Tales of the Aggronaut

Minecraft But Cumbersome

January 9, 2025 by Belghast

Hey Folks! I guess I might still be taking a bit of a break given that I did not blog yesterday. I am mostly spending my evenings chilling out mapping in Path of Exile II while listening to the latest book in the Divide series by J.S. Dewes. However there is another game that I have been exploring a bit. One of my friend tipped me off to Vintage Story, which is a game that attempts to bring back the confusion and fear that was playing Minecraft back in Alpha when we did not have all of the patterns and progression trees memorized. This game has apparently been out since 2016, and started its life as a mod of the same name. However mechanically it feels fairly similar to Minecraft in that you punch blocks to harvest them, place them with the right mouse button, and open your inventory with E.

The similarities however go careening off a cliff pretty quickly. In Minecraft you punch a few trees, get some resources to craft some basic tools and then rapidly start progressing your way up through the skill tree as you immediately dive into being able to mine resources properly. In Vintage Story… you go through the Stone Age first. Essentially in that first day you are looking for a few resources, the first being flint, which shows up occasionally in these stone piles scattered around the surface of the world. In the above image there is a stonepile in the middle of the screen, and flint will show up as a slightly darker colored rock in those piles.

When you have at least two pieces of flint you can create your first tools by the process of knapping, which is a legitimate thing that our ancestors used to create effectively the first known tools. Essentially in the real world, you use one rock to flake off pieces of another rock until you have shaped it into the manner that you wanted. In Vintage Story you place down the stone on the ground and then slowly knock out pieces of rock until you have freed the shape of the toolhead that you are trying to create. Initially you are going to create a Knife which then can be used to harvest plants, because you will need grass and reeds to progress further.

Once you have a toolhead you can place it in your crafting inventory along with a stick, which you can either pick up off the ground, or get from punching bushes rarely. You can also create an Axe with flint that allows you to start felling trees… and then taking those logs and splitting them into firewood. When combined with dry grass you can create your first campfire. You have to use dry grass and sticks to create a firestarter though… which has a seemingly random chance of lighting something on fire as it loses durability.

Once you have your trusty flint knife, you can wander around and find bodies of water… which often have cattails growing beside them. You can now harvest these and then use them as reeds for the creation of wicker goods. Namely you want to create hand basket which allow you to expand your meager inventory beyond the tool hotbar slots. You can also use these to create more permanent chests that will be helpful once you settle down and build shelter.

I built a relatively simple shelter… that is honestly quite ugly… but I don’t know how to make decent looking building blocks. Essentially the game has a day/night cycle that is 45 minutes in length. In the default survival mode when night falls, a monster type called creeps spawn and hunt you down. You have to be inside in order to really survive this. Similarly wolves are another massive problem in survival mode as they will aggro you from quite a long distance away and chase you for a good ways before giving up. You can also customize your difficulty level, and for the time being I am playing on a custom mode that delays the nighttime spawns for several days and makes wolves neutral. I am essentially trying to get my feet under me before I deal with chain deaths.

I’ve reached the point where I am beginning to move into the metal age, and with this I need clay in order to form molds and crucibles. Essentially once you have a shovel you can seek out clay deposits and then similar to knapping, you form the clay into specific shapes building up several layers of blocks until you have reached the final shape. Here I was creating four crucibles where I had to create the base for each and then build up several layers of walls before finally adding the top to the container.

However your clay doesn’t become usable until you have fired it in a kiln. The cool thing about this is… so far everything that I am doing in this game mirrors the real world practices. So the simplest form of a kiln is a pit kiln, where you effectively dig a whole… surround the raw dry clay vessels by material that burns, and then layer on things that will burn more slowly above that… finally lighting the whole mess and letting it burn and cool on its own. Weirdly enough I have actually fired clay bowls in the real world with a version of this… in essentially a metal trashcan. In the game version you dig a single block hole, place your vessels on the ground, layer up 5 layers of dry grass, then 2 layers of sticks, and finally place 4 pieces of firewood on top before lighting the whole thing. It takes 24 in-game hours to complete the process at which point you will have your fired pottery waiting on you at the bottom of the pit. These however catch EVERYTHING on fire… so make sure you surround the pit with some sort of non-flammable retaining wall. Definitely DO NOT do this in a wooden home.

There are a lot of random spawns out in the world, including traders that will buy things from you and sell other things back to you for the gears currency that they trade in. There are various ruins of buildings, that occasionally will have chests that you can loot with resources that you might not yet be able to create on your own. When I last stopped playing I was firing a hammer mold and a pick mold, and was roaming around the world looking for surface deposits of copper. The next step is to go through the process of smelting that copper in a crucible and then pouring the molten copper into the two molds. From there I will need to create a pair of tongs so that I can take the toolheads once cooled and go quench them in a nearby body of water.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the game is that it has a very robust mapping system. You can right click on the map and add waypoints noting various things that you find in your travels. I’ve heard that finding copper deposits on the surface also indicates that there should be nearby copper once you are capable of mining below the ground. So I’ve marked all of these with a copper colored pickaxe with the goal of eventually going back once I have the necessary tool to go exploring further. Similarly if you find clay, you can mark it on the map so you can go back later and harvest more of it given that there always seems to be a lot of it when it spawns.

The game is definitely interesting, but I am not sure if it is the sort of thing I will play with any frequency. I play games not necessarily to mirror the difficulty of how you might do the same thing in the real world, and while I appreciate the level of “sim” built into this survival Minecraft clone… it might be a bit too cumbersome for me personally for the long run. Especially given how quickly your tools break down, forcing you to create new ones. The level of nonsense that I am going through to create my first copper tools… is not something I want to do on a daily basis. In theory once you move on to smithing, things get a bit easier… but still the amount of resources needed to do only the most basic things seems a bit on the extreme side.

If you are the sort of person who likes to run Minecraft with the super simulation heavy mods installed, it might be worth checking out Vintage Story. One thing of note… this is not on Steam but is instead on Humble Bundle, Itch.io, or directly from the developer. I picked my copy up from Humble mostly because I already have a bunch of games on that platform.

Failed Goals: The Books of 2024

January 7, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I’ve not done as much navel gazing as I usually do around this time of the year. Normally I do these posts over the holiday break as filler to keep my blog active. This year however I just took most of that time off from blogging entirely. I think it was good for me to finally take a proper break. However this also means that you are probably going to get a spate of navel gazing posts now in January. During late 2022 and all of 2023 I was on a tear of consuming way more books than I have previously. Generally speaking in a given year I would normally read one or two books, but in 2023 I set a goal of 20 and made it through 52. As such I set the ambitious goal of 50 for 2024… and fell extremely short of it. Essentially I made it through 39 “books” though several of those were short stories and a few graphic novels.

I still use Bookwyrm as my primary platform for keeping track of my reading, and when I logged in I was presented with my summary of 2024. If you are curious you can also still see 2023 for reference, and weirdly I did not read that many fewer pages this year. Part of this was of course that I dove much deeper into the world of Brandon Sanderson and his epic over-thousand-page tomes. What kept me from my goal is the fact that I essentially hit a gulf mid-year where I just stopped reading altogether until the tail end of the year. Had I kept up a consistent clip, there is no doubt I would have burned through those 50 books that I set as my goal for the year. For 2025 however, I set myself a bit more realistic goal and landed on 30.

Another tool that I started using more reliably was Storygraph. This was a suggestion from my friend Cuppy some time ago as a Goodreads alternative, and more than anything the feature that I like the most is its recommendation engine. While Bookwyrm is my primary tool, I am keeping Storygraph updated as well and then using their algorithm when I get stuck for something new to read. I don’t use any of these apps on my phone, but instead prefer the web application experience. My wife however has shifted to using Storygraph entirely and uses the app reliably to keep track of her own reading. Sometimes its suggestions are painfully obvious, but occasionally it chooses something that would not have normally piqued my interests.

For example a few of my favorite short books last year came from storygraph. I would say honestly that The Lost Girls was quite possibly my favorite book of the year, and I would not have been tipped off to it were it not for randomly searching its generated suggestions. It is so painfully “90s goth culture” and well worth the read and has a sort of Vampires meets Heathers vibe to it. Where Darkness Blooms is quite honestly not that dissimilar from a book I read in 2023 called Dark Harvest, but it still takes an interesting spin on the “small town has a dark secret” trope. It wasn’t necessarily the most amazing or original book I have ever read but it sure was a fun little read and I would recommend it to anyone just looking for something quick.

Another thing that I am proud of from last year is that I made my way through the entire Dark Tower series back to back at the beginning of the year. This is something I had always wanted to do, but struggled to get hooked into. I am not necessarily the biggest Stephen King fan, but now having finished this series I understand a bit more of the unvarnished admiration of this sequence. I think my favorite bit of this series is the language of the characters… specifically Roland. I admit I have said “thankee sai” more than a few times over the past year. Admittedly… now that I am indoctrinated into the shared universe of the Dark Tower, I have a not so insignificant desire to go back and read some of the other King books that are connected to it as well. If you believe the fans… essentially EVERYTHING King has ever written is connected to this one universe.

As far as 2025… I am off to a decent start so far. I just finished the two books in the Cerulean Sea series by TJ Klune and will absolutely read the next one whenever it comes out. These are very much “Wizarding World” but unapologetically queer. In fact the afterword of the second book essentially says as much and that their goal is to write queer stories that embrace everyone. Really well written. I think I like the first book a bit better than the second book, but mostly because the second takes a bit to get rolling and is a very different sort of tale. Essentially all of the books from this author are soft adds to my long list of “I should probably read this at some point”.

I’m not really sure where I am going from here. I did not start something new last night after finishing Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I checked into a few things but they were not available through any of my now four library cards. I’ve been hesitant to dive into another Sanderson epic, because I know those are such massive commitments. I want to read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher so I might try and find a copy of that somewhere. I also want to dive into the Feed series by Seanan McGuire writing as Mira Grant, so that might be a thing I do. I’ve also read zero of the Murderbot books so that is a possibility as well. Maybe today I will decide where I am heading next so that I can go there tonight.`

An Unjuiced Life

January 6, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I took quite possibly the longest break I have ever taken with my blog over the break. It was good, and honestly I should allow myself to do this a bit more often. It isn’t necessarily that I did not want to blog, but more that I did not want to have to summon forth something worth talking about. I spent a lot of the break listening to audiobooks and grinding away in Path of Exile II, which is an extremely comfortable existence for me. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that I have landed on. I’m still mostly playing my Minions Infernalist and am enjoying the largely chill methodology of mapping. I can go days without taking a death, which makes it feel pretty similar to my experiences with Righteous Fire characters in the baseline game.

Even in the baseline game I am not what you would call a “Juicer” aka someone who buys optimized maps or optimized scarabs in order to run the most content dense and optimal mapping experiences. I am instead what would be referred to as an “alch and go andy”, where I greatly prefer running whatever maps happen to roll when I throw an Alchemy Orb at a white map, and then utilize whatever scarabs happen to drop. This is also the way that I have been playing Path of Exile II, where I am relying entirely upon drops in order to keep “map sustain” going. The thing that I have learned is that in order to do this, you really need to target Boss maps, because they seem to have a much higher density of T15 map drops. Bosses seem to be guaranteed to drop two T15 maps, and then during the course of the map you will often see one or two more T15 maps meaning that a single boss map can sustain four or five other maps worth of content. I am also getting enough Precursor Tablets in order to essentially cram one of them into every single Tower that I come across.

One of the things that I loved about Path of Exile, is the Delve alternate game mode where you spent your time spelunking through the mines looking for treasure. The Path of Exile II endgame atlas borrows a lot from this concept with everything being a bit more exploration based than the traditional Atlas progression. Delve for me was a game mode about finding the best possible nodes, and more specifically chasing the three Cities and the boss fights that could spawn in them which were capable of dropping some of the specific items that came from that game mode. As such my POE2 Atlas strategy has been about trying to find the three Citadels that can spawn, each of which containing a boss fight, as well as keeping a look out for any interesting unique maps that happen to spawn along the way.

Essentially Iron Citadels contain the boss fight from Act 1, and spawn in segmented off plots of farmland. You will often see the worked fields appearing on your map and the gothic buildings well before you actually arrive at the Citadel. Weird quirk of this specific Citadel is that they often spawn in clusters where I have seen three of them within a few towers distance of each other. Stone Citadels contain the boss of Act III and seem to spawn often butting up against mountain ranges. You will usually see a number of steppe pyramids and ziggurats in the near vicinity. The Copper Citadel spawns exclusively in the desert and contains the boss of Act II, and it will be in a larger swath of desert as opposed to sandy coastal regions. In this case you will see grayish green tents surrounding the few nodes closest to the Citadel.

Why am I chasing these Citadels? Well for one they drop specific fragments that are required to summon the Uber boss. However given the current one portal state of the game, I have zero interest in attempting the boss. Instead I am using these Citadels as a way of making pretty decent spikes of currency. The Copper Citadel seems to be the rarest, which is vetted by how much more these fragments go for as compared to the others. The most common seems to be Iron Citadels in part due to the fact that they often spawn in clusters. However I am guessing that the Stone Citadel can do the same thing given its fragment is just as cheap. Essentially running around 150% Rarity, I am pulling 5 to 10 Exalts per map run and then when I find a Citadel I get a rather large payday with the bosses often dropping two fragments each given that I can run them with my Atlas tree that buffs up their level.

Essentially I am running an Atlas that adds +3 levels to every single map boss that I encounter, as well as trying to stack as much rarity from the tree. I am specifically also adding some pack size nodes and ones that cause one rare in my map to duplicate. Basically I am trying to add as many rares to the map as I can, which is why I am also dipping into the Essence nodes just a bit, which means that I usually have one of those on each map. The only things in a map that drop any loot worth mentioning are Rares and Uniques, and as such trying to stack as many of those as possible really helps out. One of the interesting things about the node that doubles one of the rares, is that it occasionally also triggers on bosses giving me two copies of the same boss to fight at once. This can get a bit dicey at times, especially for bosses like the Miller which often like to time their attacks so you are essentially having to dodge from two different things at the same time.

Other than that I have leveled up an Invoker and now have it in maps as well, which makes my third character capable of mapping. I am trying to fix some of the survival issues with this character, namely that it is so much squishier than my Infernalist. I am probably going to respec the entire tree at some point and follow one of the other build paths that I have seen. I am running the Polcirkeln ring which means I do not necessarily have to run both Heralds to make big pops happen. This allowed me to pick up another defensive aura which helped, but also… given that I am having to charge into packs of mobs there is just a higher likelihood of taking random deaths. I’ve gotten used to my fart boots on the Witch consuming corpses and effectively making me immune to on death effects. I am pretty sure that all of the deaths I have taken on the Monk thus far have probably been triggered by something happening after I exploded a pack of mobs.

I am really interested to see what happens this week as GGG comes back into the office. I fully expect there to be some significant patches happening. We are essentially interesting a period of time which is the battle for the soul of the game. Either they are going to claw back the power that players have found dragging the game back down into its Ruthless roots, or they are going to lean into the play style that players seem to want. Ruthless is the least played game mode for a reason, and I for one am hoping that we see significant buffs to the under-performing classes and only the lightest of nerfs to the classes and abilities that are performing well. If they nerf my minions character, I am probably done with the game because quite honestly… nothing else feels good enough to keep me around.

AggroChat #506 – Games of the Year Show 2024 – Part One

January 5, 2025 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! It is that time again when we pull together our list of favorite games from 2024. In theory, we each get three primary choices and an almost unlimited number of honorable mentions… which causes us to divide the show into two packed episodes. In this case, we have 36 games on the list divided into two shows of roughly 18 games.