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Last Epoch Cycle 2 Reset

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the reset for the second cycle of the Last Epoch ARPG. That is a contorted mess to say, and EHG really needs to get better at naming this shit. In fact is is actually less clear than calling it Cycle 2… because EHG refers to this as Cycle 1.1 Refresh. Legitimately name things more clearly so that you can understand which Cycle/League/Season you are in with a reasonable chronology. Diablo IV just simply increments the number and Path of Exile gives every league a name and a patch version. Naming your cycles off the arbitrary versioning scheme of your game is kind of madness. Whatever the case… I opted to essentially recreate my last seasonal character to see if I could improve upon the design and as such BelBurnsBrightly now exists… I would absolutely give you a character profile link if LastEpochTools were updated. Instead, I present you BelLikesToSpin the last incarnation which I will be following pretty closely.

I’ve said before that the only thing standing in the way of EHG claiming the “Best ARPG” crown is more content. They are competing with Path of Exile for that title when it has over a decade’s worth of content that just creates this environment where there is always something interesting going on in your maps. This cycle reset introduced the addition of Loot Lizards, and I have to say… they go a long way towards making maps feel fun and exciting. Essentially these critters spawn with a pack of loot on their back and you have to chase them down and “knock the pack off” their back… giving you a lovely loot pinata explosion. They come in a bunch of different varieties but so far I have seen ones that drop Rare loot, ones that drop Idols, and ones that drop Unique items. In all cases, they drop a lot of affix shards and glyphs which go a long way to helping you get started in the new league.

They also seem to have a very high drop rate for Runes of Ascendence which is helping me out considerably in getting the uniques that I need for my build. It took me two Runes to fish for the Firestarter’s Torch which is quite possibly my favorite item in the entire game. After that I started fishing for the cast on smite sword Palarus’s Sacred Light. I think I am five runes down and have not picked that up yet, but I did get the Humming Bee which is shockingly good for this build. I am hitting extremely fast which is causing me to gain a bunch of ward while spinning through the levels adding significant survival while also increasing my elemental damage output a tiny bit. The rest of my gear is a bit of a mess bit I am leveling several weavers will items, and then using Calamity to increase my fire damage and Avarice to give me elemental leech. I did have two quicksilver coils, but I dropped one to level a WW ring to see what I might get from it.

The other major system change is the addition of a stash tab priority system… which will be familiar to you as the affinity system in Path of Exile. Thing is this goes so much further than that system ever has by adding all manner of filter parameters allowing you to get really specific about what you want to store in which tabs. Stash maintenance is one of the biggest annoyances in an ARPG and being able to dump the loot you want to keep quickly is so important to the flow in your endgame progression. So for example if I wanted to create a tab that ONLY stores Legendary Potential 3 and 4 uniques, for a specific class… I could do so extremely simply. Basically, this adds all the power of the loot filter to a stash affinity system which now officially crowns EHG the “Best ARPG Stash Tab System”. Since GGG has been spurred into action to create quality life improvements based on innovations from Last Epoch, I am hoping we see something like this in Path of Exile soon.

I am not skipping any of the content so I am slowly chewing my way through the campaign. I got through the beginning of Imperial Era Majeka last night and will pick up from there today and push through hopefully to the end. I am working on getting my survival up a bit because I know Lagon is always going to be a bit of an obstacle. I am no longer deathless because last night while hanging out on Discord with Ace, I had to get one of my cats off my PC case…. because she was clawing at the magnetic vent cover. When I looked away something wandered over and wrecked me. At least this saves me the frustration of losing my deathless stream to either Lagon or Rahyeh which are traditionally the things that kill me in other runs.

One of the persistent memes in the POE community is “Login Dude!” when there is a good patch or a quirky bug worth exploiting. So I guess this is the point where I say to you that if you played Last Epoch in the past, this weird awkward cycle reset period is a great time to return. There is plenty of meat on those bones when it comes to the addition of Loot Lizards alone, and the quality of life that the stash tab priority system adds greatly improves the quality of life. Basically, I am at the point where I really need to sit down and build my loot filter for the league so that I can start sifting through loot that is actually worth keeping and worth breaking down. It isn’t necessarily a daunting or difficult task, just one that I had been avoiding.

Nether Fortress at Home

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Good Morning Folks! This is probably going to be the last day of Minecraft updates for a while, given that this afternoon the Cycle reset is happening in Last Epoch. I feel somewhat mixed about this because I have actually been enjoying myself quite a bit, and have a number of projects on the horizon that I am contemplating doing. Probably the biggest single project that I undertook last night was utilizing some of the real estate that I cleared outside of my base to set up proper fields. Right now I have pumpkin, potato, beet, and carrot farms outside of my walled area and have also taken the opportunity to move my sugarcane farm into this protected lot as well. At some point, I will probably uproot my wheat farm from inside the base and then expand out the fenced area to move it outdoors. Farms take up large amounts of room to do them properly so it just makes sense to move them outside of the closed-in area.

Other than that I started building out some more themed buildings in the main walled-in complex. I set up a proper smithy with an anvil, stonecutter, grinding wheel, smith bench, and a stack of blast furnaces. At some point, I might modify these to auto-feed fuel but before doing that I really need to set up a blaze farm in the nether. The lava buckets have been great for cooking meat, but this is not as easily repeatable for automating fuel intake into forges. Sadly the lava cauldron setup that I have does not work with either hoppers or dispensers so there is no way of feeding it into a furnace or blast furnace. I found a broken nether portal to the north of my base where I harvested a bunch of obsidian and magma blocks and then decided to use those as part of my design with some copper trap doors over them since I have so damned much copper.

The other new building that I added was a storehouse where I am consolidating all of my stuff. At some point, I plan on massively renovating the central tower and as such I am slowly migrating everything that I was storing up there down into sorted bins at ground level. I’ve incorporated a few barrels just because I like the look of them and on the left side you have spare tools, and on the right side, there are torches and arrows. Just to the far side of the building is a little troth that I set up for making obsidian, which I used to complete gathering what I needed for a nether portal. I also created a quickie infinite water source there so that I can grab it when I need it.

One of the big things that I did this morning was craft and enchant a full set of diamond armor. This means that I have officially retired my unenchanted and heavily battered set of iron armor. I figured I might as well use it as a decorative element so I set it up on an armor stand outside the smithy. I say I made a full set of diamond armor but that is a lie. I am wearing a golden armor helmet to give me immunity to piglins in the nether. While I enjoy killing them… I don’t want them to be aggro on sight. The nether is dangerous enough for me to not add additional difficulty levels. Several years ago when I started a hardcore Minecraft run, I did not know about this… and it summarily ended my run VERY quickly.

That experience has made me take the nether EXTREMELY seriously from that point forward. As a result, I have built my main portal underground and in an area closed off behind both a gate and a copper door. I’ve also been using these new copper grates in lieu of glass blocks because they are considerably more sturdy and I am not going to accidentally break them by swinging my sword to fight a stray piglin that makes it through my portal. At some point, I might fancify my portal room but for now, it works well enough. In general, I want to rethink the core of my base because it is getting extremely cumbersome to climb down the spiral staircase when I want to harvest materials from my strip mines down at bedrock. The spiral is super compact and was extremely efficient for getting down deep early on when I was still breaking the caves and such beneath my base, but the long staircase just works better for general purpose.

I’ve built the most rudimentary of shelters on the nether side, with cobblestone so that it won’t blow up easily and a copper door to wall off the portal chamber to keep it from being destroyed. Spawnwise I lucked out extremely well in that my portal is beside a Nether Fortress in the soul sand biome. This gives me access to a ton of resources and the ability to start farming Wither Skeletons as well as Blaze and the Lava Slimes. I think I might be on the boundary between biomes because a little way into the Nether Fortress it all changes over to Basalt and Black Stone. I wish I were in one of the tree biomes so that I could start farming those resources and I might need to make some expeditions out into the nether to try and find one of those.

For the moment I have limited most of my exploration to the immediate area surrounding the fortress. Last night I found a Blaze spawner really close to my portal, and as such I am probably going to set up a Blaze rod farm there. I will of course have to sort out how best to get from my portal to that area safely, which means a lot of tunneling and general construction. I will probably need to set up a more permanent base camp in the nether with chests full of non-nether materials for building tunnels. All of this is probably going to happen considerably later, and as such I am honestly glad that I have been blogging about my adventures. This will serve as a way of jogging my memory when I eventually return to this save.

Anyways! For now, I will be venturing forth into Last Epoch and starting a new cycle character. If you are so inclined for that nonsense I will hopefully see you there.

Block-Based Nostalgia

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Good Morning Folks. I’m still testing positive for COVID-19 some two weeks after my initial test, and honesty… I still feel fairly awful. Every day is a little bit better, but it is a battle waged in inches rather than feet. While I am actually getting decent enough sleep now, which is a huge positive… my game time is still rather fraught and unfocused. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of my time in Minecraft. It seems like this is my “sick” game because over the years I have faded back into it whenever I was not feeling myself. I never really stick around terribly long, but it is sort of the experience I can completely shut my brain off for and just build and explore.

This recent bout of Minecraft nostalgia is brought to you by the fact that I remembered that I have videos that I shot eons ago… in deeply potato quality of my very first Minecraft world. I explored with a sense of wonder, in part because I was still figuring out the rules of world creation back then. I didn’t know with certainty where I could strip mine to get diamonds, nor did I really understand how to find key resources like coal or iron, and I just sort of freeform built wherever things seemed cool. I think in some part I wanted to maybe rekindle a bit of that with a new world. There is part of me that wishes that I still had these original files… and quite honestly I thought I had backed them up because prior to us getting a multiplayer server Rylacus and I used to swap our worlds back and forth so we could see what the other was building.

Right now I am very much in the “ugly but efficient” phase of the world where I am building out of whatever materials I happen across. For the moment I have this awkward-looking tower that is nice and safe from all of the monsters that spawn around it. I have no clue how tall I am going to make it, but given my penchant for building Skyroads, I will probably keep building upwards over time. For the moment only one floor is really very active with my bed and crafting machines, but I expect to add in some other stuff at least for storage purposes.

Beneath the tower, I started digging straight down and then began to do my more recent spiral staircase style of digging. Digging straight down is entirely too dangerous, so if you start digging around a central column, with each step going deeper you usually have enough time to react to any danger you might encounter but also it does not take a ton of space. I used to always dig a stairwell down, but it always felt like I was wasting a lot of space in doing so. I’ve not hit bedrock yet, but I did tunnel down into a geode. I spent enough time down there to torch off a large section to make it a bit safer. I similarly hit a natural cave on the way down that had quite a bit of iron, which I have similarly torched off to make it safe.

The tower is technically the first place I attempted to settle in this world. While I was running from the spawn point I built this makeshift bridge and then started digging into the side of a mountain. Given my natural dwarven tendencies, my first bases tend to be similar areas. The big problem here however is that I dug into a very active cave system with a zombie spawner. I was quickly overwhelmed and forced to run back from the spawn. This of course meant that my next priority was to get enough wool to be able to make a bed. However, I did come back to the cave system farm it down, and eventually torch off the zombie spawner so that I could make it a bit more reasonable. This is just around the corner from my tower and I might at some point try and connect the two areas with an underground tunnel.

While it is not the most efficient thing in the world right now, I did set up a very rudimentary zombie spawner farm so that I can come back here when I need experience for enchanting. I am sure I will improve this a bit over time to make it work more efficiently. It works well enough for now and if I need to shut it off I can easily throw a torch inside there to make it safe enough to work on. Right now the zombies have a bad habit of getting caught in the blind corner to the right, so at some point I will optimize this to make it work a bit better. If I ever get a silk touch pick, I might pick the spawner up and move it to someplace a bit closer to my base. Thought like I said above it might be fun to connect the two areas up via a safe underground tunnel.

For the moment I am planning on expanding out the walled-off area to add a bit of a farm, and maybe starting to pen off some animals. Once I get a reliable crop of grain, I am probably going to lure some cows into a “meat hole” which is a truly disturbing contraption that essentially has you feed cows until they overpopulate the number of spawns that can appear on a single block… and then kill off the older entities creating meat and leather. Sheep on the other hand I can just harvest like normal with shears, and potentially I might build a lava-based chicken farm to get eggs and feathers. Essentially I need to build up some reliable sources of food… because for the moment I am running on whatever I have lucked into farming out in the world and some bread that I found in chests.

However, I am somewhat hesitant to go wild on building a bunch of automated farms… because on some level that destroys the simplicity of the game.

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.