Sandbox Archives - Page 18 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Base Building and Wormholes

July 11, 2014 by Belghast

Zombie Shamble

This morning I am shambling around the house in a zombie like state. For whatever reason I seem to have not slept well last night. I remember waking up at many moments to either kick the covers off or freezing and cover back up. My wife has wondered if she is coming down with something, and I am honestly starting to wonder if this is something more than just allergies. All I know for certain is that I could not seem to regulate my body temperature last night, and the constant pile of cats didn’t really help with the ability to get comfortable. I generally had one pinning my legs down and another stopping me from rolling over, while a third fought for control of my pillow.

I enjoy the hell out of my wife. She can fall asleep without any preparation and tends to sleep all the night through. She can fall asleep at like 8 pm and then transfer to the bed and continue sleeping the rest of the night through. I wish I could do that, but if I take a nap it completely destroys my ability to sleep that night entirely. Additionally I never can seem to functionally get more than four to six hours of sleep in any given night. The result of too much sleep is pretty much the same as not enough sleep for me, resulting in a morning much like this one where I have trouble stringing contiguous thoughts together in my head.

Base Building and Wormholes

Last night I spent most of the evening plugging away on building my base on the Alliance of Awesome server while watching season four of Farscape. I had a simple mission last night, to figure out a way to protect my base from invaders that all too easily could drop down from the cliff above or jump across from the trees nearby. As a result I harvested copious amounts of wood surrounding the cliff to remove the ability for them to perch on top of the trees and drop down from above. The main mission of the night was to find some cactus. The area the spawn is near is a mixture of heavy forestation and to a lesser extent swamp land. While we have an ample supply of cows and horses there was no readily available desert biome.

As a result I started going on these daytrips out as far away from my base as I could before eventually teleporting back using the /home command at the last possible moment before nightfall. While the majority of these were mostly futile it did allow me to stockpile the various things you can get from killing animals and I have a 50 stack of steaks that should hold me for some time as well as a lot of chicken and ham. In fact I brought home so much of it that I had to break down and build several more furnaces so that I could cook each meat at the same time. During my evenings in game I would work on harvesting out the hillside quarry that links up to my fort out on the water.

Cactus Finally

On the four trip out I was getting to the point where I thought maybe just maybe there was not a convenient desert adjoining the biomes in any direction. I had crossed every other imaginable biome, except maybe deep jungle when I started to stumble into what looked like a savannah. Then on the far side of that I started to see some sand dunes. I was starting to get a little edgy however as the sun was extremely low in the sky, which mean I did not have very long at all to harvest any cactus I happened to find. So as night fell I wandered around the desert gathering up whatever I could get. A warning for anyone who heads to that desert… it seems to almost entirely be spawned with endermen.

I gathered up around 30 blocks of cactus and ported out of there with the /home command. I wish I had taken more screenshots but I was in a rush to get the resources I needed and get out of there. In the Savannah region there was what looked like an abandoned safari hut. I would think it was a player creation, but there were absolutely no torches anywhere and it was completely open up on one end. I am wondering if this is a new type of prefab since I last played the game. There were no resources in it other than a crafting table that had been embedded into the floor. That is one of the things that I find most interesting is that since I have not played much minecraft in a long time, there will likely be a ton of things that are new to me.

Defensive Position

2014-07-11_06.19.32

As you can see in the above photo I installed a row of cactus as a defensive barrier to stop things from either being able to scale the sides of my base or drop down from the cliff above. It doesn’t stop the spiders from trying, because every night there is at least one that suicides down on the cactus dying well before they make it into the base. Right now I have a pier or sorts that connects the door into my base to the landmass and I am thinking about putting a line of cactus there as well. It does an amazing job of blocking bad stuff from getting to your base. Right now I am also trying to tunnel towards the spawn so that I can hopefully have a route to get back there if needed.

I’ve started my mine down to try and harvest some diamonds, but that plan fell apart completely when I broke into a rather shallow cave complex. There is still a ton of iron and coal that I need to harvest out of that at some point and sure up the stairs so I can continue to go down past it. Like any Minecraft session I have more projects that I have focus to complete them. At some point I want to expand the main tower structure to go up into a lighthouse of sorts. In order to carry that off I am going to need either some lightstone or some netherrack… which both mean a trip into the nether. Which also means that I need to find plenty of diamond, and use it to harvest obsidian. There is quite a large amount of surface spawn lava nearby so that shouldn’t be a huge ordeal to safely harvest obsidian. In any case… I seem to be obsessing about Minecraft again.

#Minecraft

Return to Minecraft

July 10, 2014 by Belghast

When it Rains…

The old euphemism “when it rains it pours” is fitting today because it is absolutely drenched outside… and additionally we have been dealing with all sorts of issues this week. Over the weekend we had to deal with my wife’s vehicle and the tensioner going out in a rather dramatic way. For those that don’t remember we were driving Sunday and the bolt essentially sheared causing pretty much every light on the dash to come on at once and us to barely make it home before the engine overheated to the point of no return. Monday during the day we got that issue fixed and it was a rather simple mistake that lead to it. I thought we were done with our auto troubles for the time being, but reality seemed to have other ideas.

Yesterday over lunch I ran to Target to pick up cat food and while I was out something to eat. When I started up the jeep there was a very loud mechanical whirring noise that I didn’t recognize, but otherwise the vehicle seemed to perform fine so I tried my best not to think about it. As I was heading back from lunch and entering the edge of downtown I noticed that the red battery light had come on. At this point I am not really sure what to do… I’ve had a few alternators go out, and generally speaking that light combined with the whirring noise I heard earlier probably meant mine was dying. I parked in the garage and went into the building calling the shop to see if they could work me in. Sure enough they could, so I thought I would try and make my way there, hoping I did not get stranded along the side of the road. I mean we have AAA so in theory there was never really the chance that I would truly get stranded… but I crossed all my things in hope that I made it through successfully.

When I got out into the jeep I turned everything off that could possibly be drawing power. So by the time I made it to the shop I had a rather sweaty windblown hairdo that I am sure was extremely attractive. Thankfully the shop we use is around the corner from my house so I could drop the vehicle off and walk home. Just about the time I walked in the front door my phone was ringing. They had been able to assess the issues and said it was in fact the Alternator, that the bearings were bad and it would need to be replaced. About three thirty they called back letting me know the vehicle was ready for pickup. It is probably a bad thing that the girl behind the desk addressed me by name when I walked through the door. That means we have been in there entirely too often lately. Good news is that my Jeep appears to be fine now, and since both of our vehicles are paid off… I guess paying a car payment a piece worth of repairs is not too bad in the long run.

Return to Minecraft

A few days ago Zeli mentioned that she would be setting up an Alliance of Awesome Minecraft server so that her child could have a safe place to play the game. It is a whitelist based server, and since my Minecraft name is pretty easy to remember I asked her to go ahead and set me up. Last night I finally got around to logging in and playing. For some time House Stalwart has had a Minecraft server run by a member, and at this point we have conquered pretty much all of the land surrounding the spawn point for a few days worth of travel. While this huge sprawling city is awesome to behold, it doesn’t leave much room for you to go out and tame the wilds. So I opted to start fresh on a brand new server, since really the “taming the wilderness” phase of a new server is the most enjoyable for me.

Zeli started us off with a stack of steaks, a steel pick and steel sword, which is a pretty good toolset to gain a foothold in the wilderness. I however squandered this horribly. Having been so long since I played on a server, I forgot about all of the controls like /sethome and wandered around at night for awhile and down into a cave managing to get myself killed… and as such losing all of the nifty baubles that I started with. I really had no clue where I was in relation to the spawn point, so I pretty much set out to start fresh. We have a village near the spawner, and I managed to find it… which means that we also have the village trackstar zombies at night spawning near us. It took me a lot of deaths to finally get to a place where I had enough tools to defend myself.

I did not get terribly far, but right now I have the start of a mine dug into the side of a hill, with a bridge extending from it out into the water where I am slowly building a tower of sorts. I figure the mine will feed my need for resources and the tower out in the middle of a pond will give me plenty of defense. Just going to have to come up with a clever way to get in and out of said tower. The area I am in for some reason has a couple of golems spawned near me, which do a fair job of keeping the baddies away at night. I am guessing someone spawned the golems at the spawner and they just wandered off. Additionally there are mass amounts of horses and cows where I am set up at, meaning I have eventual transportation and a ready source of meat and leather. This time I did remember to type /sethome. Right now I am very much in the “locking things down” phase, trying to create something that will protect me entirely during the nights.

Farscape

While playing Minecraft last night I opted to hang out downstairs and watch Farscape. This is one of my favorite television shows, but I have not actually made it all the way through the series. I was at the very tail end of season three when Netflix lost the license to the show the first time. For awhile I was having them ship me individual DVDs but that process got rather frustrating. I could have of course gone out and found the episodes otherwise, but I got sidetracked. At some point in the last few years they managed to get the licensing set up again and all of the episodes are now ready for streaming in all their glory.

The thing I love the most about this show is that it actually has some pretty diverse aliens that are both a member of the crew and ones that you encounter along the way. The claim to fame of the show that it was done by the Jim Henson creature shop, and because of this the aliens that are brought to life by master puppeteers just have a realness to them that you cannot get with CGI. Dominaar Rigel feels like a real character and not a small puppet, and because of this the show has held its production value, whereas most science fiction feels cheesy a few years after it is made as our graphical standards keep increasing.

At this point I have just finished season three and am ready to start the fourth and final season. If minecraft continues to hold my interests, I will probably spend a few more nights watching Farscape and building away in the Alliance of Awesome server. In fact I think that is what I did last time I watched Farscape… build away on the House Stalwart server. Minecraft and watching television seem to go hand in hand for me. If you’ve never seen Farscape I highly suggest you check it out, as it has this whole Buck Rogers meets Star Wars feel to it. I pretty much like all of the characters except for a late addition to the crew … Jool. It is not that I mind her character, it is that I mind the sonic assault that is having her in any sort of action situation. When she gets freaked out she emits this high pitched scream that drives me up a wall.

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`

Band Back Together

June 9, 2014June 8, 2014 by Belghast

Lackluster Milestone

This past week I have been pushing hard to meet a personal goal. Inside FitBit on your profile page they have this little progress bar with a weekly goal of 70,000 steps. So I have been pushing all week to try and hit 10,000 per day to make sure I could reach this goal. I thought lights and buzzers would go off when I hit it, or at the very least I would earn a badge for it. Problem is that we recorded the AggroChat podcast last night, and immediately afterwards we went for our evening walk. When I got back in my mind was on the podcast that I needed to edit and I spent until well after midnight doing just that. So by the time I actually came back to the website and checked my progress… the bar was back at 0. I never got to see the bar full, because I really wanted to take a screenshot of it. Unfortunately however they have no mechanism to go back and see how you did the previous week… seems like a massive design flaw.

Right now my 7 day average is over 11,000 steps and my total for last week is 79,818. I have to just be at peace knowing that I did in fact accomplish the goal… even though there is nothing showing that I did. The problem with the fitbit is it is also a double edged sword. When things aren’t being tracked I just as quickly stop caring about the overall progress as I started. I try my best to charge my band at work when I am not going to be walking around for a bit. However at one point Friday I got up to go to the bathroom… and started to take the “long route” that involves basically walking the entire floor… but stopped the moment I realized I didn’t have my band on. If it was not getting recorded… it was immediately not worth the effort. I know this is a jacked up way of looking at things, but anyone who has done one of these always on pedometers likely experiences the same thing. I am somewhat disgusted with myself because this is only steps away from “food only being good if you took a picture of it”, but alas the positive effects of the fitbit far outweigh the negatives.

Band Back Together

Last night was a fairly monumental occasion because for the first time in a month we had our regular cast of hosts for the show. Rae has officially decided that she no longer hates us… even though she swears that she never actually did. She has started employing the wonders of her phone and setting an alarm for recording time. This week we talk about all sorts of interesting things. Kodra is going to be out next week at Origins game fair in Columbus Ohio. This con has a pretty proud tradition of competitive gaming and he is going there to participate in the regional for the My Little Pony card game. We’ve talked about this TCG before, but Kodra gives us a nice long rundown of the two decks he is considering taking to the competition and the strong points of each.

We talk for a bit about the World of Warcraft Alpha launch and more specifically its timing. Finding it really interesting that for the most part it has no NDA. I am wondering if this is going to be the case for all new Blizzard games considering Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm do not have NDAs associated with them either. Finally we get around to talking about the real big event of the week… all of us dipping our toes into Wildstar. It was a really great show, and it was awesome to finally have the regular cast all in one place again. Kodra introduced a new feature at the tail end of the show, where he, Rae and Ashgar talk about the League of Legends LCS games… and I sit in the background confused with nothing at all to add to the conversation. That said I am going to try and watch a few games to see if I can get into it now that I am regularly playing league again on Thursday nights.

Shards Online

For the next several hours you can download and play the trial of Shards Online. One of my good friends is on the community team for this game, so I have been promising for a bit that I would check it out. At face value the game seems like the spiritual successor for Ultima Online. Functionally playing it, it feels a lot like playing Neverwinter Nights mixed with a MOBA. You essentially have the standard left click to attack auto abilities and then special abilities aligned to QWER. Functionally it is a unity based game, so that means it should run well on multiple platforms. The current client is pretty poorly optimized and on my laptop that has dual Nvidia 660 GTX video cards… I was only seeing around 30 frames per second. However given time that should change as they optimize the settings.

The gameplay is really intuitive and straight forward, and for the most part I felt like I could take a number of mobs in the test shards. The shards that are available are all significantly smaller than the final size, and designed simply to give a player a feeling for the gameplay. The real promise to me is that players will be able to have a certain measure of control over their own game worlds. In the days after I left Everquest, every so often I would dabble in the emulator server community. I had insane amounts of fun redesigning zones and on one of my forays I completely reworked the way that the entire butcher-block to crush bone sequence worked evening out the rough spots in the leveling curve and re-itemizing the entire thing. I worked on bringing the Dark Elf influence to a higher effort with camps of actual Dark Elves scattered around the closer you got to crush bone.

So for me the promise of shards is that you can legally run your own server, and configure a community the way you want it. That said I am not sure if this is a game for me. I really do not like a click to move environment, and the graphics while charming feel like a throwback to an earlier era. I simply do not have the nostalgia about Ultima Online that many players do. I played a very small bit of it before finding Everquest and getting into that game. So my “good old days” are not Ultima but instead a mixture of EQ, DAoC and Vanilla World of Warcraft. As a result I feel like I am missing a piece of the charm that is this game. For someone who pines for a return to the days of Ultima Online… I feel like this is your opportunity to get into a world and help shape it. For me, it is just a really interesting novelty.

Shards is a game where you start out extremely weak and then build up your character over a number of painstaking levels. As a result my desire to zerg rush camps and play action hero style caused me to see this screen a lot. Not sure if there was really a death penalty other than having to wait for the release timer to tick down, but I died often enough to realize this is not my style of game in that aspect either. I think it is going to be interesting and I hope we see a massive surge in funding thanks to the preview weekend. I think the lackluster funding is mostly a side effect of kickstarter fatigue and the lack of kickstarter MMO projects that have actually released. In a way however I also feel like Shards is a game for an earlier era, and is not really the type of game to appeal broadly to currently MMO gamers. If you however want a trip down Ultima Online memory lane… this game is for you, and I hope you give it a try.