Good Morning Folks. This past weekend I originally set out to start a brand new world in Enshrouded, and see all of the content. What I have done instead… is compulsively hollow out the side of a mountain, with the goal of building down to the shroud. There are certain patterns that I get suck in with games… where I cannot bring myself to do something else until the mission has been accomplished. I even built a worktable and a bed on this nonsensical shelf floating above the shroud just so that I could quickly reset the day or build more stone blocks as needed. There is nothing impressive about my build… it is mostly just a box, but I still find myself compelled to build in this manner. Often times I “pretty” the structure up once I have reached a point where I feel okay about it… but at least for awhile I always go through a bulk utilitarian building phase.
Removing spawned material in Enshrouded is a massive pain in the ass… so what I learned when I decided to dig a basement at release, is that you can use prefab blocks as a way of removing chunks of the world in a consistent manner. For example my preferred floor height is two 2×2 blocks stacked on top of each other. So as I started hollowing out the side of the hill, I started placing these blocks and then removing them in a structured manner so that I could clear out individual floors of my weird boxy structure at a time. Effectively… I will probably be stuck in this pattern until I have hollowed out as far down as the current parameters of my base will allow. Then I will go back into a phase of adventuring again… until I can increase my base size… and then likely back to hollowing out the ground again.
This is not just an enshrouded thing… in Valheim I could not hollow out the earth easily… so instead I built this stupid network of connected bases. I had no real reason to build so many bases… but I just felt compelled to keep creating beachheads in new areas of the map. I even went so far as to create this secret base, with a hidden portal… that was MASSIVE and way deep out into the chain of islands on a shared map. I thought it would be funny if someone on our server stumbled onto it and wondered what the hell was going on. In Valheim specifically I used to use the fact that you could transport the same character between multiple save games…. to rapidly transport materials between locations since things had so much weight. I would pop over to a private save… dump my inventory, then move to where I wanted to dump the items in the public save… and pop back over to retrieve them into my characters inventory. I think this “efficient” gameplay annoyed Kodra who was all about the real world ramifications of having to transport objects around the world.
Minecraft is the real place where you can see my compulsive patterns in action. I have so many different save files… all with the same basic patterns. Something super common is my trademarked tunnels to nowhere. I will just start digging in a direction and keep going until I hit something that looks interesting. For example this tunnel goes for unknown thousands of blocks… I think I went through four diamond pickaxes to carve this 3×3 tunnel that effectively leads to nowhere interesting at all. I saved every bit of the stone that I harvested meticulously in a bunch of chests, so that I could then in turn use it to build other dumb structures that no one will ever see. A lot of times I will find myself compelled to build like this while I am listening to an audiobook or something, bringing subtle order to the chaos of the random spawns.
In the same save file you can see a “stack of boxes” similar to what I have going on in Enshrouded. What you cannot see is just how many floors are below ground that I compulsively dug all the way down to bedrock. Once you get down there… you can see a bunch of mining operations as I scoured the earth looking for resources. There are people who build pretty houses in these games, but for whatever reason… I always strike down into the earth to find my safe domicile. I think on some level if I had my druthers… my perfect house would be dug into a mountain side with big windows facing out into the world… but plenty of shadowy places where I can escape the light of day. I keep effectively building these same structural ideas in whatever game I happen to be playing.
Another thing you will find in a lot of my saved games… is interlinking paths that don’t really serve a purpose. There is no reason why I built skyroads between mountain peaks…. and then also hollowed out paths between them. Like there is no mechanical purpose to any of this. As soon as I closed off an area and lit it up, I was completely safe from anything that might spawn at night. However I just kept building these random terraces and cascading staircases that went up the sides of hills… and then dipped inside of the mountain only to poke out the other side and go in a different direction. My builds in games often feel akin to the Winchester house… where I just kept building for the purpose of building. Then randomly I will decide to roll a brand new world and start the entire processes over again.
Sometimes I will end up with something unintentionally beautiful… like this area where I dug into a mountain and found a natural grotto with waterfalls coming down from above and a subterranean pond. So I then set forth to build a stairwell that went up through said pond… for reasons that do not really exist other than to do it. I am sure all of this is some sign of a malady or something…. but I find a weird level of peace just sort of aimlessly building. I used to sit in the floor with building blocks, legos, or later contrux as a kid and effectively building the same sort of structural designs over and over. Now said buildings… exist in digital form. Because of this weird compulsion that I seem to have… all of these games will likely remain evergreen. Hopefully there will never be a time when I do not find joy in the simplicity of placing or removing blocks. On some level I think this is probably some way I deal with anxiety… because I am shuffling around quite a bit of it right now.
