Fake Plastic Trees

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve talked about Tripod before, the poorly named three-legged calico that lives in my backyard and has done so for the last three years. Lately, she has been doing something new and it is sort of adorable. I always feed in the mornings, but I don’t always feed in the evenings. There are some times however when she decides that she wants food and is going to tell me about it. This is a shot from our security camera from last night with Tripod highlighted in a green circle. She has started standing up on the garden utility box outside the kitchen window and meowing at the top of her lungs… which we can hear while we are upstairs. So of course, I obliged and went out in the dark and fed her… at which point she greeted me with a cacophony of friendly meows. I’ve questioned the relationship we have given that she is still very feral and still impossible to get near… but clearly it seems I am her human and my role in life is to provide food when she wants it.

The problem with doing a long series that spans three weeks… is that there is a lot of shit that happens in the meantime that I never talked about. On Saturday, November 19th in a fit of frustration I deactivated my Twitter account, shortly after Elon Musk had reactivated the account of Donald Trump. I was immediately reminded by many people… that in 30 days it was highly likely that some doppelganger would set up shop with my handle, and we’ve seen that happen several times before in the past. So Sunday morning I slunk back onto Twitter, reactivated things, and then decided to borrow a tradition from Mastodon. When you migrate your instance it shows a desaturated version of your avatar and your banner and posts a link to where you have moved. So @Belghast and subsequently @Aggrochat now show that I have migrated to the Fediverse.

I have to admit I am still exceptionally happy with the Fediverse and though I have had to move during all of the burst in activity to Masto.ai, I am way more engaged than I was for the last several years of Twitter. It seemed for a while that everyone would be congregating in one form or another on the Fediverse as Twitter has continued to degrade over the last few weeks. I always knew that there would be a group of stragglers that avoided leaving Twitter until it absolutely no longer allowed anyone to log in. However, what I did not expect is for another social network to come in at the 11th hour and distract everyone so completely. Hive Social… not to be confused with Hive the project management software, or Hive the blockchain nonsense company, Hive the grocery store, Hive the furniture company, Hive the smart home automation company, or even Apache Hive.

Hive is mobile-only, which immediately puts it in a lower-tier category for me personally since I don’t really use my phone other than when I am laying in bed trying to fall asleep at night. I am primarily a desktop user, which is also why I generally hate vertical format videos but that is a rant for another day. The service itself seems aggressively “fine”, but what it offers is a near-perfect amalgam of Twitter and Instagram and asks absolutely nothing from the user. You download an app, click some buttons, and you are immediately in a very familiar interface talking to hopefully familiar people. Its downsides however are that the performance in the app is awful… like staggeringly awful. Then there is the problem that you are moving from one walled garden controlled by a central authority to a different walled garden controlled by an “even less prepared to handle this fame” central authority. Then there is the whole issue that a key member of the team is a Milkshake Duck. I poke my head in from time to time to see what my friends who are mostly on that platform are up to, but I am not giving it much attention until at a minimum a web client exists.

What has driven me up a wall though is that while we have left Twitter, the same Twitter-like behavior persists. To quote a friend of mine “You can take the people out of Twitter, but you can’t take the constant self-promotion out of the people, I guess.” What particularly is driving me up a wall is seeing the same posts recycled between Twitter, Mastodon, and Hive. This “awareness” started when I followed an internet comedian of a sort that I had not followed in years on Twitter. They are known for short quippy posts that are mildly humorous and I was fine to have that in my feed on the Fediverse. That was until I saw one scroll past that I thought sounded really freaking familiar. It turns out that they had just been recycling posts from like eight years ago from Twitter.

Then there are the folks who are talking about how both Hive and Mastodon are the one true social network and so much better than Twitter… but posting the same statement to both platforms with only the names of the networks swapped. The above screenshot really bugged me the most though, because you have this faux heartfelt message… that showed up on Sunday on Mastodon… and then showed up almost word for word from the same person on Hive yesterday. The identity has been blanked out because I am not trying to call out one specific person, but a behavioral pattern I am seeing from folks who were micro-influencers on Twitter, trying to pack up that same game in their traveling case and take it on the road to the next network. You are better than this… We are better than this. It is one thing to cross-syndicate a post or share the same image in multiple places, but it is another thing to dive deep into the parasocial bullshit by cross-posting something that seems like a genuine unique sentiment.

I think that is the part of Twitter that always bothered me the most… the insincerity. When I start a post and address it “Hey Friends” I am not trying to pull on your emotional heartstrings, I am genuinely addressing you as my friends. I’ve been on the internet for so many years and the majority of my long-term friends… came from somewhere online. I never know when a random occurrence will become my next friend that I stay in contact with for the next several decades. I’ve always tried to approach each interaction with the possibility that it could be legitimate and genuine… but Twitter had burned me hard on this. So many times I found out that someone I thought was legitimately my friend, was just posturing and posing as one. Going into the Fediverse and Mastodon, I hoped that I could be open again… and for the most part, I am trying really hard to be. However, seeing the constant influencer nonsense taking place there and gaining a foothold… is making me start to doubt that it will stay that way.

Anyways I am home on the fediverse for better or for worse. I hope yall are having an excellent week, and I didn’t mean for this post to take quite the sharp downer turn that it did. Much love and hopefully tomorrow will be a more chill post.

Voidbent and Other Goals

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a very excellent Thanksgiving weekend for those in the United States. For those elsewhere, I hope it was just an amazing weekend. Last week I wrapped up a series of gear guides, and over the weekend I spent some time formatting that information and adding it to the New World Tools page so that you can find items for specific gear slots. When I started the project the entire intent was for me to be able to find a 590-named weapon for every weapon type so that I could use those for leveling purposes. It morphed however along the way into me documenting every camp I knew about and making sure the weapons shown on the loot tables were actually dropping. I had no clue it would take anywhere near as long as it did, but at least now I have a good series of guides as a result.

The problem with a series spanning three weeks is that there were a lot of other things that took place while that was going on. For example, I accomplished one of the goals that I set out for myself before re-rolling and that was to max out my armorsmithing and craft a full set of item level 600 Void Bent armor. While this isn’t the best set of armor by any means, it is sort of universally good enough for almost any mod of play in the game. The fact that I crafted it myself means that I get to take advantage of the entire item level without experiencing any drain due to my lower expertise. The benefit of the armor has been very noticeable and I can survive the higher-level areas of the game significantly better than I could before.

Out of all of the Greatswords that I saw dropped, I decided that Bloodsucker’s Sword best fit what I want out of a tanking weapon with lifestealing and leeching crosscut on it. Similarly, I happened to luck into a nice sword drop from Rafflebones called Jupiter’s Favor that has Mortal Lifesteal which will give me back a little life each time a mob that I have damaged has been killed. At some point, I would like to replace it with Deeproot, but that would require some more coordinated group farming to get. The shield I crafted from a pattern that came from the Halloween event. I honestly wish I had started farming those items sooner so that I could have collected an entire set of the item level 600 crafting patterns. Other than that I spent time upgrading my bags and crafting a full set of tier 5 tools. Last night while bulk crafting to level engineering I even lucked into a quad tier 3 fishing pole.

My immediate goal has been to continue pushing up my trade skills. At the moment I have been alternating between working on getting Engineering and Cooking up to level 200. I find Cooking way less enjoyable as it just requires large quantities of materials, but if I ignore it for a while I end up gathering up so many materials in the process of just playing the game. Engineering I can focus grind a bit better because right now I need so much Wyrdwood and Ironwood, but the lower level materials are essentially free. I’ve set up a base for this phase in Everfall and I can get enough low-level leather and cloth in order to keep the fishing pole farm sustainable pending I acquire the rarer Ironwood planks. At some point, I will probably end up focusing on other professions. I got furnishing high enough to make a set of trophies but it seems generally awful to level still.

I finally pushed the Everfall faction up to level 30, which unlocked access to a Tier 4 house. I purchased the one in the main town square across from the Inn and Trading Post. I contemplated where exactly I wanted my first home to be, and since I have had my inn bound at Everfall almost this entire time… I decided that was as good of an option as any. Right now my plan is to build back up my gold and then focus on getting a house in Mourningdale and a house in Cutlass Keys since I also spend a lot of my time in those two zones. At some point, I need to actually make my way over to Brimstone Sands, because for all I know I might fall in love with that zone. I am still chipping away at quests in Shattered Mountain because I am weird and obsess over doing things sequentially… I have yet to start on any of the new content.

In another time and another mindset… I would be preparing for the launch of Dragonflight today. I am not however and there isn’t any big reason why. I played quite a bit of the Alpha and Beta and thought the game was pretty solid, but I am just not drawn to the World of Warcraft style of gameplay anywhere near as much as I used to be. However, for all of my friends who are amped to be playing it, I hope you all have an amazing launch that goes smoothly and that the game reignites those fires of joy inside of you. For now, I am still finding myself enjoying my time in Aeternum. I still have hopes that we end up with a group of people at max level and can roam around and do some of the fun open-world stuff. However for the time being I might have to wade out into the broader community and start making some groups happen on my own.

Ebonscale Reach Earth Shrine Farm

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Good Morning Folks and Happy Thanksgiving! This year I am thankful that this is the very last post in this New World Gear Farms series. Normally I would take this holiday weekend off from making posts, but I wanted to finish this up and not have it extend into the third week of this nonsense where I post nothing but loot guides. We are going out on a bang though because this is maybe the best of the loot camps I have shared with you just in the sheer amount of possible drops. Today we are going to focus on Kilgoran one of the corrupted Imperial Dynasty folks that spawns at the Earth Shrine in Ebonscale Reach. This single mob features six notable 590 gear drops and is actually shockingly easy to take down pending you put a little thought into “breaking the camp” the first time.

This camp is also conveniently located due East of the main town in Ebonscale Reach. You visit this area for a series of quests that take you around to all of the elemental shrines, so it is highly likely that you have already been here before. There are a few options as to how you can attack getting to Kilgoran, you can of course work your way through the entire complex but this will involve fighting a significant number of corrupted mobs. The better option is to run in from the side along the water and jump up onto a floating platform just ahead of the stone area surrounding the boss. While doing the camp you will need to deal with a sword/shield corrupted, a bow corrupted, and two of the corrupted crawlers in addition to the boss himself. If you can time the kills just right you can get this camp into a pattern where you are killing something every few minutes rather than having to deal with everything all at once.

One would think a camp that has six different drops would mean I was here for longer than pretty much any other camp. That would not be the case and weirdly I managed to get everything in about three hours. I had very little in the way of drop duplication so that makes me think that all of these items have effectively the same drop chance. As always loot and randomization are weird so your mileage may vary significantly. I think for a lot of folks the Sword and the caster Neck will be the reason why they come out here as both are not available for any other camps. The other quirk of this camp is that there are two different shields that drop, one of which is Strength-based so it would be excellent for a DPS sword build as opposed to a tank build. Let’s dive into the loot table:

There is a very rare chance of getting Legendary Crafting Materials from this camp but sadly no Obsidian Gypsum chance. This is a really easy farm though to knock out a number of 590 weapons if you were like me and trying to get one for every possible slot. Essentially that is how this entire adventure started, is that as I was leveling more weapons to rank 20, I decided I wanted some of these tasty named items rather than random trash that happened to drop. I did not necessarily intend this to become a multi-week-long calling however or a central focus of my blog.

At this point, I am going to talk about something other than gear farming for a while because like me you are all probably a bit sick of this. That said one of the next things I am going to do is work up a per gear slot guide of a sort and add it to my Game Tools page for New World. I have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below. I am not opposed to doing more of this nonsense, but I want to have a bit of a break before I start talking about it again.

Edengrove Seniab Ruins Farm

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Good Morning Friends! We are closing in on the end now. I have this farm and one for tomorrow… and then we are done. I committed to this process not realizing how many there would be and I have to admit I have gotten a bit tired of this “bit” as I am sure you all have been as well. The end is nigh however so we are going to push through. This is another good farm not too terribly far from the Taedas farm we’ve already talked about, this time focused around another shaman-type Dryad named Cael. This one also has a Void Gauntlet and a Life Staff and I think the jury is out on which are the best set for which purposes. I largely came here because it was a relatively easy bow to farm, and also had another trade skill set item.

To get to this farm we are best off using the spirit shrine that sits smack in the middle of the zone, but it is also a fairly reasonable run from Valor Hold. I would however suggest making a detour and picking up that mid-shrine if you don’t have it. This is a much higher-level farm than most of the others we have been doing, and everything surrounding Seniab is level 60, so adjust accordingly. I would suggest plopping down a tent just outside the area because it is a fairly long run from the shrine if you are trying to recover. If you happen to be there will a full group, at the top of the tower, is a true boss named Baines that is way too hard to be duo’d. If you had four of five people you likely could take him down on the same respawn timer as Cael. Cael however is easily solo’d and if you sneak up the tower you can loot both of the chests behind Baines without aggroing him pending you sneak and watch your approach angles.

I personally find this to be a much easier camp than Taedas, even though the actual level of the mobs inside of it is much higher. There is also more to do if you are willing to do it, in that each doorway to Seniab has a dryad in it, with two warrior-types and two prowler-types. You can get in a rhythm where you kill Cael and the one warrior-type that spawns with it, then go around the room killing the door guardians, and by the time you finish with all of that… Cael is likely to be spawning again soon. Additionally, there are I think four chests in the vicinity without climbing the tower, and even more, if you do choose to climb the tower up to where Baines is. So if you are at the farm for very long it is well worth taking a trip up the tower every hour to get the chests. Let’s dive into the drops:

As I said before this is a really easy camp if you are needing any of the weapons that are dropped and probably the only bow that is very easily solo’d. I’ve been out here several times with friends and the Life Staff seemed the most common, followed by the Void Gauntlet, and lastly, I have only seen a single bow drop. Again with the loot weirdness that happens in New World, it is entirely possible that you will have wildly different luck with what seems to be commonplace for you. Again all of these weapons can be taken up to 625 with Umbral Shards pending you cap out your expertise at 600 for that weapon type. I did not see this boss drop any Obsidium Gypsum, so I am not entirely certain what flags a mob for dropping that. If you need some the easiest way I have found is the Putris camp.

One more of these to go and I will be posting it tomorrow regardless of it being Thanksgiving. I will be EXTREMELY thankful to have this series behind me. Once I have wrapped everything up I will be adding a section to my New World Gametools page with these guides categorized by the weapons that they drop to make things a little easier going forward for someone coming along after this series has finished. I have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.