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TerraSlime TerraSlime 27 September 2021
0

Slime Rancher 2.0

I enjoy playing slime rancher. I also love creating pretty slimes. One day I had the brilliant idea to create, well... mosiac boom largos. My ranch has not fully recovered. Also, don't put tabby tangle largos near mosiac honey largos. Just don't. It's a REALLY bad idea and I know because I thought "Hey, slimes are so pretty and shiny I should put two dangerous largo types together...." So I did and... well, I was furious with myself.

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TerraSlime TerraSlime 27 September 2021
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Slime Rancher

Do not create mosiac anything largos. I tried it. My ranch has never been the same.

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Maelen Maelen 2 July 2021
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And they all lived happily ever after.

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

To no one's surprise -- certainly not to Bernadette's -- Yagluth was not much of a challenge.


It was very much of an anticlimax. The pre-battle preparations prevented anything else getting in on the fight, and after that, the only real problem was in finding him to target. He turned out to be all hat and no cattle, or to vary the vocabulary, all pyrotechnics and no real impact. Once Bernadette got over her general reluctance to melee anyone and took Frostner to him, it was all over except the pounding.

After he fell, Bernadette took his head and the three oddly named Yagluth Things and carted the head over to the display area. It was a nice day and there was no sense of drama. Moder had bee…


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Maelen Maelen 24 June 2021
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Work therapy

Idle hands find work for the devil to do.

The hunt for Moder had gone on so long and taken so many twists and turns that Bernadette felt lost without it. Still, Moder wasn't the last of the Forsaken. There was still Yagluth, the undead sorcerer revered by the Fuling. With him, at least no sentiment was likely to get in the way. Like Bonemass, he was a disgusting creature who didn't belong in the world of light. So, slowly at first, Bernadette began to take the steps needed to banish him.


The first order of business was to use all the new things that the death of Moder had made available. It seemed distinctly odd to Bernadette that a dragon's tears should be required to construct a spinning wheel and a windmill, even the magically enhanced v…

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Maelen Maelen 20 June 2021
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Sic transit....

He is the despot's despot. All must bide,
Late or soon, the message of his might.

Moder, the invisible, the legendary, always waiting on the next mountain top, always one more mountain away, is dead.

She died broken and crying, lurching and stumbling across a jagged, lunar landscape, shot by an unending barrage of poisoned arrows from an enemy she couldn't touch or target. Bernadette used walls and trenches and pits and a huge bonfire to turn her last fight into a nightmare of confusion and pain.

None of the creatures of the mountain came to Moder's aid. None of them could; walls had been built and the paths were cut and blocked. She fought alone and died alone.

It was a short fight. Bernadette had brought hundreds of arrows. In the end, most w…




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Maelen Maelen 15 June 2021
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Ireland, without the whiskey

(To the tune of "Houston," by Dean Martin)

Getting tired of this biome,
Want to quit and go back home,
But there's work that must be done,
And after that, I'm gone.
Gonna farm some Surtlings,
Surtlings,
Surtlings!
Gonna farm some Surtlings,
Surtlings,
Surtlings!

As it turns out, Bernadette already had a base at the northern tip of the island whose southern end hosts Moder. So, it seemed a good idea to go down the island from north to south, plant a portal near Moder's altar, and get to destroying her. Of course, it wasn't that simple.

Going "down" the island was repeatedly obstructed by large patches of swamp and plains biome. This made it necessary to try probing south by boat, which triggered the usual response of fog, foul weather, and general meteor…














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Maelen Maelen 13 June 2021
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No more Fuling around.

Dammit, finally. Moder is revealed. Finally a vegvisir indicating the location of her altar.

Mind you, the bloody thing is over on the other side of the map, but at this point, Bernadette would have settled for anything short of the lunar surface.

In the end, the search went much the way she expected. She missed the island she was aiming for by quite a bit, to the east, ran into the obligatory huge storm and spent an uncomfortable night in a rough camp on a Black Forest shore, turned back north in the morning, found and followed a swamp biome shoreline, and by a mixture of luck and judgment -- mostly the former -- ended up following it through fog to the original intended landing place. She then beached the karve to be carved up by the custom…

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Maelen Maelen 11 June 2021
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One more island....

One more river,
And that's the river of Jordan.
One more river,
There's one more river to cross.


The path to the south has two stages. The first is a fairly short sea journey to the island where Yagulth's altar is situated. The second is a slightly longer hop from the far side of that island to another that might contain Moder's altar. The first island has a large patch of meadows and Black Forest biome in its center, sandwitched between two areas of plains, with Yagulth's altar in the one to the west. The second island requires landing on its northern edge, a narrow stretch of plains, and crossing it to an area of Black Forest which should, hopefully, be large enough to allow the construction of a base camp.

The first jump has been successful, a…





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Maelen Maelen 10 June 2021
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Farewell home... for now

And Dragonreach was getting to look so comfy and domestic, too....

But all the turnips in the world won't change the fact that Moder is still hiding out and without her, Bernadette is stuck.


Having established herself at a mid-point on the way to investigate Moder's latest reported position, and Yagulth's altar, Bernadette set up the usual facilities, including a smelter and charcoal kiln, and then proceeded to explore the area. She cleared several burial chambers with the help of a friend, but none of them turned out to be especially profitable, and in the same company pushed over to the other side of the island and sacked two more Fuling villages, neither of which yielded totems, but both of which had lesser loot in the form of black meta…

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Maelen Maelen 6 June 2021
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We are building

Dragonsreach, alas, will not be reaching any dragons -- at least not directly. But Bernadette will keep it for her main base, at least for the time being. No point in moving too often, and the manufacturing setup there is superior to any of the other bases. It's also better defended; during the last troll raid, the trolls took one look at the moat, turned around, and stomped off. She'll leave them alone if they leave her alone. (Unless she needs their gold.)

Supplies are beginning to build up again. Turnips and carrots are no problem, nor is meat. Wood is being farmed, though the replanted trees look so nice that Bernadette is reluctant to cut them down again. The chief choke point is feathers for arrows, since Bernadette's preferred style …

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Maelen Maelen 4 June 2021
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Skeleton surprise, round 2

The system events in this game really need a lot of work.

The only ones that are any threat to Bernadette are the drake attacks. And even then, if she can avoid accidentally falling through portals to the swamp and re-emerging wet, they're little danger.

The last Skeleton Surprise at Dragonsreach took farce to a new level of absurdity. The skeletons, who had almost no bowmen with them this time, dogpiled in a huge heap on the other side of the moat facing where Bernadette was shooting at them from the battlements, and proceeded to fall into the moat. And go splat, or rather rattle, at the bottom, since it's six or seven meters deep at that point.

It looked weirdly hilarious, like a rush for tickets at a rock concert.

There was also a Surtling att…

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Maelen Maelen 2 June 2021
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She takes a village

Exploring new mountain areas will almost inevitably entail sea journeys. Since there's almost nothing Bernadette likes less than travelling by boat, she decided to vary her routine by seeing if she was strong enough now to roll a Fuling village or two. And as it happens, there was a fortified tower and a village right down slope from one of her mountain outposts, Astrid's Hold. Time to visit the neighbors and say hello....

She did expect the experience to include being recycled a few times. It had taken three or four "deaths" before she got the hang of Sunken Crypts, after all. New environment, new challenges. It only took one this time, and even that would not have occurred if she hadn't run out of frost arrows at the wrong moment.

The chief …

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Maelen Maelen 2 June 2021
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Toasted cheese

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day,
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.




The battle was short, squalid, and anticlimactic. In other words, everything Bernadette had hoped and planned for it to be. The Elder had very little room to move with a moat dug around the altar platform, and so he scuttled back and forth for a few moments while she and a friend bombarded him with fire arrows, and quickly burned out. There was no outside interference; the moat saw to that. The result was two more swamp keys as backups to the one Bernadette had already and an Elder trophy to be hung on the outside of the main building at Dragonsreach.

"Little thing of blood and bone, I should have snapped you like a twig! Now I wither…





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Maelen Maelen 1 June 2021
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Fort Wisconsin

Bethany: Were they sent to Hell?
Metatron: Worse. Wisconsin.

(Quotation from the movie Dogma, since that's where I got the connection between cheese and Wisconsin.)

When your guide seems to be crazy and your inspiration comes up dry, what do you do?

Follow the guide. Maybe it just looks crazy. Or maybe it'll get you to the destination after a long, exasperating, but survivable detour.

Moder is missing and Bernadette can't find her. Inspirations have given her the runaround, although they've also led her to mountaintops stuffed with silver ore. And the mechanism that's supposed to direct Bernadette to Moder's altar is trying to send her to the Elder's altar instead, to refight a fight she cheesed her way through a long time ago.

Burning the Elder al…


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Maelen Maelen 29 May 2021
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Skeletons surprised

The system events in this game need a bit of work. Skeleton surprise ended up a surprise for the skeletons rather than for Bernadette, even when she only had her second-line Level 1 silver sword with her. Whole groups of them were converted to steak knife handles with one or two swings and an enormous sound of rattling, an Apocalypse of the Chopsticks.

But we're getting a bit ahead of the story here....

It begins with yet another "inspiration" and the depressing fact that Moder moves her altar around quite a bit in different versions of the map. Not that that's unreasonable, considering that she can fly. But Bernadette wishes that when she sends that dream that ends "Seek me," she'd leave a forwarding address.

Once more with the thing that Be…

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Maelen Maelen 27 May 2021
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So it goes

Angry troll is angry...


Bernadette sympathizes. The leeches can be a real nuisance. Of course, she whacked him anyway. The cash is always useful.

It was a good idea to go back to the island she'd just left. In the end, she and a friend found four Sunken Crypts and cleared well over a hundred pieces of iron scrap, plus the usual assortment of treasure and other goodies. There's a bit of iron scattered around the swamp too; she has yet to check the whole place with the wishbone.

There were two Surtling fire geysers in the swamp, both of them easily converted to centers for assisted suicide. For comic relief, there were system events involving Surtling attacks, the first of which was merely futile. The second was such a farce that Bernadette did…


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Maelen Maelen 23 May 2021
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Silver threads among the cold

Dig, dig, dig.....Moder still proves elusive, damn her. On the bright side, the search has brought Bernadette enough silver ingots to refloat the Spanish Armada. She'll never want for teaspoons in her life. And every second peak seems to terminate in a dragon nest with an egg in it. Nevertheless, the lady of the house remains stubbornly absent, and the runestones have gone crazy, giving directions to a new summoning point for the Elder, not Moder.

Cozy evenings in the middle of a howling storm, stuck half way up the side of a mountain in a cave or crevice, when even the wolves and drakes have had the sense to go home, are beginning to lose their charm of novelty. Time for some general tidying up and perhaps another effort at getting more ir…

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Maelen Maelen 21 May 2021
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Pointy end up.

That village site proved too much of a temptation for Bernadette. All that flat land.... the hoe is by a long shot the lamest of the tools, hard to control and erratic in its effects, and skipping all the misery of levelling a new site is a gift from the gods.

So, building commenced. Bernadette decided to call the place Dragonsreach, as a sort of pious hope that she'll finally be able to reach that damned dragon. Log after log went back into the ground from whence it had grown, pointy end up. Since it's still a pain to get iron to this area, she chose to double-wall the entire compound, and double up on the outside doors, to make sure that even a Fuling raid (when they come -- and they will) is not able to penetrate the perimeter. Then, a l…

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Maelen Maelen 20 May 2021
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I land....

It's a very nice island. About 60% Black Forest and the rest swamp, neatly divided by a line down the middle. There's one Surtling fire geyser at least visible in the swamp half, but no sunken crypts to be seen. Doubtful if there are any in a relatively small and isolated area.

Too bad it's the wrong island. Bernadette drifted off course a bit, she's not very seagoing, and ended up on a smaller one half-way to her intended destination. Oh well...

It was okay as a stopover. She built a good base. Beat off the usual raids. Cleared a burial chamber, the first one in ages -- it looked pretty pathetic after all this time, with only a scattering of treasure and one lonely Surtling core to reward her efforts. Killed trolls. And killed trolls some m…

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Maelen Maelen 18 May 2021
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Warm welcomes

Aborigines, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.)


Oooookay.... either we can thrash around here for an indefinite amount of time, until Bernadette has levelled half the mountains in Valheim, or we can have a mysterious inspiration from "somewhere."

Bernadette, of course, chose to be inspired. It wasn't the inspiration she wanted, since she hates sea voyages, but it was better than climbing another butt-freezing mountain and every so often having one of the piles of stones take offence and attack her. Pissed off tree trunks are easier to handle, though the wood and resin and eyeballs they drop aren't as pretty as cry…


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Maelen Maelen 18 May 2021
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Ups and downs

If Moder's spawn isn't on one mountain, it must be on another, amirite?

Well, Bernadette supposed so. Which one is the question.

East-northeast of the Elder's spawn there is a range of very high mountains, some of the highest Bernadette has seen on the map.

So, she want back up to the portal there and cut a switchback right up to the top. It took a long time to complete. It also accidentally intersected a silver deposit that yielded another 70 units of silver ore, which was nice.

Finally, she got to the top. And there was a stone tower there, a fairly substantial one. It didn't make any sense having a tower there, since you could hardly see the ground, let alone defend against anything down there. But nevertheless, a tower. There was also a drag…

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Maelen Maelen 16 May 2021
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Both-siderism

The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
To see what he could see

The other side of the mountain
The other side of the mountain
The other side of the mountain
Was all that he could see

The last silver ore deposit was in a fairly extensive patch of mountain biome, so Bernadette decided to dig around a bit and see if there was anything else there. There was something: exactly the same setup, a ruined mining cabin on top of an extensive deposit with a Stone Golem making a nuisance of himself in the neighbourhood. So, she settled in to exploit.

It turned out that there were two deposits, not one, almost next to each other but triggering the wishbone independently. In the end, they came to well abov…









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Maelen Maelen 16 May 2021
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Heigh-ho, Silver!

The wise man delights in water; the gentleman delights in mountains. (Confucius)

Bernadette began with a choice between two paths. So she took a third.

Going north into the swamp towards a possible juncture with the road south from Carcossa remains an option. But there is no certain benefit in it. The road north could be a dead end on the left as it was on the right, and there are no further structures visible. This doesn't mean that there are no more Sunken Crypts to be found there, but looking for them will be a gamble.

Preparing for an attack on the Fuling village -- actually, on a stone defensive tower and a large settlement -- might easily be imprudent at the present time. The Fuling are the most capable enemies in the game to date, and …



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Maelen Maelen 15 May 2021
0

A rattling good time....

At the end, Stuffy said, "Not so dusty: how did it sound to you, Sergeant Jenkins?"
"If you ask me, Sir," replied Taffy unabashed "like a pack of skeletons frigging on a tin roof."

There's another new system event to deal with after Bonemass's demise -- the Skeleton Surprise. A whole graveyard-full of bones throws itself at your walls and tries to batter them down.

Of course, with only a couple of minutes or so to do the job, they don't have a hope in hell of actually breaking in unless they happen to find a door that's been damaged earlier and not repaired. And it was rather mean of the developers to initiate this event right after the player gets Bonemass's Forsaken power, because a massive debuff on all forms of physical damage is just wha…


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Maelen Maelen 14 May 2021
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Troubled bridge over waters

Sail on silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way...

But they haven't arrived yet. Another suboptimal outcome.

It turned out that the depth of the water rapidly increased as the bridge drew toward the other side. At about the two-thirds point, it became impractical to continue. It might have been possible to complete if Bernadette had been willing to tear down a mountain or two and build an earth and stone causeway to fill in the gap, but that would have been a waste of time, energy, and material. It's not even clear whether the piece of swamp that can be seen on the other side is part of the mainland, or on another island of its own; it's a bit to the east, not directly south of the four earlier crypts…





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Maelen Maelen 13 May 2021
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We now return....

...to our regularly scheduled programming.

Which in this case, means finding a bit more iron, since neither silver nor black metal will be replacing it.

Before taking down Bonemass, Bernadette had located and cleared a couple of Sunken Crypts on the coast to the south of Carcossa. This push was suspended to deal with Bonemass, but since north of Bonemass's spawn there is nothing much to be found, it's time to look south again.

The situation as it stands now is as shown here.

Instead of continuing south after finding three more crypts near to the first one discovered (Crypts B-01 to B-04), Bernadette decided to go north from her silver workshop, Mountville Portal (at the lower right of this map). This brought her to Seawatch and past a draugr v…

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Maelen Maelen 12 May 2021
0

Banal butcheries

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them?

Bernadette is growing bone-weary of killing greydwarfs. It makes her feel dirty and sad.

They come running up to her and throw a rock, and then she one-shots them so hard that the corpse ends up ten meters away.

Then she harvests their resin and wood and eyeballs. Her lamps burn with the resin from their bodies. Her portals find their destinations with their eyes.

She doesn't really want to kill them. She just wants them to go away. She'll plant as many bloody trees as they want if that's the problem. She just doesn't like it that killing them has become so banal and routine.

She doesn't like hating them for being so stupid and weak, either.

She and they share s…


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Maelen Maelen 9 May 2021
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Rock around the clock

Fiery the angels fell
Deep thunder rolled around their shores
Burning with the fires of Orc.

Bernadette has finally met the Stone Golem and he... underperformed severely. That's getting to be a theme for this game. Create a decently thought out enemy, model and animate it acceptably, and then slap it into an environment that conspires to cripple it.

What the Surtlings are to the swamp, the Stone Golem is to the mountain. Environmentally knackered.

The mountain environment suffers from what might be termed an excess of verticality. Lots of ups and downs, some of them very abrupt. This is not a suitable environment for a great hulking heap of magically animated boulders to be lumbering around in. In the most literal sense, he doesn't fit in. There…



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Maelen Maelen 9 May 2021
0

Mountain mania

And the silver rush is on.

Silver veins seem to be rarer even than buried Muddy Scrap Piles, but when you find them, they last a long time. Bernadette suspects that's to give the drakes a decent chance to line up a shot at you. It hardly matters. To a veteran of Skyrim, a drake is a pathetically easy kill. They hover in one place and make a lot of noise, and two hits bring them down. The Dragonborn should have been so lucky.

The first acquisition of the new age has been a Draugr Fang bow. Bernadette wishes the damn thing didn't glow so brightly -- it gets in the way of the aim -- and of sneaking -- but the bow itself does good damage with a bit of poison thrown in, and it has double the knockback of the Huntsman bow. She also made Lox capes …

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Maelen Maelen 8 May 2021
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Bonemess

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin

Boney wasn't exactly a flop, but he didn't generate much dramatic tension. Bernadette and her friend cheesed him in the suggested fashion, and he fell without much incident. All in all, probably the best result possible. Who wants an epic battle anyway? A victory will do just fine.

The parkour preparations were of minor importance. There wasn't much in the way of manoeuvre for their carefully laid obstacles to get in the way of. Bernadette tossed the bones into the green glowing mouth, while her friend perched on top of the skull. The battle only lasted about six minutes. Bernadette's friend drew most of the aggro for the first part of the fight, until Bonemass demolished the structure that she was standing on and…

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Maelen Maelen 7 May 2021
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They paved paradise....

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Bernadette is planning to pave Hell and put up a parkour lot.

And she does know what she's got, and she wants it gone. In the worst way.

She might even set up a tree museum later if anyone wants to pay a dollar for a look at these slimy old trunks. A free piece of Ancient Bark with every ticket! She's got tons of the stuff now.

(Could you do tree farming in the swamp? Might be one way to get some use out of the place.)

Okay. Bernadette is set up comfortably in a strong stone building by the side of Bonemass's spawn point, with all the modern conveniences, a Comfort level of 17, and for once, portals under cover in the basement. Bonemas…



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Maelen Maelen 6 May 2021
0

Sit back and watch the show....

It's been a too long time
With no peace of mind
And I'm ready for the times to get better.


When Bernadette cleared and flattened a broad space in front of her main base for the Bonemass campaign, she was thinking mainly of self-protection. See them coming, be safe, that sort of thing.

She hadn't counted on it turning into the Circus Maximus on a busy day with the Roman public in a thumbs-down mood. There's so much combat out there without any help from her that going out to collect the meat has become part of the morning schedule. And sometimes it's just a madhouse.

Take today. Bernadette hears noises of battle and gets up on the ramparts to take a look to find two draugr running like lunatics over the whole area killing every boar, neck, and d…




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Maelen Maelen 6 May 2021
0

I never promised you a rose garden....

I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There has to be a little rain sometimes.

I always hated that stupid song.

Why? Because it embodies a fuck-your-feelings attitude toward emotional distress that's probably best responded to by a rifle butt in the teeth. A slightly prettier version of the infamous "Asshole," but in reality worse, since delivered straight instead of sarcastically.

What brought it up? A little rain, sometimes. More specifically, being rained on for four days straight, with mist and fog and darkness at noon, Comrade. It's bloody annoying. I'm not here to count raindrops and a lot of the ground mist effects are painfully fake. When you step over the boundary into the Plains or Swamp biome and…




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Maelen Maelen 3 May 2021
0

Go north, young man, go north

We fly though the night skies,
Flapping our fat thighs,
Picking up dead guys,
There goes one now.

Stack 'em and load 'em,
Bring 'em to Odin,
See if he know'd 'em.
Sometimes he does.

(From a completely irrelevant political blog, heaven alone knows how the Valkyries got in there!)

Have you ever wondered how this game is going to end? I can't see a five-person dev team creating an adequate Valhalla, and however well it were done, it would be a letdown. You finally get to Norse Heaven and spend eternity.... seeing who can burp the loudest at the table, I guess. There's a reason why literature spends more time in Hell than in Heaven. Heaven is a bore.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming....


Bernadette has been busy at a number of differen…










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Maelen Maelen 1 May 2021
0

FU-lings?!?

Bernadette appears to be running into Level 5 characters on her way to the Level 3 boss. Odd.

But it has its positive side. If things go on like this, she'll end up with more lox than a Saturn 5 rocket.

After giving up the southern push, Bernadette moved north and established a northern outpost closer to Bonemass, in a patch of meadows biome on the southern tip of the island he appears to be on. She already knew that the right or east side of that island is one long stretch of swamp, and a bit of probing showed that to the north and northwest of her new base, the meadows quickly yielded to a very narrow strip of Black Forest and then to.... bloody Plains. Again.

Not that that can't be turned to advantage. Up to the northwest, the west side of…

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Maelen Maelen 30 April 2021
0

The mountain hath labored....

The mountain hath labored, and brought forth a mouse.

That last exploration.... really wouldn't look good if Bernadette had to draw up a balance sheet. Fortunately, the losses are in time and wood rather than blood and equipment. But it's still frustrating.

Going south down the coast into the swamp, directly away from Bonemass, might seem perverse. But the later game revolves around supplies of iron. Neither silver nor blackmetal will entirely replace iron as the basic material for weapons and armor; indeed, there is to date no blackmetal armor at all. This forces Bernadette's hand: swamp-slogging has become compulsory.

So she pushed a road south, along the coast, in her usual fashion. The wood is free, and it protects against attacks. Resistan…

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Maelen Maelen 27 April 2021
0

Karving naif

We had to destroy the village in order to save it.


So Bernadette decided to take a rest from her mountaintop removal mining in the high cold areas of the map, and go sailing. She didn't really know how to sail the karve, the mid-range ship, but she figured that she'd learn. However, just as a precaution, she left all her iron armor and weapons behind and went with a second-string set of troll hide armor, albeit the Level 3 troll armor made possible by the obsidian upgrade to the workbench.

The precaution turned out not to be necessary, but there were a few close calls.

Instead of building a new karve at Outpost Three, the closest of my bases to the location indicated for Bonemass, Bernadette decided to sail one of the two she already has up f…


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Maelen Maelen 27 April 2021
0

Eggcelent

Crisscrossing the mountain's slopes with trenches and excavations is difficult work, since the terrain, including the bedrock level, is so irregular. It's also unusually hard to see where you are going; long stretches turn into literal tunnels when you burrow through a softer layer that has a hard cap of rock above it. And so far, no silver has showed up. But apart from that unreasonable hope, things have been going fairly well.

To begin with the biggest prizes, Bernadette now has two of the three eggs needed to summon the fourth boss, the dragon. They were in nests on mountaintops and were not difficult to remove, though their extreme weight demands they be moved one at a time. The drakes guarding them, described as a sort of mini-dragon, …

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Maelen Maelen 26 April 2021
0

Mountaintop mining

Born underground, grown inside a rocky womb
The earth is our cradle; the mountain shall become our tomb
Face us on the battlefield; you will meet your doom
We do not fear what lies beneath
We can never dig too deep


Bernadette didn't actually plan for things to turn out the way they did.

It began with what seemed to be a modest deposit of copper ore up the mountainside where the Black Forest biome begins to shade into the Mountain. Like a lot of "modest" deposits in this game, this one was much bigger than it seemed on the surface and digging it all out involved removing a large chunk of the mountain side.

At this point she thought: why not just keep digging? There didn't seem much chance that she would simply happen on some silver ore by chance, …






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Maelen Maelen 24 April 2021
0

Iron, cold iron

Gold for the master, silver for the maid
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
"Good!" said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
"But iron, cold iron, is the master of them all!"


Sunken Crypt 10 was the jackpot. Bernadette had only half-seriously hoped to find 100 iron there; in the end, there were 94. That changes her iron situation from crisis to comfortable at one stroke. There wasn't even any strong resistance in any part of the tomb: one blob that she popped with an arrow through the first breach in the Muddy Scrap Pile plug, and no more than four or five melee zero-star draugr shot to death in the same way. There were no spawners and no Draugr Elite. Just piles of iron and a decent selection of other loot, including several pieces o…




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Maelen Maelen 24 April 2021
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Seek and ye shall find

This patch of swamp isn't quite finished yet. Bernadette has located and cleared the ninth Sunken Crypt, and located the tenth. Bernadette doubts if there are any more, but she's thought that before, hasn't she?

To get to these crypts required moving away from the coast again and back into the heart of the swamp, so she went at it in full World War One style, with roadways palisaded on each side every step of the way. This is a quick and easy method to move across contested ground if you have stockpiled the supplies needed and have some idea where you are going.

The route to the ninth crypt was a bit mucky, but there was very little resistance. Stone and wood brought Bernadette to the door without any chance of her being molested from outsid…

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Maelen Maelen 22 April 2021
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Maginot was right

Bernadette's resources base to the south has turned into a temple to the spirit of André Maginot: big, expensive, invulnerable, and immovable. It's underlining a major defect in Valheim game design, which is that at some levels and in some cases, static defence is easily capable of overwhelming any attack that might be thrown against it.

With solid stone walls and a deep moat all the way around it (not visible here except a bit at the bottom right), there is precisely nothing that any game event can do about her when she's inside here. An attack actually profits her. With the walkway around the top of the walls, it's easy to shoot down attacking draugr and skeletons. Worse, the attackers in their frustration take it out on the local wildlife…

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Maelen Maelen 21 April 2021
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And now for something completely different....

After that long slog in the muck, Bernadette felt she deserved a holiday. Besides, she was running out of flint for arrows. So, off to the south for a resource collection run.

On the southern tip of her first island, to the south of her potions factory, was an abandoned farm with a good supply of wood and raspberries, near to a neck-infested coast with abundant deer and wild pigs, on the border there between the Meadows and the Black Forest biomes. It's a good place to harvest flints, neck tails, and leather scraps. She's set up a small brewery, a foundry, and a kiln there (the idiocy with Surtlings in the swamp has removed all need to be economical with Surtling cores).

There would be plenty of room here for pig breeding, but Bernadette fin…

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Maelen Maelen 21 April 2021
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Drained by the Swamp

Four more Sunken Crypts down. That seems to be all of them, and they've become something of a routine. All have the same basic layout of three branches. Nearly all have a single spawner in one branch; one crypt had two spawners, and two seem to have had none, though Bernadette may have destroyed them without noticing by shooting blindly through partially destroyed blockages. Usually, the spawners announce themselves with a loud buzzing noise, but it's not certain that all of them do.

Bernadette usually managed to smash spawners from a distance with archery. Ideally, by the time she entered the room with the spawner, it would be destroyed and all the draugr shot to death. She prefers avoiding personal interactions with those things, thank yo…

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TungstWn TungstWn 19 April 2021
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I made an escape room in Valheim!

I created a series of 20 puzzles/challenges that players can take on. Some are very easy; some are very difficult. Beat one room to move on to the next.

It's sort of like a LoZ style dungeon, but I'd call it an "escape room" rather than a "dungeon" since there's practically no legitimate threat of death.

There are 13 guidelines (you can't really enforce rules in Valheim) to make escaping an actual challenge. Sure, you could pound through a stone wall or build a ladder over the wall, but following these ordinances of the challenge will make it more fun.

You start at the center of the world in the ring of boss stones. That area is surrounded by high stone walls. Pass every challenge, and you will gain your freedom. Then you can see what it all lo…

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Maelen Maelen 18 April 2021
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Another brick in the wall

Third and fourth Sunken Crypts down. The design remains the same, though sometimes one of the branches is blocked off by a wall or a collapsed section. The third crypt was as rich, if not richer, than the first two; the fourth was Bernadette's first dud, with the side sections short and the central corridor collapsed. Still, she managed to get twenty or so iron out of it.

The sky up ahead is noticeably lighter. It looks like she's finally approaching the coast. There seems to be at least one more crypt visible in the distance, and another Surtling geyser. She doesn't know whether she'll bother to farm that third geyser. The Surtlings depress her; they're so wasted.

Bernadette got what she wanted out of this stage of the game: the iron pickax …

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Maelen Maelen 17 April 2021
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Bosch country

Faustus:  Where are you damn’d?
Mephistophilis:  In Hell.
Faustus:  How comes it then that thou art out of Hell?
Mephistophilis:  Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.



The Swamp biome is a dismal place at the best of times. At night, in the tangle of fencing Bernadette has erected to keep from being attacked by the swamp's various creatures, it's a scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, albeit usually rather quiet for his usually more spectacular tastes.

Third Sunken Crypt down, and a portal parked on top of it for good measure. The layout of all of them is much the same -- tombs are tradition-bound structures and you wouldn't expect much of a personal touch in them except for those built for people at the very top of the social structure. Three branc…






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Maelen Maelen 16 April 2021
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Hellzapoppin'

It was quite a day today....more like a couple of weeks in game, though with "days" that take up less than half an hour in real time, that's not hard.

First job was to push out to the left or "west" side of the island and find where on the shoreline the Plains biome begins. Once Bernadette got up there, mostly through Black Forest territory, there was a new sight -- the dreaded Deathsquito; two of them, actually, hovering over the small peninsula that juts to the "west" where the Plains biome hits the sea. So, with her nice new bow, she shot them both and got their needles, thinking to experiment with a new variety of arrow. Once home, it turned out that it takes four deathsquito needles to make twenty needle arrows. Pfft. She'll get some m…

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Maelen Maelen 15 April 2021
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Over the hill and far away

Bernadette was not pleased when she checked where Bonemass had appeared on the map. He couldn't have been much further from The Elder if he had tried. Maybe the two of them have professional differences....


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Maelen Maelen 15 April 2021
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The Fire Folk

The rest of the first crypt was uneventful. Apparently, all the muscle was concentrated in the left-hand rooms. There was no unusual loot to the center and the right, but a satisfying amount of iron scrap. The first major iron piece that Bernadette made for herself is a Huntsman bow, of which more later.

Then it was time to tidy up, collect some resources, and extend the protected roadway in a new direction. She had already spotted another crypt still deeper in the swamp. Getting there involved taking out several draugr and skeleton spawners grouped together in what looked like a large burial mound, but the spawns weren't of very good quality and all it meant in the end was more draugr guts and steak knife handles for her dining pleasure.

On…

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