Enshrouded

Sibling Time

by

Good Morning Folks. Tuesday nights are often what we refer to as “Sibling Time,” where my sib Ace and I get together and either play Destiny Rising or just hang out and chat while doing our own thing. Since we are both somewhat down on Destiny Rising at the moment, we are trying to branch out and play some other things. Initially, I thought we might be able to do Dune Awakening, but they were just too new, and if I carried them… they would likely bounce from the game entirely. I did, however, figure out that I can easily retrofit my sandbike to have a booster seat on the back instead of storage. So when the time comes for them to go do some of the stuff in the area of Hagga South, I have built my base, I can zip over and pick them up. Hopefully, a weekend of piddling around in-game will give them the basis of being able to do group content together. I’ve largely finished Hagga South, and am about ready to transition to the zone just North, but I plan on leaving the base largely intact so that Ace can potentially claim it when they are ready to start doing stuff in the northern area of the zone. That is one thing that I wish you could do more easily: transition a base to another player rather than demolishing the control panel and then letting them place one instead.

We have been loosely shopping for other games to play, and one of them that we both enjoyed greatly is Enshrouded. So last night I logged into my level 25 geared out character that I have not played since launch… and tried to figure out how the hell to join a game with each other. Hint… you must be online in Steam in order to see each other in the game, so as two perpetually “Show as Offline” introverted goblins… we had to both show online for a moment while we joined up on Ace’s world. It was at this point that I saw their highly optimized base layout… and also might have given them more than a little bit of shit about not having walls. One of these days we will join my world, and they can give me abundant crap over the severe level of overbuilding that I do on my bases… which are extremely NOT optimized. Real talk, though, coming back last night has made me want to play more, and I am probably going to do so on the level 25 character since I don’t really feel like gearing out another one. Guild Wars 2 has kind of made me wish all games allowed you to reach a point of “forever gear” quickly and then just get to do the fun stuff.

For a while now, Ace had been telling me about all of the updates in-game, in part trying to coax me back to wanting to play it again. One of the feature drops specifically was something called Hollow Halls. These are a series of what can best be described as “Raids” in the MMORPG context, that were patched in with 0.7.1.0 from March 2024. I had done plenty of the more dungeon-like content in Enshrouded, and they were really fun, but also really short, and mostly focused around rushing to a boss and then taking it down and collecting the trophy. Hollow Halls are way more detailed than this, and to start off you have to begin a quest which grants you your key to the first one, and then completing each one unlocks the next Hollow Hall in sequence. Last night we did the Nomad Highlands one, which is the third of four Hollow Halls in sequence.

There are technically mini-boss style encounters scattered throughout the large sweeping dungeon, but the real challenge is the environmental effects, mob spawners buried in frustrating to get to places, and this whole mini game that focuses on finding a bunch of runestones, which then unlock the door to the next area of the place. The huge positive about this place is that effectively each “floor” has a spawner, so that if you die, you can get right back into the action rather quickly. There were a lot of puzzles that involved very careful gliding, and I happened to die on the lava… which was unfortunate because even though Ace was able to resurrect me, I died again before I got control over my character. Due to the spawners, though, I was able to bip right back down to where we were in a matter of seconds. We were playing on their world at the lowest difficulty settings, and even then, it still took us about two hours to complete this place.

One of the really neat things about these massive dungeons is that they have special block types that you can only get by finding chests in them. What was nice, though, was that just by looting the chest, it unlocked the block for everyone in the party. They also had their world set so that each boss dropped a trophy for every party member, which meant that we walked away with multiple trophies by defeating all of the mini-bosses contained within. I dinged level 26 while I was in the dungeon, and I believe when I last played this game, the level cap was 25… so it will be interesting to see how much deeper this rabbit hole goes. I am probably going to run around on my geared character for a while and then build out a world from the start so that I can see all of the content I might have missed along the way. I had a freaking blast last night, and I figure we will probably be doing more of these Enshrouded nights.

Another game that I have been wanting to play again is No Man’s Sky, and it turns out they have also been playing around a bit. So after concluding our Enshrouded time together, I popped over into NMS and started a new, relaxed character. I made it through the initial sequence of getting my ship up and running and am on the second planet. There are tons of games that we both enjoy playing; we just need to set the focus on actually playing them together. I also think that I might have convinced Ace to give Path of Exile another shot with the upcoming 3.28 league, so that will be fun as well. Sibling Time is one of those sacred rituals in my life, and especially after the passing of my partner, I have needed it more and more as a stabilizing force. A few hours doing dumb things with Ace, cures many ills… and there is so much of me that wishes that we had actually gotten the chance to grow up together, rather than being adopted siblings.

If you’ve not played Enshrouded in a while, I highly suggest checking in on the game again.

Voxel Crafting and Headpats

by

Good Morning Folks. I’ve been intermittently blogging for the last few weeks, mostly because it just does not feel like I have a full compliment of stuff to talk about right now. I am still mostly mainlining Guild Wars 2, and chipping away at various achievements. I’ve stalled out a bit on the whole Vision track thing, but have pushed Tailoring up to 500 on the Necromancer, and Leatherworking to 470 on my Ranger largely so that I could consume down the various ascended materials that just sort of clog your inventory. At some point I should work on pushing Armorsmithing up to at least 450 so that I can craft ascended gear for every weight. I’ve made a decent amount of gold selling some Celestial gear that I made for leveling purposes, because the market still seems to be hungry for that. It makes sense given that there are so many do “everything with this build” guides that focus on the Celestial stat package.

My friend Zarly starting the game… has made me realize how much of the early experience from the standpoint of a brand new account… I just do not understand. I was going to start a series of getting started posts, but quite frankly… I have so much quality of life stuff on my account that I am not even sure if it would make sense. I’ve been kicking around the idea of registering a second Guild Wars 2 account from the standpoint of keeping it ENTIRELY free to play, just so that I can grasp what that later experience looks like. From that standpoint I could do a much better job of writing up guides, knowing exactly the limitations of what someone who has not dumped a bunch of money into the game has access to. Little things like explaining what the hell the parts of the UI are… would probably be valuable for someone just getting started. It seems like a heck of a lot of work, so I am not sure if I am going to go down that path or not… but it could be a valuable resource like some of my other getting started posts.

I think another part of my reluctance to blog is the fact that it is backyard time, which means I am spending at least a little bit of time each evening hanging out there. Greybie one of our outdoor feral cats has come to expect me to go out there pretty much every day. I will walk out the door and he will come running over expecting me to sit down so that I can pet him for awhile. I’ve charged up my Steamdeck and loaded it full of bite sized games with the eventual purpose of spending evenings out there with our retinue of ferals while my wife reads. This has not quite happened yet but probably will soonish. I need to find the battery pack that I have that connects up to the the steamdeck case so that I have a bit more longevity given that the device is a battery hog.

Over in Enshrouded, I have completed the obsessive building phase of my base and created floors all the way down as far as my current building limit will allow me. Towards the end I had the whole process of hollowing out the spawned earth down to a science. When I raise my base size limits again I will keep going down and I am just barely above this little plateau that I am likely going to build out to be a farming area. I built a temporary plank of stone so that I could take a single screenshot that encompassed the entire stack. So I will not start back up with an adventure phase next as I attempt to improve my base and rescue more of the craftspeople. Right now I have the Smith, Hunter, and Alchemist and am slowly working on getting all of their machines up and running. I need to craft some better gear, so that is likely going to involve some trips out to bandit towns to clean them out in order to get metal scraps that I can then convert into plates.

I did stub out my staircase upwards to the vertical limit and at some point when I want to go back into another building phase I will probably continue my stacks upwards. I legitimately have no use for most of the space that I am creating… but I just like having it anyways. My original thought was to take an entire floor and devote it to a single crafter, and that probably will be the direction I eventually go. Start building out the floors so that they have a little apartment area for the crafter and then a large open bay full of the crafting machines that they control, as well as rows of the conversion machines like the kiln to bulk generate a bunch of resources. Mostly this overbuild is in part because some of my previous builds just needed more space in order to operate at the level I wanted them to. Essentially I am viewing this world as my new forever world, that I will keep incrementing over time.

Lastly I have been poking around a bit with Lay of the Land, a new voxel crafting/building game that is in very early access. I had wishlisted it on steam some time ago, and recently watched a video from LevelCapGaming talking about their experiences with it. Right now you can gain access to the game through the $5 per month tier on the developer’s patreon which gets you access to various builds that they post. It is pretty robust but also… not exactly easy mode either. This game has a physics engine, which means you are almost certainly going to die the first time you attempt to fell a tree as it is very likely going to fall over on top of you. The crafting system works a little differently than Minecraft, but is also easy enough to grasp once you figure it out.

The game uses much finer resolution of voxels and as a result it can generate really interesting rounded prefab buildings. This however complicates the process of building a bit, but the game has functionality similar to some of the Minecraft modes that allow you to set a start point and and end point and will fill the space between with the same material. Crafting is also a bit different in that you throw items onto the ground and then hit R to pop up a menu of items that can be crafted with those items. It feels a bit odd but in practice it actually goes much faster than crafting the same type of object in Minecraft.

The only gotcha right now is that so far Lay of the Land is a single player only game… with a single map that gets generated and does not expand infinitely in any direction. I have no clue what the long term plan is for the game, but for now it is mostly just a neat single player experience. Just like I got in early with Minecraft, I figured I would go ahead and support this game and see how it develops. I am not sure I will keep the Patreon rolling indefinitely, but for the current moment it seems interesting enough to check out and see what I can do with it. The biggest difference between this game and Minecraft is that combat is actually pretty interesting. Mobs have attack patterns and do crazy stuff like throw bombs at you… which also means you are probably going to die a lot. I will of course talk about this game periodically to give you updates on my thoughts as it progresses.

Compulsive Building

by

Good Morning Folks. This past weekend I originally set out to start a brand new world in Enshrouded, and see all of the content. What I have done instead… is compulsively hollow out the side of a mountain, with the goal of building down to the shroud. There are certain patterns that I get suck in with games… where I cannot bring myself to do something else until the mission has been accomplished. I even built a worktable and a bed on this nonsensical shelf floating above the shroud just so that I could quickly reset the day or build more stone blocks as needed. There is nothing impressive about my build… it is mostly just a box, but I still find myself compelled to build in this manner. Often times I “pretty” the structure up once I have reached a point where I feel okay about it… but at least for awhile I always go through a bulk utilitarian building phase.

Removing spawned material in Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass… so what I learned when I decided to dig a basement at release, is that you can use prefab blocks as a way of removing chunks of the world in a consistent manner. For example my preferred floor height is two 2×2 blocks stacked on top of each other. So as I started hollowing out the side of the hill, I started placing these blocks and then removing them in a structured manner so that I could clear out individual floors of my weird boxy structure at a time. Effectively… I will probably be stuck in this pattern until I have hollowed out as far down as the current parameters of my base will allow. Then I will go back into a phase of adventuring again… until I can increase my base size… and then likely back to hollowing out the ground again.

This is not just an enshrouded thing… in Valheim I could not hollow out the earth easily… so instead I built this stupid network of connected bases. I had no real reason to build so many bases… but I just felt compelled to keep creating beachheads in new areas of the map. I even went so far as to create this secret base, with a hidden portal… that was MASSIVE and way deep out into the chain of islands on a shared map. I thought it would be funny if someone on our server stumbled onto it and wondered what the hell was going on. In Valheim specifically I used to use the fact that you could transport the same character between multiple save games…. to rapidly transport materials between locations since things had so much weight. I would pop over to a private save… dump my inventory, then move to where I wanted to dump the items in the public save… and pop back over to retrieve them into my characters inventory. I think this “efficient” gameplay annoyed Kodra who was all about the real world ramifications of having to transport objects around the world.

Minecraft is the real place where you can see my compulsive patterns in action. I have so many different save files… all with the same basic patterns. Something super common is my trademarked tunnels to nowhere. I will just start digging in a direction and keep going until I hit something that looks interesting. For example this tunnel goes for unknown thousands of blocks… I think I went through four diamond pickaxes to carve this 3×3 tunnel that effectively leads to nowhere interesting at all. I saved every bit of the stone that I harvested meticulously in a bunch of chests, so that I could then in turn use it to build other dumb structures that no one will ever see. A lot of times I will find myself compelled to build like this while I am listening to an audiobook or something, bringing subtle order to the chaos of the random spawns.

In the same save file you can see a “stack of boxes” similar to what I have going on in Enshrouded. What you cannot see is just how many floors are below ground that I compulsively dug all the way down to bedrock. Once you get down there… you can see a bunch of mining operations as I scoured the earth looking for resources. There are people who build pretty houses in these games, but for whatever reason… I always strike down into the earth to find my safe domicile. I think on some level if I had my druthers… my perfect house would be dug into a mountain side with big windows facing out into the world… but plenty of shadowy places where I can escape the light of day. I keep effectively building these same structural ideas in whatever game I happen to be playing.

Another thing you will find in a lot of my saved games… is interlinking paths that don’t really serve a purpose. There is no reason why I built skyroads between mountain peaks…. and then also hollowed out paths between them. Like there is no mechanical purpose to any of this. As soon as I closed off an area and lit it up, I was completely safe from anything that might spawn at night. However I just kept building these random terraces and cascading staircases that went up the sides of hills… and then dipped inside of the mountain only to poke out the other side and go in a different direction. My builds in games often feel akin to the Winchester house… where I just kept building for the purpose of building. Then randomly I will decide to roll a brand new world and start the entire processes over again.

Sometimes I will end up with something unintentionally beautiful… like this area where I dug into a mountain and found a natural grotto with waterfalls coming down from above and a subterranean pond. So I then set forth to build a stairwell that went up through said pond… for reasons that do not really exist other than to do it. I am sure all of this is some sign of a malady or something…. but I find a weird level of peace just sort of aimlessly building. I used to sit in the floor with building blocks, legos, or later contrux as a kid and effectively building the same sort of structural designs over and over. Now said buildings… exist in digital form. Because of this weird compulsion that I seem to have… all of these games will likely remain evergreen. Hopefully there will never be a time when I do not find joy in the simplicity of placing or removing blocks. On some level I think this is probably some way I deal with anxiety… because I am shuffling around quite a bit of it right now.

Email of Destiny

by

Good Morning Folks. I was sort of all over the place this weekend, dipping my toes in a bunch of different gaming ponds. However the absolute highlight of the weekend is attached to some deeply strange circumstances. On the 16th I got an email from Nintendo outlining how the Switch 2 Preorder lottery would work… and in it included the phrase “It’s your time to purchase” which it stated would be in the email you receive if you were chosen. Obviously I immediately turned around and searched for this exact phrase… and while I did not uncover an email from Nintendo it DID include an email draft that I never actually sent to a friend of mine… where I was sending them SWTOR patch notes. Thing is… this is a person that I used to talk to on a near daily basis… but had not talked to in years. We apparently had a brief conversation in 2021 but I have no working memory of this event.

We always had this weird tentative connection, and for the life of me I have no clue how we met because so much of my time in World of Warcraft is crusted with the dusts of time. However we sort of had this dynamic of being friends that went to different schools. Occasionally I would convince her to join in one of my mad schemes… or recruit her to join a raid here or there… but for the most part we operated in completely different circles. So completely out of the blue… and unlike myself.. I decided to email to see how they were doing. What shocked me the most is that I got a pretty quick response, which led to us chatting on Discord off and on throughout the day. I’ve lost contact with so many people over the years from leaving World of Warcraft to leaving Twitter, people who meant a lot to me and were really close friends… but also when it comes to online connections you never know how you are perceived in their eyes and how much of a friend they actually consider you. When I made a break from World of Warcraft I sort of put all of that in a box and shoved it into the back corner of a closet… and I am glad that I made enough of an impression for someone to be interested in reconnecting.

For other non-gaming related stuff, this was Eurovision weekend and it is always a highlight. Ace and I have been watching this for awhile… and then making random often snarky comments over Slack during the show. I feel like it was a bit weaker of a total show than some years, because there were way fewer “fun” acts and way more “serious” acts. It seemed to be the year of the torch song, and I was at least thankful if someone was going to go in that direction… that the best one won out. However the absolute highlight of the show was a collaboration between Kaarija and Baby Lasagna… the 2nd place but significantly better than the winner contestants from 2023 and 2024. They did this amazing fighting game mashup experience of their two fan favorite tracks… and then broke into a brand new song that they created together and dropped on the day the semifinals concluded. Unfortunately the ONLY way to see this if you are not in an EU country… is via this reaction video because the REAL video of the experience is region blocked.

Enshrouded dropped a massive patch that they are calling the Thralls of Twilight update. As a result Saturday I spent most of the morning playing a brand new character and new save file. There are so many immediately noticeable visual upgrades, but I have not really gotten far enough to experience many of the new content updates. I did something that I had never done before… which was place my original base flame on the edge of a cliff and then proceeded to build off the cliff creating a very defense-able location. My idea is that as I expand my base area… I can eventually build down into the shroud below. So instead of actually playing the game and progressing my character… I spent most of the morning carefully excavating the cliffs surface one 2×2 block at a time. I made a decent amount of progress and created this work platform down at the lowest point that the original blueprint of my base would allow. At some point I will start expanding down again to see how far I can get this time. As Ash stated during the podcast… I really am apparently a Dwarf because I do love hollowing out a mountainside.

Another game that I have been playing quite a bit of is Slormancer, which is a 2D ARPG with an art style and quirky animation style similar to Rogue Legacy. It is a really simplified version of the ARPG genre, and uses a dual stick style control scheme that would fit perfectly for a device like the Steamdeck. I’ve not actually tried it yet but that is on my list of things to do in the near future, because this seems like an ideal chilling in the backyard type game. It also has a bit of a feel of the 2D beat-em-ups like Guardian Heroes or Castle Crashers. I’ve not made it terribly far yet, but have gone far enough to unlock all of the characters and fight my first mini-boss. I think I probably prefer the knight to the huntress or mage, but have not really gotten far enough to unlock the various skill specializations. I know the mage got instantly better as soon as I specced into the ability that fires a second bolt after the first. Really cool game and I can see myself poking at it off and on for awhile.

I am also still playing some Last Epoch because every so often I just want to run a map. I feel like I am not engaged in Path of Exile for the moment, or at least not forcing myself knowing that when 3.26 drops I will be back with new force. Eleventh Hour Games keeps releasing quality of life updates, for example I noticed that when you click on an egg and search your bank… it highlights items with no legendary potential so that you can easily see which items that will work. More importantly though is the differentiation between the Tomb marker and the objective marker, making it much easier to complete maps in general. I know that my Not-Righteous-Fire Paladin is going to eat a nerf… because it is a bit too powerful… but I am hoping it lands in a still very playable state for next season. Though since they have already said Season 3 is going to be all about Necromancers… I am probably going to be playing one of those.

Guild Wars 2 lately has become my main game, and I am spending a lot of time in Dragonfall. I am not exactly sure WHY… but when trying to figure out my next project I landed upon Vision. This is an extremely long process that involves doing pretty much everything there is to do in the Season 4 zones, and yields a Legendary Accessory as a result. I figured I would start on the hardest of the zones… Dragonfall and have been slowly chipping away at various achievements. It might be easier to knock some of this out in WvW through using the Dragonfall Reward Track. Since I like WvW quite a bit… that at least gives me something to be working on again since I do not currently need another Gift of Battle. Probably the hardest sub achievement is going to be Championship Bout, which involves killing a laundry lost of bosses that spawn after you finish the zone meta event. In theory if there is a good commander and everyone is working together, you could probably get this in a single go. However without fail… the group fragments and folks start taking on random bosses meaning that no one group gets credit for everything.

I’ve made a lot of progress on various achievements though, and have used the Memory Essence Encapsulator for Dragonfall to finish that bit of the quest. This is going to be the hardest bit honestly, because buying each encapsulator costs a bunch of crafted resources… some of which I cannot make and will have to lean on the market board to pick up. The big problem is the Lesser Vision Crystal which requires 500 skill in either Armorsmithing, Leatherworking, or Tailoring… and I have not hit 500 in any of those. I guess that could be a side quest for awhile… to try and push one of those up. According to GW2 efficiency, my tailoring is the closest sitting at 465 currently. Since my friend that I talked about at the top of the post just started playing Guild Wars 2, and is playing a Necromancer… I might get some levels crafting them some gear which at least gives me a purpose behind spending the resources required.

Anyways… what matters the most though… is that I have objectives. That seems to be my key to sticking with any MMORPG is that I have some goal that I am working towards. When I achieve the goals I tend to fade away, so as long as I can keep grabbing a shiny new objective to work towards… I am way more likely to stick around for awhile. It was a good weekend, and I hope it is going to be a good week… though that is doubtful considering we have bad weather for the next several days. I am hoping no more tornadoes that come close to my house.