Gaming

Gaming post

Egg Pitching Machine

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.

The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.

All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.

The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.

Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.

One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.

I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.

The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.

All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.

Luring Defenseless Animals

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So I am still on my Minecraft nonsense, and priority one for yesterday was to lure some helpless animals into my custody. We are not going to talk about the deeply disturbing things that I am going to put them through… or at least not until later. The biggest challenge was trying to separate the cows from the sheep because both of them were lured with wheat. It was pretty hilarious me slowly backing towards my base with a mob of five sheep and four cows. I created an impromptu dirt bridge across the pond outside of my base to make it a little easier and was impressed that none of them fell in the water. I did make it three blocks wide which seems to have helped in this case.

I also went out into the world and tamed a bunch of doggos. It is pretty wild playing this game while being trailed by six wolves. It ends up making the entire experience feel a bit more like a World of Warcraft Hunter. I plink something with an arrow and then before the mob can get anywhere near me my team of expert “goodest boys” has wrecked it completely. The only negative is that they won’t seem to attack creepers, which is one of my larger problems honestly. They completely destroy Pillagers though, and they are the sole reason why I was able to rain the nearby outpost and get myself a shiny new crossbow. I have no clue how to destroy said outpost, because by the time I was leaving everything was respawning in full again.

I did have to put my sweet babbos in timeout though, because digging tight tunnels while followed by six wolves… is complete madness. The best part about these kiddos though is that they eat zombie meat and seem to think it is good… which means I get to save all of the steak for myself and heal them up with otherwise useless junk. I specifically parked them under the shelter of my base because it felt awful to have them sitting out in the rain and weather. I have no clue why I am suddenly personifying these puppers, but it is a thing that is happening. This is hilarious considering the sheer animal cruelty that I am committing just across the courtyard from these “goodest boys”.

Since I did not have access to much Redstone, I have opted to instead make a traditional “meat hole” with my chickens. There is a fried chicken machine that works much better but it requires me to have way more resources than I currently have. My hope is that at some point I can convert the current machine over to the automated version at a later date. Essentially both the Chicken and Cow machines work based around the concept of entity cramming, where only 24 entities can occupy the same square of space and when a new entity is created… the oldest entity is killed off creating drops… which get whisked into a chest via a hopper system. So essentially I hop up on the top of the machine and feed the chickens grass seed, which creates baby chickens, which kills off older chickens, and drops feathers and meat into the chest. Additionally, the hopper collects more eggs than I can ever use… most of which I am throwing at the ground to try and spawn additional chickens and then eventually manually killing them. Cows work so much better than Chickens for this purpose… because the drop rates of chicken meat and feathers is much lower than beef/leather.

The sheep are suffering a significantly less dire fate because shears exist and I can just corral them in a small space and then hop down into the pen and harvest all the wool easily. Most of the food that I am using comes from the cows, and the chicken farm exists only to serve as a way of getting feathers to replenish my arrow supply. Were it not for the fact that sheep end up being “bycatch” from my act of trying to lure cows into my base… I would not even have messed with collecting any. Once you have made a bed… there isn’t much use for sheep in general. Sure they drop meat, but they are overall a way less efficient animal. Similarly, I did not even mess with collecting any pigs. However since this batch of sheep so willingly entered my den of horrors… I figured I might as well keep them penned up in case I need more wool in the future.

The other part of the arrow-making routine has involved creating giant towers of gravel and then harvesting it down hoping for flint. I really wish they would add a crafting machine recipe for turning gravel into flint, because honestly… this is a bit maddening to keep harvesting the same gravel over and over hoping for that rare drop. The only real positive is that you get to see some nice above shots of my base while I am up on my tower of nonsense. You can see that I am farming sugarcane out by the water to build up a proper enchanting shack. I think the next big renovation phase is going to be trying to make my base look a little less shit. I also am contemplating expanding out a bit more and doing a land grab to get more “safe” territory. I’ve contemplated moving the entire from of my base out over top of the waterfront so that I can move my sugarcane farm indoors.

In other news, I have finished my spiral staircase down to bedrock, and in doing so found my very first diamond block. Legitimately it was just a single node, which is a bit infuriating but once I got down to bedrock I set up the standard strip mining operation. This quickly yielded enough diamonds to make myself a set of tools. Right now I have Iron Armor, and it will probably be quite a long time before I can get enough diamonds to make a full set of armor out of that material. I found some pointed dripstone and I think one of my next projects is going to be building a renewable lava setup. This will be useful for a few reasons… the primary that I will be able to start using lava buckets instead of coal for cooking the assorted meat that I am gathering. After that, I can start using it for farming obsidian to eventually build a nether portal.

So at this point, I have a Diamond Pick, Diamond Axe, and Diamond Sword. I am too cheap usually to make shovels, but at some point, I am sure I will. I still mostly use stone tools because I don’t have tons of diamonds yet. I am just too cheap to waste diamonds right now. I am sure tonight I will probably spend a bit more time down in the mines because there are still a lot of resources that I have not found. At some point, I plan on building a nether portal and start trying to gather some of the resources there. However, I do not want to set foot into the nether without at least some gold armor, because I do not want to deal with massive pigman aggro. I have found exactly zero gold so far, so I am probably going to set up a few different branch mines off my spiral staircase at different levels looking for various resources.

Accidental Free Company

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So it is no longer morning… but also feels really weird not to start a post with “Morning Folks”. I am still on the mend and struggling a bit, and Covid brain fog claimed me this morning and kept me from making a post. Instead, I thought I would do a bit of storytime because I find this funny. Shortly after the release of Dawntrail, my friend Ace and I started baby characters on the Kraken Dynamis Server. The new Path of Exile League came out which caused me to want to take a break, but at some point, I am sure we will return and pick up where we left off at the end of Heavensward. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and weirdly… it was weirdly enjoyable to actually be playing on a server where everyone was newbies either by new accounts or by fresh transfers.

Moments after logging into my character for the very first time on that server, I got an invite to sign a Free Company Charter. I thought sure… I have been that person trying to get my guild started before and would help out with this process. I half assumed that the moment it got started, I would get kicked out… but that was not what happened. Instead, I was promoted to an officer and later drug Ace into the madness just for funsies. We did not really have any plans to make a Free Company for our shenanigans, but having a few genuine new players around was rather charming. Based on our interactions… it was VERY clear we were the wizened elders of this group, but it was still fun to hang out while we were pushing the content through its paces.

We got busy doing other things, some of them on our mains… others in other games. The thing is, I kept logging in periodically when I thought about it to do the daily MGP grind just to get a reasonable base of currency built up on that character. While I was not actively playing, I was actively checking in on how things were going. There were a lot of fresh recruits that eventually left the Free Company leaving us down to just me and Ace who were logging in regularly, and then a trio including the originator of the FC that had not logged in within two months. I didn’t think much about this because Free Companies come and go in membership. Even our primary Greysky Armada goes through large blocks of time when Sol is pretty much the only person reliably logging in.

Late last week I logged in and saw a message that I had been promoted to the leader of the Free Company. So I guess I have now inherited Darkwraith… a super edgy named FC to keep up and running. I made a few tweaks… firstly I renamed the primary role to Leader, because “Master” squicks me out something fierce. I went with a Leader > Officer > Veteran > Memeber > Recruit naming scheme for the ranks because it felt less awkward and also sort of clearly delineated what each role was for. The only other thing that I am contemplating is shifting the Allegiance from Order of the Twin Adder to Maelstrom… because who the fuck ever wants to be part of team piss yellow? Mostly I plan on keeping the lights on and even inviting anyone else who wants to play on Dynamis. This is still 100% an alt project that I am never going to give my full attention to, but it is weird how this FC that I didn’t even intend on joining fell into my lap.

I am not going to lie… there is at least a large chunk of me that wants to rename this to something involving “Robosquids” given that Free Company renaming is a thing you can do easily. I am pretty sure the original owner of the Free Company is “gonezo”, given that he largely popped over to the server to get housing… and has also long since had that demolished. So at this point, the Free Company is essentially what we make of it. If you have alts on Kraken hit me up, because apparently, I lead a Free Company now. I have another group of friends who randomly ended up on the server so I might snag them to at least get the guild leveling at a decent pace.

World Boss and Meta Add-On

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Good Morning Friends. Zone Meta Events are the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 amazing. For the uninitiated, a “Meta” in Guild Wars 2 language is a zone-wide event that takes place on a reoccurring timer. Some of these are straightforward single-shot world bosses, and others are complicated if/then/else chains that start with minor escort events and end up in giant 80+ player raid fights. The popularity of specific zones is often determined by how popular the metas associated with them are. That said… pretty much EVERY zone has at least some player population wanting to complete the meta at any given moment. For example, this is Queensdale this morning at 6:30 am… with folks waiting on the spawn of Shadow Behemoth. We wrecked the World Boss in what felt like record time… all during non-primetime hours.

I’ve personally always struggled with keeping track of what was going on at any given time. For example, you can type “/wiki et” in the game and it will pop open the event tracker page… which does a reasonable attempt at laying this data out but also… causes my eyeballs to fuzz out and my mind to go blank. It seemed a bit mad to try and figure out what I was going to do in a given evening, with the amount of playtime that I had in front of me. This meant that most of the time… I participated in the meta events that I happened to accidentally stumble into rather than approaching any of them with a sense of purpose. I had tried a few plugins for BlishHUD in the hopes of helping me keep track of this nonsense, but honestly, it always felt a bit too cumbersome, and as a result… I defaulted to just roaming aimlessly or following the World Boss train when I could hop on board knowing for example that Tequatl always spawns at server reset.

Over the weekend, I stumbled onto a better solution. I was setting up ArcDPS again, and I went through the process of setting up the Addon Loader Nexus as it supposedly handles some of the problems with ArcDPS on the release of major patches. Nexus works very similarly to BlishHUD and offers the ability to hot load addons into the game while it is running and similarly comes with a library of addons you can install quickly from within the UI. One of these is called World Bosses by Sognus and for me at least it has been a game changer. Essentially it puts little clocks for lack of a better term over the top of the world map zones that contain popular metas, and at any given time you can see what phase that meta is in and what phase is coming next. For example, I blew up a chunk of my screen in the above image showing that Dragon Stand was just about to start a fresh meta train, which would of course be the ideal time to join that map.

What is even better about this is that after playing with this for a bit, it becomes trivial to see the natural synergy between different meta events and how you can easily hop from one to the next one without much forethought. For example, in the above image, the Aetherblade Assault is just about to start in Seitung Province, and then when it is wrapping up… The New Kaineng City Blackout should be starting… and then as it is wrapping up you can pop over and pick up the Echovald Forest Gang War event. Similarly this weekend I rode from Dragon Stand to Chalk Gerent to Octovine without missing a beat, just rolling from one event to the next and racking up the sweet sweet loot. I used to think that either people joined specific Commanders exclusively, or just had some vague sense of precognition about these things… but with this addon, it becomes super easy to follow the meta train.

If you are curious I would check out this general video about Nexus, as it can install a lot more add-ons other than the World Boss one that I am specifically talking about. I am also a huge fan of BlishHUD for marker packs that help with world completion, jumping puzzles, and getting various achievement collections completed like all of the nonsense associated with the SkyScales. Thankfully the two addon loaders play nicely together, and each of them seems to do something slightly different than the other one. There are a few add-ons that can be found on both of them… for example, Regions of Tyria a dumb addon that I enjoy greatly that announces the name of every area when you enter it, exists on both platforms. Add-ons and Guild Wars 2 are a massive rabbit hole, but the World Bosses tool seems well worth diving into because it gives me a level of confidence at being able to join in various Metas that I have not had before now.

Zone Metas are legitimately the best part of Guild Wars 2, and being able to participate in them more predictably is pretty freaking amazing. Sure I might not be in the mood every night to gather together with eighty strangers and mash buttons to take down a big bad, but when I am… this just works so much better. It makes me realize how important add-ons have been to my enjoyment of various MMORPG tropes throughout the years. Generally speaking, they just take information that already exists and present it in a more digestible format that my ADHD-addled brain can consume. While I have completely eschewed them in Final Fantasy XIV, I do get why players use them because I have always found having an interface that I can more directly control key to my enjoyment in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.

Anyways! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. If you ever want to do Meta nonsense, hit me up in game.