MMORPG

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.

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.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.