Quail’s Tale Tavern now officially has an emblem!
For whatever reason you can only submit a new emblem on Monday’s so it took me a few reminders to get it set up, but I’m pretty happy with the outcome. A small casual guild for life skillers, I can’t wait to see what trouble we get into.
Black Desert Online has some of the best character creation I’ve seen in a long time – with some faults. Number one, all of their player characters are human, and while you CAN add less desirable features, the game aims for what society as a whole thinks is “beautiful” and it can be difficult to create a vision of your own.
You can add as much or as little colour as you want, detailing even the iris on the eyes – but the body slider is fairly limited and even all the way to the right, for females at least, you’ll still be quite slim, or at least muscular without any appearance of fat.
Where I think BDO really shines in terms of characters is their NPC. Mob encounters are amazing, there are tons of races, a plethora of villagers, every town and every district has a distinct feel to it and you can immediately tell the area of Grana from Calpheon, as an example. I absolutely love it.
I got myself a new iPad a few months back, along with an apple pencil to try out. I get daily use from the iPad especially on days where I find doing day to day chores difficult, since it lets me organize & entertain. I am all for traditional art, but it is not kind to me due to both space required, and physical limitations. I grew up drawing, set it aside for about 20 years, and then decided why on earth did I ever give that up. It’s a hobby I feel passionate about and that I love for many reasons.
Anyway, I searched around for iPad apps that were user friendly, cost effective, and had features that I’d actually make use of. There are a ton of them out there, including a subscription version to Clip Studio Art, which is what I use with my Huion tablet on my PC. Unfortunately from reviews I’ve read it doesn’t translate very well to iPad, and while I’m not against paying a subscription, there were other options available where you could just purchase the product.
One of those apps suggested was ProCreate. A hugely popular iPad only program that has a very low entry fee. It does almost everything I want it to as a beginner, and it’s really easy to find tutorials and get into things. I’ve spent a few months now working with it off and on, and I’m a fan. I do wish there was just one program I could use across both my PC and the iPad, but for now this works.
After spending a few months doing illustrations and using simple brushes, I decided to give the watercolour brushes a go. I’ve got zero experience working with watercolour, but I learned that you work light to dark, which is the opposite of what I’d normally work. The picture above is a simple digital image I did – and my most favourite part of this piece is that to me it doesn’t look digital at all. It might not be particularly good, but I think the overall effect is great and someone with a lot more practice than me can probably do wonderful things with these tools.
In any case, I do have a DeviantART account over here, and I have a twitter account just for art related stuffs. It’s a nice quiet place where I can quietly (and completely) change my focus / noise, and I’m really glad I’ve separated it from the regular ‘noise’ of the rest of my hobbies (including gaming). I don’t imagine I’ll be doing any legendary artwork any time soon, but practice, practice, practice, and we’ll see where this goes.
I have two Black Desert Online accounts, and they’re both very different. I don’t really have time to keep up with two in a game that really encourages you to stay online (even if it’s AFK) 24/7 so I decided that I’d let one rest until it qualifies as a ‘returning’ account again which grants me access to the Olvia servers that have a very nice bonus – and I’d continue playing the ‘newer’ account.
There are a whole lot of reasons for this decision but the biggest one is that newer accounts simply get MORE. They get more of everything. My older account created back in 2016 already had some hours played on it, so they don’t qualify to get the ‘you’ve played 15 hours, have a treat’ bonus that everyone else gets. They also don’t count for the daily login ‘Rookie’ rewards which is from an event that is running right now. The thing is, the event already ran to conclusion last month, and I qualified for it then, too. So this is my second time running through those particular rewards. The qualifying factor is you have to be playing an account where you have logged in after creation within 720 days. Older accounts won’t qualify for that.
The rewards are nothing to sneeze at, either. They include a lot of inventory space, and special bonuses like pets. Coupons for the pearl shop, and buffs.
The only thing my older account had going for it was that I had three level 58+ characters, and the new account has a single 59 character. My crafting was never that high, though I did have a nice amount of energy and contribution points. Those things are all fairly easy to catch up on though and getting buffs and inventory spots is a lot more difficult. The decision to swap accounts came pretty easily, and (so far) I don’t have any regrets. The older account will still be there, after all, just waiting for me to pick it up again.
Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!
It happened. I finally got two coursers (the gold icon indicates this) with the appropriate skills – a male and a female. I used the horse calculator to work out what levels I should have them at (a combination of 29/30 for the best results) and I set them to – er – work, and waited 2.2h for a foal.
I had a low chance of a T8 result, and almost equal chances of a T7 or a T6. My RNG luck held true as it always does, and I ended up with an ebony black T6 female. I’m at least happy to have a female, males have two breeding chances, and females have only one so I wanted to replace the T5 I had just used and this will work well for that. I decided to explore the imperial market, and I sold my level 30 female for 30,000,000 silver. Not a huge amount, but it was enough for me. I also earned some currency that I can trade in for goodies.
Now I’m working on leveling that T6 horse and hoping for another courser so I can breed that with the T5 male who has one chance left. I do also have a T8 female, but I’m reluctant to breed that at the moment. It’s also not a courser, which I might work on changing. You can get tokens that allow you to RNG another skill in order to make that happen. They’re usually sold in the pearl shop, but as is the way with this game, they lure you in with a handful of freebies.
The breeding process was fairly painless but does require navigating the stable UI quite a bit. You need to register your male horse for breeding and lock it to only you so that other people don’t rent it out. That’s right, if you get a good horse you can rent it out as a stud. This does take your breeding slots though. Anyway, you set it to you, then you go back to the basic stable UI and select the female, and then do your thing. I followed some guides out there (there are plenty) and 2.2h later came back to a foal. You also have to make sure you have room in the stable for the new horse, which is not too bad when you can rent lodging to expand those slots and there’s various buffs and scrolls that can increase the slots temporarily as well.
End goal? Get a dream horse. That’s a LOT of work and RNG though, so we’ll have to see how it goes.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
stargrace