Stargrace

Changes to ARK: Survival Evolved

The last time I played ARK: Survival Evolved was right when the game released on steam as an early access game. While many people had performance issues it ran pretty well on my machine, and I happily set up a dedicated server for a few friends. Of course after a few weekends of playing I got completely burnt out, which is usually the case for me and early access games. I let it go for a while, updates happened, and then yesterday I decided to play and see what had changed.

First of all, there’s a lot more server customization than there was last time I played. I decided to play around with these settings not necessarily to make the game ‘easier’ but to make it less time intensive. I changed the experience bonus to 3x what it is at by default, along with the amount of resources you gather at one time. I left encounter difficulty and damage alone, there was no need to change any of that.

There are now dedicated servers, and non-dedicated servers. Non-dedicated are easier to adjust. You basically just select all of the options at the login screen, login, and then friends can join you. There are a few ‘downsides’ to this type of server though. One, your friends are tethered to you. They spawn at you, they can’t walk beyond you. This can be frustrating. Also they can’t just log in and play whenever they want to, it’s all reliant on you playing with them. Hence why I decided to go with a dedicated server.

In order to adjust the settings on a dedicated server you need to adjust the server.ini file. There are TONS of options that can be adjusted. There’s a pretty good list of them here on the steam forums.

There are also mods that you can use in your game now. I haven’t looked into these at all yet, but I know the steam mod community is a large and amazing thing to witness. I can only assume that the ARK branch of this community is well represented and I’m sure I’ll start checking out the mods before too long.

They’ve also added a lot of new creature encounters to the game. While I was collecting supplies in the jungle I ran into some mosquito like creatures that ended up poisoning me so I died. There are also new water creatures, new dinosaur types, new crafted items – and of course the game is just as beautiful as always. I didn’t have any issues with performance even though I was running the server along with my game client, and I really think that for a game that I had not even heard of before the company has done a pretty incredible job.

Did you pick up ARK when it first came out? Are you still playing or would you prefer it to be out of early access first? Let me know in comments!

I still haven’t found a way to turn off friendly fire, so a word of caution when you’re playing with friends…

Season 4

I didn’t participate at all in Season 3 of Diablo III, and I’m not even sure why. I was probably playing something else at the time and just didn’t have enough hours to go around. That’s usually the case. Anyway, when the season swapped to 4, it came at a pretty good time. Aside from WildStar and Wurm Online I haven’t really been dedicated to MMOs, and live is pretty stressful lately (maybe you can tell by the lack of blog posts) so what I needed was a game where I could just hack things to pieces and then shower in their loot. As luck would have it, that’s exactly what Diablo 3 lets me do.

I created a demon hunter this round. The only two characters I have actually played previously was the Crusader, and I had an old Witch Doctor sitting at level 55. That character was ancient by now and I think I had something like 95 hours played on it even though I was only 55. Leveling is MUCH faster now. Once I set my mind to it, things were faster than ever. I now have a level 70 monk, barbarian, and wizard alongside the demon hunter. I’ve only focused gear on the demon hunter because for now that happens to be the character I’m enjoying the most, but I am sure I’ll flip flop between everyone else. There’s something to be said for not having to do any thinking and just be able to let go and game. I tend to keep CBC radio on in the background and just listen while I complete bounties or rifts. It’s a very stress-free way of gaming, and it was exactly what I needed. Anyone else have a game or two that they tend to hunger down with when they’re feeling exceptionally stressed out in real life? Let me know in comments!

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself.

Lots of Wurm Online

Things have been incredibly busy since the end of August and all of September (of course you know WildStar is going free to play, right?) so I haven’t been doing a lot of gaming. When I do, it’s typically very relaxing games like EVE Online and Wurm Online. In Wurm, my Nahjo priest finally made it to 50 skill which means.. well it means next I need to get to 70. At 50 you start earning gems from prayers though (randomly) so that’s a good thing. Since my channeling skill is already at 60 and there’s not a great deal I need channeling for (you don’t use it for strongwall or for genesis) I’m not going to focus on it that much. My Vynora priest on the other hand needs to gain at least 10 more points (just barely over 61 at the moment) and a few more skills before I’m comfortable with the character.

Meanwhile down at my Southern deed I’ve been working on breeding horses. Not for any particular reason, I don’t need a lot of animals, but I do find it calming and easy work (as is tending my fields). Both deeds are pretty well established now, and I’m wondering if it may not be time to narrow it down to one deed. The downside to that of course is that I have a LOT of supplies up at the Northern deed, and I’m not willing to disband the Southern one which is where my other alliance friends are located. I’m not sure how long it would take me to move everything I own from one deed to another, but I’m guessing it would take more than one corbita loaded with crates. Do I have the patience for that? Probably not. So in the meantime I continue to use my karma to port between the two towns as needed. I really wish there were a faster transportation method, but most players tend to agree that travel is one of the perks of Wurm. I tend to agree – unless you’re playing on Xanadu. That server is just so enormous.

I’ve been thinking of starting up another free to play character and just exploring and seeing what the game is like from a free players point of view. Maybe I’ll do it on a completely different server and see how it goes.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

New Header, New videos

Pictured above is a new header I had designed by Belghast, yay! I’ve been trying to get a new header for my blog that I could use on various social media sites for ages now, but lets face it, my skill in creating these headers is pretty much zip to none. In instances like this instead of getting upset that I can’t create the header myself, I decide to find someone who can. On that same note I’ve also commissioned someone to create a new cartoon-esc avatar for me to also use across social media, so I don’t have to keep using my real picture. Now, why would I do this? It’s for a few reasons. Number one is that I’d like things to be uniform across all of these places. Number two, I’d like to do more streaming on twitch / youtube, and I don’t particularly want or need my real image gracing the pages. It took me a few days to find someone who was willing to give the avatar a try, but I’m confident that I’ll be happy with the results. I’m incredibly happy with the new header for the blog, and I’m looking forward to transitioning that header over to other media over the next week.

Speaking of media, I did do two twitch streams on Saturday. I did a short recap on Wurm Online (where the sound is absolutely horrible, my apologies. If you want you can fast forward past the part that’s playing music so it doesn’t drown out my voice so much) and then another stream later on in the day where I was exploring the Festival of Unity SPLAT event on Antonia Bayle (so much fun). I plan on picking up a new mic before too long, and I’m also picking up a webcam, something I’ve actually never attempted to do in my streams. I would like to make these streams a weekly thing, but that will depend on how busy I am and what games are on my plate. Wurm Online for example is not the most thrilling of games to broadcast unless you’re going out on a hunting trip or are working on terraforming the property.

You can follow my twitch channel if you want to be notified of streaming, or if you’d like to see the videos I’ve made in the past, I have most of them over on my youtube channel. Again I can’t promise that I’ll actually go anywhere with any of this, but it’s a nice fun little hobby on the side, and who knows. Maybe I’ll develop a knack for it over time. In the meantime, I’m incredibly happy to finally have updated my site a bit. After all, it has been 9 years since I started blogging on MmoQuests. It was time for a facelift.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Minecraft mods: Mystcraft

As much as I love exploring the Overworld and the Nether, sometimes I get a bit bored. Especially if I’ve been playing the same world for some time. That’s where Mystcraft comes in. Now, yes, there are lots of other mods that also add worlds and areas to your game, but this is the one I’ve been playing with so that’s what I’m going to talk about. It’s a very simple mod and you don’t need a lot to get started.

I made the basic tools first. I would need a writing desk, a book binder, and an ink mixer. Making ink is pretty easy, a bottle of water and two ink sacs. Then I made a linking book. I found out that this is basically the most important thing ever. You link it to the Overworld, and then when you enter the Ages that you create, you put down a book stand and that book right away so that you can gate back home. Of course you’ll want to make sure you’re in a relatively safe location first, so I tend to take a bunch of bricks with me and build an enclosure before exploring anywhere. Basically you take a whole bunch of pages (which are found in various places in the Overworld, as well as in a library in each age) and then bind those together into a book that becomes your teleportation device to the age. That’s what those books are in the screenshot above. The worlds themselves are a combination of the pages you have put in, and what the game adds on its own. The more of your own pages you put in, the less random stuff the game will put in. You can find pages that control every single aspect of your world, from when the sun rises (or if the sun rises) to what the ground is made out of. Even the colours and weather patterns are mapped out by those pages. The writing table is used to copy pages so that you don’t have to use your hard copies.

The first world I made I had added a few blank pages to fill in the slots so random stuff wouldn’t be added, along with iron blocks. The entire world was filled with areas where I could harvest iron – except the world was also poison if I ever stepped out into the sunlight or the moonlight. Very quick deaths resulted while I figured these things out. Still, I could harvest if I stuck to a tunnel system at least, so that’s what I did. Now there’s no way I’ll ever run out of iron.

The downside to mystcraft is that it’s incredibly random. You might THINK you have created the perfect non-aggro world, but once you get there you discover the air is poison or the ground is corrupted and is being eaten away, or some other downside like acid rain is falling from the sky. Or giant meteors are falling on you.

Best video ever.

Doesn’t that look like fun?!
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.