Sandbox

Black Forest Outskirts

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Yesterday I played an excessive amount of Valheim. I am still not entirely certain what it is about this game that ticks the right boxes for me, but suffice to say it does. After yesterdays post I did a bit of research and I now understand how one summons the bosses in this game. Essentially in each new area you are going to find an altar that allows you to sacrifice items to it. I didn’t fully grok how exactly this worked or what the game was trying to tell me. However near each altar will be a runestone that gives you a clue as to where to find the items needed for sacrificing. So for example the first boss in Valheim is a giant lightning deer and the clue that is given is “Hunt His Kin”.

Turns out the Deer Trophies that I had been collecting from sneaking up and “murderating” them with a knife… is the key to summoning the boss. I needed two of these and this summoned the angry stag god Eikthyr. Now the guides that I had read talked about needing a specific level of bow with specific arrows, but I opted for a more Belghast solution. I fought it with a Flint Axe and a Shield and this allowed me to block pretty much all of the incoming damage and time my attacks between blocks. It seemed way easier than I was expecting. Over lunch break yesterday I finished the first boss and moved on to the Black Forest.

This has also led me to build a brand new Chateau in a big open field near the entrance to the Black Forest. This became a necessity given that it was over a days walk between my original home and where my new hunting grounds would be for the next segment of the game. I opted for a completely different design this time, but so far my fortifications have not been needed. For whatever reason none of the hostile monsters seem to be screwing with my domicile this time. I do think I am going to make a jaunt over to the original home base and collect my bee hives because I have not had much luck in finding replacement Queen Bees to build new ones.

Truth is my second time around I made a much better home, minus the bit of floor missing… which worked out fine in the end because that is where I have my camp fires set up. I find it annoying that I now have to manage two fires given that I need one for the meat rack and the other for the cauldron. I however have so much more “room for activities” with this design as opposed to the more longhouse thing I had going on previously. Now I am very much in the mode of collect raw metal and create charcoal… which is why I left the meat on too long as an extra easy source of it. I can craft bronze which opens up a whole new world of gear that I can equip.

The one word of warning that I have is the Black Forest is a whole new world of challenge, and all of those things that you fought regularly in the lowlands seem to have a version that is much much harder to kill and attacks in packs. Gone are the Greylings that haphazardly roam into you and may or may not attack… and replaced are Grey Dwarves that attack in packs of five or six and have specialization with casters. The dungeons have been specifically challenging filled with Skeletons so I am getting much use out of my tier 3 gear and more specifically my shield.

The king of the “programmer art” creatures in this game though has to be the Troll, which looks like a giant doofy blob of humanoid playdough. They are however extremely challenging and while I have killed a few… they have taken me down to almost dead each time. Blocking helps quite a bit… but also does knocking them down which I am not entirely certain if it happens because I hit them in the junk or in the leg. When I am swinging my axe it sort of hits both at the same time. However while knocked down they seem to take considerably more damage which allows you to sorta power through with the kill.

I’ve found the altar for the next boss, and I am guessing that since I have killed a Troll I am likely ready to actually take it on. On the other hand I kinda want to finish crafting and upgrading my gear at this step in the game before moving to the next. Having a lot of fun with this game.

Valheim Early Impressions

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As is likely to happen, every so often a game comes from out of nowhere and takes the zeitgeist by a storm. One of those happening right now seems to be Valheim, a small indie survival game based on Norse mythology that has entered steam early access. Currently the game is $20 and based on the press I had seen about it, I decided to poke my head in. I have to say Valheim is charming in a way that most games in the survival genre are not, and it is very hard to put my finger on why. In many ways it reminds me of games like Outward that in turn remind me of my early experiences in MMORPGs like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The game sits in this really odd place of being both beautiful, and also a little rough around the edges. Take for example the character models. They are blocky and brutish and remind me more than a little bit of the faceless poppets from Ashen. I went with my standard beardymans look and ventured forth into the world not fully understanding what I was getting myself into. One of the interesting things about the game is that it works both as a single player adventure as well as giving you the ability to host your own server session or rent a permanent server space. Additionally your one character can span multiple worlds, so that when you feel like you have tapped out the resources in one… you can just move yourself along to a brand new randomized world.

The intro to the game shows you being carried into Valheim in the clutch of a giant raven. This seems very reminiscent to the opening sequence of Demon’s Souls. The key difference being you are effectively being carried by one of the messengers of Odin the all-father given his connection in lore to the raven. In fact Huginn serves as your guide to the world, and each time you encounter something new he shows up to teach you some lesson about how to utilize this thing. That said the game really does not do much in the way of hand holding at all, and you are effectively left to your own devices to sort things out. Shortly after the crow sequence the following text plays out on screen effectively explaining the games setting.

Long ago, the all-father Odin united the worlds. He threw down his foes and cast them into the tenth world, then split the boughs that held their prison to the world-tree, and left it to drift unanchored, a place of exile…

For centuries, this world slumbered uneasily. But it did not die… As glacial ages passed, kingdoms rose and fell out of sight of the gods.

When Odin heard his enemies were growing once again in strength, he looked to Midgard and sent his Valkyries to scour the battlefields for the greatest of their warriors. Dead to the world, they would be born again… In Valheim.

From here it plays out a lot like Rust or Ark where you start by punching trees and foraging berries and eventually build up to making proper tools and weapons that allow you to explore a little more safely. There are hostile animals as well as little forest Trog looking things called Greylings. They will randomly decide to come after you and also have the habit of coming around and messing with your stuff, pending there is anything worth messing with. One of the first missions of the game seems to be finding shelter, given that the nights can get very cold and if you stay cold for too long you start to take damage.

This was my very first “base” which ended up as a crudely assembled long house with a dirt floor and a few objects like a bed and a workbench. This served me well for awhile and more than likely I would have been just fine keeping this up. Knowing what I know now however, the Island you start on is dotted with ruined shelters that could very quickly be repaired to a pretty comfortable state much faster than going about building your own thing. On future islands I am probably going to seek one of these out as my starting base of operations. Instead I built a structure where you spawn in and have just been exploring out each day from that location.

There are interesting aspects of the game, like cooking for example requires you to stay by the fire and listen for the thing you are cooking to change the way it is sizzling. This reminds me a bit of the way that cooking in the Monster Hunter games works, in that you have a brief window of “doneness” that you have to harvest the item before it is charred beyond recognition. Side note however this is how you get charcoal that I believe you will need in the future for other things. I have a cooking rack over my fire which allows me to cook two slabs of meat at a time. I also have a number of bee hives that supposedly will allow me to start making mead… but I have yet to properly figure that one out yet.

My activity for last night was to build a proper house, which you can see in the last two images, the inside and the outside. I had to put fences around my bee hives because over night I could hear greylings messing with them. They got too close and aggravated the bees, which drove them away but I don’t want them to be able to break them. Finding a queen bee is enough of a challenge that I don’t want to lose one. As far as where I am going now… I am not exactly sure. For the time being I seem to be out of aspirational goals, so I think now is the time when I am supposed to fight the first boss. That is the other aspect of the game that is interesting is it apparently has bosses and dungeons. Neither of which I’ve actually encountered as of yet.

I did however get what I think is the boss to summon hordes of monsters to come attack me. This is ultimately why I put the row of spikes around the outside of my building, to try and double up the layers and hopefully be able to fend off and attack if I needed to duck inside and wait it out. The entire attack seemed to only last for a specific amount of time and I am guessing these are going to happen at a fairly regular interval until I defeat the boss. I have no clue HOW to summon the boss however and I have gone to the location where it is marked on my map and found nothing. So this means I am likely going to do some research and try and figure out what I need to do to move forward.

Regardless, I think one of the things that makes this game so relaxing is the soundtrack. It has one that is not dissimilar to that of Minecraft which at least during the day leads to a relaxing sort of vibe as you wander the forest looking for resources. Are you also playing Valheim? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

Adventures in Redstone

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It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.

  • The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
  • The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.

Redstone circuitry has always frightened me more than a little bit in Minecraft. I could get extremely simple automations to work, like opening a door from a switch but always seemed to struggle when it came to anything more complicated. So I now had before me the task of trying to figure out how to trigger six banks of four pistons all from the flip of a single switch. Pistons can move 12 blocks and if you attempt to move anything more than that they just fail completely. My field is laid out with a row of water every 5th block, though in truth I could have gotten by with significantly less water were I planning a bit better. Four blocks at once however is pretty much the upper bound of what I was willing to attempt to fire as a single mechanism.

I fired up a super flat demo world for the purpose of allowing me to sort out the mechanics in creative mode before attempting to apply the same logic in my single player world. I’ve not reached a point where I have unlimited supplies so I needed to be fairly judicious in the application of my resources. Even then I still built it wrong, but we will get into that later. Essentially my idea was to use sticky pistons and push the blocks to one side and in theory retract everything when I turned off the switch. The above image shows the final circuit design that I landed upon. Essentially a matrix of blocks connected by redstone with a single repeater to help boost the signal strength since redstone will only conduct for 15 spaces.

From there I decided to go ahead and create a larger scale mock up of the final machine, this time doing four iterations of the same modular design instead of the final six. It was around this point that I realized things were not going to work as I had originally envisioned them. This came from a simple misunderstanding of how sticky pistons actually work. In my mind they pushed a column of blocks and then retracted that same column of blocks as I had seen this behavior over and over in builds that relied on them in a vertical stack. When used horizontally they exhibit a completely different behavior of just pushing all 12 blocks and then retracting only the block directly making contact with the piston.

This lead me down the rabbit hole of not only needing six banks of four pistons all firing at once… but at the same time requiring a second series of six banks of four pistons firing in reaction to the first bank firing. Essentially I needed to shift all the blocks to one side and then trigger a counter event that pushed all of the blocks back to the other side. It is through the process of building something that you often learn how you SHOULD have built it. Where I thinking more clearly I would have simply set the circuit up so one side is always on and the other side is always off and the switch just toggles between those two states. However that is not the path I actually went down.

Meet the fearless observer block. The side with the cute little face sets towards a block of some sort that has the ability to change states. When this state changes the observer sends out a pulse of Redstone energy triggered out the backside of the block that can be connected up to some mechanism of your choice. The pulse is similar to that of a button push and I decided I was going to try and harness this mechanism to create my back process of triggering the opposite banks of pistons to fire resetting the playfield back to its normal position.

This ended up being significantly more challenging than I would have expected. In my mind how this should have worked was that I set the observer facing the empty block that I had on one side and as soon as a block was pushed into that spot it would trigger the back loop of the process and push everything back. This did not work in practice I believe because I was using a lever to trigger the entire process. This is the sort of revelation that happens long after you have built the damned thing and not necessarily in the heat of problem solving. So instead I switched to watching the state of the piston on the first bank. In practice what happens is each time I extend a piston or retract a piston it sends a pulse. You can slow this process down a bit by adding an additional observer which I ended up doing to fine tune the order of operations a bit.

The above image is the end result built in my single player world. Now is where I talk about how I did this wrong. Firstly I should have used a button to fire the event, and I think had I done so my original idea of monitoring the empty block state would have made things work perfectly. The second critical flaw that I did was use sticky pistons. This is all due to my earlier fallacy that using a sticky piston would pull the entire column back into place, but instead only pulls a single block. What ends up happening in practice is that on the back leg of the journey… a single block stays attached to the piston when it retracts creating a less than optimal situation.

However since I crafted 48 sticky pistons and lack the materials to craft another 48 regular pistons… I am pretty much stuck with this design decision for the moment. What I did in order to counteract this is dive even further down the rabbit hole and farm up copious amounts of clay and dye and create a rows worth of glazed terracotta. This block has the unique property of not being able to adhere to a sticky piston and as a result gets pushed neatly back into the original position by the second set of pistons. The unfortunate part however is that I have now lost a full row worth of plant-able space due to this design flaw.

At some point I want to replace the pistons at least on the backhaul side in so I can reclaim that row of planting space. I ended up building a way down into the mechanism of the machine that way I could debug any problems that might come up. Additionally there is the off chance that some of the produce will pop off and then get pushed down into the lower machine cavity and this gives me a way to drop down and double check that this did not happen. There are a lot of things that I would change if I ever did this again, namely I would just stick to normal pistons on both sides given that the “sticky” nature only serves to complicate the process. If I find another cache of Iron I will potentially swap them out and then switch the entire mechanism to work off a button.

The problem with redstone is the same problem with most of my development projects. You have to sort of force yourself to walk away from them otherwise you will continue fiddling and “optimizing” them for eternity. I set out to build a machine that would harvest my field of crops in with the single push of a button and I accomplished that. If it weren’t for the water… I would consider building a Minecart hopper system that cycled around the field collecting anything that dropped but that really is a path of madness. As it stands now… I just need to go find some more Iron before I do much of anything else.

Visiting Strange Worlds

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Good Morning Friends. I apparently am just writing about Minecraft now, given that it represents most of what I played this weekend. I did some offline work on the “Bel Bungles” world but even there I am several episodes ahead that are queued up to release this week. Thing I have learned is I am apparently really bad at ignoring messages, or not so much willfully ignoring them but being oblivious to them existing. Somewhere buried in my DM inbox was a message from my friend Zelibeli complementing my Minecraft series and inviting me to go play on her server. This weekend I took her up on that invite and spent a good chunk of Sunday making a bit of a home.

She had an exceptionally pretty and functional main area to greet folks as they joined the server. I had not quite groked how to do screenshots at that point because all that seemed to happen was a Mojang loading screen image. After some googling I decided to instead rely on the built in screenshot functionality which is F2 and I hopped in really quickly this morning to take a few. I decided to head out from the spawn towards the nearest mountain…. and then claim it. I made my way up the sheer cliffside overlooking the swamp below and carved out my first hidey hole that ultimately has served as my base of operations in this world.

As picturesque as looking out over the balcony to the swamp below was… it wasn’t super functional. So my first order of operations was to dig a shaft down to ground level and then establish a “main” entrance off the forest floor below. This would also serve as an easier way to get any of the resources that I couldn’t find by hollowing out the mountain Dwarf style. Namely early on I would need a lot of wood and as such I proceeding to create a clearing that would serve a few purposes. Firstly of course wood but secondly it would allow me to see something coming and not be quite so surprised when a Skeleton or Zombie is waiting for me that didn’t quite get burned up from the sunlight.

I decided that I also wanted to have a way to grow some food. Zeli had provided me a super generous care package that included a Diamond Sword and Pick, along with a full suit of Chainmail and a stack of Pumpkin Pies. That said I don’t want to rely on the kindness of strangers forever so I needed a place to grow at least some modicum of food, along with providing a large amount of wheat for some later shenanigans. So from my hole in the wall I carved up to the summit of the mountain where I begin building a fort. It is very much in the “ugly but functional” stage of the build, but I will hopefully change that as time goes on. Unfortunately I am in a snow biome which means that I need to be careful with any free standing water. Currently I am using trapdoors to solve this problem but I am not sure happy with the torches placed on top of them.

From the Forest floor outpost I also decided to start digging another shaft downwards looping back upon itself heading towards bedrock so I could start the process of harvesting my own diamonds. Along the way however I encountered an abandoned Mineshaft which has ultimately distracted and dominated my play time. Firstly these are disturbingly dangerous to break, and I am starting to wonder if there is a cave spider spawner inside of this one. I hear them everywhere and that means I have to be super cautious given their EXTREMELY virulent poison. The other piece that I did not realize is just how rich in resources abandoned mines are. Sure there are the occasional carts with chests in them, but mine has an absolutely ridiculous amount of Iron in it. Not to mention the just casual resources like wooden structures and tracks. My goal is to eventually harvest everything I can get from this place before moving on.

The only negative about playing on a server, is in order to conserve resources it doesn’t load in chunks that you shouldn’t be interacting with… which means I can’t ACTUALLY see the main area from my home without someone hanging out over there and forcing those chunks to load in. You can however see the big communal farm, or at least part of it. I wanted to start somewhere at a distance from the main area but also close enough pending I wanted to go trade stuff to someone else. For now I am pretty happy with “Mount Belghast” that I am slowly working on. I noticed the swamp below spawns Slimes on occasion, which should make for easy sticky pistons when the time comes that I actually need some for a build.

My heart still belongs to my private world that I am using for recording the Minecraft series. However I do want to make a nice little presence in this shared world. Huge thanks to Zeli for inviting me to her world, I might at some point record a tour video once I get things working as intended.