LadyCrimson

Enshrouded: reached a spot where one can periodically farm lvl 50 gear. Good spot for a base altar. Chr has done all the main, non-side/animal husbandry stuff and I'm now just running all over re-collecting oodles (and oodles) of resources, crafting items/blocks etc, for a 2nd "semi-creative/builder" chr/world. Main chr. will be the grinder and other chrs can just build anywhere, with maxed altar upgrades and the like from the get go. I also discovered one doesn't have to fish in any particular biome. What you can max catch seems bait type dependent. eg, can catch high lvl fish with frog bait, anywhere, any biome. So I found this waterfall near Lower Meadows (semi-starter area) that fell into a literal puddle not big enough to fish in. I pickaxed a large hole under it, and it filled with water. Build a pier over it and placed glowing blocks so I could see at night etc. Fished for an hour. Suddenly realized my created pond's water level was still rising and flooding my pier/base. Had to put in a couple drains at the water level I wanted. So that's what those are for. :P

^^ What is with some "default" program layout designers these days. What is that monstrosity for - touch screens? I guess you're supposed to be able to put some image over every forum sub-category? Ugh.

Chosen "forced" font at size 22 and minimum font size at 20 (custom FF setting) works for me. ;p It's what I've been using for a long time, ever since higher res. monitors and many sites/forums still using stuff like 12-14px font sizes.... What's going to take some getting used to is not having the user avatar/info sidebar. The post columns look strange, lol. EDIT: forum no longer seems to turn the any smilies text into icons, if you make a text smilie it pops up a list you can choose from, or not. Which is actually fine to me. These days I'd rather be able to use an actual :D instead of an icon, if I want.

Ok, I've now seen the modern version of The Running Man. It was ok, as such things go. Not a very good film, really, but at least it did feel more like it actually used the book as inspiration. The main chr/actor tho - I was assuming the uber angry/max bad temper posture/walk/expression was intentional, and it didn't work. It was like a bad SNL angry-man satire. The pacing/editing killed it, like many things these days. I mean, I felt more attachment to everything going on (and chrs) in ye old Lethal Weapon series. These days it's just set piece after set piece sewn together with nylon threads. Edit: actually, a lot of stuff these days feels akin to doing a TikTok scroll pattern. "Set piece", finger-scroll, "Set piece", finger scroll. Makes sense I suppose. 2nd Edit: I saw Matt Damon/Ben Affleck's interview re: Netflix asking them to put a huge action sequence in the 1st 5 minutes to keep phone-users attention at the start, and they made it sound like that's a totally new thing/ruining movies. Matrix? Bond, sometimes? It's more how it's done - plus whether the film makes that 1st attention grabber worth the rest of the time, to the end.

It's Costco day. Which is where one spends a silly amount of money, to supposedly save money. At least we've never left CostCo with a giant inflatable boat or $5k patio set. Wouldn't fit in the car, anyway.

Ok, got Altar upgraded to 9. For some reason I thought there was one more past that, but that option is now greyed out like there's nothing left. Hm. So there is now either: ---actually try to finish most/all of the, uh, 50-70+ "quests" I've been ignoring, as well as some optional dungeons, the last few NPC's, as well as fill out any of the rest of the map (maybe 15% left). But game isn't really item-hunt worthy and revisiting/marching through areas multiple times to reach quest marker locations is already growing old. ---ignore all that and finally just resource grind to build giant bases and/or an entire "village", probably with a 2nd twinked chr (that wouldn't have all altars taken up as map markers....). Do I care about that. Undecided, really. Building is fun but never been one to make giant fancy stuff. Probably because I'm not good at it and/or it takes more time vs. longevity of my motivation. ---find another game --binge watch some TV --binge-sleep the rest of the winter. 🤔

^ If they at least made it so it wasn't percentage based and easy settings let us old/slow farts react before being dead, that might help. Or the meteor attack didn't cover half the donut, or its laser beam wasn't six miles wide and follows you around. The design of the fight arena tho is always going to problematic. You can easily "slide/teleport/glide" avoidance yourself off the edge. Seriously, it's a super skinny donut with a mile wide center hole as well as the outer edge drop off. Did I mention the boss can fly? And has adds? And yeah, I think nov. 2026 is their current projection (delayed a couple months), although per usual re: EA, I always have my doubts. Although I don't get the feeling it'll be 10+ years, haha. There are a couple other "indie" games I've had my eye on but I like (mostly) completing games before I move on, first, otherwise I never finish anything. I was also looking at StarRupture but it seems a bit too Satisfactory/factory type building for my tastes.

I would have liked that movie more if the entire film had had that ludicrous over the top feel. But to me it felt out of place vs. the rest of the movie. If you want to be a horrific satire/comedy, pick that and stick with it. Is Evil Dead 2 a great cinematic film. No, not even close. But (back when) I laughed my butt off from beginning to end. Long live Bruce Campbell.

@Hurlshort -- have fun with the Enshrouded Altar upgrade 8 boss. After taking a mental break from that game for a bit I went back and filled out some more areas, got more stuff/npc's - I have 17 NPC's, and even if some aren't crafting stations, holy that feels excessive. Anyway, there's a long long task (as usual, I get lost a lot) before Altar8-boss. You need lvl8 to be able to have frost-death protection (no death-timer) even while in your base in the actual snow. Could you live without that, sure, but hey, it's progression. So that boss. Yeah, nope. Even on easiest everything, I died in like 15 seconds during 6 tries. I might've done a sliver of damage to its health bar. The spike is unreal vs. everything else in the game. Its main two attacks seem to do percentage damage so doesn't matter your health, clvl or settings, your health dies in seconds. The area you have to fight = must be master with glider, double-jump/glide, slide/constant avoidance timing, speed/reaction etc or die in meteor puddles or slip/misstep/fall and/or be lasered or pushed to fall death. Sure, it's a skill issue and I suppose a few will like the challenge, but imo very unfair - again, vs. all the rest of the game. Out of place, all of a sudden. I could've maybe dealt with the dodging of near-insta-death attacks themselves (been there done that in other games) but the fight area for me was impossible with no room for "hey I suck, ok", navigation (imagine a very very skinny donut shaped piece of land). After reading online comments about this perhaps over-tuned boss, I gave up (I'll never have that type of "skill" and don't care to bother), and used a (kinda buggy) cheat-engine table to insta-kill it 5 times (so I can have spare heads for other chrs), removed cheat-engine-table, then continued on my sandbox-y way. Altar upgrade 9 is easy peasy in comparison, have head already, almost there. Just to say, you can easily not bother with this boss/last few upgrades, and still build tons of sim-y castles and towns/do most everything else. I have a feeling a lot of people haven't even reached this point in the game, because they're too busy building obsessive deco-towns. Or this is where they quit. Or they went to a "resource" server and just grabbed a head from a chest that someone else farmed (that's a thing in this game, if you don't mind Online).

Just to say, I recall spending too much time making that cat avatar work - partly because tiny size ruined the visibility of eye-squinting expression, plus the circle cut off the ears etc. I gave the cat more and more "eyeliner" and filled in the pupils darker and darker until it kinda worked. 😛 Not a fan of circle avatars either.

HBO - The Pitt, season 2. First two episodes that are available were pretty good. It's another shift, 10 months later (from the 1st season0. Not much to say so far, outside of that they seem to have maintained the quality. So looking forward to the rest.

That nerve destroying op for hubby's lower spine is now on the horizon. Just waiting for a booking opening to open up. Doc says there's 3 vertebrae that are the "worst" but 5 total are problematic so they're going to do all 5. And if THAT doesn't help him, it's down to the spinal-fusion thing, which is a lot more dubious re: could get better, could not, could actually be worse (and just like with the nerves, can't reverse it). Don't know if we'll stay over night in the area or not, depends on time of day (3-4 hr drive). Maybe just rent a room for a few hours of rest/traffic avoidance first.

Tiffany? Who's Tiffany? Also: I miss American Bandstand, silly dancing and lip syncing and all. I remember seeing this on the old tubeTV back then and I'm pretty sure I have it recorded on VHS tape in a closet somewhere. Famous film composer Danny Elfman used to dance funny, hehe. It's how we saw our fave bands outside of in-person live concerts, back then. Now YT over-saturates us all. But at least it also lets us nostalgia.

This is how I picture my husband being at this age. So cute.

Enshrouded: I'm (current) max level, all biomes visited (but not fully explored), most "crafting" things acquired etc. But based on empty workbench squares, I'm missing some building blocks. So this is when I start wiki-ing more. So yesterday I start one of the areas/things for a couple of them. Took me near 2 hrs to get to the end (1st time, exploring, puzzle/traversal-deaths etc). Near the bottom, got one new block. Then I encountered my first major game bug. The boss at the end - which I need its head - I saw its health bar appear on the UI, there was music, but no boss. I killed a few mobs, looked around, saw a treasure box - grabbed it - then saw a teleporter pad. I thought, ok, maybe I have to take this to the real boss-room. So I used it. Which took me to .... the start/entrance of the dungeon. And teleport is one way, ofc. And everything's respawned by now, so even if it took me half the time doing it, I'd have to redo all the puzzles/open doors. Granted, I guess there was a glitch, but I temp-rage-quit again. EDIT: my god I talk too much when I'm frustrated. shortened: I've had about enough of the MMO-like resource/other grind. also, the bug seemed to be I was able to pass thru/unlock a gated door I shouldn't have been able to, before beating the boss. I'm still stupidly stubborn enough to try to get at least all the "building blocks" unlocked (I'm close-ish) but after that I'm out, until a creative mode, or they rebalance things extensively. 😛

Enshrouded: After a bunch of unrelated exploration/resource collecting/dungeon crawling etc I finally got around to making some "cold biome" wear. So between base-comfort rating, clothes, and new hand-warmer I can now stay in super-cold for about an hour. But - I could live with the top, but the hat and pants, no, just no. Thank goodness for transmog. I went back to my original "look". But at least I can live in the high snow for more than 40 seconds. Also learned that if one is relying on base-comfort frost bonuses, teleporting to a TP-only flame altar removes it because it takes on the TP-altar's zero frost bonus, when you get there. >.> so one has to make any base near winter/snow the same frost-comfort level.

Exploring. Wonder what happened to them? Hmm, death by frozen pond. Poor lost souls. But they don't need that anymore - I'll take it, thanks. Stopping for the night.

On your Easy, did you slide every slider full to left? Because one setting controls the numbers. Less/Normal/More, something like that. I left it on Normal because I don't care how many there are in most cases, as long as they die easy/don't kill me in one hit or whatever (bosses mostly, mobs are nothing). The enemy I had to farm is a flying one and it simply doesn't spawn many in the few shroud areas it can spawn. I only found one larger area where maybe 3 spawned, other spots just had one. I have now found coal, which means I can craft a hand-warmer, but I also need a certain kind of leather, which I do not have. Hehehe

It's winter and I have nothing better to do. Plus I'm pretty sure I have both more free time and more "ocd" factors. 😛 At the moment I'd give the game in its current form maybe a B or B+. I like aspects but there are still those super annoying things that get your goat, a little too often. So I try to focus on the things I like, until the game "forces" me to do otherwise. I've somehow finished 70ish "quests" (I use that term loosely) but there's oodles of them all over the map I've ignored and every new thing procs more. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of NPC-crafts by not doing some of them. I do like that there's no money/buying/selling. Just resource grind. Speaking of which, I spent a few hours trying to get the 40 of the one item I need to upgrade the altar again. After that time I have --- 37. And that's with the setting that I think increases amounts you loot a bit. >.> The "grind" is that you have to wait for enemies to respawn and ofc it's not a thing that spawns in numbers. It gets MMO old. EDIT: if game didn't have all those easy settings I can turn on/off at whim, I'd probably have irritation-quit. 😄

Enshrouded: I found the snow biome. Or rather, I found some edges of it. I guess I didn't notice before because I've been using double-jump, gliding, and a lot of pickaxing to reach places before the game wants you to, I think. So I'm often in tunnels, or it's night, or --- Anyway - I glided and then made a tunnel upwards in this one spot. I hit patches of snow and new granite/blocks (I can now build snowmen). At one flat cliff ledge some way up, I plopped a base-altar. Good thing, since about 60 more seconds of tunneling upwards through rock, I wtf dropped dead, apparently from cold. Tried again, paid more attention, saw the tiny "frost death imminent" timer bar this time. So I went sideways. Found another snowy ledge, but this one had a nice, empty, pre-built fancy stone house. So I put a base altar in there as a foothold. there was a path upwards. So I tried again, just walking. Worked for a while, then that bar showed up again and I had to rush back down. I think it's "altitude" based, not the actual snow. Guess I need frost protection. I have zero idea how to get it. My altar stage is still only lvl 5, that's probably some of it. Each altar level (for me so far) has at least one (shroud) material required that is so annoying to get, even with 25+minute shroud-time. Either because of grind or getting lost finding a POI area or a spawn area etc. Dangit, guess I gotta grind.

Enshrouded: --I see an entrance room like this in this game and I nope outta there. Don't get me wrong, most of such aren't that terrible or anything - outside of a couple platforming things, because I suck at platforming things - but some have taken a bit of time/effort or reloads. I ran out of patience already. 😉 As always, it's hard to get a picture of one's base. I haven't gone very extravagant, mostly functional. I also keep building upwards for workstations because I don't want to increase the "build area" of the base-altar, since it stops trees/plants/terrain/anything from respawning. --This is the front, at night. Notice all the NPC's in a line. Was tired of them wandering all over when I have to find/craft from them, so I made all their walking-distances to 0. They don't even go sleep in their beds anymore. There are too many craft-station-NPC's. >.> --The glowing blocks for lighting are the only things that don't go out when it rains so I use them a lot. --The back, night. It's a steep dropoff in back, roadside in front. --Similar backview, day. The porch floor below my chr is where the small farm-area is. Since apparently no sun is required.

I've had the 32gb ddr4 since I built this thing. Only one game ever wanted it all, and that was only for rendering a map, not actual playing. I have had no care to "rush" to higher speed ddr5 and get that extra 6-10fps or whatever. Nor for current gen/faster nvme's or even sata ssd's. After a point those things start to feel like "window-treatments" for house windows. It's nice, but not really necessary/gaming. It's not a rush thing, those. Although the way AAA dev's are going, in a few years gonna need mega-nvme drive just to prevent read/transfer poor frame pacing/stutters. Haha.

With the way melee animations work, I haven't had alt-itis like I do in some games. I've tried melee a few times and once I melee-thrust myself off a cliff. Technically I think using the staff to cast spells does the same forward/stuck in an elongated animation movement but since you cast it from afar it doesn't bother me. I might try the bows later. Of course, I'm still using mostly the easy settings, because after the first 20 or so hours, I'm just trying to rush to unlock stuff. Having to find/loot block varieties in "random" places is so annoying. Loot a chest, bang, "true sandstone fancy block discovered." Pffft.

It's already in the game. I've seen ppl on forums talk about it. It's mountains I guess. I've been focusing on exploring and seeing what one can do with building blocks (no gravity/structural integrity considerations, can "float" bases, like in NMS). I still haven't even tamed a cat/animal. Just like in real life these days, I don't really want to take care of one. 😛 Edit: I went without the larger backpacks for ages because that swamp FT spire annoyed me - I kept falling with those bouncy pads. Later I finally tried chopping a stairway into a tree and got to the top that way. I hated that swamp area.