No Man's Sky Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Goodbye Arakaali

February 20, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I took today off because I had some non-medical business to deal with… and all of my time has been spent dealing with medical nonsense. As a result, I slept in far later than normal, to the point where all of the cats seemed to think I was fundamentally broken. I had some wild dreams, and while they were not all connected, they all shared the general theme of ripping holes in reality. Take what you will of that. Sadly, yesterday was the end of the Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I have to say goodbye to my beloved Minions Servant of Arakaali character. I had so much fun with this build that I honestly might forgo my traditional Righteous Fire starter for some sort of minions character. Either that, or honestly, I had enough fun with my Golem Ice Trap Elementalist that I might try that instead as my starter. There is a teaser that might be hinting that some of the Phrecia classes are going core, and if that is the case… I may literally build the same damned character I played in Phrecia 2.0.

Yesterday, we got our official teaser trailer that revealed the name of the league, and I have to say… so far, nothing we have gotten as teasers has given us any real idea what the league is going to be like. Normally, by this point, we would have gotten at least a few quality of life improvement teasers, but no… all obtuse nonsense. My personal guess is that we are going to be presented with an NPC in maps that allows us to make one of two choices, which will change the way the rest of the map plays out. I am expecting this to be something akin to influence altars that present us with two choices, and each time we make it, we gain some terrible affix on our map… since GGG seems to like to kick us directly in the crotch as often as possible. The one thing I really hope about this upcoming league is that they have figured out a way to make T16.5 and T17 maps less complete ass. Other than that, I would really love to see Abyss from POE 2 come to POE 1, because it is so much more enjoyable than the de facto chase the green orb on your mini map version that we have now.

Other than that, I spent a bit of time in Dune Awakening, and I am working my way up to mining cobalt. I got my welcome back carepackage and it included way more resources than I expected, so as soon as I have the research points for it I will be learning how to make a Dune Buggy. As a result, I went ahead and added a proper garage to my base in the Vermillius Gap. I need to go back down south and farm the shit out of all of the missing intel that I left on the table as a result. I trained some points in Trooper to give me the shigawire claw, which feels like it is honestly required at this point. The nice thing about it is that it allows me to zoom in to the top floor of NPC bases so I can often times get in and out with intel before anyone even notices I am there. The defensive form thing was nice, but really bum rushing them with the knee and then stabbing them through their shield is my go to for dealing with the melee berserker types.

Building the garage has allowed me to expand out the top floor, and now I have so much room for activities. I kind of dig this weird three-story base thing that I have gone on, where the garage is at the lowest level, then the bottom floor has water tanks, blood recycler, and power plants, and then finally at the top floor you have most of the crafting machines and general storage. I also love the location of my base because there is Iron, Copper, Granite, Metal, and plenty of Water to harvest all within a few feet of my front door. Additionally, there are nearby Kirab bases that I honestly just need to get better at killing regularly for other materials. Sure, the welcome back package gave me stupid amounts of rare materials, but I don’t really want to lean on that if I can help it.

Other than Dune Awakening, I have also been playing some more Enshrouded. I am working towards various objectives in my most recent world, because I would like to ultimately see what all of the progression looks like at this point. I am running around on my highest geared character, but it has some minor problems… like all of the legendary gear I am using existed prior to rune sockets going into the game. So I have a great sword, for example, but one that I cannot socket a rune into. It will probably be a while before I find another equivalent weapon because I farmed all of them from the endgame chests to get the gear set that I am wearing now. Right now, I am mostly going through the process of unlocking all of the NPCs so I can finish building out my base properly.

Speaking of bases… I gave Ace shit for their minimalistic design, so I only find it fair to share my maximalistic nonsense. This is as far as I have gotten in my attempt to build all the way down to the shroud from the starter area. Making this even less realistic is the fact that I am carving out floors as I go down by tunneling out the rock from the mountainside with the place and remove trick. As I expand the footprint of my base, I will continue burrowing downwards, and at the same time expanding upwards into the vertical maximum height as well. At some point, I need to actually do something realistic with my design, where it is something more than just a series of empty floors. Right now I have a highly dysfunctional base, but I am not terribly far progressed, so it does not really matter that much.

I am also still occasionally piddling around in No Man’s Sky, and am working on unlocking the ability to process toxic waste. I happened upon a processing facility on the second planet and got the quest to upgrade my multi-tool to be able to handle it. This distracted me from the normal flow of the missions, and now I am largely roaming around the frosty surface of the planet, scanning everything that I can for credits. This morning, I ventured off towards some salvage… only to realize that, apparently, it is underground somewhere, and I could not see any obvious caves to explore. I’ve always enjoyed the super chill nature of this game, especially playing on super casual mode, where I am not constantly battling for my own survival. I like the concept of survival games, but hate the constant feeling that I am making zero progress, so when given the choice, I dial down the survival aspect so I can just enjoy the exploration.

The last monkey wrench to throw into the gears… is that I reinstalled Project Gorgon and decided to give it a look to see how it has progressed. I remember next to nothing about this game, but I do remember it reminding me quite a bit of Vanguard. Largely, I think this part was the fact that there are so many random trades that you can do. I inexplicably enjoy the fact that I can get points for burying my corpses. I played a bit last night… overpulled a half dozen spiders onto me… died and then returned to the spawn point. I think I am going to have to sort out my gear and abilities before I do something like that again. I did laugh heartily as I was attacked by an exploding sheep. I had been getting the itch to play something EverQuest adjacent, and maybe Gorgon will scratch that itch.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I need to pick up the house, gather my tax information, and deal with a few other things. Next week, we get our proper preview of the upcoming Path of Exile league, and I am looking forward to it.

Sibling Time

February 18, 2026 by Belghast

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.

No Man’s Sky Thoughts

August 13, 2016 by Belghast

This morning was an absolutely glorious morning, in part because of a massive cold front that blew through over night. It is suddenly 70 degrees outside with a lovely breeze, rather than the usual over 100 degree madness that has been happening for weeks. As a result we decided to get up and walk over to daylight donuts for breakfast and then take it into the backyard and eat it on the patio. After the generally shit week that I had, I needed this little bit of respite to maybe start to recover. It is not that anything really went wrong… just the stress of entirely too much maximum level adulting. The week was one with several adulting raid bosses, and the progress made on them were mixed. However I am now happy to chill out on the sofa with a cat precariously balanced between my arms trying to find a way to snuggle while I type. So far it is working but I have a feeling at some point she will wander off because my hands are engaged in something other than serious petting action. Other than all of this… yesterday a game was released that I had been waiting anxiously for since it was first announced at E3 during the Sony PS4 reveal show, or at least I think that was when I first saw it. No Man’s Sky promised to be the space exploration game for me. Elite Dangerous looks awesome, but it is entirely too fiddly for my tastes. I don’t want to have to care about learning to pilot a ship through the vast expanses of space, or learning how to dogfight when there is no “up”. I just want a Star Trek away mission simulator that lets me wander around the cosmos and land on interesting new planets to explore. No Man’s Sky seems to be exactly that, but before I get into the good parts I need to talk about the bad.

Lots of folks are having trouble playing this game on the PC now that it has been released. I am not sure what happened during the process of the launch but the “minimum” listed specs seem to have been thrown completely out the window. I know Tamrielo has already returned his copy through steam because on his pretty hoss machine it simply would not give him more than 10 fps. First lets go over the minimum specs that were released for the game.

OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel Core i3
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 480, AMD Radeon 7870
Storage: 10 GB available space

I’ve played it on two of my machines… first on my Laptop

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: 4th Gen Intel Core i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 960m

On this machine I had to bump it down to 720p/medium to get stable framerates in the range of 30 fps, with the occasional dip into 15 territory. However nVidia experience claims that this machine does not meet the minimum requirements to play the game, whereas instead every single category above technically outstrips what the suggested minimums are.

My upstairs gaming machine has the following specs…

OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: AMD fx-6300 3.5 ghz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: nVidia GTX 980

As one would expect the beefier graphics card means that I am getting significantly better performance, but not massively so. I am running the game at 1080p/medium and I get severe dips from the 60fps to 30fps and it is extremely erratic. What this feels like to me… is a game that was rushed to make last minute changes and is extremely poorly optimized for the PC. From the sound of it… everyone that chose to get the PS4 copy seems to be just happily playing away. Those of us on the PC are trying to find that precarious line where the performance to pretty balance is reasonable. The biggest confusion point that I am seeing thought is having a big badass system doesn’t necessarily make a difference. It is almost totally random who can and cannot run this game. As a result I highly suggest you purchase the game through steam, that way if for whatever reason it does not work for you… you can return it to get a full refund. I believe GOG does the same thing, but I have never actually returned a game there so I am not sure how fast or easy that process is. Essentially this is definitely a “buyer beware” title… and if you simply want to play it without much fussing then I suggest you check out the PlayStation 4 copy.

Now that all of that is out of the way…. the game is really pretty and feels like you are exploring alien worlds. It has this feeling of minecraft, starbound and elite all throw together in the a mixer and some weird hybrid came out of the process. The key thing that stood in the way of me playing Elite or Star Citizen… is that my player fantasy has nothing to do with flying a ship. I could give a shit about actually flying anything… and would be perfectly happy just taking “taxis” between planets. What I want is the exploration of new and interesting places, and that is the fantasy that NMS hones in on. There are going to be folks that complain that this title is entirely too “walking sim” for them, but the couple of planets have all been filled with rich and interesting environments for me to explore. Right now my biggest problem is the lack of inventory, and lack of understanding how to increase said inventory. There is just so much I don’t know how to do, and so many items I pick up that I don’t have a clue what they are even for. What is the most interesting to me is the fact that when you encounter an alien race, you don’t know how to communicate. You learn language through finding these knowledge stones, and each of them teaches you a single word in another language. Now I have yet to see what actually happens when you know some words… because I absolutely lost faction with a race by patting them on the head.

The coolest moment so far has to be when I finally repaired my ship, and decided to lift off of the planet and out into space. I watched as the horizon got darker and darker until all of the sudden I broke through the atmosphere and could see the stars around me. Similarly awesome was the moment when I realized that landing on this planet… I had to be super careful about my angle of entry. If you come in too straight you absolutely start to burn up in the atmosphere damaging your shields in the process. So that mean’t I had to skim along carefully descending slowly enough to avoid taking damage, but that also meant that this was no means a quick process. There are consequences of pushing off planet, and I burned through all of my fuel on the first planet using my ship to explore. Each time you thrust off the surface it takes resources, ones that you cannot easily replenish without significant time spent exploring… which in itself costs resources because the environments are usually hostile and stress your life support systems to where they need recharging as well. There however is a central loop that I find enjoyable of exploring and gathering and exploring and gathering. In fact last night I absolutely lost two hours of time playing this game. Not that I was aware that I spent time… but I thought I had maybe spent fifteen minutes playing, until I looked up and realized that two hours had passed. So if the issues of the launch can get ironed out, I have a feeling that this is going to go down as one of those Minecraft like experiences that just keeps building upon itself.

So final advice is… pick it up definitely. However if you have a Playstation 4, you might lean towards that for your purchase. Otherwise definitely purchase it through a provider that is going to allow you to return the game on PC if for whatever reason it does not like your machine.

Pax Prime Hopes

August 28, 2015 by Belghast

The Big Show

It feels like we live in this world where there is always another big games show around the corner. I remember when quite literally all that existed was the Consumer Electronics show, at least for the United States. Now we have dozens of shows sprinkled throughout the year, all of which vying for exclusive announcements. As a result companies have to trickle information out so that everyone that attends one of the shows feels like they are getting to see something unique or special. This weekend of course is Pax Prime, and I had hoped this year I would be attending. The truth is however that Pax Prime will likely never be in the cards, as the husband of a teacher… August is a HORRIBLE time for me to be travelling. During this month my wife is in full on panic mode as she gets adjusted to another school year, and while for a bit I was bummed at not being able to attend, I am realizing it was ultimately for the best. As a result I will be a loyal yearly Pax South attendee and pretty much brush aside the thoughts of doing the Pax Prime thing. Instead at some point I will just go out to Seattle to meet my friends that seem to be pooling there, instead of trying to make one big combo trip. Having been to a Pax, I have to say in truth the folks at home have a much better view of what is going on there through the live stream. As a result I am looking forward to spending much of the weekend watching as much as I can. Which gets to the point of this mornings post. I thought I would talk a bit about the various things I am hoping to get out of Pax Prime 2015.

Final Fantasy XIV

The thing that I want this weekend… is a release date for 3.1. I know we are getting close, but I want to know a firm release date so I know just how long I am going to have to wait. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through a bit of a content lull much like it did after the release of A Realm Reborn. Quite frankly at this point I am tired of running Neverreap… since that seems to be the dungeon I get most often. Two dungeons in a roulette rotation simply is not enough, and I am honestly a bit concerned with the news that 3.1 is only going to add two more as well. My hope is that they create a four dungeon expert roulette instead of moving Neverreap and Fractal to Hard Roulette and making expert just be the two new dungeons. The other piece I am really looking forward to is the next 24 player dungeon the Void Ark, aka the creepy airship you sometimes seem flying around in the Sea of Clouds. The game needs a shot in the arm of content, because folks are starting to slow down… myself included. More so than this… I would like to see some future vision type stuff for 3.2 and beyond. In the past we have usually had this list of things that Yoshi P had promised for “future” patches and we are a bit low on that right now.

Wildstar

Similar to FFXIV… and honestly a lot of the things I am going to talk about this morning…. I just want a date for when the Free to Play conversion will happen. They keep putting new patches on the test server and it is starting to feel like maybe they are close, but what I need from them is a date. I am enjoying Wildstar so much more than I have at any point in the past, and a lot of the changes that are coming in with the free to play conversion are going to be generally good for the game as well. Past the free to play conversion… I would like to see some information about what their long range plans are. I don’t even know if they have a presence at Pax Prime this weekend, but even if folks don’t they tend to time announcements around major shows as well.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Since the expansion announcement at Pax South, I have had a strange connection with this title. Traditionally speaking I do not really enjoy Guild Wars 2 that much. That said I have to say the revenant looks more interesting than any of the previous classes. I fully expect that I will be picking this title up when it launches if for no reason other than the fact that it is once again “buy to play” and I have gotten my original purchase out of the game. This has been the year of announcements completely unfettered by timelines, and it is starting to get frustrating. Once again we have a big title looming on the horizon with zero date announced for when we will be expecting to play it. I am expecting that this one is going to be a lot like Heavensward was, where they announce the launch date and it is only a few months away. My hope is that Pax Prime finally is going to be the show where they talk about this at. Give your fans some firm dates.

Blizzard Titles

I am honestly not expecting anything new to come out of this conference from Blizzard. They did their big reveal of the World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom, and I fully expect that with Blizzcon coming up in November that they will be holding everything else closely waiting on their big show to reveal it. I fully expect that they might announce a new Overwatch champion at Pax Prime, and potentially some more Heroes of the Storm champions or maps. What I am really wanting from them is an announcement for when Overwatch testing will begin and a beta key delivered in my mailbox. Everytime I launch the patcher and see that Overwatch button at the bottom of it… I get a little sad in side. I really want to play this game, and I sincerely doubt I will be doing so anytime soon. Over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that I still very much love Blizzard games… it is apparently only World of Warcraft that I am on tentative terms with. I would love beyond love them to announce something for Diablo 3… like maybe another expansion? They have already hinted that they might be doing a Warcraft RTS after they wrap up with Starcraft II… so that alone has me pretty pumped.

No Man’s Sky

I am so irrationally hopeful about this title, even though I keep telling myself that there is no way it can deliver on everything it has been promising. I love exploring new areas, and I love killing strange and interesting creatures. No Man’s Sky promises to give me a procedural generated world where I can do this… over and over again throughout the galaxy. On top of that the graphics are kinda cool as well with their hyper saturated version of reality. Again… all I really want from Hello Games is a release date. I have a feeling that we will have an announcement for some sort of beta testing to begin soon. Supposedly Amazon UK is already taking pre-orders so hopefully we will get a date this weekend.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

At this point I just want more information on this title. We saw a short trailer from E3 and I have been wanting more information since. Once again I have no clue if there will be a presence at Pax Prime, but I am hoping! I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how this title is actually going to work. I want to know if there is going to be a multiplayer aspect, or if this is just one big single player skyrim-esc sandbox. I also want to know more about the world that surrounds the game.

Devilian

With my recent foray back into Diablo 3, it has made me extremely interested in Devilian a Diablo like Korean game that Trion is going to be publishing. I know Trion is going to have a good presence at the show so I am hoping we find out when the beta process is going to begin. I ended up with a key from Gamescom and I keep checking my Glyph launcher expecting it to show up in the list of games that are playable at some point soon. While on the topic of Trion Games, it is too soon to hope for a Rift expansion but I would still like to get more information about where that game is heading, and some more detail on the future plans for ArcheAge. The folks at Trion Worlds are awesome so I am always interested in what they have to say.