Shadowrunning

For those of you that don't know, I currently play in a Shadowrun campaign run by Lance every other Monday night (usually). Shadowrun is a cyberpunk RPG set in 2070. I am a big fan of the cyberpunk genre. When I say cyberpunk, I mean the actual meaning of the word. Characters that are typically working in the shadows or outside the bounds of normal society struggling against a dystopian government or mainstream culture and featuring things like cybernetics and hacking. In the case of Shadowrun, you're shadowrunners, mercenaries with no identities doing espionage for or against the big corporations that refuse to become wageslaves. Shadowrun is special because it injects fantasy into this genre. So you have megacorps being owned by dragons and a crew of shadowrunners composed of magic wielding elves, chromed out trolls, physical adept (magic using monk types) dwarves, as well as hackers and drone users of various races, and so on. It kind of seems a little kitchen sink-like, but it works.

Shadowrun has been around for a while. The first edition came out in 1989. Lance and I and our group play the 5th Edition of the game that came out in 2013. There have been several video games as well. The current crop (Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, and Hong Kong are quite good. There's also Boston Lockdown, but I can't speak to its quality. So it's not DnD with a pedigree going back to the seventies, but it has been around a while. I've gotten my hands on copies of previous editions, but only for the purposes of the lore, so in this post if I refer to mechanics I am speaking only of the 5th Edition of the game.

The game is a skill based classless system similar to GURPS in that you invest far more time in character creation than you do in leveling and your increase in abilities is rather slow and it is skill based and classless and has positive and negative qualities you can add to your character for a points cost. The main mechanic is rolling d6s attempting to achieve a certain number of hits to be considered a success (opening a lock) or meeting or exceeding an opposed roll's number of hits (attacking an enemy and comparing your roll with their defense roll). Hits are a result of 5 or 6 on the d6s. The number of d6s you roll is determined by your skill level, relevant attribute, and gear or qualities you may have that augment it. Your characters and some gear (mainly weapons) also have inherent limits to them. When attacking, your number of hits can't exceed a weapon's accuracy. Certain skills and such can't exceed your physical limit (a calculation based on your physical attributes), mental limit (based on mental attributes), or your social limit (your social attributes). Your attributes are Agility, Body, Strength, Logic, Intuition, Reaction, Willpower, Charisma, Magic, Essence, Edge, and Initiative.

The first thing I want to say is that I have been enjoying playing it with Lance and his associates. Good people and Lance is a good GM. The second thing I want to say is that this system is one of the clunkiest most unnecessarily over complicated rulesets I have encountered in my primarily d20 system focused gaming history. This, coupled with the third thing I want to say, makes it a very frustrating game to play. Oh. The third thing. The rulebooks are some of the most poorly designed I have every fucking encountered in terms of layout, rules clarity, and the separation of background material and rules.

I'm not going to speak about my dislikes of the system, as they could just as easily be my personal likes and dislikes and my d20 system Stockholming coming to the fore, but I would like to talk about a few things I like about the system.

The first is the concept of Essence is it relates to social interaction and cybernetics. Essence is part of the calculation of your social limit. Did I say that already? It tends to stay at 6 or go down and it represents your metahumanity. It's also tied to your Magic attribute, if you have one. One of the primary things that decreases essence is chrome, cyberware. There are high quality versions of cyberware that reduce it less, and there is bioware as well which tends to reduce essence by a smaller amount than its cybernetic equivalent but tends to be vastly more fucking expensive. The gist of this mechanic is that when you replace your skeleton with titanium bones or implant kevlar into your skin or replace your fingernails with razors blades, you lose something of yourself, something hard to define. Something just begins to seem off and inhuman about you and others react to this offness. Thus the impact of Essence on your social limit. If it wasn't obvious, a really shitty social limit is going to prevent you from being an effective talky character. If you can only get one or two hits tops due to your social limit, it doesn't really matter how many handfuls of d6s you are tossing onto the table. 

This makes a lot of sense to me. If your bones are titanium, you're going to move and carry your weight differently. You're not going to react to physical pressures on your body in the same way. You won't be easily shoved and surfaces are going to respond differently to your weight on them than they would flesh and blood bodies. If your eyes are implants, you're not going to need to blink to keep them moist or squint in the sun. If your skin is made of kevlar, it's not going to itch or cause you to slap at mosquitoes and bugs on it. A completely cybernetic limb isn't going to twitch or shift to find a comfortable position because it's asleep and you won't crack your knuckles as a nervous tic. As you pile on the chrome, the comforting little tics and idiosyncrasies of flesh and blood that we rarely notice are going to fade away and since we rarely notice them consciously, we'll just have an indefinable sense of something being off. You might say that having kevlar skin or metal limbs is fairly obvious, but in a cyberpunk setting the chrome itself is not unnatural or weird. It's no different than wearing glasses or walking with a cane would be in our society. Maybe I'm over analyzing it or attributing more to the mechanic of Essence and social limit than the designers were, but it makes a lot of sense to me and it's kind of an elegant way of showing what replacing your flesh with chrome does to you.

The second thing I like is the damage tracks. There are two, physical and stun. Physical is lethal physical damage based on your Body attribute and stun is nonlethal and mental damage based on your Willpower attribute. Shadowrun recognizes that there is a sort of mental hit point value for your character. Both damage tracks have negative effects they inflict on your character as they decrease as well. Which is a big beef I have about DnD. There's no difference in the effectiveness of a character with 1 hit point and one with 100. Shadowrun also doesn't go for overblown hit point sacks. My character, Marius the Elf Street Samurai, only has like nine boxes on his physical damage track. Damage is figured out by the damage value of a weapon and the target making a roll of their Body + their armor's rating. That's a slight simplification, but the gist is that if your weapon's damage exceeds the target's roll, you start marking off boxes.

The third thing I like is the concept of racial minimums and maximums for attributes. This is something I liked about 2nd Edition AD&D as well. The attribute range for humans is 1 to 6. During character creation you start at the minimum for your races and use your attribute points to increase from the minimum. Elves are faster and prettier than humans so that have a range of 2 to 7 for their agility and 3 to 8 for their Charisma. Trolls and orks are big and tough so their racial minimums and maximums are higher for Strength and Body than a human's. This doesn't mean all orks and trolls are tougher and stronger than all humans. But the troll that is a street samurai using melee weapons is probably going to be stronger and tougher than the human or elf street samurai that uses melee weapons. This makes sense. Orks and trolls are big, they can physically support more muscle mass and whatnot than a human or elf can. Elves are slender and graceful, their bodies are naturally able to achieve more agility than a humans, the same way cats are naturally more agile than a cow or dog. Halfling characters in DnD could have a Strength far surpassing that of the average human, even just at character creation, even though they are skinny and half as tall as the average human.

Next up on my list is how Shadowrun does initiative. Just like DnD, initiative is a measure of turn order in combat. It's your Intuition + Reaction +1d6. There are things that can increase your bonus dice and whatnot. The first thing I like is that initiative is based on a physical attribute (your reaction speeds) and a mental attribute (your awareness of your surroundings). I find it odd that Reaction is not folded into Agility like it is in other games, but whatever. So I think it's really neat that the majority of your initiative in Shadowrun is static with only a minor amount of variation. It makes sense, people who react quickly and pay attention to their surroundings and are experienced with seeing when people are ready to kill would statistically, probably maybe, be quicker to react and be ready than people who are not those things. Anyway. So one interesting thing Shadowrun does with initiative is that everyone takes their turn, then they subtract 10 (I think) from their initiative and anyone with an initiative above 0 gets to go again. So instead of gaining additional attacks because class feature or attack bonus, you gain additional attacks and actions for being super fast and stuff. I dig it. Additionally, there are some forms of attack and defense and some special actions you can take that cost you initiative. It's kinda neat. I like it. It makes combat a little bit more fluid and interactive and that sort of thing. 

So. Last thing, the priority system. Originally I found this system incredibly confusing and clunky, but it's actually kind of neat. There are five priorities: A, B, C, D, and E. During character creation you choose your metahuman type (race), magic (which determines your magician type and spells and magic skills), skills, attributes, and resources (cash). You choose things by assigning them a priority. So if you want to have a lot of cash, you assign your resources priority 4 (400,000 nuyen). I tend to like Elf characters because I am partial to brutally quick little characters. Elves are only an option if you choose metatype priority as A, B, C, or D. Elves at priority A are noted as Elf (8), elves at priority D are Elf (0). The number after the parentheses are points you can use to increase your Edge (which is basically luck), Magic, or Resonance. So you can choose a "weaker" race, but augment it with other features. Anyway. It's an interesting system that's less complicated than completely constructing characters from scratch via points values, but is much more reasonable than just mandating all races and classes are equal in power. 

So yeah, there's some stuff I like about Shadowrun and stuff. 

Better Than Wolves

A long time ago, Minecraft had this update that introduced wolves to the game. They're a passive mob, meaning they don't attack you like zombies and skeletons and whatnot. They also have the neat ability to befriend you if you feed them a bone. Then they kind of follow you around and whatnot. Or they can be set to guard a spot from hostile mobs and other players on a multiplayer server. While neat, it isn't exactly a lot of content. So in response, this guy created a mod called Better Than Wolves. 

Normally, mods add things, usually blocks and tools, ores, etc. Usually they're based around some kind of core concept like magic or technology or storage. A lot of the time they mostly add automation or simplification to Minecraft. For instance, Buildcraft adds the quarry, which mines a potentially very large area while powered. Thaumcraft adds little golem dudes that you can set simple tasks for, like harvesting your crops or defending your base. Industrial Craft adds lots of electric tools. Forestry adds multifarms that grow almost any crop and when powered and supplied with the appropriate resources, plants and harvests the crops or trees or whatever automatically and ejects them into a pipe system for storage. 

Better Than Wolves doesn't do any of that really. In fact, it goes to great lengths to make simple tasks harder. Better Than Wolves is almost a complete reworking of most of the game. When you get hungry, you lose the ability to jump or sprint. You can't transport water source blocks in a bucket, you have to dig channels and reroute water manually to hydrate your crops. Trees take forever to grow. You can't mine stone with wood picks or craft wooden axes and swords. Moving through grass slows you down. Etc.

The mod adds a shit ton of content to the game and reworks a lot of recipes and mechanics of the game. The little bit of automation it adds is usually derived from mechanical power and creative applications of cranks and gears and redstone. Like you have to use a hand crank to power the millstone to grind up flour for bread. Or put a water wheel in a spot of flowing water. 

I've been trying out the mod recently and I find it to be almost infuriatingly difficult to progress in. But, everything you do succeed at is that much more rewarding. Even if it is as simple as chopping down some fucking wood. I mean, punching a block of wood for half a minute waiting for it to break is a huge pain in the ass. It drains your hunger bar and doesn't get you much wood. When you finally get enough wood to make enough wooden picks to mine stone and make a stone axe, its awesome. You're not only working faster, you're getting more planks per log and using less hunger. When you finally mine enough iron to make two ingots and make an iron hoe and get farming, well, that's just nuts. 

The mod is on some level fascinating. It forces you to think things through and plan things out in a way that fairly simplistic vanilla never really made me do. But, it doesn't go the route of simply adding a new block or machine to do it for you. Soul Shards, MineFactory Reloaded, and DartCraft all add the ability to craft mob spawners to farm mobs for certain resources, but Better Than Wolves grants you the tools to create pretty neat traps (there's a sawblade machine you can power with a windmill to kill mobs for you), but doesn't do it for you. So you still have to come up with creative methods of getting the game to spawn monsters, and come up with an equally creative way to kill them and collect the loot. Instead of giving you a high cost enchanting table upgrade that lets you pick your enchant instead of getting a random one, Better Than Wolves gives you a high cost enchanting table upgrade, but forces you to provide it with a specific enchantment on a book before it will let you pick it to put on a tool or weapon. 

I don't necessarily know if I am committed to playing the mod religiously and exploring all of its content, but I really like the concept and the challenge of it. I dunno. Sometimes heavily modded Minecraft is super fucking easy, which makes it boring at times. I mean, once you set up a 64 x 64 quarry, you're pretty much set for metals forever. Which means there's no real reason to wander underground and stumble upon abandoned mineshafts, strongholds, or mob spawners and their included loot. 

I dunno. Fucking Minecraft. 

Binders Full of Mods

You know, I never paid any attention to what that whole binders full of women thing was during the presidential campaign. I heard it mentioned, but never actually learned what it was about. I just assumed it was crazy, Mormon, misogynistic, and involved Kolob.

There are so many fucking mods in Minecraft on our server. One problem I have is overlap between them. Each big mod has a system for ore processing, most mods have different systems for ore processing, automating mining, and farming, and a few have different systems of enchantment, or for managing livestock, etc etc etc. 

I tend to like the aesthetics of the Buildcraft based mods like Buildcraft, Forestry, and Thermal Expansion and would likely go with those without complaint. I dunno, I just really like the tube transport system and the moving engines. But, you can't competently ignore the Industrial Craft stuff, which doesn't use the same power as the Buildcraft mods, because it has fantastic stuff like electric rechargeable tools and highly advanced gear like jet packs and armor that uses energy instead of durability. However, all the Industrial Craft blocks are ugly gray metal squares. The engines and blocks of BC based mods tend to have more colorful textures and effects. Which are neat.

There is a mod that creates power converters to convert stuff from one energy source to another, but I haven't enabled it on our server because it feels like cheating to me.

Personally, I prefer power generation based on green resources, rather than burning coal or charcoal or solar power. I use fermenters and stills and tree farms to produce biomass, biofuel, and ethanol to power my shit. I also use a little bit of lava for my quarry engines. If I wanted to be creepy, I could use the MineFactory Reloaded mod and harvest meat products from livestock and create meat. Which is a liquid. Which can be pumped into some Buildcraft engines as a power source. Or I could compress it into meat blocks and cook them for food. 

Ick.

I haven't touched Thaumcraft at all this time around, simply because I haven't felt like investing the time. I have started experimenting with the ME (matter energy) storage system. Basically you build some special blocks and storage media and store all your shit as data and create a bunch of interfaces to craft and store items. It's super neat. One of the big issues with Minecraft is all the crap you end up collecting and having to store or find a convenient way to get rid of. So you end up with rooms and rooms full of chests. The ME system is super expensive and uses primarily gold and diamonds, which are hard to find in large amounts, but I have several thousand items stored in one block that took up an entire 9x9x3 room in my base full of barrels. Barrels are an item from another mod that can store up to 4,096 of a single item. Not even half of my barrels were full, but most were at half full. I have lots of crap. Having a storage device that not only stores a shit ton of stuff, but condenses the space, is really glorious.

I haven't really figured out what I want to do now that we've rebooted the server. I've experimented with a few of the new mods, which has been interesting and fun. There's one called Dartcraft that seems to be inspired by the Zelda games. The ore it installs looks much like the triforce, and the armor you can create with it strongly resembles Link's outfit from the games. 

I've basically just been getting my base situated and automating resource collecting, but I don't know what I want to do with all the shit I have. Once again, I find myself groping for a sort of creative project to engage. I still have some work to do on power generation and getting that completely squared away. I think I just came up with a decent solution though. We'll see. 

I've kind of been toying once again with building something iconic from DnD. But once again, I come to the realization that most people aren't really aware of what all the iconic legendary dungeons are or what they look like. Still, it might be kinda cool to say that "Yeah, that's Castle Ravenloft." over there. I dunno. I'll figure something out, or I'll get bored. I might end up slipping into creative mode, which I can do as an admin, and create dungeons all over the place for people to stumble upon and sneak through. That might be cool. 

Still Moar Minecraft

I don't even. What?

So I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately, perhaps you've noticed. I really really like the vanilla version of the game. I've spent countless hours just digging holes in the ground looking for ores I don't precisely need because I never really do anything other than dig holes and build towers and glass structures and stuff. Nonetheless, I love the game. It's so much fun. 

This guy from work bought a server, as I've said before, and we started using all these mods and stuff, and those have added and ridiculous amount of new content. Trains and engines and magic and all sorts of fun things to expand the crafting and building you can do in the game. You can breed trees and bees with Forestry and make golems with Thaumcraft and make quarries with Buildcraft. 

That's a picture of my quarry. You can see on the lower left where I've built solar panels to power it and also a series of chests and tubes for extracting the mined resources. I built it over water so the water would cascade down into it to nullify any lava nodes, which stop the quarry from mining. I built it next to a volcano (a biome addition that can sometimes explode with lava) because I wanted some basalt and obsidian. 

So there's all this new cool shit that I think is neat, so now I think the game is neater and have been playing it a lot. Obsessively, one might say. Oh well, we all have our hobbies. Looking at things and how the server runs, I've thought about getting a server for myself. Not with any real intent to make it public per se, but just as a large space to dick around in that occasionally a friend could join me in or wander around to see what I'm up to. Plus, I'm kind of thinking I'll need a back up. The guy running our server right now is unreliable.  

One of the neat thoughts I had was just wandering around in creative mode just building dungeons. With all the tricks you can pull with redstone, making a deathtrap dungeons would be pretty easy. There are tripwires and levers and pressure plates and machines that can shoot arrows or exploding potions and pistons that can retract blacks and so on and so forth. It's kind of a neat concept. I mean, in theory, anyone wandering in could just deconstruct your dungeon layer by layer, but there are various operator and admin plugins you can use to keep people from altering anything in a certain area. 

Basically, this amounts to setting up something like an RPG server. Essentially create a safe spawn zone and then build a world around it using some of the neat stuff some of the mods can do accompanied by admin powers. I just watched a guy who goes by Direwolf20 on YouTube set up a program that has his little ComputerCraft robots build towns (apparently if you build specific types of buildings, villagers will start spawning and colonize them). Towns. He used computers to program robots in Minecraft to build a town. I dunno, I thought it'd be really fun to wander through the world doing things like building the Desert of Desolation and The Keep on the Borderlands or The Black Mountain. 

I mean, that'd be pretty neat. If someone I knew was doing something like that, creating dungeons to dig through for treasure, in Minecraft, I'd totally be into it. With the mind I have for dungeons and trapping, it could be like FourthcoreCraft. I dunno, I've got some interesting thoughts in my head about interesting things. We'll see, I guess. 

Eventually I'll do a post about Pathfinder, I promise. 

Minecraft Stuff

So a few posts ago I said some stuff about Minecraft and how I was playing on a multiplayer server with a few guys from work and their friends and whatnot. Shortly after that there were some problems and the server was down for most of a week. After it went back up, it was wiped of our world and buildings, but the guy who owns the server decided on the urging of his friend to use something called Feed The Beast. FTB is this program that uses a bunch of mods and collects them into packs and loads them into Minecraft for you and runs the game for you. It's all legal and above board and you still need to own Minecraft to play because it uses your normal Minecraft account and everything. Plus, Notch and Mojang made the game to be heavily used and abused by the modding community.

FTB has these modpacks that include various mods from various people that have done various things to the game. Some of these are useful utilities like a minimap mod that allows you to set up waypoints and stuff on the overworld so you always have a good idea where you are or at least know which direction you should start walking to get back to your base of operations. Others have useful utilities like using increasingly expensive ores to create increasingly spacious inventory items. Others add neat things like new biomes with new plant life and different textures and colors for stone and dirt. Redwood forests are pretty fucking crazy looking and volcanoes are as well. Others add new resources and subsystems to the game like copper ore, a better system for managing rails and carts, electricity, magic, nuclear power, power armor, flying armor forcefields, or teleportation.

Normal Minecraft is pretty basic, you have a furnace, anvil, crafting table, enchantment table, and cauldron. You refine ores by burning fuel (wood, coal, etc) in the furnace, you craft things in the crafting table (by arranging various amounts of materials in a pattern on a 3x3 grid), you brew potions in the cauldron. You can also use levels to enchant with the enchanting table or use the anvil to repair tools or combine enchantments. I think that's about it. You can do a lot with redstone circuits and running power to things, but its pretty complex once you get beyond pulling levers and powering carts as they move along rail tracks. I mostly settle for lever operated lava pits and redstone operated secret doors. Other people are crazier and create huge clocks and calculators with it.

So now we're playing Minecraft with all these mods (the Direwolf20 modpack, specifically) and I am completely lost because I knew nothing of these mods or FTB. I'm a vanilla Minecraft guy, I've figured out pretty much everything in the base game and nowadays I just like playing around on creative mode placing blocks and building neat things or things from my Pathfinder campaign. Which reminds me that I need to update the Orcunraytrel save to reflect the new additions that Karl put on the tower while the guys were in Cantellen.

There's all this new stuff and it's all insane. You need to harvest resin from rubber trees to combine with smelted copper to make wiring to connect your coal fueled generator to your battery box to store electricity then connect it to your extractor to get a better resin to rubber ratio. You'll also need to use an electric furnace so you're not burning through all that coal because coal can be ground up and hydrated and compressed and put into a container then extracted to get a coalfuel cell, which can power your generator for longer than a normal piece of coal. Or you can run a windmill and solar panels and a water mill to power everything. Or you can break down plant matter to run your generator.

So there are some interesting aspects to these mods and there are a few beefy ones that change a lot, while others are just minor tweaks or additions. My favorite one is the Thaumcraft mod. It adds magic into the game. Basically, what you do is destroy materials to release various essences of magic into the air and then you use a wand to create something out of them. Sometimes it is a useful building material like arcane wood, which you can craft a door out of that can only be opened by you. You can also build warded building blocks and glass, which are immune to destruction at the hands of other players. Handy on a multiplayer server. Other times, you can create more mundane resources. Like you can throw tin into a cauldron and wave your wand and create gold and such.

There are also useful utility magic items like the portable hole, which creates a magic tunnel that lets you pass through blocks. There's also a wand of excavation that blasts the earth with a beam of magic so you can collect the blocks. You can also create little golem dudes to guard and attack other players or hostile mobs (or peaceful mobs) or pick up stuff for you or refill your cauldron. You can also build swords and tools out of a magic metal that is more easily enchanted than other materials and has almost as much durability as diamond and deals almost as much damage as diamond. 

It's a pretty neat mod that takes some work to get into. You can't just find a recipe online and make stuff. You have a little spellbook and you have to create a research table and kind of research the various essences. So gold has the metal and valuable essences, so I had to research (destroy) valuable objects, metal objects, and objects related to change (like seeds and eggs) to shift my progress bar on research before I could actually transmute metal into gold. It's kind of a neat process that is a little more involved than the normal construction of objects in Minecraft. It's also kind of pretty. Most of the new objects and resources are very shiny and colorful and feature little auras of particle effects. 

Another of the main mods, and one I am currently focusing on quite a bit is the Industrial Craft mod. This one mostly centers on the inclusion of advanced machines and technology and runs on electricity. The basic device is a generator that you burn fuel in to generate electricity, which you then transmit to machines via gold, tin, and glass (I think) wiring. You can also transmit electricity by powering up batteries and then placing them into the machine you need to run. It's just easier to run wire all over the place frankly. My base is kind of a rat's nest of the stuff. Wiring is a little complicated, each wire can only take a certain amount of electrical output or it melts. If your wire isn't insulated enough, it damages you when you're next to it. If it is too high of a voltage for the machine to handle, it explodes the machine. Luckily, there are transformers to downgrade voltage, so you can use a high capacity/high voltage storage device and downgrade the voltage it outputs to power your basic machines. 

The mod also gives you access to some tools that have unlimited durability, but they run on electricity. My diamond tipped drill only stores enough power to use it about 150 times, which isn't a lot during a mining run. However, you can create batteries and other storage devices. I actually crafted a battery pack to wear that stores 30 times as much energy in it as the base amount the drill can hold. It's handy, because I also run around with a chainsaw. The chainsaw and drill are also super fast at mining and cutting wood, so it speeds things up considerably. Until I need to charge up that battery pack. 

The generator isn't your only means of electricity production though. You can pump lava for a geothermal generator, run water through a water mill (or sink it into a lake), you can put solar panels of varying degrees of power on the landscape, you can even put up windmills. I mostly use plant life to generate biofuel and some solar panels. The mod also allows you to build a nuclear reactor, if you can find some uranium, and the power output on those is pretty significant, but you have to manage them real well or they explode and spew lava all over the place and destroy a lot of blocks around you. You can also use the uranium to build nukes, which destroy a space about 80 - 100 blocks horizontally and 100 - 130 blocks vertically, and is accompanied by a poison and hunger effect. 

There is also some pretty advanced technology in the mod. You can create a jet pack and some composite armor and a mining device that will automate mining for you in a 5x5 or 9x9 square till it hits water or bedrock. But it takes power to run it. There's also the force field, which kills any players other than you that are inside of it unless they have a special access pass you craft for them. There's also a portal gun and weighted companion cube, and a teleporter. The advanced technology is fairly expensive in terms of resources, so I haven't really played with it yet. I'm still trying to figure out all of the basics of the mods, so I'm still figuring out my power grid needs and what I'll need for long term play on the server, so I haven't built any of the higher end stuff. Plus, one of the smaller mods adds a bunch of new biome types, so I've been doing quite a bit of exploring instead of mining and resource collection. 

One of the other bigger mods is Buildcraft, and it does a lot of the same stuff that Industrial Craft does, but in a different way. You still have machine types that improve upon the furnace and operate with better speed and efficiency, but they run on Minecraft Joules and are generated by various types of engines you can build.  Minecraft Joules and Industrial Craft electricity are not compatible, but can be converted by some devices from one to the other. It also tries to automate mining with the quarry, which looks kind of cool, but does about the same thing as the Industrial Craft miner. The engines are as tricky as the electrical system, they can overheat and explode and cause conductive tubes (wires, basically) to exlode. One neat thing from Buildcraft is transportation tubes. You can build tubes of various types to move resources around. So you can set it up so that your combustion engine is pumped water to keep it cool and then use it to power your pulverizer to break down ores (so you can refine them for more the a single ingot per ore) then connect a tube from the pulverizer to a chest or furnace to keep moving the ores out once they're pulverized. Industrial Craft and Buildcraft are real big on automation.

Another mod is Forestry. It is about trees and farming. Using this mod you can automate the harvesting and planting of trees and crops. Right now I'm trying to set up a automatic farming process to farm peat for me (so I can power some peat fired engines to play with more Buildcraft stuff), along with some trees, wheat, and reeds (so I can convert them into biofuel for my electrical generators). If I can automate basic resource collection with a quarry and some farms, I should be able to just wander off and dick around doing whatever and not have to worry about needing wood or food or fuel for a project. Forestry also includes a crazy system of bees, breeding bees, and breeding plants. I have no idea how it works or what the benefits are, but I guess there are like 132 different types of bees (Thaumcraft actually adds 72 new species, so the base number of bee breeds is like 60). One neat thing that Forestry adds is the electrical engine, which can be powered by Industrial Craft electricity to pump out as Minecraft Joules. However, it doesn't output much. To modify and improve its output you can use a Foestry crafting device to build a soldering iron and circuit board and put different electron tubes into it. Farms can also be modified this way. The types of crops your farms can grow is determined by a circuit board and electron tube set up. 

There are other mods in the game (including one based on Myst, which allows you to generate and travel to what are essentially other Minecraft worlds that you can rape for resourcs), but these are the only ones I really have any experience with so far, other than building neat items to see what they can do because I have a shit ton of resources for them lying around because I don't use them. One interesting thing of note is that all this new and shiny shit has completely killed my desire to create anything in terms of neat structures and buildings. This kind of bums me out, because I was all excited to create that floating castle and stuff, but I figure that once I get a handle on all of this new stuff I'll probably want to craft something neat looking. Like a flying castle with smokestack factories as the corner towers of the walls and a nuclear reactor cooling tower as the main fort, with a force field around it all. 

Moar Minecraft

So I started playing Minecraft again. A friend from work decided to get a server so we could do multiplayer. So myself and a few work friends and a few of their friends are fucking around on a multiplayer server building insane shit. I haven't played Minecraft in quite a while, so I was like five or six updates behind and they've added a few interesting mechanisms and features and such. I'm pretty excited to play again. I've never played on a multiplayer server before though, and it is a survival mode server. So there are monsters that spawn and you have to worry about hunger and health in addition to the monsters ruining things for you. Plus, other players can trash your buildings or steal your shit. For instance, I logged on before work a few days ago and found the whole side of my stone hut blown apart as if a creeper had exploded next to it. Nothing was stolen or anything, but its still irritating that someone was wandering around and not paying attention and destroyed my stuff.  

Like I said, I've no experience with multiplayer servers and the guy running the thing, Kyle, is basically a narcissistic sociopath. So yeah, there's that. Anyway, I've played survival mode for hours and hours and constructed fantastic things like underwater fortresses of glass, glass mountains with small castles inside them, etc etc etc. I much prefer creative mode and just flying around and building whatever the fuck I want without having to worry about death or an exploding creeper leveling my building. Plus, other players can just open your chests of shit and steal all your valuables. 

I'm really paranoid about other players, I have issues with paranoia. Kyle has said this is a trust server, so he does not have anti-griefing enabled and has no intention of doing so. I assume this means that if a player places something, it becomes indestructible to other players. 

Anyway. I've never played on a multiplayer server, so I had no idea what to expect. I expected it to be a lot like WoW with players killing and looting each other and just wandering into buildings stealing stuff. That hasn't happened, aside from my partner Ryan, who is a noob, stealing a bunch of higher end shit and promptly starved to death and lost it all. Talking with Kyle, I've learned there are these things called plugins you can install to modify the game. So we can enter a command and teleport back to where we died and pick our shit up off the ground. Which is handy. He also installed a plugin that ties your chests and smelters and doors to you when you place a sign on them and no one else can open them and it makes them invulnerable so an exploding creeper can't blow up next to it and destroy all your shit. Other players can destroy the sign that ties you to the chest or door, but that pings the admins with who is breaking what chest. There's also this plugin he installed where you fight waves of mobs after choosing a class (just determines what gear you start the fight with, nothing else) and gain rewards based on how many waves you survive. It's kinda fun.

So I've been playing around and digging and generally just fucking around and I've come up with a building project I want to work on. It's kind of involved and time consuming, but it isn't something I've done before and building it in survival mode presents some challenges. So it should be pretty rewarding to finally get the thing. 

The project is a flying castle over a lake with a moat around it that looks like it has been ripped up out of the middle of a lake. So there will be this big lake with a castle above it and a bunch of water streaming off of the castle down into the lake below. Should look kind of cool, hopefully. My goal is to also surround it with aerial islands with like crops and farm animals and that sort of thing on them, all kind of interconnected by wooden walkways and that sort of thing. I'd like to kind of scatter dirt chunks in the air around the islands as well to kind of like debris that fell off of the island as it was raised and that sort of thing. If I can end up building it in a non-boring, somewhat decorative way, it should end up looking fairly neat. If I make any progress on it, I'll of course post pictures and that sort of thing. 

I'd also like to create a sort of involved way of accessing the place. No, with the essentials plugins, we can set warp points that you can warp to, so all I really need is a warp point command like /warp clintscastle. Boom. However, I don't want people I don't know swarming all over this place doing whatever they want, because it's kind of my base. So what I'm going to do is set up like a little ground level fort inside of it with a portal to the nether. The nether is a lightless place full of lava and powerful bad guys. Dangerous as fuck. However, every step you travel in the nether is equivalent to eight steps in the surface world. So what I want to do is build another portal to the nether in my castle and then connect the two portals via a tunnel (probably of obsidian, maybe) so there is a sort of neat little way of accessing my castle from the ground. Additionally, I'd probably set up locking mechanisms around my castle entrance, like build something like a Stargate iris around the nether portal using pistons and such so it is secure and people can't surprise me through it. 

That's another thing I'd like to play with, traps and mechanisms. I've got an idea for something like a portcullis trap that locks someone in place and then unloads arrows on them. I've also got an idea for trapping a tunnel where you pull a lever and four dispensers pop out of the walls and block off a tunnel and fire arrows down it. Dispensers are tricky though, I think they need a charge every time they fire, so you can't just give them power and have them fire until they hit empty. 

I dunno, like I said, I'm having fun getting back into Minecraft. As stuff develops, I'll post more and probably add some pictures once everything is completed. 

Fucking Minecraft

Everyone knows of my obsession with Minecraft and how much I love digging and building and crafting things. I also love city management/economy simulation games like Anno 2070 and Patrician IV. I dunno exactly what it is about those games, but they make me happy inside and I can spend lots and lots and lots of hours puttering with them.

So a several months ago I bought this game called Towns on Steam for cheap. It was still in like the alpha or beta stage, but preordering it allowed you to play it. They're still updating and patching and refining the gameplay and so on. The premise is a bunch of people found a town in the middle of a wilderness and you organize them and give them tasks and set up resource collection and production facilities and building houses and such for them. The game's graphics are pretty low end, kind of pixelated and you observe the various levels of the world in an isometric view and use like a mouse wheel to scroll up or down to the next level of the map. Periodically monsters invade from the borders of the map and if you dig too deep too quick, you can find progressively stronger monsters beneath your little town. I spent a lot of hours playing that game.

A few days ago I discovered a similar game called Gnomoria. Same concept as Towns, it's just gnomes instead of human villagers. There are also fairly hearty RPG elements to Gnomoria. There are heroes that gain levels in Towns, but in Gnomoria there are no levels, just skills and stats that improve through use. This includes stuff like healing wounded in the hospital, farming, dodging, wearing armor, and hauling stuff from point a to point b. Even your yaks have stats. There are no classes, but each gnome can be assigned a profession, which isn't really a class. It's more like a guide for the game to determine what the gnome does, as you have no direct control over your gnomes. Gnomes you designate as soldiers will attack a target if you direct them to, and you can assign different priorities to the various farm fields and pastures and workshops you build to determine which of them get more attention from the gnomes with professions that allow them to use them. Professions don't really matter, as you can make up your own or just click a bunch of boxes and have everyone doing everything. This is kind of counterproductive though, as it means no one will specialize and the higher a gnome's skill level, the quicker they perform a given task.

Every so often goblins and other nastiness wanders onto your map, along with wandering gnomes and merchants. This isn't exactly a strange or unique mechanic. What is interesting and unique is what drives the immigrants, traders, and enemy attacks. You have this stat called kingdom worth. It is based on the value of all your workshops and buildings and the resources you have collected. As the kingdom worth value goes up, you attract stronger and stronger enemies. It's kind of a neat concept. Of course, the easiest defense against enemies is to just put a wall around your little village without an entrance inside of it. The enemies will eventually starve to death outside of it, but so will immigrants, if the collected enemies don't get them. Additionally, all those enemies will drop all their weapons and armor on the ground when they die, which will add to your kingdom worth and draw progressively tougher types of invaders to your kingdom while your soldiers sit inside the walls not improving their combat skills on weak enemies.

Additionally, there is a tinkering mechanic to the game. If you build a tinker's bench, periodically a gnome will sit down and tinker and develop mechanisms. You can use those mechanisms to put together mechanical doors and walls and hatches and guns and stuff. I've seen some stuff online and there are some fancy mechanisms for defending your kingdom and such. Pit traps and collapsing walls and bridges that the bottom drops out of into a pit. It's all pretty nifty.

Anyway, I dunno, it is a fun little game that I have enjoyed spending stupid amounts of time on. Took me forever to get the hang of surviving the first few goblin attacks though. For some reason, it never occurred to me to put a dirt wall around the village to make a constricted access point and guard it with soldiers, rather then leave everything open and have the goblins kill my working gnomes before my soldiers could get there. I may have ragequit the game several times. I never stooped turning down the enemy stats and making metal deposits shallower though. That's one of the things you can do when you create a new game. There are a whole bunch of things you can tweak when you create a new map. You can determine the size of the map, how flat it is, how mountainous/hilly and how wide the bases of hills and mountains tend to be. You can also reduce the frequency and strength of invaders, along with determining what kinds of invaders can be on the map.

I think it is a neat game with some interesting mechanics and a bit of charm. It is also still in alpha or beta or whatever, so I'm very interested to see what the final product ends up looking like and what additional features they add. A bell to wake up sleeping soldiers would be really fucking handy, just saying.

Guild Wars II

I periodically hang out with some guys from work. For the most part, our schedules are the same and we all work at five p.m., aside from a few variations. They kind of do this thing where they get really excited about an upcoming game and when it releases, they play the fuck out of it and lose interest in a few months. This is how I got into EVE Online and Diablo III. Primarily they are into stuff like ARMA/Day Z and Call of Duty. When Guild Wars II came out they played the crap out of it, but quickly lost interest. Three weeks ago I was over at one guy's house hanging out and there was a lull in the gathering, he had to go to a corporation meeting for his corp on EVE and he started fiddling with Guild Wars II during the meeting, as he still periodically plays it even though the other two guys do not. We chit chatted a little bit while he played, what we like about MMOs and what we dislike and why he likes and still plays Guild Wars II, that sort of thing. It sounded like something I could get into, so when I went home I purchased a digital copy and loaded it onto my computer.

I've been playing it for a little over two weeks and I have to say I really like it. This post is kind of going to be about why, and I'm likely going to have to compare it to World of Warcraft a little bit to do so, as that is the only other MMO I have played extensively. I suppose I could use EVE as a comparison, but I feel like EVE is kind of in a genre of its own as an MMO. Just to give you an idea of what kind of experience I have with Guild Wars II, I have a level 34 (out of 80) Thief and a level 10 (out of 80) Engineer and upwards of a hundred and ten levels in each of the two crafting professions those characters have. I'm big on crafting. In World of Warcraft, I've played the main game and all its expansions. I have a level 72 Rogue specced for stealth, with...lots of levels in crafting. I am an obsessive crafter and have switched professions with my rogue many many times. I think the last time I played he was an Alchemist/Herbalist, before that it was Engineer/Miner, and before that is was Leatherworker/Skinner, and before that it was Alchemist/Herbalist.

Since I love crafting so much, I might as well start with crafting. Crafting is pretty straightforward in both games, you find a trainer to teach you a crafting profession, find the necessary components to make something, then get the tools or crafting station you need and start making stuff. As you craft things you level up your crafting profession and can craft better stuff. In Guild Wars II there aren't any gathering professions, if you want herbs to use for cooking, you just equip a sickle and start gathering potatoes or peppercorns or whatever. If you need lumber for a rifle stock, you equip an axe and chop down a tree. If you need iron for a rifle barrel or silver for a ring, you equip a pick and start mining. I really think this aspect of the crafting system is swell, because then you can take two professions that are actually useful for your character. Additionally, you can switch professions and learn new ones at any time, but unlike WoW, you don't lose any of your progress in professions you unlearn, so you can return to them at a later time if you want to. That is pretty freaking sweet. There is a cost associated with returning to a crafting profession you've already leveled up a bit, and that cost is dependent on how high of a level the crafting profession that you are returning to is. It is all kind of neat and it doesn't punish a player for changing their mind like WoW's does. It also gives you a lot more freedom and allows you to be fairly versatile, if you have silver to burn for dropping and picking up crafting professions frequently. The crafting professions all use a lot of the same resources as well, so unless you have a shit ton of money to buy components from the trading post or a lot of stored crafting resources, it becomes somewhat difficult to make progress in more than two crafting professions.

Crafting is actually a lot of fun in this game. You learn recipes automatically as you level up the skill without having to buy them, but there is also a discovery aspect. It's a special panel where you have access to all the crafting stuff you own and you can plug it in and see if it can make anything. Every time you craft something you gain a bit of xp, but when you discover a new recipe you get a larger chunk. My level ten Engineer has probably only gained three levels from mobs and questing. Everything else has been from levelling up his crafting professions. The amounts of xp you gain decrease as you go up in skill level, and eventually reach zero, so you can't just keep making copper rings and bronze pistols to reach level 80.

Quests and leveling are something I really really like in Guild Wars II. Each zone has several quest nodes, special locations, special vistas, and challenges to do for bonus skill points. In WoW you typically enter a new area, find a guy with an exclamation point above his head and go kill ten of something or collect ten hooves from something. or take this quest object here here and here for him. Then you get cash and xp or loot. Then you rinse and repeat for the next seventy or eighty levels.

In GWII, you gain experience points from everything. So when you enter an area and find all the red triangles for vistas, you gain xp for visiting each of them. When you do the skill point challenges, xp. When you find all the waypoints, xp. I love this, because I am all about exploration and seeing neat sights. Tony and I would spend a lot of time just walking around Azeroth instead of questing, just bullshitting and occasionally raping the random Ally fuckhead we ran into while we wandered.

The quest nodes are cool. It is basically an area with a quest giver in it. You don't get a quest per se, but when you enter the node you are told several tasks that need doing. Could be killing mobs, rescuing prisoners, destroying traps, feeding rabbits, watering plants. Whatever fits the flavor of the area. What I like is the variety. If you are getting bored with fighting bandits, take a break and rescue prisoners. If you need loot for cash or crafting, go back to killing bandits. While you do these tasks, a little progress bar fills up and when it completes you get some cash and the person in charge of the node becomes a karma store. Karma is a special currency you accrue by completing these nodes and doing other things. They typically sell special crafting resources that can't be found or purchased elsewhere, crafting recipes, or magical gear. The nodes are much more fun to me than conventional questing because they give you a goal but also give you some variety in ways to achieve that goal. Each area is also peppered with special events that happen from time to time like bandits attacking a farm or a merchant needing guards to move to the next city and if you participate you gain cash and xp dependant upon your level of participation.

In addition to this, if you find all the waypoints, complete all the quest nodes, gain all the skill points and see all the vistas and points of interest in an area, you get a big chunk of cash, xp, karma, and a pile of loot for completing it all. Which is neat. It takes some work, but the rewards are worth it in my experience. Don't misunderstand me, you are still rinsing and repeating, but at least in the short term, to me, it feels like there is a little bit more variety than what I used to do to level in WoW.

There is also a deleveling mechanic to the game. In WoW, if you are level 80 you are level 80 everywhere. But in GWII, each area has a level cap, so when my level 31 Thief heads into a starting area he's never been to before, he drops back down to level 10 or 4 or whatever. He still has all his skills and gear, which are an advantage for sure, but he can still find a challenge in these lower level areas and still gain a reasonable amount of xp and cash from completing stuff he hasn't done yet in them. It kind of stinks that you aren't truly safe and invincible even in low level areas, but at least an area isn't useless and boring because you're a higher level, there's still stuff of value for you to do there.

Waypoints, waypoints are awesome. Waypoints are scattered all over each area. They enable you to jump around quickly from area to area, but they charge you copper for it based on your level and how far you are from the waypoint you are jumping to. Except in the main cities, if you are in a main city jumping to another waypoint in the city is free. This is great for an MMO. Nothing infuriated me more than hopping onto WoW only to have to pay a fee and then spend ten or twenty minutes on the back of a wyvern doing nothing till I could get to the area I was questing in for the day. Time is a big factor in MMOs, if you aren't getting cash or xp or leveling your profession, you are wasting that time and flying from place to place in real time really begins to represent a significant time sink when you are questing in distant areas on a regular basis. With a click and a loading screen you can get to work in GWII, and that is just fantastic for a casual player like me that isn't willing to devote the majority of his free time to an MMO.

So PVP. PVP has never been my thing. I have never been good enough or devoted enough to get good at it. I played a rogue in WoW because I am a lurker by nature and really never had any good gear, so fighting other players was always a challenging experience that I didn't care for. This is why I specced my rogue for stealth, so I can get the first hit in and possibly run away if the other guy is going to be the one to get the last hit in. I am a coward. Plus, a good chunk of people in WoW are willing to spend days farming bosses for specific loot drops to power up their characters. I am not one of those people, I like playing games too much to be willing to spend that much time to replay and replay a small section of the game to get a specific item.

My understanding of PVP in GWII is that when you enter into PVP everyone is the same level and has the same gear. The only differences are the skills you utilize and how you use them. So in this set up player vs. player combat comes down more to skill than it does to how long you were able to farm phat lewts. Kind of a cool concept. Plus, the world vs. world PVP has a lot of benefits for the server that is winning the battle. Bonuses to crafting and gathering and experience point gains and that sort of thing. Kind of a cool concept, but again, PVP isn't really my thing.

Skills are the next thing. So in GWII you have skills and you use those to do stuff. Each class has utility skills and healing skills and weapon skills. Weapon skills are based on which weapon or combination of weapons you use. A Thief with two pistols has very different weapon skills than an Engineer with two pistols and a Thief with a pistol in his main hand and a dagger in his off hand has a different set up than one with a dagger as his main and a pistol as his off. Weapon skills are unlocked by killing enemies with the weapon in question. Utility skills are unlocked by buying them with skill points, and they are set up in tiers so you have to buy a certain amount of 1 skill point utility skills to be able to purchase ones that cost 3 skill points, and you have to be a certain level. You also unlock more utility skill slots as you increase in level. Utility skills are entirely dependent upon you class, and the Thief's seem to focus on traps and poison and evasion. Each class is also responsible for their own healing, so they have utility skills that heal and remove conditions or grant beneficial conditions. The Thief one actually heals you a bit and gives a heal over time and stealths you for a few seconds, which allows you a backstab. There are also skills that have a combo effect, so when you use two skills in quick succession, they have a more potent or additional effect. Kind of a neat, if not completely new and innovative, effect that rewards crafty playing and experimentation. 

Alright, I guess that is enough about Guild Wars II. I really like the game, so I'll keep playing it. It's not like you have to pay a monthly fee or anything to play, so there's no harm taking breaks from it if I need to. All in all I find it to be a fun MMO that I think is swell.

Kingmaker

Stupid fucking dogdamn nifty city building sim game subsystems.

I like maps and city building. I can't draw for shit, but I love doing stuff like plotting out coastlines and drawing little symbols for mountains and my goofy little trees. Making maps is one of the things I love about GMing. I also love simulation games. I love managing trade and resource needs and production. I have put many days of time into playing Anno 2070 just building things and managing resources without once building a military structure or fleet of ships. I can't count how many hours I have spent looking at city construction optimization guides for Anno 2070. Finding ways to tweak roads and house placement and link up warehouses in an optimal way with production facilities and the resource gather facilities they need. It is kind of a sickness.

At one time I considered mapping out every alley of New Haven and Je'Clre. Luckily the players never did anything with Je'Clre, so it has kind of remained a shithole with about a dozen buildings. At one time I wanted to map out every square of Orcunraytrel that the players explored, but it was never feasible. I dunno, I have this weird fascination with having physical representations of the game world. I want my players to see what I see, I want them immersed. I want them to experience it the way I do. It's why I do things like have Jeremy make flags and why I want graphics in the campaign book and used to use minis with our battle mats when we gamed in person. This fascination was why I grabbed a fancy program like Campaign Cartographer, and while I think it is a fantastic program, I have trouble using it. I can get maps built, but it is never easy or intuitive and often leaves me frustrated. This is certainly in part due to user incompetence. The tools are robust and well designed, I just never seem to be able to get what I want out of them when making maps on a large scale. I have periodically used them to make scenario maps and hideouts and that sort of thing, but I tried making The Known World so I could throw a nice clean rendition of it into the campaign book, but I couldn't make it precisely the way I wanted to. I think part of the problem is that I don't understand layers or really how to manipulate the tools properly to make them work. I dunno, I just could not take my hand drawn map and make it look like I thought it should with Campaign Cartographer. I suppose I should really put more effort into the idea. I've established that I can't get what I want because I don't know what I am doing, so I should just try harder I guess. I dunno. Maybe someday I'll get all ambitious again and do so.

Back to the topic at hand.

When I first started the Orcunraytrel campaign I came up with some guidelines for the expansion of the expedition. Just some broad ideas about when certain things would happen. When certain goods would become available, when a town gets built, when the city gets a wall, when it gets better guards and so on. It was based on the bounty money paid out, which kind of acted as a gauge of how the faction's interests were being furthered. I tabulated the player's bounty rewards and because they are the stars of the show, I took a small percentage of their bounties and added that to the total again to account for other groups doing other bounties. It had no playtesting or balance or anything beyond rough guestimates to it and I changed the amount of rewards from bounties that elicit a change or improvement several times.

Looking at the Kingmaker stuff, with all of its maps and guidelines for kingdom creation and expansion, I find it satisfying my map urges and my simulation urges. It breaks cities down into districts of nine blocks each with a handy little grid thing with roads breaking up the blocks, and then you put handy little pictures in the blocks to show what is there. This builds the map of the city and allows you to have a scenario scene right there in your city without having to randomly assign stuff to Ye Olde Street of Tannery. It is already built.

I think what I might start doing is managing New Haven and Kusseth with the Kingmaker stuff, rather than my little goofy system I came up with on my own. It offers more structure to their expansion and doesn't rely on the PCs. I always say the world doesn't sit around waiting for the PCs to interact with it, it moves and grows and changes even if they do decide to spend a month in a dark hole in the ground, so maybe separating the advancement of the colonies from the players is the appropriate thing to do. Bounties and affiliations would still exist, but the pirates and Kusseth wouldn't need the players to fill them before they could do stuff like train better guards or put a cannon on the wall.

I think what I might do is use the Kingmaker stuff and just start running a simulation of their expansion based on how long they've been in Orcunraytrel (four years at this point in the campaign, with the players joining the expedition about six or seven months ago) and kind of make all the checks and watch the town progress. This would also give me a chance to come up with a clearer idea of who exactly is in charge, as there are all kinds of roles that need to be filled in the government, and having names associated with that kind of thing helps to make the place more legit, instead of saying "You guys go see official number 9." you have a name and race associated with the guy. 

The actions of the players still have their impact, for instance a recent email chain will now open up sorcerer's guild type options in the expedition, which is nice because they can now get spellcasting services and Eric can do things like by scrolls and that sort of thing. It will also allow them to grab magic items (within reason and as they are available) if they desire to. It also eliminates the need to go through the black market for stuff, which they haven't done, but still. 

On a side note, a mile in Minecraft is about 1600 blocks, it takes a long time to lay out that many blocks to form a grid around a tower. Especially when you have to use TNT to blow up intervening terrain. Sigh.

Anno 2070

So I purchased this game called Anno 2070 on Steam the other day, about a week before this posts to the blog. I am pretty much obsessed with it. I played it for eight hours straight the other day. Every two hours or so a little notification in the game pops up to say "Hey, you sure you don't want to take a break?" or something to that effect. They get increasingly more amusing the longer you play. Its a nice touch and a clear sign they knew how addictive of a game you had. The game is set in the year 2070 and humanity has taken to the massive ocean, as climate change and pollution and whatnot have melted all of the ice everywhere and drowned the world, leaving lots of islands all over the place. 

I am a big fan of the RTS genre, I like getting resources and building units and such. Anno 2070 is built in the vein of that, but it is a lot more complex than your standard "build a barracks and but footmen" style RTS. The production chains are a lot more complex and rely on a variety of resources. Actually, let me start with the factions. There are three. 

There are the environmentalists, the tycoons, and the technologists. Each faction needs different resources to grow their population to rake in taxes to pay for their industry, and the whole game is set up on islands, not continents. Each island has a set number of resources available. The environmentalists like tea and health food. So to meet their requirements for stuff to drink you need to build tea farms, which can only be farmed on an island with a tea resource (each island has three agricultural resources and the ability to be seeded with a fourth one if you purchase the seeds). Health food requires vegetables and rice. The tycoons like booze, which needs rice to farm, and convenience food, which needs meat and flavoring. Flavoring can only be farmed from an island with a vegetables resource and meat comes from beef farms, which can be built anywhere. It gets more complex, the tech faction likes algae based food that can only be farmed from undersea plateaus. Only rarely do you find an island that naturally has two resources that synchronize with one another (like rice and vegetables) and if you use your fourth open resource spot there will always be something else you don't have. Plus, each island has mineral resources like copper, sand, coal, iron ore, uranium, and so on with only a limited amount of nodes it can be mined from. To make pasta you need wheat and a river slot to put a mill, but river nodes are also used for gold mining and sand collection. Sand is also used for computer parts or glass creation. So it gets pretty complex and irritating trying to balance what resources you need with what resources you have available and what nodes you have open. 

You have to establish pretty extensive trade routes to keep your islands supplied appropriately. Your technologies and the resource collection factories and farms you can build are unlocked by upgrading your population. Upgrading your population also increases your tax income. However, your population needs to be 80% satisfied with six total categories to increase the population, so you need those supply lines. As your population increases more categories that need satisfaction are added, you start at two with just food and drink. You can force your population to upgrade by just building a shit ton of dwelling areas, but that just increases the amount of demand in your populations in the long run, which will net you income but make the next population upgrade more difficult to achieve because no one is fully satisfied with everything. You also have to worry about actually getting the resources to your people, so you have to have a bunch of warehouses built all over to actually hold everything you collect. It is all collected in one unified warehouse, but each warehouse has two or more transport robots that actually have to wander out across your island taking goods from point at to point be. This can make it a pain in the ass to make tools when your tool factory is on one side of the island and your iron smelter is on the other and there is a long ass road between the two. It find it easiest to just build way more warehouses than you need, increases your storage space, adds more transports, and ensures most of your production facilities are near enough to a warehouse that delivery and pick up are nice and quick. 

You can also trade with other factions by selling surplus to them or purchasing stuff you need from their trading ships, but that can get expensive if you have a serious need. Additionally, if a population stays unsatisfied below a certain point for a certain amount of time, people just up and leave, which leaves you with no tax income to collect. Your factories and resource gathering sites are all automated, so you don't need people to run them, but they do have maintenance costs and electricity requirements. So you have to pay to keep shit running and you have to keep a functional electrical grid running. If you put too many demands on the electrical grid, your factories run at a slower production rate. There is also an ecobalance to manage, if you pollute with a bunch of factories it impacts the satisfaction or your citizens and causes your agriculture resources to produce at a slower rate. However, if you have a positive ecobalance, it increases the rate of production for your farms and such. I'm not sure if you get a bonus to factory production facilities if your electrical grid has a positive balance. You can also find islands with nuclear waste or special eco devices that inflict massive penalties or bonuses on your ecobalance. Fires, crimes, and diseases can also break out in your population centers as well and reduce your population, destroy buildings, or reduce population satisfaction. 

Long story short, it is a really complex game that is very fun. I love tweaking the system and attempting to set up the perfect supply chain, that rarely happens however, heh. I've had a lot of "one more hour, one more hour, one more, oh shit it's five a.m., well, one more hour" situations crop up while playing it. It is a fun game for me, there is plenty of complexity and entertainment value to be gained from it. You can build military units, but they're mostly ships and submarines and a few air units. I haven't played around with fleet battles too much, just kind of sticking to playing with the economy. There are also quest givers among the other factions. They also sell special devices to improve a unit or collect a resource you otherwise can't, seeds for different resources, and upgrades to afix to your warehouses that improve certain production rates or reduce maintenance costs on that island. The quests can involve fetch and carry or destroying a unit, or running around on the bottom of the ocean with  a sub using searchlights to find sunken tech. 

Its a fun and involving game. I like it. 

I Can't Decide Whether I Hate Myself Or Anno 2070

Huh, probably should have posted something here today. Whoops. Wednesday...probably.

Tower Upgrayedd

Alright, so the following pics are some additions to the whole Minecraft Fort Jagged Tooth thing I periodically work on. Recently my computer crashed while I was working on it and I lost my most current save file of Orcunraytrel. At that time, I had about seven hundred feet of ten foot tall and ten foot thick wooden wall surrounding the fort, a two level stone barracks, and a double sized forge. I held off from posting pictures of it because the guys didn't have the cash to put up all those additions at once. Since the corruption of my save file, we've established that they just want a Goebleen barracks and storage space for now with more additions to be built as cash is available, sounds like the next one will be an addition to the forge. 

Overview

The above picture is kind of an overview of the area. I didn't feel like flying around the massive maps that Minecraft can generate in an attempt to find the perfect spot for For Jagged Tooth, so I found a fairly flat area and started building. However, that flat spot was surrounded by hills and there is a large swamp to the east. So I started using TNT to blow holes in stuff and now it exists on a flat plain that I can expand as needed to represent the Fort and its environs. TNT is fun, but dangerous. One blast accidentally took out half the first floor of the tower and I had to rebuild it. The mound on the right side of the map is the Goebleen barracks.

The tower from the north side. 

The tower from the east side. 

The wooden structure is the stable with a water trough in front of it while the stone structure on the right is the exterior of the forge. On the left is a well. The mound on the right is the south facing side of the Goebleen barracks. 

The tower from the south side. 

The little wooden structure on the left is an outhouse. After all, there are like thirty or so dudes in here, they need someplace to shit. 

The tower from the west side.

The outhouse.

 The outhouse has a hatch to shit in. The shaft extends to the very bottom of the map. Don't fall in.

The Goebleen barracks from the east side.

The Goebleen barracks from the west side.

Interior of the barracks.

Originally, when I built a barracks I built it out of stone, but the guys said they were planning to house Goebleen mercenaries in it and have them build it, so I decided it would be build in the way Goebleen build their warrens. Basically it is a big hard packed dirt mound with tree trunks as supports and rafters. They've laid down cobblestones as flooring (I couldn't use dirt because any dirt near other dirt in Minecraft starts to grow grass and turn green) and have piled blankets on the floor for sleeping mats with chests for belongings. The ceiling is also six feet tall than ten feet because Goebleen are short. The ladder to the storage space is in the corner near a support beam over in the right corner of the screen.

Goebleen barracks storage.

This is the storage facility beneath the barracks, full of chests and supplies. They also keep it well lit with torches and such because Goebleen are wary of darkness and the demons it typically holds. Ten feet underground is about as far as the Goebleen are willing to dig. 

Anyway, so that is the new addition to Fort Jagged Tooth. Previous pictures of the interior of the tower itself are here. Yay Minecraft!

Lamentations of a Shitty Writer

Its like 3:00 AM and I'm laying on my couch with my kitten crawling all over my back (thank goodness for the Blogger app) and it occurs to me that I haven't written anything at all in over a year. I dunno, I periodically say things like "I write stories." or "Writing is one of my hobbies." and stuff but I haven't written anything new, or even made edits to something previously created in well over a year and all of a sudden here at 3:00 AM, this fact distresses me enough that I need to post on it. Well, I suppose that is not entirely accurate. I did sit down several months ago and watch Apocalypse Now and took copious notes in an attempt to kind of gear up for writing the Hekinoe story about D'alton in Fresgulen that was going to kind of mimic Apocalypse Now. A haggard and burned out D'alton was going to go deep into Fresgulen to hunt down an AWOL Derf gone mad(der) with power and sorcery. I spent a half hour jotting down notes and quotes from the movie but that Dogdamn film is too damn good, sucked me in and I just lay there on my couch and experienced it. Reminds me that I need to watch Hearts of Darkness.

Hold a moment while I bring up Netflix and take care of that.

On a side note, when I reformatted my laptop I did not understand properly how PageFour saves and stores your writing, so my notes on Apocalypse Now, and my story about The Rebellion Arc are both lost to the ether. Though I can probably recover The Rebellion Arc from the blog here, I believe I posted the first chapter and prologue at some point. .

To continue: I really like writing.

Hold another moment while I procure whiskey and check my auctions on Diablo III and switch to the ole desktop, which I am now rocking a dual monitor set up on. Kitten got bored with kneading my back.

There is just something about watching my words scrawl across the screen at 80+ words a minute, letters popping out faster than the cursor can blink and my brain just flowing through my fingertips across a keyboard. That sensation of just completely zoning out to external stimuli and just being in it with the character experiencing their environment and reacting to it as they would. Just typing and not consciously thinking about anything or analyzing spelling or grammar and just creating a scene or dialogue or whatever. Fuck, I dunno, it is a great feeling I guess.

Don't get me wrong, it took me about fifteen seconds to figure out that I wouldn't ever professionally write anything and be paid for it, nor do I really have any desire to. I have a friend who has in fact been paid to write things, and I would not desire to ever experience his frustration over something I have enjoyed so much, nor would I want to feel the stress associated with meeting deadlines and word counts and that sort of thing in a set timeline. I just want to write and go, teehee, that was fun. Whatever shall I write next?

I like creating things, crafting them, and building them from the ground up. The majority of my current hobbies, and the hobbies in the past, have revolved around creating something. I used to draw a long long time ago, mostly goofy fantasy stuff with skulls and dragons and whatnot. I used to paint miniatures obsessively for a relatively short time. I've always played DnD as the GM, which is about as creative as it gets, building whole worlds for the guys to run around in (and more often than not burn to the ground, hehe). Reading isn't really creative, but I read so much fantasy and sci-fi, that is kind of exploratory in nature. Visualizing someone's story and the world they've built with their words and whatnot. I wouldn't call it creative, but I would call it closely linked to this nonsense that I am talking about. Minecraft is a wee bit creative too, as you've seen. 

Part of the problem is that my creativity cycle kind of alternates between DnD and actual creative writing. When I am not playing DnD or something similar, I tend to write a lot. When I am playing DnD and enjoying it, I tend to write very little. The amount of creative writing I do is inversely proportional to how much I am enjoying my current gaming. The clear correlation there is that I like to write things and when I am writing something a lot, I don't write other stuff so much. Right now, I am really enjoying my gaming. I feel I have a really good group where everyone kind of wants to do similar things and gets along with everyone else, so I am very satisfied with my gaming at the moment.

Just the same, there is a part of me that is frequently, "Man, I should really write something that is not campaign information about Hekinoe." but I just can't find it in me to sit down and write something when all I do is sit down and write stuff. I don't even know what I would write about at this point either. I'd have to stay in Hekinoe. The problem with my writing is that it naturally flows into DnD, so when I write a lot about the Nel/Fey from my single completed story, I create rules for them. That's why there are like six or seven versions of their rules spanning three different editions of the game. Plus some GURPS stuff I kicked around with them. If I start writing about a new world or characters, my thoughts will inevitably turn to "How would this look in DnD?" and I'd start to get that itch I get when I feel like creating a new world.

On a side note, the fact that I have remained tied to Hekinoe for multiple years, and finished a campaign set in it, is nothing short of miraculous for me. We've been playing for seventeen years and The Rebellion Arc is the first campaign we've completed, while the aborted Psychogenic Fugue Arc is one of dozens we've stopped mid stream. So, I guess I'd have to try and write something set in Hekinoe, but I don't know where to put it or who to make it about. I dunno, I'll figure something out.