Workers, Promotions, and Potatoes

When it comes to hiring workers to do chores for you, there are three you can choose from. Giant, human, and goblin. Goblins work the fastest, but they also are the weakest and they require a lot of food upkeep. Not great for overnight crafting/harvesting sessions. Giants have a lot of strength, but they’re also the slowest. I found them far too slow for my node harvesting endevours. Humans are between the two, and they’re a pretty good balance for my game play style. Every 10 levels when they’re done working you can attempt a promotion, so right now for 24 hours PotatoGob is working on a promotion test. He can fail this test, but if he passes his name will turn blue like the other two at the bottom of the list who are ‘skilled’ workers.

I took a page from PixelOne in guild and have named them after their activities, just to keep them straight in my mind. So far I just have them out in the world harvesting for me so I can take their materials and then craft with them, we’ll see what other trouble we can get into. I think I’d like to craft furniture, or maybe ships, but I have no idea what any of that entails. Yet.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Top Notch Character Creation

Black Desert Online has some of the best character creation I’ve seen in a long time – with some faults. Number one, all of their player characters are human, and while you CAN add less desirable features, the game aims for what society as a whole thinks is “beautiful” and it can be difficult to create a vision of your own.

You can add as much or as little colour as you want, detailing even the iris on the eyes – but the body slider is fairly limited and even all the way to the right, for females at least, you’ll still be quite slim, or at least muscular without any appearance of fat.

Where I think BDO really shines in terms of characters is their NPC. Mob encounters are amazing, there are tons of races, a plethora of villagers, every town and every district has a distinct feel to it and you can immediately tell the area of Grana from Calpheon, as an example. I absolutely love it.

Thoughts on ProCreate

I got myself a new iPad a few months back, along with an apple pencil to try out. I get daily use from the iPad especially on days where I find doing day to day chores difficult, since it lets me organize & entertain. I am all for traditional art, but it is not kind to me due to both space required, and physical limitations. I grew up drawing, set it aside for about 20 years, and then decided why on earth did I ever give that up. It’s a hobby I feel passionate about and that I love for many reasons.

Anyway, I searched around for iPad apps that were user friendly, cost effective, and had features that I’d actually make use of. There are a ton of them out there, including a subscription version to Clip Studio Art, which is what I use with my Huion tablet on my PC. Unfortunately from reviews I’ve read it doesn’t translate very well to iPad, and while I’m not against paying a subscription, there were other options available where you could just purchase the product.

One of those apps suggested was ProCreate. A hugely popular iPad only program that has a very low entry fee. It does almost everything I want it to as a beginner, and it’s really easy to find tutorials and get into things. I’ve spent a few months now working with it off and on, and I’m a fan. I do wish there was just one program I could use across both my PC and the iPad, but for now this works.

After spending a few months doing illustrations and using simple brushes, I decided to give the watercolour brushes a go. I’ve got zero experience working with watercolour, but I learned that you work light to dark, which is the opposite of what I’d normally work. The picture above is a simple digital image I did – and my most favourite part of this piece is that to me it doesn’t look digital at all. It might not be particularly good, but I think the overall effect is great and someone with a lot more practice than me can probably do wonderful things with these tools.

In any case, I do have a DeviantART account over here, and I have a twitter account just for art related stuffs. It’s a nice quiet place where I can quietly (and completely) change my focus / noise, and I’m really glad I’ve separated it from the regular ‘noise’ of the rest of my hobbies (including gaming). I don’t imagine I’ll be doing any legendary artwork any time soon, but practice, practice, practice, and we’ll see where this goes.

The Benefit to Starting Fresh

I have two Black Desert Online accounts, and they’re both very different. I don’t really have time to keep up with two in a game that really encourages you to stay online (even if it’s AFK) 24/7 so I decided that I’d let one rest until it qualifies as a ‘returning’ account again which grants me access to the Olvia servers that have a very nice bonus – and I’d continue playing the ‘newer’ account.

There are a whole lot of reasons for this decision but the biggest one is that newer accounts simply get MORE. They get more of everything. My older account created back in 2016 already had some hours played on it, so they don’t qualify to get the ‘you’ve played 15 hours, have a treat’ bonus that everyone else gets. They also don’t count for the daily login ‘Rookie’ rewards which is from an event that is running right now. The thing is, the event already ran to conclusion last month, and I qualified for it then, too. So this is my second time running through those particular rewards. The qualifying factor is you have to be playing an account where you have logged in after creation within 720 days. Older accounts won’t qualify for that.

The rewards are nothing to sneeze at, either. They include a lot of inventory space, and special bonuses like pets. Coupons for the pearl shop, and buffs.

The only thing my older account had going for it was that I had three level 58+ characters, and the new account has a single 59 character. My crafting was never that high, though I did have a nice amount of energy and contribution points. Those things are all fairly easy to catch up on though and getting buffs and inventory spots is a lot more difficult. The decision to swap accounts came pretty easily, and (so far) I don’t have any regrets. The older account will still be there, after all, just waiting for me to pick it up again.

Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!