#those are hard to get when the main land biome in your world is just small sandy islands.

[bitchfitch]

when i have time to redesign Jish my sole goal will be to make him Extremely huge large and intimidating looking, but have that vibe cease to hold up at all the moment you see him do tricks for grapes.

[magic-is-something-we-create]

HI I AM COMING TO BEG U FOR HELP HOW DO YOU MAP OH MASTER OF ART

HELLO HI I AM HERE TO AID U MY BROTHER IN ARMS!!!

this got very long and i tried to cover things that helped me when first getting into hand drawing maps, but if there's any other places where you're struggling let me know!!!! ive got a lot in my brain im just going from broad to narrow here :)

BIG SCALE:

great ways to make continents that look like continents include

- peeling an orange or equivalent citrus messily and laying out the pieces of peel, and copying those shapes pros: realistic coastlines that would fit together like in real life, if you get into the nitty gritty these can also serve as tectonic plate templates. cons: messy. might not have oranges on hand. can be hard to scale up and transfer to digital - getting some paper and pouring a bunch of doodads of some kind on it, then clumping them in vaguely the shapes you want and tracing the coastlines. things i have used in the past include dry macaroni, beans, dice, and paper stars. pros: potentially less messy than oranges, more control over the shapes, scales up easily cons: coastlines will be less realistic tectonically if that's a concern (for both of those i usually then take a picture of what i get and start editing in my drawing program of choice from there)

other strats to try: taking a grungy brush in your drawing program of choice, making it Huge, and scribbling a few clumps, then on another layer going in and tracing around the edges to make the coastlines. using a map from real life and cutting chunks out and rearranging/copying/warping them to make a collage you can trace for coastlines. etc

SLIGHTLY SMALLER SCALE:

country borders were, until quite recently, determined mainly by geographical obstacles like mountain ranges, rivers, canyons, oceans, etc that are very hard to cross. also borders will be highly disputed when it comes to warring states or eras without, like, satellites and bureaucracy and such!! making them fuzzy or jagged or having areas where both colors mix or stretches of land where no one knows where either country ends is in fact very fun and cool and sexy

mountains usually are chains, and so are islands. i like to make big curves across the world map where i think it would be cool to put mountains, and when those curves extend into oceans i like to put island chains on those as well. if you choose to do whole ass tectonics with your orange then do those on plate borders

biomes can get really specific in their placement if you want to be hyper-realistic, or you can put them wherever you like. personally i like a little realism a little "fantasy world can have whatever you want in it". deserts are usually on one side of mountains, and on the other is really lush. the higher the mountains the larger the areas and more extreme the difference between the two. outside of that case, youll usually get forest > grassland > desert in a gradient. also remember there are multiple kinds of everything

HOW TO DRAW THESE THINGS

good ways to draw rivers include: tracing blood vessels from photos where you can see someone's veins through the skin, dead trees or lightning, or cracks in stone. theyre all fractals and how detailed you want to get is up to you. BUT they always flow downhill and eventually meet the ocean (the ultimate downhill), usually starting in the mountains. also those fractals all go kinda reverse of what you might think; the ends feed into the main river, not the other way around. i used to mess that up a lot

PROTIP: canyons and the like are almost always old riverbeds. use the same method as you do making rivers, just widen the brush, maybe draw a border around the shape instead of just a line

mountains: personally i prefer using premade brushes for mountains just because the one (1) time i did them by hand it took me like four hours for one mountain chain. this video has some tips on different mountain styles if any of those look good to you, otherwise there are about a bajillion videos like that out there!!

biomes in general: just a little texture is usually plenty! doing some bushy edges on deciduous forests, pointy bush edges on pine forests, a few little grass lines and sand dunes, etc etc is usually plenty to get the point across :)

SMALLER SCALE

roads are personally the bane of my existence. i try to treat them like rivers just a little straighter, depending on what time period you're emulating you might go curvier. also they dont care about maintaining width or what direction the fractal goes in humans just put those shits wherever they walk a lot. in contrast railroads are usually pretty straight, simply because trains are built different than cars or wagons or people

cities are almost always on a source of freshwater and a valuable resource that draws people for work in the early days. also they'll have like 10-20x the landmass of the city itself in farms around them, less if theyre on the coast and have access to lots of seafood, more if theyre more landlocked. those farms can be farther away if theyre more industrialized and can transport the food en masse easily. you also dont have to draw the farms just kinda mention them in the story if relevant

towns can be on smaller rivers, lakes, or even just by natural springs. you wont find permanent settlements in places where water isnt accessible (unless you have magic to fix that which is always a cool detail)

EVEN SMALLER SCALE

city maps i have 0 advice on other than roads get thinner the fewer people travel on them, industry will be on a very different side of town than the rich people for smell and noise reasons, and especially when emulating pre-car times, think about how far you would feasibly walk in a day. if you want characters to be able to know pretty much the whole city that they live in, it's gotta be reasonable for them to walk to the farthest edge of their knowledge and back home (or to an inn) in a reasonable timeframe, if they have a home. also big cities tend to have colleges, trade schools, and a bajillion and one jobs that need doing. magic cities might need mages to maintain infrastructure, non-magical cities need people who light the streetlamps when it gets dark, waste disposal is Hugely Important, etc etc etc

it can sound boring at first but coming up with the odd maintenance jobs people have to do in cities can be a really fun creative exercise, and it might inform how the city is laid out, too!!

IN CONCLUSION

think of the world in layers. landmasses + oceans -> biomes and geographical landmarks -> countries and borders -> settlements -> districts. i literally have those on different layers in clip studio so i can futz with them more easily.

also realism is not the be-all-end-all of this. there's lots of room for symbolism and environmental storytelling in maps, as ive ranted about in the past, and stuff doesn't have to make absolute sense in the real world to work well for your world. breaking the rules is like, art 201 and it applies to ever part of the art in question <3

i hope this helped!!!! again pls let me know if you have any more questions i love helping out :D

[prismarine-parrots]

The Pranker Gets Pranked

April Fool’s!

Grian logged into the Hermitcraft server from his personal home world. He had taken a break from the server, just for a day or so, to enjoy some time off from the intense working and to brainstorm some plans for what he was going to do next after Sahara.

"Hello, my name is Grian and— whaaaaat the heck."

Now, he was FULLY aware of the date. April first: April Fool's.

He still was not expecting the entire Hermitcraft server to be missing?

He was on the spawn island, which was a problem, as Grian knew he did NOT log off here.

"Okay, so I know today is April Fool's, but... what happened here? I was planning on coming on and pranking the OTHERS, not being pranked myself! This isn't fair!"

Grian's "Did You Die?" Box stand made of light grey concrete powder was missing. The only thing there was a single block of the powder, and in the sky there was a single block of red stained glass where the random farm that was here was. The Nether Portal was still intact, but that was about it.

Grian glanced around and scratched his head in confusion.

"So I have no idea what's going on. I might as well go through the Nether Hub and see what else is weird..."

The builder hopped into the portal and watched as the magic purple film covered his vision, and the sounds of him warping to the hellish dimension and the swirls fading. He stepped out of the portal and was immediately surprised by a rather horrifying sight.

"What happened to the Nether hub?!"

Where there was once a wonderful, one-to-eight scale of their Season 6 world, there was now a grid of a sea- or jack-o-lantern, a block or a blue carpet, and a piece of grey stained glass. The blocks in-between were open and below them was the flat netherrack the hermits has spent the first six months of the season clearing out in their free time- and those blocks were spawnable. So in between the grids there were zombie pigmen galore, some wither skeletons, and the occasional blaze. The only things that seemed left alone were the Nether portals.

"All our hard work! The months that we spent working on this- well, others did, I just mined a couple hundred pieces of netherrack, but still!" Grian complained to his metaphorical viewers that would be watching his video later.

He turned to his portal and his shoulders sagged when he saw that the scale model of his base had been decided to birch fenceposts.

"Oh no, what happened to my base? This is not good... well forget what I was planning today, if the rest of the server if like this then I'm going around and seeing what disaster has come to the server," Grian chuckled, knowing fully well that Xisuma and likely a couple of others had set this up.

He stepped into his portal and waited the five seconds, before coming out in the overworld and stepping out of the purple-black frame.

And immediately falling into ocean.

Grian swam back up to the surface, coughing and sputtering.

"Oh come on!" He complained, treading water (which he had gotten very good at this season with the amount of ocean usage that they had been doing) and looking up at his base from the ocean. His vision was blurred from water on his glasses, which he quickly took off and cleaned to get the salt water off his lenses, although it really was useless when his sweater was soaked. He put them back on so that his footage matched his eyesight, and he gasped.

"My base!"

His base was basically nonexistent. The floor was missing, the walls in a random pattern, not even having the awkward grid of the Nether hub. There were two-by-two pillars of white concrete where his mob-spawning towers once were, and the smaller towers outside Grian's main base were single-block nerd poles of white concrete.

"This is insane..." Grian laughed to himself in sickening awe. "Everything is gone! My mess of chests, the mustache machine- oh, no, I see some stained glass still, oh nooooo..."

Grian swam away from his base to where he knew the massive ring around his base was supposed to be. He instead found a single-block wide circle in the surface water. Grian frowned and shook his head, before looking up at the complete mess that was now his wedding-cake tower to build height.

"This is SUCH a mess, guys... I can't believe this. How long did it take for the guys to do this? Did they use WorldEdit? TNT? To be honest, this look like mass amount of TNT usage. If they destroyed my base with TNT, I'm okay with that to be honest. It's my favorite block! Don't worry guys, I have the world save from before this mess, I'll just play Hermitcraft on single player now!"

He withheld evil giggles, knowing that there was of course people who did not realize the date and thought that this entire thing was literal. Grian was set up by the other hermits to pull some real pranks on his viewers, and he was still totally going to find ways to prank hermits before the day was done. But he had to keep in character- bursting into laughter at his dastardly schemes was going to give those schemes away!

"I need to go see other's bases! Xisuma's! False's! Mumbo's!" He gasped dramatically, "what happened to the Mumball?!"

The builder leapt off the ring and took off toward's his fellow Architech's base. the Architech station was mostly untouched, with the station rails still there but the bridges extending to and from on both sides of the platform were nonexistent, making it looks like some sort of strange ocean rig. It took not even five seconds further for the destruction of Grian's neighbor to come into view.

"Oh noooooo," Grian laughed sadly, "His storage system!"

The frame of the (SLIGHTLY squished) spherical base was completely intact. The glass all seemed to be smashed, including the glass that held the water for Mumbo's storage system IN the system. Water flooded the pathways between the chests and down onto the city of farms below.

"This is tragic..." the builder groaned as he flew over the sphere, not wanting to land in any water. Bumbo Balloni, the all-seeing entity levitating at the top of Mumbo's power beam, was missing half his faces and the snow golems inside were wandering the four micro biomes behind the rows of chests.

"Mumbo? Mumbo are you here? Mumbo Jumbo! Mumboooooooooooo! Do I need to start singing the AFK song? Mumbo Jumbo you are not-where-you-needtobeeee... Okay that was even worse than me singing when I was sick. Don't remix that. Oh no, now I'm going to get a sugarcane song too, no! I should really stop talking now..."

Grian spotted something in one of the buildings underneath the main build. He gasped in delight and dived down to it- Mumbo's garden where his bed was.

"Mumbo! Come look at what happened to your base! It's insane!" Grian exclaimed, hoping that by not mentioning April Fool's he might be able to get the spoon. However, he came to a sudden stop when he saw what he thought had been Mumbo Jumbo.

An armor stand, dressed in dark grey dyed leather armor, with a Mumbo head on top, having been edited by the magic book to have arms and look like like a player standing still.

Grian stared at the stand.

Then he gave a fake sob and fell over the armor stand. "Mumbo, no! You've been turned into an armor stand! The horror! Am I the only hermit not an armor stand because I went home for a day? What a cruel turn of events! Wow, I sound like Joe," he laughed to himself, before shaking his head.

"Alright, this has been very funny, but I don't know what to do now. Keep touring the server? I'm the only one online, it's going to get boring without anyone else to... interact with, and figure out what happened to the server..." Grian almost said "prank" which would have given away the veil of obliviousness that it was April Fool's.

His phone buzzed in his black skinny jeans pocket. Fishing it out, there was a server notification and a text.

xisumavoid joined the game.

<xisumavoid> what happened to my base?!

<xisumavoid> Grian! What did you do?!

<xisumavoid> there's guardians everywhere!

xisumavoid was slain by Guardian using magic.

<xisumavoid> meet me at shopping district. Right now.

"I'm going to be in so much trouble for something I didn't even do," Grian groaned, "I'll tell him when I meet him. This wasn't me OR the man in the chicken costume!"

Grian announced this to his camera and took off the small island that was dwarfed by the size of the build placed on it.

"This is a mess as well! Oh no! The stock exchange, iTrade, Tek to the Skies- my pickle shop!"

There was different types of disaster at each location. The Nether hub was a grid, Grian's base was spaghetti, Mumbo's base was waterlogged, and now it seemed that the entire shopping district had WorldEdit cutouts of the shops so that there was only half the build standing, whether vertically or horizontally.

"I have no words..." Grian murmured to himself. Not only that, but he was also running out of things to say without sounding repetitive of his and Mumbo's bases' reactions.

He landed in the plaza with the Nether portal outside iTrade and looked around.

"Xisuma? Look, I know you're mad, but I'm just as confused! I thought this was you getting at me?" He called aloud.

No reply.

Grian frowned. "Xisuma?"

The Nether portal warbled and spat out fuming turtle man.

"Grian, I don't know WHAT you did-"

"It wasn't me!"

"I swear if you said it was the man in the chicken costume-"

"It wasn't? My base has been reduced to nerd poles! Why would I do that to myself?" Grian asked. Xisuma stopped pointing angrily at the builder and a confused look entered his eyes behind the purple visor.

"Who did then?" X demanded. Grian shrugged.

"How should I know? I haven't been on in two days!"

"Oh my days..." X put his hand on his helmet and look to the sky. "I don't understand..."

They stood in silence for a while, unsure of what to do or say in this mess.

"Are you sure YOU'RE not trying to get at me?"

"Ugh, you fools are so dense... if neither of you did it, who do you think did?"

Grian and Xisuma both jumped at the voice that sounded slightly like the one in green, but not at the same time. They spun around to see...

"HELLO GRIAN"

The other said something that shouldn't be repeated in a PG-oneshot.

Grian's blood ran cold at seeing himself with black soulless eyes.

"NPC?! I just saw you at home!"

"And I thought I banned you, Evil Xisuma! Get off my server!" X ordered.

"And what gives you the right to order me around?"

"LET US BUILD A RUSTIC HOUSE"

"NOPE!" Grian immediately protested and turned to walk away, but when he turned around the alternate version of himself was behind him, red eyes glowing.

"On second thought I'll stay!" The builder squeaked. X raised an eyebrow at Grian but said nothing.

"You see this glorious chaos we caused?" Evil Xisuma announced, waving his arm to the demolished shopping district, "you think this is your server still? No! I am the admin of Hermitcraft now!"

"AND I AM THE BUILDER NOW GRIAN" NPC Grian likely would have had the same victorious, malicious grin that Evil X did if he were able to.

Grian and X glanced to each other, likely having the same question about this alter of the other.

You never said anything about a doppelganger?

The admin in red chuckled and held up a hand.

"Well boys, it's been a good run. But the Hermitcraft server is mine now," Evil X grinned. "Say goodbye to your precious world."

"GOODBYE"

Grian started to meekly protest, hoping to find a way to reason with his AI counterpart and this other version of Xisuma. But EX snapped his fingers and NPC Grian blinked, his red eyes flashing for just a moment, and then everything disappeared.

Grian shook his head, feeling lightheaded, and glanced around to find himself in the vaguely familiar cityscape of the HUB for all players.

Xisuma groaned, evidently suffering the same effects of being forced out of a server as well.

"Oh my days, what happened?"

"I got no clue man. But either this April Fool's prank has gone very wrong or we just lost," Grian sighed. "Calling it now, things will be back to normal by morning..."

X grunted in irritation. "I know I was in on PART of this, but not everything! I think we might have just lost Hermitcraft! And if I'm not admin anymore, then I can't rollback the server or kick Evil X and whoever your dude was and... and..."

Grian decided to not inform the not-Doom guy that he was one hundred percent that most of this was a prank. He simply pushed up his recording glasses on his nose, making sure they were still recording X's panic, smirking to himself that this was going to make a great video by the end of the day.

There's a few perks to being known as a prankster. I can't let this oppertunity be passed up now, can I?

--

Evil X withheld his laughter until both his partners had used the /kick command to kick Grian and his counterpart from the server. They both disappeared before his eyes, and he immediately burst out in hysterics, holding his knees and being unable to see from tears.

"That was priceless!"

"I AGREE THAT WAS VERY FUNNY" NPC Grian agreed in his robotic tone. "I THINK IT IS TIME TO RETURN TO MY CLOSET NOW"

"Awww, not gonna stay to mess with Grian more?" DocM asked the AI, sounding slightly disappointed.

"IT IS TIME FOR ME TO GO HOME"

"You sure you're going to be safe if you go back home?" Python asked, "Won't Grian do something?"

"I WILL LIKELY GET YELLED AT AND THEN HE WOULD LAUGH HE LIKES PRANKS AND WAS TALKING OF APRIL FOOL'S EARLIER"

"Aw, so we didn't get him. Damn," EX grumbled.

"I don't know man, he seemed pretty startled to see NPG over there," Doc chuckled and nodded to the AI. "It's good to finally get back at him for the stunts he's pulled on me."

EX felt grim satisfaction knowing that there was someone else out there who got enjoyment out of seeing people suffer in retribution for something they did to them. The scientist-creeper-cyborg-thing gave off the sort of sinister and intelligent vibes that EX could appreciate. The red creeper hybrid had a more mischievous vibe than sinister, but had been more welcoming to EX and NPC Grian for their short time on the server than some of the other hermits that had taken notice of them for the prank in the hours they had been waiting for Grian, and partially by chance Xisuma, to come online.

"I guess I'll be going as soon as Mr. X realizes he's still admin and will re-ban me and revoke your powers I hacked you," Evil X assumed, slightly sad but also knowing he totally deserved it for pulling this thing again.

"See you around then, I guess," Doc said rather duly and then headed for the Nether portal.

Python waved and NPC Grian, unable to really give a farewell, simply disappeared.

EX sighed, shaking his head, and took out the devices he stole from normal Xisuma and logged off the server before he could be so rudely kicked like he had many times before.

--

"NPC! HOW DARE YOU!"

"HELLO GRIAN WANT TO BUILD A RUSTIC HOUSE"

"NO! I WANT TO KNOW HOW YOU MANAGED TO PULL THAT OFF?!"

"IT WAS NOT MY IDEA ASK EVIL XISUMA"

"I hate that I know you're lying but I can't get it out of you..."

"I KNOW GRIAN"

———————-

Word count: 2738

Latin version didn’t let me keep that last part with NPG and Grian ;^;

Happy (well, now it's belated, but it wasn't yesterday) April Fool's!

[daniellarsson89]

Valheim

Warning! Spoilers of game included ahead. If you wish to experience Valheim without knowing much about it read no further. If you have played Valheim before and/or want to know my journey in the game continue reading.

So I did not know much about this game when I started. I looked on some streams to see what kind of game it was. Then I noticed my friend was inside the game on Discord and I wrote to him about it and the game was really starting to grow on him. Few days later I bought the game and me and my friend took the journey to Valheim together.

We got left of by some Valkyries or whatever the angel-like or so thing that dropped us off in the world is called. Then I think you could pickup stuff and that way got stone and some wood and you could do your first axe and/or stick. Cant remember exactly was sometime ago. A bird helped out by telling us about things in this strange world we had entered. Then we picked some berries and ate them for the stamina and health buffs you get from them. We continued hacking on wood and then it was time to find shelter because it got cold during the evening. We made a campfire and got roof on it and repaired our equipment. When the night was over we continued hacking on the nearby trees and scouted out a location for our base. 

After building the base I think we went to the location of trophy and there we found our first stone Vegviser(I think it was called that) marked the location of the first boss. Yes you read right, we got bosses in this survival game! We continued farming the nearby woods and fixed food, gear and staying away from skeletons in the black forest that we also encountered this early on. Damn they hit hard! We then thought it would be best to go to the first boss because we had been farming quite sometime. My friend had already found the spawn location which was on another spot then the marked we had on map. We went to the spawn location and I got to check what was needed to spawn the boss. The stone was marked with a deer so I thought, maybe a deer trophy and I tested it and it worked. Cant remember really if I spawned him without help from friend or not but we both was ready to fight the boss. And Boy it was a big deer that spawned. So I stayed a bit far off trying to learn its attack pattern. My friend just stood there or near him. Here comes the sad part. Appears you can just block the attacks. So that was what my friend was doing, when learning that I entered the fray as well and blocked attacks. Hit. Blocked. Hit. Checked what way he was turning and then hit again. Basically that was it until the boss died. Which was quite lame first boss, but hey its a boss at least. We got the trophy from boss and took it to the trophy stones so we got a power Eikthyr that was really nice to have during long runs and/or climbs on mountains later on.

We then started our journey into the black forest and met some skeletons and trolls. The trolls was big and nasty. The first troll we met held a tree in his right hand and made large swings with it that I couldn't avoid. I think it was a one shot. On me that is. We then went into our first Burial Chamber. Here there was a lot of cramped space and you had to check twice before entering any of the rooms inside because they could be swarmed with skeletons. By swarm I mean like 2-3 but it felt like a swarm. We found some nice loot that we could then build some things in our base. We got back and built portal I think and some other stuff, then we continued on in the black forest and mined a lot of ore that we upgraded our weapons and axes with. Cant remember exactly when we found the Vegviser or whatever it was called that marked the location on the map. Appears the boss was on another island! By now we could build our first boat so my friend made that and then I got to steer the boat on our first boat journey. 

Turns out steering the boat was a nice system. You can turn left and right with A and D and a indicator on how much you turn is shown in the game UI so you don't have to hold down the button to steer a lot which is nice. You can set speed in four steps I think. Back, paddle(one), two or three. That number is how much the sail is curled up or let loose. With three being full sail. Hard to explain but something along those lines. Okay so we went east and were out on water and then we came to a river that we wanted to try sail through because the second boss was on other side of a landmass so we tried. We hit some stones but all in all it went good and we got through. Then it got interesting. We continued and saw some new areas and we heard a strange sound. All of a sudden my friend just said on Discord “I died” and I was like “but how?” Then I saw a large mosquito flying hitting the boat, apparently it had one-shot my friend just because he was standing up in the boat. I tried my best to survive and get as far away I could from the bug. I was stressed out but I made it. Then I turned around and got most of my friends loot. I had to turn back and forth again three times until I got the important stuff because my inventory got cluttered with less valuable things. Then we decided I had to go opposite direction of boss to try rendezvous with my friend and so this journey continued. I got past some new scary looking areas and some black forest then appeared. I got hit by something big and scary though and after awhile the boat just got destroyed. I was in black forest and quite long away from our main base but I moved towards that location at least. During this time my friend was going in another boat to the west instead of east that we took before. I came to a Meadows(first biome) area and there I build a portal. My friend got the boat near me and we relaxed some. Then we continued the journey to the second boss. We got there finally after quite along boat trip.

Time for the second boss. So, Yeah. I got the job to figure out what spawned the boss so I tried all kind of stuff. Trophies, food and other stuff. Then I was about to give up when I asked my friend for advice. He had done it on other character. But I asked if the things on top of the pillars was a clue and he said that it was. I got back to base and then I noticed the things on the pillar resembled an item we had in our base. So I went back to the summoning place and tried it and it worked with the Ancient seeds. A huge tree spawned and we were in trouble. I held my distance trying to read what the boss did. Noticed he spawned many arms, tree arms that I didn't know what they did. But I got it when I closed on them that they hit hard. So tried to avoid those whilst getting closer to the boss. I did bad in the start and had to use healing potion. Then after sometime I got closer to him easier and got some hits in. We continued fighting and then he got down, without any of us two dying so that was nice. Got trophy and went back to trophy stones, his power was quite lame though. Faster/better woodcutting, hello? that is so situational. The one from first boss is so much better and versatile at least between those two.

We could then go into the next area which was a swamp, and boy it was so lame. We managed but it was so hard for me at least, my friend was bit better at knowing what the enemies did. I hate the poison blobs and it was annoying with the Draugr archers, especially the star marked ones hit so freaking hard. So we got a swamp key from second boss and we used that to enter some Swamp ruins and mined from ooze that contained leather scraps and ore. We then made few runs back and forth with that, but it wasn´t a major spot we was at. We then found our way to another swamp and built a base there, where we upgraded most of our gear from I think if I remember right. We also found the way to the third boss which was in another swamp, so we had to get there. We travelled and built a outpost with portal and then headed for the boss. There I had to try figure out again what it was and the hint from the runestone at the summon said something about “Burn its remains” or so and I tried with skeletal fragments and skeleton trophy which didn't work, also tried other things I had on me. I then went back to base and  checked for something “bony” and found Withered bone, which I returned with and that worked. This fatty was so hard though. Around the location of the boss was a lot of water. So when the boss spawned minions and also spit out gas we were in trouble. The gas itself wasn't an issue cause we had resistance potions for that but in combination with the water that limited our movement and the adds and the boss itself it got quite hard to recover. The boss itself was probably not hard but all this in combination made it super hard. Also. A Wraith joined the party and I died. Then ran back, and my friend died too and ran back and I think we then took the boss after we died each one time. That sucked, because it should probably have been easier with more land around the boss. We got the trophy from the boss, which we turned in at trophy stones for physical damage resistance buff,  and also some weird magical bone.

The weird magical bone could be equipped and the bird told us we could find silver with it so on to the mountains it was. It was so cold up there you had to use frost resistance potion or you would freeze and take damage. So we got some potions and ran up. Met some wolves that we killed and De big Dragons also which we shot down with arrows. The dragons hit hard with their attacks but when I learned that you could roll away on them it was quite easy to dodge when you saw them and you were ready. Which wasn´t all the time of course. We went over the first mountain. No way to boss. No silver. We then went to the second mountain. Same thing. No silver. No way to boss. We then took our boat on a journey and found another larger mountain, where we finally found silver. We then shipped that back to nearest base and smelt some and made weapons and upgrades. We then went ahead and found another new mountain where we found not one but two silver veins and one of those was big as hell. There we mined it all and was like “Do we really need this much?” my friend said second vein was the biggest vein he had seen also which was quite nice. We saved all the silver there and then went another way with the boat. There in the horizon we saw it. A huge mountain appeared an we were like “This have to be the boss mountain” when we climbed it. We got all the way to the top and scouted. This is a shot I took.

No silver vein. We saw no structures. So we moved to another top and then there it was. My friend saw it. A structure! I said “Where?” “Over there” he said. “Where I shoot my arrow” And I saw nothing, turns out it didn't render until I was bit closer. Inside that structure was the pin pointer to the next boss. We took the boat and went on our way. To the mountain. And boy was it a big mountain. Pretty much the same as the one before and it took sometime to get to the top. During this time and when we mined silver we had found some dragon eggs and both me and my friend thought that this had to be what you summoned the next boss with and when we got to the altar it seemed that both of us was correct. But. You needed three eggs! damn son. That was annoying but we had one egg with us and two of the other we could take on this mountain we was at so that was okay. We then spawned the big Mother dragon and fought. We had to shoot it when it was flying and it shot ice down on us that we had to roll out from. I rolled twice when my friend rolled one big roll but I thought it was safer to roll twice. We also ate frost resistance potions here. With our capes we had built from silver we didn't take cold damage from the weather though which I forgot to say until now. Back to the boss, we shot arrows on it when it was in the air and when it got down it bugged out sometimes. Its attack pathing was weird when I and my friend was on opposite sides of the dragon attacking it, it “spazzed” out. Jerked its head back and forth basically. But with that said it got dark and we had adds and I died from a star wolf and a werewolf that wanted to join in on the fun. We had the boss at 20% when this happened and that led to my friend dying too. All seemed lost. We thought the boss would de-spawn. But it didn't. so we got back and got our corpses and took frost resistance potions and fought on and the dragon finally died. We got trophy and turned that in at the stones, the power we got was that we could have tail wind on sails when sailing, which is quite nice on long sea journeys. We then built some upgrades and continued on to next biome.

We had already found the next biome before so we just went to a base with plains nearby and explored from there. The Deathsquitos(Mosquitos) was deadly but they didn't one shot us this time. Which was nice. We also met some furry large creatures that we killed, we could block these so that helped. They also dropped large meat that we could grill and get quite nice food buffs from. We also met a lot of goblins that hit quite hard too but without stars they was quite easy. You pretty much blocked at the right time so they got staggered, then you hit them few times and then blocked again. I was so bad at this but I am starting to learn. You also sometimes cannot block attacks from one or two star marked mobs, which is annoying. This depends on how strong your shield is I think. The ones with stars hit a lot. Suddenly I heard my friend. We were in luck. My friend saw the stone that pointed to the boss and apparently it turns out the boss was on the same island we were at! in the same area we now were in. Look at that! So we continued in that zone. We went ahead to the boss area and we think that we will spawn it with some totems. On the ritual altar there seems to be five slots available so we think you will need five totems to spawn him so we will try to gather that. We then went to a nearby village and tried to hunt some. Damn was it hard. A star marked berserker were going at my friend so we were out of luck, but my friend didn't die. I then died out of nowhere to a two star marked goblin that one shot me. So I ran back with full food buffs and rested and got my gear. You get a corpse run de-buff when you get your corpse that makes you almost invincible so I just spammed attacks on the berserker which then went down. Bam! Hurray for corpse run buff. We then went back to our Outpost 4, yeah did I mention we have 7 Outposts?. And we thought that we should build another base inside the plains so that we could sow some seeds on the new stuff we found, I think it was called Barley. At least the things we could make with the new ingredients were so huge so it would be worth it to have a supply of those materials inside plains. Other thing was fish that also gave pretty good buff so I did some fishing when my friend was expanding the base some. I think I finally got 20 something fish, but man it was boring in this game. Sometimes the fish wouldn't hook so it took ages and/or I had to move position and the fishing minigame wasn't that fun I think. You didn't have to do much but it was so slow and if you sent out the line to far the fish might escape, yeah I just didn't like it. But back to the plains, we were in our Outpost 4 base and prepared things to expand and make a Outpost near the fifth boss. But it got quite late so we were going to bed for the night.

We begun thinking we want a base in plains too so we would be close to the boss and also so that we could grow some barley. So we started building. When we had a shell my friend said “Wouldn't it be better to have it closer to the sea” and I could just agree. So we moved it closer to the sea and begun building. Which took quite sometime. We had stone walls and tree for roof. We also deconstructed Outpost 4 and went with all the mats to Plains base. Boy was it rough. You cannot teleport with some materials in this game, so we had to go by cart. And the cart gets stuck in terrain sometimes so you have to clear the area and sometimes go another way to be able to go forward. So yeah it was rough and after dying sometimes we got to the Plains base, phew! We then farmed some more totems and head for the boss cause we wanted to try it. I told my friend we should have fire resistance potions with us so we had that. Then when we were about to spawn the boss I didn't have full food buffs yet, but he said that I could eat during the fight so we spawned the boss. And Boy was it a boss. A large skeleton appeared that only had his torso and up I think. We began trying to fight. I was far off and he shot out a fire beam which from him and I rolled off, then he made a move with his hand and all of a sudden I took damage from no where. He had shot down meteors from the sky! My friend died from that or other damage. I went in for a hit, but he made area fire damage too sometimes, but apparently that did not tick for much damage so you could just stand in it my friend said. We continued trying to fight and he got his corpse and I died and we rotated like that, then we noticed the boss healed too and we just said. No. We wouldn't be able to take him like this. So we tried to get our corpses and then ran off to base. Seems the boss tried to follow us so we ported to our main base. I hope the boss doesn't ruin our plains base, but we have to see during our next gaming session.

So we started playing again and talked about what to do, the boss hadn't ruined our base, but he started following us when we went to it so it was hard to be there. We decided to build a little farm elsewhere so we set out with the boat. We built a farm some distance away from our main base. We did not see any Sea Serpents on our way over there. So we decided to go further west toward the end of the world, and soon we saw a Serpent and we killed it. It just dropped some meat, turns out you could make some pretty good food out of it, but nothing more. Then we went to try check out Mistlands which we had seen before and I was wondering what it could be. I thought it was a sea area only, and suddenly we had a area that was called Ashland. We went ashore and then built a outpost and started exploring, it was just small Surtlings there. Then we found a deposit that we mined of Flaming metal, that we wanted to see if it gave something new that we could build. So we began a journey to try to find a swamp with Iron in it, turn out the island we were at didn't have any swamp on it. We went with boat to any swamp we could find and set ashore there. My friend found some green things on tree that was glowing and tried to shoot on them, but it didn't do any damage. I tried to make a stair to it and hit with sword but no luck, a bit later he did the same thing but with axe and it worked. Turns out you could build a bow from it so we farmed some more and did that. We didn't see any Sunken Crypt here with Iron in it though, so we went to another swamp. That took sometime to find but finally we were there and my friend found a Crypt pretty fast that we made a small outpost outside and farmed some Scrap Iron. We did a smelter for the iron and I stood stomping there waiting for the 10 Iron to be smelted and then made a Blast Furnace. When I took up the smelted Fire Metal I was sad, it didn't give any new recipes..so sad. So next time we will probably try to cheese the fifth boss with bow and arrow, lets see how that goes.

We did a short session, where we took the iron back to base. We both had the Mother buff that change wind on the sails so that went quite smooth. We then upgraded some gear and grew some Barley for our food supply. My friend farmed some Lox for their meat also. Soon it was time to go to bed, so we decided to stop there without doing much more. 

Today we farmed more food to prepare for the boss fight, and my friend fished some and I got some more Lox meat. Together with Barley we now had three large buffs, Lox meat pie, Blood pudding and Fish wraps I think. After thinking about it we then went to the boss, because with 300 frost arrows each we should probably be able to take down the boss by range. So we started the fight and drank a fire resistance potion each. We then fired arrows when we could and as soon as the boss raised its hand we knew the meteors would come down so then you could run in another direction with sprint and it was fine. Even though I was slow sometimes so one or two meteors hit me, at least it wasn´t lethal. My friend got most of the beams that he did, probably because he mostly was closer to the boss. We continued firing arrows from a distance and my friend went in for some melee hits here and there, thus also triggering the AOE effect that the boss did when you was close. I also went in for some hits with sword and it seems he was vulnerable to that kind of damage, or at least we though so. I mostly did damage with bow though. All of a sudden my friend said “Is that poison arrows?” because he saw a green trail from my arrow. I was like, “oh it probably is”. Seems the game took that automatically instead of my frost arrows when a stack was depleted. It was kind of funny. So we continued to hit the boss and even though it regenerates, we had the continued damage so in the end he got down. We did not die a single time during this try, which was very satisfying.

We now have roughly 80 hours in Valheim together, damn that went by fast. All in all it is a good game even though it is only in early access, so I hope that the team developing the game will be able to create a greater experience now when they have the resources to increase the team if they want to because of the many units sold. I had a blast. Some smaller things may be annoying, like enemies being inside rocks, which makes it harder to hit them. Or inventory equipment showing as grey bar instead of white fully repaired in certain slots. But that only happened once though. And as the game is in early access I can ignore the little faults and see the greater picture and still have a good time.

With that I want to end the post with a screenshot from the fifth bosses trophy. Enjoy!

[mmoxie]

A Very Long Post How Warcraft has Changed as a Setting

I’ve been thinking about World of Warcraft for a few days, trying to hone in on an observation I’ve been having trouble articulating for a long time now. Watching the backlog of Hayven Games (RIP) videos helped me get a better idea of how to say this:

When World of Warcraft was initially designed, it was done so with the intention that it would genuinely be a world. A setting, before everything else. That’s why quests didn’t come across as so impactful- you kill ten boars, you pick some apples, you run some brigands off of the farmland- because these things were just ongoing troubles in the world. They weren’t the explosion of the Well of Eternity, they weren’t Archimonde at Hyjal, they weren’t Deathwing carving Kalimdor in half- because a quest taking up the whole zone would make it feel less like a piece of the world, and more like a task to be checked off in your journal.

You did progress through zones, but they were expansive, unstreamlined. Arathi Highlands is sprawling and has standing stones, wandering elementals, huge stretches of open plains. There were whole patches of zone with basically nothing in them- you could just be on an unnamed hill, somewhere in Arathi, looking at nothing but the distant mountains, and that was the present day of the Arathi Highlands.

Burning Crusade continued this tradition. You entered a setting. “Something horrible happened here” was the theme for it, and you could see that just in the shape of the map itself. Ongoing military action by the Alliance and Horde was something you brushed with, not something you enlisted directly into.

Wrath of the Lich King is where things started to change, but they changed the least. Pieces of the previous settings had their plot threads tied together, meant to be interacted with in the present. Northrend had some pieces of history, but it was the start of “something is happening here” as opposed to “something happened here.” We got up there, and we killed Arthas Menethil, the Lich King, and in doing so we ended a plot thread that began in Warcraft 3. A piece of the setting- which is what Arthas was, a name that had impacted the world, the person you credit/accuse for the creation of the Scourge- was gone. Now the Scourge were masterless, with Bolvar Fordragon acting as basically an air traffic controller for zombies, where once this malicious force of the dead had a legitimate dark master commanding them all, making them malicious, making them into our enemies.

Cataclysm leaned harder into this idea of “things are happening.” The whole world changed. Quests were reworked, zones had their average level raised or lowered, there was a much stronger idea of leveling “flow” from zone to zone. And in doing so, the invisible corridors were built- and they would only get more claustrophobic over time. Sure, this new Azeroth was more efficient- I’ll even go so far as to say more fun- to level in. But other than the beautiful set pieces and utter devastation brought on by Deathwing dragging his tail across the world, there wasn’t much reason to go wander. You couldn’t expect to find some quest giver tucked away in a corner, or some weird cave you’ve never seen before. The new zones played at being expansive in the same way, but they may as well have been color coded, or had giant arrows drawn on the ground telling you to move on to the next one, you’re done in this one.

Every zone is just beautiful enough to visit. The sum total of Vashj’ir is gorgeous enough to tour through once. Get your seahorse that you’ll never use again and go. Deepholm? Twilight Highlands? You can visit, but virtually every part of the zone is extremely hostile, with the only safe zones being the little spots to pick up quests.

Pandaria eased up on this in some places, then doubled down in others. The farmland in Pandaria is practically a “flyover state” unless you want to tend to your little plot of vegetables. You quest through the zones in a fairly linear fashion, but there are hidden paths, places to climb, caves to delve into, peaceful little ponds and more. It’s the most freedom from the quest chains that we’ve seen since Burning Crusade. There are places in Pandaria that it’s genuinely just good to visit, and I think that’s extremely special.

WoD didn’t happen. WoD was one quest with 100,000 tributaries all branching out and then guiding you right back in. Zip through a zone because you have to. Because you have to beat that zone’s “story” to take a step in your main quest’s story. Everything’s too tight and too hostile to tour, to explore, to do anything like you might do in the early years of the game.

And now with Legion, we have this WoD-level streamlining, the invisible hallways drawn in so tightly that you have time gates and zone quests and world quests, which... are their own bag of worms. Because world quests don’t ask you to explore, even though they get you out into the world. They take you to a hotspot for a few minutes, you tidy up the problems in that hotspot, and then you go. There’s no reason to stop and look around, you won’t find anything. Secrets are lit up with gold stars and silver chests, and if you find something fascinating that isn’t marked with one of those, it might not have been intended to fascinate.

Zones are where things happen in the present now, and that’s not a bad thing- but it puts blinders on you, and it puts blinders on the design process for the zone. Your leveling path has become a literal path, as long as you move in this direction you will continuously advance. You aren’t encouraged to seek out lore, mysterious secrets aren’t built into the fringes anymore because there’s no reason you’d go looking. You might get some set dressing if you look really hard.

I’m not interested in talking about whether Vanilla was “better.” The truth is that it wasn’t. It was limited and buggy and user-unfriendly and demanded a great deal from its players in terms of time investment and stat building, even from encounter to encounter. But it succeeded in building a world that felt like a world, and I feel like in the thrill of making big events, we’ve lost that world feeling in our maps. The closest we’ve gotten in recent memory is “a city that feels like a city,” and even that is rife with strong, universally-hostile enemies that patrol around Suramar removing from you the only buff that makes it explorable.

The maps have started feeling like levels. Like Green Hill Zone. Like Lethal Lava Land. Like Bubblegloop Swamp. Instead of biomes that sort of bleed into each other- like the transition from Elwynn to Redridge to Burning Steppes, or the way the world dries out as you go from Ashenvale to Durotar to the Barrens to Thousand Needles, gradually ramping into the actual desert of Tanaris. Game levels are not what these maps once set out to be, and sometimes it just really bothers me, because- not to put too fine a point on it, but I prefer Warcraft as a world.

These invisible hallways they’re building are great for telling a story, but with this post I really just want to emphasize that participating in a story wasn’t always the point. Sometimes the way you chose to navigate this big, wide world was a story of its own kind. Other than “choose which zone your order will turn its attention to this time,” that sort of thing really isn’t a major part of the game anymore, and that’s what’s been bothering me, and I’m relieved I can finally put it into words and get it out of my system.

[gamingworld87]

The Elder Scrolls® Online

Join over 10 million players in the award-winning online multiplayer RPG and experience limitless adventure in a persistent Elder Scrolls world. Battle, craft, steal, or explore, and combine different types of equipment and abilities to create your own style of play. No game subscription required.

MMOs can’t thrive in mediocrity. In order for a game in this genre to please a consistent or growing player base of the size necessary to keep an MMO world ticking over, there needs to be something about it that’s both different and brilliant. Upon first launch three years ago, The Elder Scrolls Online did not have this essential ingredient. It felt too much like an MMO by-the-numbers and its splash of Tamriel flavouring was not quite enough to set it apart.

Since then it’s been added to, revamped and revitalised, with One Tamriel, which opened up the world via a level scaling system, and Zenimax Online’s forays into more flavoursome RPG storytelling with its Orsinium DLC (among others). Morrowind, ESO’s first additional ‘Chapter’ (the developer is weirdly reluctant to use the word ‘expansion’), is a fresh mark in the sand for the game, a point from which fans will be able to say it really found its place in the wider pantheon of MMOs. And that place is as a teller of great stories.

I’m fairly late into a particularly long session of playing when the effectiveness of ESO’s new storytelling potential hits me. I have spent the better part of two hours in Sadrith Mora, entangled in the plight of Sun-in-Shadow, an Argonian slave with untapped magical abilities and an enthusiasm for the local mage community’s propensity for political intrigue. As I jog about the town, chatting to other wizards and councilors on her behalf, smoothing her possible path to a higher rank, little nuggets of exposition are expertly planted all adding extra spice to proceedings. There’s Eoki, a love-spurned fellow slave waiting for his one-time partner to free him. There’s a deep seeded racism in the council chamber, with one character in particular seeming to hold a meaty grudge against Sun-in-Shadow’s lizard-folk.

And then there’s Sunny herself. Each time I return to her to hand in a quest I find myself combing her dialogue to find hints of her true motives, buffeted as I am in this beautifully overgrown collection of fungal towers between viciously ambitious mages all out to get their own way. Each time I’m handed a quest which requires a brisk stomp across the open map I find myself setting out again, despite the late hour, not because I want to get the promised loot at the end of the trail, and not to tick off an objective in my journal. Instead I keep going into the early hours because I just really need to see how this all plays out.

The setting plays a huge part in that. Stepping off the boat at the start of the chapter in Seyda Neen in full high texture quality, contemporary-o-vision is a powerful thing for those that were there 15 years ago. And the whole map is full of moments like this, from the half-built cantons of Vivec City (ESO’s Vvardenfell is chronologically set 700 years prior to Morrowind), to the ever-present lurking of the volcanic Red Mountain at the island’s centre. There are constant nods sprinkled throughout the game for veterans to enjoy, and, importantly, these don't feel like obligated fan service. The team re-building this world clearly harbours a love for the original.

And it’s easy to see why. For those that weren’t there all those moons ago, Vvardenfell is an exceptional backdrop for a fantasy game. It’s an almost alien landscape, where looming mushrooms tower overhead and biomes shift from dense foliage to ash-choked badlands. This is mirrored in the soundscape as well. There are refrains that will instantly trigger your memory, such as the rousing main theme, but there are incidental sounds which layer atop your otherwise sedate exploration, further fleshing out the world. The low groan of a silt strider. The chirping of a chitinous bug. This is not a typical fantasy land and, despite the inherent nostalgia, it feels as fresh now as it did back then.

What doesn’t feel that fresh at all is the game’s combat. This is an area that has had only minor improvements over the last three years. It's still clunky, preoccupied with left and right mouse clicks in time with over-egged animations and stun markers. The new player class, the Warden, is perhaps a telling indicator of how uninspiring the existing classes are to pick from and why they are so hard to even remember beyond the character creation screen.

The Warden is capable of performing in DPS, healing and tank roles, and boasts an ultimate ability which sees a persistent bear guardian follow you around to aid in combat. It can do everything well, basically, and picking anything other than Warden when starting the game afresh now feels like the wrong thing to do. That’s great if you’re just starting out, but for those already wondering why they bothered picking Nightblade three years ago, the itch to just start over and get yourself a friggin’ bear will likely be high.

I can't help but wonder (and I do this whenever I ponder the class system of an MMO I happen to be dipping into) why more games in this genre don't look towards FFXIV’s excellent class system, which simply lets your one main character be whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be. In ESO, and its new Morrowind excursion especially, I ache for the freedom of character development proffered up by the game’s mainline inspirations.

One thing that is great about the Warden—again, to the detriment of the other classes—is that it is a very readable class. With all characters capable of wearing any armour sets, it can be hard in a pinch to clock what role any given player character is supposed to fill. Is that fully plated cat-person over there a tank or a healer? With the Warden, well, she’s got a bloody bear next to her for a start. Each ability performed is also given a telltale series of persistent animations. A load of mushrooms sprouting at that Warden’s feet? Then she’s a healer. Covered in ice? Then she’s a tank. It’s a shame that the old classes remain comparatively unmemorable or unreadable.