Sandbox

Slug Shakes with Friends

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Good Morning, Folks! Last night was our regularly scheduled Sibling Time ™, and I spent it with my sibling Ace. One thing that you have to know about Ace is that they love ANYTHING to do with the ocean, which means that I have more or less lost them completely since the release of Subnautica 2. Last night we decided to dive into the realm of multiplayer, and I have to say… much like it is with EVERY survival game… Subnautica 2 is better with friends. That is not to say there are no problems. Subnautica 2 has way more of a specific story than the first game, but less so than the expansion. The unfolding of the story happens in a very non-sequitur manner if you are not the person clicking on all of the objects. You will be exploring the world and have a sudden voice clip play from out of nowhere.

The game more or less follows a similar flow to the first one. You are on an Ocean planet, working for an evil corporation, and the first steps in this new world are to unjam your pod and send it to the surface. From there, you are gathering resources to build a more permanent structure and upgrade your kit of equipment to do various things. Where this game differs from the first one is that it adds to the mix genetic mutations that allow you to interact with various things that you cannot from the start. For example, before you launch your pod, you have to take an adaptation that allows you to process oxygen under the high atmospheric pressure of this planet. One of the first mutations that you seek out when oceanside is something that will allow you to process water and nutrients from the planetary wildlife. This is where the slug shake comes in, because effectively, you end up picking up these adorable sea slugs and drinking the filtered water inside of them.

Last night was a heck of a lot of fun, and we plan on playing on this same save file next week during Sibling Time. Probably the highlight of the night was disturbing this giant crab monstrosity that seems to churn up resources as it moves around. The other highlight is just how fast resource gathering goes when you have multiple people working towards the same objectives. We ended the night with a pretty sweet base, after our first one did not really meet our long-term needs. We had a lot of issues with that first base and object collisions, but in the second base, we largely built it once we opened up the ability to create rooms, so we have so much more space for “activities”. Right now, we are sort of working towards our ability to get a vehicle, and with that, I know that Ace is going to push me to start exploring the deep dark ocean that terrifies me so.

Since I have largely stopped playing Diablo IV, that means I am back in Path of Exile for the moment while waiting on the launch of Path of Exile II’s new league on the 29th. One of the characters that I really enjoyed this league is my yolo build around taking a guardian and then using a few new uniques to create a giant army of minions. Mostly, I guess I am seeing how far I can push this build before I lose focus again and start playing Path of Exile II. It is shocking just how well this build works and how tanky it actually is. It is nothing like my Righteous Fire characters, but it still has a fair amount of block and over 5000 life. I have been doing Delve with this character, which seems wild because you need a very tanky character for that. I’m not sure if I have ever had a Minions character that felt this comfy. Do I think anyone should follow this build? Probably not. It was super easy to level, and I mostly just typed Minion into the search box and went for those nodes.

I think for Path of Exile II, I am once again going to go with an Infernalist for minions. There does not seem to be any really popular overpowered build guides for this class, but my plan right now is that I am going to do what I did with the above build and just type “minion” in the search box and go where the nodes are. If nothing else, that should get me through the campaign pretty easily, and then I just have to work on defenses. My hope is that going Infernalist is going to allow me to pivot pretty easily into Raven Righteous Fire whenever I can get my hands on that staff. This first character will also serve as something to acquire some easy currency and buy some of the other new build enabling uniques. I want to try and shield throw/slam build with the new Tul unique. I am contemplating trying to do that build as a strength stacker with the new water sprinkler unique. Honestly, I am looking forward to playing some POE2 way more than I expected.

This was a bit of a mixed bag of topics, but as is the case often with my muddled chemo brain.

Goodbye Anthem

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Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.

I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.

I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.

This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.

I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.

In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.

Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.

Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.

Voxel Crafting and Headpats

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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.

Compulsive Building

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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.