Gaming – Page 286 – A Pixel Nomad

Happy 10th Anniversary, Wurm Online

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Wurm Online, a game I’ve been playing in one version or another (most recently with Wurm Unlimited) for over 7 years now. It’s one of a handful of games that keeps me coming back and that I find highly addictive (in a very good way).

In celebration, a number of things are going on. I ended up signing up for two months of premium so that I could better partake. This granted me 5 silver, a tin leather knife, a returners mask, and a gift box with sleep powder. A lot of people are (of course) displeased with their gifts and are moaning about the lack of creativity and how they wish it was something different, but I’m quite happy with mine. Besides, we could have gotten nothing at all.

A big round of updates has come to pass too. With it came Rifts, neat little events that open every few days on each server. You can also create houses underground now, so living life like a dwarf is a definite possibility. It’s nice to see such a large update, and it’s great to see so many people returning / still playing.

I took inventory of what I had in my bags across the handful of characters I still have, made sure my main (the only one premium at this time) had the best of everything, and then set to work cleaning up the two deeds I own right away. I’m currently creating a path that leads from the market deed to my main deed, and I’ll pave it and get it done up all pretty. I know I was working on weaponsmithing, but I’ll probably swap over to something else for a bit, just because.

It’s quite a difference to see how fast (or slow) skills move in WO compared to custom servers in WU. My 7 year old character in WO has low skills compared to my 2 month old character in WU, but I take more pride in the older character (which is pretty normal, I assume).

In any case, it’s nice to be playing again, even if just for a short while.

Beautiful, but Slightly Annoying

I’m questing through Altar of Malice right now in EQ2. It’s the expansion that took us from 95 to 100, and it’s a few behind these days so everywhere I go is pretty empty as players opt to get to 100 by experience grinding elsewhere (I can hardly blame them). My first days in Tranquil Sea were uneventful. I didn’t enjoy the quest lines and the story didn’t pick up until I got to Phantom Sea. Then it all got much more interesting.

One of my least favourite type of quests are the ones that require you to harvest something but as you’re harvesting you get a message like the one below.

That’s right, you managed to pick up the item but OH NO it crumbled to dust! Now you have to harvest another one. Honestly, these quests are nothing but annoying, especially when (as I have mentioned numerous times) RNG and I are not friends. There’s a handful of these types of quests scattered throughout the Altar of Malice timeline, and every single one made me groan. Just let me harvest double the amount instead of tossing in these failures! At least then I have some idea of progression and achievement instead of feeling bad that I’ve failed, again.

With that annoyance out of the way.. the expansion is amazing looking. It”s probably one of the prettiest places I’ve seen in EQ2. The dungeons are beautiful, and I found myself taking a lot of screenshots.

Now I continue to work my way to level 100, so I can at least have one character at the cap. Sure, I’ve got two crafters (out of 9) at 100 already, but that doesn’t really give me the same sense of achievement. Ideally I’d like to get a few more characters to 100, but we’ll see how that goes (as always). It’s nice to be playing in Norrath again, even if my subscription is up in a month. I’d like to be able to afford a krono or some other means of subscription but at 100,000 plat that’s just a bit out of my range.

Still, I’ll enjoy things in the meantime.

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

A Red Dragon Fell

The lurking red dragon had been hanging around for a while but no one was really out hunting it until a week or two ago. The crowds gathered, and we all wondered if we would have the manpower to take down the beast. Especially since we were missing some key (ie: high skilled) players.

The fight went smooth, even though a few lost their lives and it wasn’t “easy” by any means. It was fun. In the end there were 6 suits of dragon scale to award, along with a rare bone, a skull, and the corpse.

I didn’t win anything (again, RNG and I are not on speaking terms) but Moumix from my alliance did, and so did his wife. He donated his rare bone to Melketh, the tank of the evening (so he can tank in the future with more rare gear) and his wife won a lovely set of scale.

I think it was a good time had by all even if it wasn’t our largest event. Some new players turned up to help and that’s always a good thing. Now we have a Champion Troll King roaming the lands, and that is a beast of an entirely different nature. The chances of us being able to defeat him are pretty slim. Champions are scary creatures, and the troll king has an insane regeneration rate. I suppose we’ll just have to see.

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

Skyfactory 2.5 – A Skyblocks Mod Pack

Minecraft is one of those games that’s very easy to customize based on the person who is playing. Enjoy going after achievements? There’s a mod pack for that. Enjoy creative mode? Another mod pack. Enjoy exploring magic? Tinkering in tech? Want a challenge? There are mods for all of those.

That’s how I stumbled into something called “Skyblock” – but this mod pack is much more than just skyblock. It’s called Skyfactory 2.5, and it’s on the ATLauncher I was talking about in my previous minecraft post.

Skyblock is a challenge pack where there’s no actual world created. You spawn on top of a single tree that rests on a single square of dirt. Your challenge is to create a base and survive. There are optimal ways of doing this – take my platform pictured above. It’s done with half thickness planks instead of blocks. Why? Because monsters won’t spawn on them. It also gives me 6, so I can expand rapidly.

Once I made a crook and harvested a few saplings it was time to make a barrel that would let me compost my spare saplings and turn that into dirt. More dirt means I can plant more trees which of course means more wood.

Saplings need light at night in order to grow so to speed the process up a bit (they still take forever) I placed some torches. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. The pack is created custom so that you’re still able to create things like dirt and ore in a world where there’s no actual ground beneath you. Creating them is not easy, but eventually once you do the slow part you should be able to automate it. One of my first goals will be to have an automatic tree farm.

Since death means you lose everything ideally you want to leave your items in chests at your base and not carry them around with you. That way if you die you don’t have to give up and start the world over. I watched a hilarious youtube video last night of a group who happened upon a chance cube. Chance cubes are awesome, but they’re also random. The cube blew up most of their base, stranding two players on a single block of dirt in the middle of nowhere while their buddy was left with whatever remained of their base. It was hilarious. It’s these moments in minecraft that make me laugh the most, the unsuspecting trials and tribulations that you come up against (like that tornado that swept me away last time, that was hilarious). I’m looking forward to seeing what trouble I can get myself into this time.

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

Comfort Gaming

I’ve talked about this before in-depth, but this week more than others I find myself drawn to “comfort gaming”. Basically just like comfort food, we all have games that we’re very comfortable with. Maybe we don’t give them as much attention as we wish we did, or maybe we’ve moved on over the years to something more shiny, or maybe we’ve just stopped playing for whatever reason. Whatever the case may be, this week has been all about comfort gaming for me, and nothing gives me that feeling like EverQuest 2.

Lets face it, we all have a really bad week here and there. Mine started out with a doctor appointment that I was pretty sure was going to be bad news. Turns out, it was. There’s potentially something wrong with my pregnancy so now I have to fly to Vancouver for testing (in approximately a week) so I can find out what’s wrong, and how sever it is, and what (if anything) I can do to prepare myself for whatever comes next. Getting bad news sucks. Getting bad news and then having to wait a week before knowing anything sucks even more. Getting bad news, having to wait, and then having to take an unexpectedly expensive trip to find out results is even more stress. Then I found out my friend in EQ2 passed away after losing his fight with depression (which I wrote about here, too). Needless to say my weekend and the beginning of this week has certainly been filled with far more downs than ups. I’m ready for something good to come along.

That’s why turning to these comfort games is something I fully embrace. I’m not saying ignore the world or pretend the problems don’t exist, but give yourself a bit of a break. You’re dealing with some pretty rough times, you need some space to step away and collect yourself.

I decided nothing really gave me that feeling as much as leveling up a new character and so I created two. One is Milay, a berserker, and the other is Quails, a channeler. I logged in a second account and decided to power level both characters (one at a time) because what I really wanted to do was just plow through content without any thoughts at all.

So that’s exactly what I did.

Both characters are now at level 50, brokers are stocked with lots of yummy items for sale, and I feel a bit better about things (or at least calmer). Is it a perfect solution? No, of course not, but I can’t stress enough how much gaming has helped me keep my sanity in otherwise impossible situations. I had a lot of fun, and got to relax. It’s a great combination.