October 2025 - Page 4 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fish for Cats

October 16, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. This most important thing that I do every day… is find one of the cats in Haven and figure out what fish it wants to eat. This is harder than it sounds… because you are having to translate what is often poorly translated features… and then playing a guessing game as to what exactly a “Plump Fish” is. Whoever added this feature to the game is delightful… because they fucking nailed this feature. The cat “chirps” are on point… and enough so that if I were not playing with headphones it would freak my cats out. I don’t love the fishing mini game… but I keep doing it so I can make sure I have the right fish that these adorable darlings want on a given day. Please note… the gift that they give me back… is in no way actually worth doing this thing. I just get brief sparks of joy from feeding these virtual cats.

Ace and I made a date to meet up last night and burn through some of our challenge keys. When you get deep into this game you can access much harder versions of existing content, and one of the things we had never participated in was “Master” difficulty of Gauntlet Blitz. Now the normal version of Gauntlet Blitz is generally a pretty chill activity, one you can absolutely complete without much issue using a group of bots. Master difficulty however does not exist with bots… and apparently few people are trying to run it. So we started this madness with just us attempting to learn the mechanics and slowly over time more people joined in until we finally had five players. There were these crazy singularities that would spawn… and slowly pull us in so we had to stop everything we were doing and dps them down to keep from getting instagibbed. This made the entire experience way more stressful… but also way more enjoyable. I would love to do this content with a full group of people I know.

One of the cool features of the game is that you can borrow characters from your friends, so it is actually pretty beneficial to friend random players who perform well in content with you. I have a well geared Helhest, but I noticed that Ace’s was a bit higher than mine so I borrowed her for an attempt at a Challenge Difficulty version of the Legendary Campaign. Side note… this apparently DOES not count for any of the objectives on your ascendancy. I made decent time, and did not take any deaths… but did not get credit towards her “do challenge legendary campaign without dying”. So seemingly if you borrow a character it will not count towards your achievement unlocks. Mostly just throwing this out there so someone does not get disappointed like I did.

Speaking of Helhest, I completed another phase of her story and I am really enjoying this particular plot thread. Spoilers ahead so be warned if you care about such things. Destiny 1/2 players have a long relationship with Mara Sov the Queen of the reef, this story-line deeply involves her and what appears to be an AI Consciousness backup known as the White Queen. Helhest in her pre-resurrection life was a Crow, and specifically a Crow tasks with hunting down the White Queen and assassinating her and anyone guarding her. I’ve always thought the whole memory wipe that comes with resurrection as a lightbearer an interesting part of this whole setting. I remember they brought back Mara Sov’s brother as a Guardian in Destiny 2… and that felt weird… considering how icky and awful he was during his normal life. So this is a similar story thread, and it is interesting unpacking Helhest’s former life.

Being completely honest. Helhest is the first time I have been tempted to give them money for the cosmetic outfit set. The crow outfit looks fucking badass. Thing is I really like this character and it is probably going to be my primary arc damage character that I run. I am working on pushing her light levels up, and will probably spend my stamina to run a bunch of chaos trials today in order to try and get a full set of exotic artifacts for her. Once I have that, I should be able to push the light levels up to a sufficient place, and if I get the rare runestones from the wheel of fortune event I should be able to complete gold this week/weekend. The game just keeps throwing discounts at me… which I know is the trap that they keep hoping I will spend more money. However like I said I am legitimately considering picking up this sweet outfit.

We got a teaser trailer dropped for where the story is going… and I am pumped, other than the whole “Coming in 2026” part. The game really needs to drop some more story content soon. In theory we will have another season between now and then, because the Season of Daybreak is coming to a close soon. So I am hoping with it comes another destination and maybe some more activities. However I am pumped that we are at least leaving the planet at some point, because the teaser trailer shows a spaceship. I am hoping this game gets a version of the Dreadnaught from Destiny 1, because that was one of my favorite environments to explore. I loved all of the weird unlocks and jumping puzzles and ended up getting us our first sword if I am remembering correctly. I love the Hive and the nonsense of Oryx, Savathuun, and Xivu Arath… and we have already seen that Crota exists in this setting which means Oryx likely does as well.

I wish the whole mobile nature of the game was not a massive turn off to most folks. It is shockingly good, and for a gacha game it is weirdly fair about its spending. In a worst case scenario, if you the the worst possible luck… just the act of pulling a new character is at most around $50. However I have never made it all of the way to pity once… before getting a new character. So far with Helhast I have had outrageous luck and pulled 3 copies of her just using my banked up resources. I am continuing to pull on that banner as I get free currency because I am wondering just how many stars I can unlock before that banner ends. This is putting me in a bad position for the next banner… but like I said, I really like this character.

A Guild of Greys

October 15, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I took the day off and it was needed. I didn’t really get much of anything accomplished, but after yesterday’s emotional blog post… and tears that followed… I think I just needed a day to fall apart. I spent a good chunk of the day playing Destiny Rising. If you have ever loved Destiny at any point in its history, you owe it to yourself to check this game out. While I have spent money on my main account, I have created an alt account that is entirely free to play, and quite honestly… I have plenty of good stuff to make playing that account enjoyable. It has been interesting to see how fast I can progress it through the ranks and am already up to heroic content. Which means that I get to have the exciting grind of collecting all of the mythic weapons all over again. Over on my main account I am mostly spending my time learning Helhest, the new Arc champion and think I am going to add her to my more focused lineup since I already have Jolder to represent Void, and Estela to represent Fire.

The biggest news from yesterday is that we managed to get the Greysky Armada guild online in Destiny Rising. You’ve likely heard me complaining about the process of creating a guild… and it is in fact even more onerous than I expected. Firstly everyone has to be available during a 24 hour period to join the guild, and has to leave their existing packs before they can even be invited. I am not sure if extended friendships are not important to the Chinese player base… but every single one of these mobile games has an awful guild system. In AFK Journey you get thrown on random servers and can ONLY ever invite people from that random server. We cheated in getting this guild off the ground when Ace and I realized that we could easily create alt accounts. With our alts and a handful of people actively playing , we managed to get the guild up and running and actually leveled it up the first time and upgraded the hangar to level 2. If you are playing this game and a reader of this blog, feel free to join the guild.

I am pretty pleased with our progress for a single day of doing pack hunt. Granted this was swapping between two accounts and running missions to uncover more ground. Essentially I was trying to find one of the strongholds, because I have never actually managed to do one of those and thought maybe with a guild of people I actually know I might be able to arrange a time when we could have three people on at the same time. The mountain ranges are somewhat infuriating because you have a bunch of highlighted areas around the map, and inevitably you will run into a wall that is not passable that will cause you to waste a bunch of turns. Sadly the community has not figured out the pattern to these maps so it isn’t like the Labyrinth in Path of Exile where you can see where you are going each week. You sort of have to just poke around in the darkness trying to find resources.

In other news, I managed to get the currency needed to push Estela up to gold and clear the logjam that was halding my ascendancy points. So I went immediately from 24 to 30, and have since pushed it up to 31. Right now I am working on getting Helhest up to gold, but have quite a bit of work left to go on her. I knocked out Silver on her last night, and am working on farming a set of exotic artifacts so that I can properly equip her. I am not sure if I can just do the equip highest and get her past the hurdle or not. I essentially need another round of the rare materials in order to push her up to gold anyways, so I am likely going to be in a holding pattern for a bit. I might start working on some of the other characters and knocking out bronze and silver so that I can get more points and raise my ascendancy level up a bit while I am waiting.

I’ve continued pulling on the Helhest banner since I like the character so much, hoping to get more copies and ultimately more talent tree points. This has led to an abomination… and I now have a 6 star version of Finnala. Like there is nothing inherently wrong with Finnala, she just does not have that great of a kit. She is ultimately a less useful version of Wolf, and the big problem I have with her is that she has no range abilities. This means that you are essentially left in the dust while running content on her because Destiny Rising is like every other game where you do the same content over and over… and it is go go go go go. She is perfectly cromulent for doing content planet side, and that is honestly have I have ranked up most of her reputation doing dailies, because she is really good when it requires fire stuff.

Speaking of abominations… we finally got our Trikora match and it was just as hilarious as we expected it to be. We honestly did better than I expected, but due to seemingly no one queuing for shifting sands, we ended up in there with two human teams, and everything else bots. We did fairly well and I think we placed second overall, but it was a massive difference between playing against human players and bots. The bots were way more aggressive… and actively tried to hunt us down constantly… but were also sort of dumb. The one time we ran into a human team unprepared we were quickly wiped. However we wrecked the bots in pretty much every encounter. This is a bad ideas match up…. but was super funny to play through.

Mostly right now I am going to be playing a lot of Helhest so that I can unlock the last bits of her storyline. So far I really like it and she is one of the more interesting characters in the game. I legitimately like her both in her skill set and the story that is being told. I think this was also part of the reason why I bonded with Estela so hard, is because the story that was being told was actually really good. Helhest would be better if you did not have to keep resummoning the drones… but then again they probably learned their lesson with Estela. The little manta ray things that she summons are constantly running ahead of the players and clearing objectives before anyone has a chance to get to them. Helhest though is a beast when it comes to a burn phase because pending she has all three drones up… you can just wreck a boss big time. This is absolutely my sniper of choice going forward, and I have contemplated burning down Umeko just to get the resources back to spend them on Helhest.

Anyways. Destiny Rising is fucking great. You should check it out, and when you do… join our guild. Legitimately though, if you ever enjoyed Destiny at some point in the past, you are going to love this game. I personally find it way more enjoyable than Destiny ever was. I just hope we get some more world content soon at the end of this season.

Ineffective Cosplay

October 14, 2025 by Belghast

Good morning folks. This is going to be one of those blog posts that does not get syndicated widely, because it is going to be a bummer. Last night I fell asleep on the couch around 7ish… went to bed around 8pm… and then slept until almost 7 am. This represents probably the longest I have slept in years. I feel like the wheels are falling off now. Technically I am still functional. I am getting up and showing, feeding myself, doing responsible work things, and making sure the house stays at moderate levels of cleanliness… but I feel like I am not really living. I am still chipping away at the giant mess in the garage, and am about halfway through. Essentially the north side is finished with cabinets set up and things moved into them… and I need to attack the south side and effectively do the same. I have a pile of shit in the garage that at some point I will call the folks to haul away.

I can’t say with all certainty that nothing brings me joy… but more… I have forgotten what joy feels like. I feel like I have been cosplaying someone who has their shit together in the whole “fake it until you make it” genre… but I am just not sure if I will ever get there. This week is hard. It is fall break for all of the schools in Oklahoma, and I did not even know this until a coworker asked for it off to spend time with his family. This was always a big week for us and we almost always had some sort of project going on that we would complete. If nothing else it was a time when I took off from work and we spent quality time together. We would often go for trips elsewhere like down to Dallas, up to Kansas City, or over to St Louis to visit friends. I could do all of these things… but I just don’t really feel like doing so.

Last Friday was really hard too, because there was a cookout essentially in honor of my wife… but not having her… made the social interaction almost unbearable. People talk about having emotional support animals… but my wife was my emotional support human and I miss her greatly. No matter how uncomfortable a situation got… I always had her, and I always knew that she understood that my skin was crawling and that I wanted to run into the night screaming at the top of my lungs. How do you condense 30 years of moments shared… into even beginning to rebuild that connection with anyone else? I feel like my life is over… and I am just this shambling husk that remains, because all of the good that was in me was sucked out the night I came out of the bathroom and found her making that awful gurgling noise on the couch. My life ended on July 2nd… and everything that I am doing now… is just a vague attempt at distracting me from that fact.

Another thing that is really hard… is that in theory they should have installed the gravestone last week. There is a certain finality in that act. Like until that happened it almost wasn’t “really real”. I’ve not gone up to check, because its a two hour drive away, and I am not even sure if I should be doing that drive by myself. I had been waiting on a call from the funeral home to let me know that it was installed… but they have also been pretty much incompetent at every step of this process. They did not tell me when the death certificates were available, did not tell me when the final death certificates were available, and did not tell me when they had a mock-up of the tombstone ready for me to review. If I did not have a “fuck this is taking forever” moment at each step… I would not have gotten any of the information. So basically… I have Schrodinger’s tombstone right now… and the only way I am going to know for certain is if I make the drive.

I’ve not gone to the grave site… since the day we buried her because… there has never felt like much of a point. She is not there anymore. My wife herself firmly believed that, and thought the whole visiting graves thing was a bit weird. I mean if she is anywhere… she would be here since she died in the driveway. Not that I understand the mechanics of hauntings mind you… but it would seem like the place someone dies would be more potent than the place where their remains end up. I know at some point I will need to go. I will need to at least for the sake of her family make the effort of decorating her grave, since they all seem to care deeply about that sort of thing. I am agnostic at best… and atheist at worst… and I have always struggled with the rituals of a predominantly evangelical society. I know I have people who are willing to be there for me… but what they can offer me… isn’t what I need. I need my wife back.

I have friends who are pushing me to get back into therapy. Essentially how the free therapy works is that you get five sessions per instance. In theory I could just keep making up a reason for why I need therapy, because it is only ever dealt with at the inception of the therapy… and not during the sessions themselves. It did help… but only those first three of five sessions or so. I think I might just be going through a low spot with the changing of the seasons and the coming of the season of darkness. I’ve never had seasonal affective disorder… my wife had that… and I have always cursed the existence of the sun. However maybe I do need to get out more and at least pretend I am a daywalker. I am trying to get out and about more on the weekends, but mostly just because I have things I need to get done. I know today I am going to run to the recycling place because it was entirely too full on Sunday, and I never unloaded the boxes from my truck.

Maybe I just needed to cry for awhile. I have been doing so while I write this post, and am honestly feeling a bit better as a result. Unfortunately crying is not one of those things that you can just sort of force to happen. Maybe I needed to get some of the sadness out of me. I will say that I would be completely lost if not for Gracie and how needy of attention she is. So many of the things I did… because I was trying to take care of my wife. Without her… it just doesn’t feel like there is a point to doing any of them. I have mostly been going through the motions because the routines are familiar… but there is no passion behind it anymore. I think I am going to cut this blog post off, because if you have read down to this point… you are a real one.

I am not sure if I have been lying to you… when I say that I am fine… or if this week just got to be too much and I fell apart. I am broken, and I have to admit that I am broken. I just am not sure if I will ever be fixed.

Second Account Shenanigans

October 13, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. This weekend I decided to focus on trying to get the pack up and going. We almost have enough to form a pack on our own, and quite honestly… I think once we have a pack going it will be easier to recruit folks to play the game. One of the cool things about MuMuPlayer is that they realize that people are probably going to at some point try playing multiple accounts… like is often the case with Gacha games. So there is a built in functionality to spin up new emulator sessions. This is often done for folks who want to keep playing the game, but have long run out of the “stamina” mechanic for that game.

First you have to enable multi-instance support from the emulator when it is running through the “…” menu up at the top. Then once you get into that you can create new instances of android. I named mine after the accounts that I used to create them so I can keep them straight. Unfortunately this means that you are going to have to go through the process of installing Destiny Rising on each instance, which will also mean that when a patch gets applied… you have to manually patch them up as well. I am MOSTLY doing this so that I can get an extra signature to make sure that the pack gets created smoothly. However Ace’s spouse has recently started playing, so I might start running around on this character, because the grouping we did last night… was a bit overpowered with us playing our mains. That is not to say that I won’t likely catch this account up quickly however.

I decided to roll with a Femme character this time around, but I have to say… just like with the Masculine options… there really were none that I necessarily liked. In both cases they were overwhelmingly soft features… which seemed odd for someone who is this big warrior type. Destiny had somewhat shitty character model options too, and I always got around this by playing an Exo. Unfortunately there are no Exo or Awoken options for Destiny Rising. I am hoping at some point we get the option to reroll our character features, because I kind of hate the void and appearance of my main character. I don’t necessarily love this second character… but the voice I chose is a little less “Golly Gee Willikers” about everything. Green hair is always the correct option… I blame Robotech for setting that preference early on.

The second account is a bit lucky… as I did my first few pulls off the permanent banner and already have a Jolder. I also got Ikora early and pulled Xuan Wei, Attal, and the newest 4 star Rossi-11. That is a pretty decent blend of characters to play. I will not be spending a single dime on this second account, and mostly will find it interesting to see if there is any difference between a purely free account and one where I have bought the subscription and battle pass. Of all of the characters to pull though… Jolder is probably my favorite of the baseline mythic characters. It will be interesting to see if I end up unlocking everything on this account. Sadly the Gwynn and Estela banners are long gone, and those are characters I really enjoy on my main account. Helhest is pretty great, but nowhere near as good as either of those characters.

Over on my main account I am a bit stuck. There is a material needed for high level artifact gilding, and it only comes from the Expanse. I have earned my two for this cycle, and am now stuck waiting another 10 days for the expanse to reset so I can earn another two. I could in theory earn more by clearing another difficulty level… but quite frankly I am getting wrecked. I’ve gotten up to wave 19 in the second tier and am just getting shredded by these hyper melee focused mobs that bum rush me… and the objective that I am supposed to keep from taking damage. I am just not skilled enough to get through it with my current light levels on Estella, but I need to push her to a gold medal in order to unlock the next tier of ascension. I could in theory reset progress on Jolder and claw back those resources… but that seems like a bad idea since I love playing Jolder.

In other news, I pulled Riskrunner from the Legendary Campaign… but unfortunately don’t really have the resources to push it up high enough to be useful. This is a solid option for Jolder to use as a primary weapon. Especially if I take any arc damage, Riskrunner used to be brutal in specific content in Destiny 2. I am going to push it up as far as I can just so I can run a few rounds with it to see how good it feels in this game. Unfortunately when it comes to progression… I am not even in a place where I can buy my way out of the problem by spending real world money. Like good on them for not making spending money the answer to the issues… but also it feels kind of bad that I have reached a point in the end game where progression happens every two weeks… rather than weekly.

I’ve also been playing a bit of Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 5, and it is wild to me how much more atmospheric that game feels as compared to Destiny 2… and by reference the style that Destiny Rising adopted. There is just so much going on in scenes and the weather effects feel like they play a much larger role in setting the scene. The lighting is much moodier and I think it really fits the almost horror elements of the Destiny universe. Of course this is from roaming around the Plaguelands, which is the very last area that was added to the game right before the launch of Destiny 2. But this also reminds me of how Destiny 2 in many ways felt like a step backwards… instead of a step forward. Rise of Iron was such a great expansion, and the game felt so much better at that point than the baseline Destiny 2 experience at launch.

Lastly we have a bit of Guild Wars 2 progress. Yesterday afternoon I was running Fractals to complete one of the weeklies and happened upon completing an achievement that gave me one Core Tyria mastery point. This was the last one that I needed to pick up my final Core Tyria mastery the Scholar of Secrets, finishing out the legendary crafting path. The irony is I have a stack of Legendaries thanks to the starter kits, but I guess if I ever want to craft the Heart of Thorns ones I have all of the necessary training. Running random Fractals is still a heck of a lot of fun, and I really look forward to this system going in for Raids and Strikes. Just being able to hop in on a Saturday afternoon and pop into some instant groups and complete that weekly was an extremely nice feeling.

Hopefully yall had a pretty great weekend. I feel like I need to start crafting a Destiny Rising Tools page like I have for other games, because there is not a ton of infrastructure out there for up to date information. If nothing it will give me a spot to jot things down as I learn them. I am extremely sold on that game, and if you ever liked Destiny at any point in the past, I highly suggest giving it a spin. Soon I hope to have a pack to be able to invite folks to.