, and folks are generally the most chill you have ever seen. The other night we had something totally dumb where someone asked every one that could tag up to do so… and we had like 20+ commander and catmander tags running on a single map. It is dumb stuff like this that really make me enjoy this fight.
I did encounter what appears to be some sort of a bug. There is a dumb crafting mini game involving fractals where you use one miniature to craft another miniature… over and over until you have created all of the named cat golems. I had three of the Mini Professor Mews sitting in my bank and from a fractal loot box I pulled the very rare Amber Quantic Dipole. So immediately I thought I would try and craft the next Golem in sequence: Mini Mister Mittens. However for whatever reason… the Mystic Toilet is not letting me add the last two ingredients… which I have plenty of: Obsidian Shards, and Crystalline Dust. I have no clue what is going on and have checked the wiki multiple times to make sure I am not missing anything. I am guessing it is just bugged. If anyone out there has an idea of what I might be doing wrong… please let me know.
In other news… I did in fact do the dumb thing. I created a purely free to play character named Belgratis. I might buy the base version of the game at some point for the account, but mostly the idea behind this character is to have something stripped down that I can use for the purpose of writing guides. I have a very basic guide in the works that I took a ton of screenshots for yesterday and will likely massage into something that makes sense over the extended holiday weekend. Not that it will be of any value to a seasoned player… but sometimes the Guild Wars 2 interface is a bit much for players who have come from more Wow-like MMORPGs.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve been intermittently blogging for the last few weeks, mostly because it just does not feel like I have a full compliment of stuff to talk about right now. I am still mostly mainlining Guild Wars 2, and chipping away at various achievements. I’ve stalled out a bit on the whole Vision track thing, but have pushed Tailoring up to 500 on the Necromancer, and Leatherworking to 470 on my Ranger largely so that I could consume down the various ascended materials that just sort of clog your inventory. At some point I should work on pushing Armorsmithing up to at least 450 so that I can craft ascended gear for every weight. I’ve made a decent amount of gold selling some Celestial gear that I made for leveling purposes, because the market still seems to be hungry for that. It makes sense given that there are so many do “everything with this build” guides that focus on the Celestial stat package.
My friend Zarly starting the game… has made me realize how much of the early experience from the standpoint of a brand new account… I just do not understand. I was going to start a series of getting started posts, but quite frankly… I have so much quality of life stuff on my account that I am not even sure if it would make sense. I’ve been kicking around the idea of registering a second Guild Wars 2 account from the standpoint of keeping it ENTIRELY free to play, just so that I can grasp what that later experience looks like. From that standpoint I could do a much better job of writing up guides, knowing exactly the limitations of what someone who has not dumped a bunch of money into the game has access to. Little things like explaining what the hell the parts of the UI are… would probably be valuable for someone just getting started. It seems like a heck of a lot of work, so I am not sure if I am going to go down that path or not… but it could be a valuable resource like some of my other getting started posts.
I think another part of my reluctance to blog is the fact that it is backyard time, which means I am spending at least a little bit of time each evening hanging out there. Greybie one of our outdoor feral cats has come to expect me to go out there pretty much every day. I will walk out the door and he will come running over expecting me to sit down so that I can pet him for awhile. I’ve charged up my Steamdeck and loaded it full of bite sized games with the eventual purpose of spending evenings out there with our retinue of ferals while my wife reads. This has not quite happened yet but probably will soonish. I need to find the battery pack that I have that connects up to the the steamdeck case so that I have a bit more longevity given that the device is a battery hog.
Over in Enshrouded, I have completed the obsessive building phase of my base and created floors all the way down as far as my current building limit will allow me. Towards the end I had the whole process of hollowing out the spawned earth down to a science. When I raise my base size limits again I will keep going down and I am just barely above this little plateau that I am likely going to build out to be a farming area. I built a temporary plank of stone so that I could take a single screenshot that encompassed the entire stack. So I will not start back up with an adventure phase next as I attempt to improve my base and rescue more of the craftspeople. Right now I have the Smith, Hunter, and Alchemist and am slowly working on getting all of their machines up and running. I need to craft some better gear, so that is likely going to involve some trips out to bandit towns to clean them out in order to get metal scraps that I can then convert into plates.
I did stub out my staircase upwards to the vertical limit and at some point when I want to go back into another building phase I will probably continue my stacks upwards. I legitimately have no use for most of the space that I am creating… but I just like having it anyways. My original thought was to take an entire floor and devote it to a single crafter, and that probably will be the direction I eventually go. Start building out the floors so that they have a little apartment area for the crafter and then a large open bay full of the crafting machines that they control, as well as rows of the conversion machines like the kiln to bulk generate a bunch of resources. Mostly this overbuild is in part because some of my previous builds just needed more space in order to operate at the level I wanted them to. Essentially I am viewing this world as my new forever world, that I will keep incrementing over time.
Lastly I have been poking around a bit with Lay of the Land, a new voxel crafting/building game that is in very early access. I had wishlisted it on steam some time ago, and recently watched a video from LevelCapGaming talking about their experiences with it. Right now you can gain access to the game through the $5 per month tier on the developer’s patreon which gets you access to various builds that they post. It is pretty robust but also… not exactly easy mode either. This game has a physics engine, which means you are almost certainly going to die the first time you attempt to fell a tree as it is very likely going to fall over on top of you. The crafting system works a little differently than Minecraft, but is also easy enough to grasp once you figure it out.
The game uses much finer resolution of voxels and as a result it can generate really interesting rounded prefab buildings. This however complicates the process of building a bit, but the game has functionality similar to some of the Minecraft modes that allow you to set a start point and and end point and will fill the space between with the same material. Crafting is also a bit different in that you throw items onto the ground and then hit R to pop up a menu of items that can be crafted with those items. It feels a bit odd but in practice it actually goes much faster than crafting the same type of object in Minecraft.
The only gotcha right now is that so far Lay of the Land is a single player only game… with a single map that gets generated and does not expand infinitely in any direction. I have no clue what the long term plan is for the game, but for now it is mostly just a neat single player experience. Just like I got in early with Minecraft, I figured I would go ahead and support this game and see how it develops. I am not sure I will keep the Patreon rolling indefinitely, but for the current moment it seems interesting enough to check out and see what I can do with it. The biggest difference between this game and Minecraft is that combat is actually pretty interesting. Mobs have attack patterns and do crazy stuff like throw bombs at you… which also means you are probably going to die a lot. I will of course talk about this game periodically to give you updates on my thoughts as it progresses.
Good Morning Folks. This past weekend I originally set out to start a brand new world in Enshrouded, and see all of the content. What I have done instead… is compulsively hollow out the side of a mountain, with the goal of building down to the shroud. There are certain patterns that I get suck in with games… where I cannot bring myself to do something else until the mission has been accomplished. I even built a worktable and a bed on this nonsensical shelf floating above the shroud just so that I could quickly reset the day or build more stone blocks as needed. There is nothing impressive about my build… it is mostly just a box, but I still find myself compelled to build in this manner. Often times I “pretty” the structure up once I have reached a point where I feel okay about it… but at least for awhile I always go through a bulk utilitarian building phase.
Removing spawned material in Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass… so what I learned when I decided to dig a basement at release, is that you can use prefab blocks as a way of removing chunks of the world in a consistent manner. For example my preferred floor height is two 2×2 blocks stacked on top of each other. So as I started hollowing out the side of the hill, I started placing these blocks and then removing them in a structured manner so that I could clear out individual floors of my weird boxy structure at a time. Effectively… I will probably be stuck in this pattern until I have hollowed out as far down as the current parameters of my base will allow. Then I will go back into a phase of adventuring again… until I can increase my base size… and then likely back to hollowing out the ground again.
This is not just an enshrouded thing… in Valheim I could not hollow out the earth easily… so instead I built this stupid network of connected bases. I had no real reason to build so many bases… but I just felt compelled to keep creating beachheads in new areas of the map. I even went so far as to create this secret base, with a hidden portal… that was MASSIVE and way deep out into the chain of islands on a shared map. I thought it would be funny if someone on our server stumbled onto it and wondered what the hell was going on. In Valheim specifically I used to use the fact that you could transport the same character between multiple save games…. to rapidly transport materials between locations since things had so much weight. I would pop over to a private save… dump my inventory, then move to where I wanted to dump the items in the public save… and pop back over to retrieve them into my characters inventory. I think this “efficient” gameplay annoyed Kodra who was all about the real world ramifications of having to transport objects around the world.
Minecraft is the real place where you can see my compulsive patterns in action. I have so many different save files… all with the same basic patterns. Something super common is my trademarked tunnels to nowhere. I will just start digging in a direction and keep going until I hit something that looks interesting. For example this tunnel goes for unknown thousands of blocks… I think I went through four diamond pickaxes to carve this 3×3 tunnel that effectively leads to nowhere interesting at all. I saved every bit of the stone that I harvested meticulously in a bunch of chests, so that I could then in turn use it to build other dumb structures that no one will ever see. A lot of times I will find myself compelled to build like this while I am listening to an audiobook or something, bringing subtle order to the chaos of the random spawns.
In the same save file you can see a “stack of boxes” similar to what I have going on in Enshrouded. What you cannot see is just how many floors are below ground that I compulsively dug all the way down to bedrock. Once you get down there… you can see a bunch of mining operations as I scoured the earth looking for resources. There are people who build pretty houses in these games, but for whatever reason… I always strike down into the earth to find my safe domicile. I think on some level if I had my druthers… my perfect house would be dug into a mountain side with big windows facing out into the world… but plenty of shadowy places where I can escape the light of day. I keep effectively building these same structural ideas in whatever game I happen to be playing.
Another thing you will find in a lot of my saved games… is interlinking paths that don’t really serve a purpose. There is no reason why I built skyroads between mountain peaks…. and then also hollowed out paths between them. Like there is no mechanical purpose to any of this. As soon as I closed off an area and lit it up, I was completely safe from anything that might spawn at night. However I just kept building these random terraces and cascading staircases that went up the sides of hills… and then dipped inside of the mountain only to poke out the other side and go in a different direction. My builds in games often feel akin to the Winchester house… where I just kept building for the purpose of building. Then randomly I will decide to roll a brand new world and start the entire processes over again.
Sometimes I will end up with something unintentionally beautiful… like this area where I dug into a mountain and found a natural grotto with waterfalls coming down from above and a subterranean pond. So I then set forth to build a stairwell that went up through said pond… for reasons that do not really exist other than to do it. I am sure all of this is some sign of a malady or something…. but I find a weird level of peace just sort of aimlessly building. I used to sit in the floor with building blocks, legos, or later contrux as a kid and effectively building the same sort of structural designs over and over. Now said buildings… exist in digital form. Because of this weird compulsion that I seem to have… all of these games will likely remain evergreen. Hopefully there will never be a time when I do not find joy in the simplicity of placing or removing blocks. On some level I think this is probably some way I deal with anxiety… because I am shuffling around quite a bit of it right now.
