2014

Simple Weekends

stargrace November 3, 2014 No Comments

Clocks went back an hour on Sunday morning, and while I had planned on taking advantage of the extra hour to do some gaming, after a very long week all I wanted to do was sleep, and so that’s exactly what I did. 10 hours worth, all be told. It was glorious. Once my day got started, I decided to spend it relaxing and with as little stress as possible. Of course that included a lot of gaming.

While I had killed Garrosh in LFG numerous times, I had never attempted any of the more difficult runs. I queued up for a FLEX raid over the weekend and defeated the normal mode version, which granted me my first heirloom staff, a 556 ilevel beauty that was a significant upgrade over the 510 mace I had been using previously. I also won another weapon, a warforged mace that goes perfect with my healing spec. The raid itself was pretty smooth. As a healer your job is simple, keep people alive and stay out of the purple. With the removal of our instant cast heals, keeping people alive got a LOT harder. Once I had defeated Garrosh on normal I decided it might be neat to try heroic. I queued up once again and was invited before too long. We managed to get him down to 25% but we kept wiping on the final phase when there is mind control going on. Still, it was a good learning experience for me. Dying costs a lot of out of pocket coin, so instead of spending more on wipes I decided to go run older raids with a friend to earn that pocket change back and prepare for WoD.

It was SO MUCH fun. We ran 25 man Ulduar which I had never been to before, along with pretty much all of the raid zones from the Lich King expansion. I earned so many achievements it made my head swim, and I also won two new mounts. I made a fair amount of coin back and I expect that in WoD the amount raid mobs drop may be reduced slightly. It seems like since the stat compression everyone and their dog is running older raids and stockpiling for WoD, which is now only days away.

I’m so excited!

Gaming

My Introduction to Craft the World

stargrace October 31, 2014 No Comments

One thing ExtraLife did was allow me to spend more time with my steam library, and with that I noticed “hey, I have a TON of games I have barely even played.”

One of those games is called Craft the World. When a game has mostly positive reviews, I tend to take notice. Especially when there are over 1,000 of those reviews, and the top reviewers have over 100 hours played. I’ve owned this game for quite some time now, and it is still in early access, but for whatever reason I just hadn’t played.

The game looks a lot like terraria. It’s a side scrolling game where you take control of dwarves, and have to ensure that they survive attacks from bad guys. You craft them a home, armor, food, remove resources from the world, and decorate to your hearts content (if that’s your thing). The game is a lot of ‘busy work’ especially during the first part of the game. You’re limited in how many dwarves you have, and each action you perform will net you some experience that will eventually allow you to level up and obtain another dwarf. The more dwarves you have, the more stuff gets done. You don’t technically control the individual party members, but rather you push out generic tasks (ie: chop down this tree) by clicking on it, and your minions will set off to do just that.

How you play the game is completely up to you, hence the sandbox portion. There are places to explore, but you may want to just sit tight at home, which is were all your “stuff” is (and that stuff can’t be moved, which is a bit of a shame). Of course since it’s early access there are glitches, but as time goes on more and more of the reviews posted have been positive. I did watch a few ‘lets play’ videos on youtube to see what thers were up to, mostly because for some reason the game didn’t want to recognize my structure as a structure. I’m still not sure what I did wrong, but I’m thinking the next session I play I’ll run through the campaign instead of sandbox mode (where you’re just sort of tossed into things).

All in all? A great casual way to spend some time, and it appeals to me because hey, sandbox.

Gaming

Typical Deed Work

stargrace October 30, 2014 No Comments

My deed in Wurm Online is coming along nicely. I managed to finish the stables and terraform a good portion of the upper tier, the last part of the deed that is still pretty much mountainside. The latest patches brought about an influx of animals to the Xanadu server as they continue to search for the “perfect balance” and I’ve started noticing a good number wandering around my place, which is nice because when I first moved in there were no animals around at all and I had to wander quite a bit to find any. Lately this includes seals, like the one pictured above. I’m not really sure if these new creatures can be used for anything but they’re non-aggro and adorable to watch.

With the stables done I have been thinking about what project I would like to work on next. The Vynora priest is still doing well. On that character I have been leveling up the typical priest skills (nature and the like) as well as channeling. Animal husbandry just finally reached 30 today, allowing me to care for one more animal and see more traits. Horse breeding is going well, as is sheep and cow. Cooking is already at 70 so for the time being I’m not leveling it up.

I’ve been working on fine carpentry along with weapon smithing on my main, tied in with some chain armour smithing. All of these skills seem to level very slow, so I can only handle them in short spurts before moving on to something else. Wurm Online is not for the faint of heart, it can take years to get skills to the cap of 100 (minus things like alignment, that doesn’t really count). Still, I find the game relaxing and fun and I’m enjoying working on my deed. There’s so much to do, I suppose the real challenge is narrowing it down.

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

Gaming

Legacy Family Adventures

stargrace October 29, 2014 1 Comment

I love that your sims can play the sims on their computers. The screen is a bit hard to see, but that’s what Alfonzo is playing above. I spent a bit of time with my legacy family during extra life, but aside from that I haven’t had a lot of time to play. Emily aged up from baby, and changed colours which I found amusing. She had a good childhood and I picked two positive traits for her. As soon as she aged up the family decided to throw a party, so she missed school and everyone missed work. I decided that was alright, at least for one day.

The screenshot I actually wanted to use was when Alfonzo caught on fire as he cooked dinner, and then set fire to the rest of the house. Unfortunately I must have been too caught up in the moment and so I missed it. I was hoping (secretly, of course) that the grim reaper would pay him a visit, after all he IS an elder with a frail heart, but alas he pulled through just fine (after a shower or two).

Jessica (the founding sim) is still working on being an author. She has published two children’s books so far. One was titled something about not eating your turtles in kindergarten (game generated title), and the second one I named after my extralife stream for a bit of flavour. Their house is growing very slowly, I find making money in Sims 4 much harder than it was in 3. Not a bad thing, but it does make the game move slower.

Their party was a huge success, and I loved that I was able to choose spooky theme music thanks to an update a few weeks back. I still haven’t seen any ghosts in my game, I have been avoiding reading up on any details and was hoping I would just fall into it naturally. Of course there’s still time.

I’m really excited about the November patch that will bring pools into play. As the seasons in real life also switch to fall it has me missing certain Sims 3 expansions (like seasons). I get tired of looking at the desert all of the time.

Hopefully the 2nd generation of my legacy family grows up well, and before I know it I’ll be on the 3rd generation. Of course in order for THAT to happen I have to actually play the game..

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

Gaming

ExtraLife Ends, and Games Begin

stargrace October 27, 2014 No Comments

Now that the excitement from ExtraLife is over, it’s time to relax a bit. Thank you to everyone who supported me through my streaming endeavors and helped to keep me awake. It was awesome. I played through all 24 games in 24 hours and had a lot of fun doing it. Hopefully everyone had a lot of fun watching me, too.

I’ve been trying to learn how to create more things in minecraft. I started out by trying to create an enchanting table. Unfortunately it uses a few items that are really hard to get. I’ve got the diamonds for it but I don”t have the obsidian, I found a mod that will help me create obsidian except that requires steel. So far I haven’t found a way to create steel. I created a blast furnace, but that creates a different type of steel which doesn’t happen to be the one I need. This is how things typically go for me, I choose something I want to learn to create, and then I have to follow the path backwards making all of the items that will let me create the main item. The reason I want to create the fancy enchanting table is because I made a force sword, and I want to enchant that. At least it’s a project for me to work on, and I have a fancy blast furnace.

November is going to be a busy month for me. For those who are familiar with my events, every year I run a Gamer Secret Santa, and I’ll be running that again this year. Registration should open around mid November, so don’t forget to check back! There’s also NaNoWriMo which begins the first of November. I’ll be writing horror this year, a genre that I have absolutely no experience in. Why? Because I like to challenge myself of course! I haven’t decided if I’ll be posting the story public or not, I may decide to post it chapter by chapter, or I might just keep the embarrassing moment to myself, we’ll just have to see.

I hope everyone else had a fantastic weekend, no matter what you ended up doing. Happy gaming!

Simple Weekends

My Introduction to Craft the World

Typical Deed Work

Legacy Family Adventures

ExtraLife Ends, and Games Begin

You Missed

Leveling Up With Timewalking

The Construction of Quail Landing

Making Gold – One Sale at a Time

Timewalking, Gets me Every Time