A Boring Book

3rd Oct 2020

I'm glad I didn't have to go to work today and not just for the normal reasons. It was still raining today and I don't think it stopped at all. In theory I don't mind the rain too much, it's better than just horrible grey skies, because it's useful for the plants and such. But there is a point where I just want it to stop and there to be at least a little sunshine. Maybe tomorrow it will stop so that I can get into work dry.

Once again I got up late as it was a day off but this time it was due to still feeling tired. I feel I slept ok so don't know why I was so tired this morning. Once I got up I turned the server on to let my resources continue to be refined ready to turn it all into my new base in Conan. Then it was on to ESO. 

This time I wasn't so dumb and remembered how long it takes to go through all my characters, so I only did two: my main and my new crafter. I did the crafter because it helps to keep my account inventory (bank) clear and I want to level her to max so I get more of the top level rewards for the crafting dailies. And I always do the crafting dailies on my main as I may as well since I'm playing her anyway. Then David and I did the event daily together, it was a nice simple and quick world boss this time so we were done in no time and got to questing. David took a while getting his own main sorted out so I ran around collecting crafting materials, I got a surprisingly good haul. Turns out the area we are currently playing in is full of nodes of all kinds, I might go back there if I ever get short on stuff. Today we progressed pretty well, completing several side quests and a whole set of main quests. It helped that we didn't go through any towns where there were loads of NPCs to talk to. 

After ESO I went back to Conan and found something rather frustrating. Apparently, for once Pyro and Sil had actually logged on without me. And, it appeared, saw all my nice resources ready to be made into type three (T3) buildings and thought they would make their own at our established south base. No, they did not go and get more resources to replace the ones they had used, and when I mentioned it I barely got a sorry. I just don't understand how you can see a whole tone of stuff and not think, 'maybe these are being made for a reason.' *sigh* at least I had all my bricks on me, you can't access other people's inventory, especially when they are offline and the bricks are the longest to make because I needed so many of them. Well anyway, I had to go round and replace all the missing stuff which took up most of the rest of the day. I was disappointed because we had a D&D session later and I wanted to make the new base today. Then Sil's nice new T3 house caused even more problems. 

There is an event in the game called a purge where there are several waves of monsters and/or NPCs who come to wreck your base. It's a global meter increased by what everyone is doing. That includes levelling up, building, killing, exploring and so on. Once the meter hits a point there is an increasing chance that a purge will trigger. Now the other part of this is the difficulty of the event can vary too. Our first purge was really easy as it threw us against the weakest monsters in the game and only a few of them at that. So when I saw the event activate I didn't worry, I placed all my pets over the base and as both Pyro and Sil were online thought it would be fine to leave to make some food. Boy was I wrong. Firstly, as we found out after, the difficulty isn't just based on the area you have built in, like the first one had suggested, but also the highest type of structure. And what had Sil just gone and made? Yep, the highest type of structure currently in the game which wracked up the purge difficulty. Of course I wasn't there to help, being the highest level I would probably have been helpful, but apparently the horde that attacked cut through many of our T1 buildings like a hot knife through butter. And on top of all that the baddies came from a completely different place too, so my pets couldn't help either like I'd hoped, as they were mostly on the opposite side of the base. Thankfully we didn't lose too much, only my old house and animal pen, and the stable with Snipe's horse in. That was a shame because his was the best looking out of all of them so far. 

Once that was over and I was sitting eating and waiting for the D&D game to start, I started to worry a little. Normally we aim for a 7 o'clock start but people don't normally get in until 10 to 15 minutes after that time. So I was sitting in chat on my own at 7:15 and thought I should probably check the text chat. Then I felt dumb. Apparently at 4 o'clock-ish Wolf the GM had told us she wouldn't be running it today since she was feeling very ill. So I could have delayed food a bit and helped in the purge event, oops. I was sad that the game wasn't running. We only play this one every other week and it is set in the star wars universe, one of my favourite settings. Plus Wolf is our best GM and the sessions are always fun to be a part of. 

So after eating I carried on with Conan instead. Finally getting everything I needed for the new base I set off up north to the place I wanted to build. By this point Pyro had logged off, but Sil was still playing with me and decided he wanted to come too. I had hopped he wouldn't as I expected him to slow me down and I wasn't entirely wrong. To be honest though it was the lag that almost got me killed. Not sure why but the game did not like us trying to get north and kept lagging really badly especially for me. Once we reached the highlands it seemed to settle a bit but then Sil had to go and kill everything we came across and more, getting himself split away from me which, as he was meant to be following, wasn't a good plan. In the end I gave up trying to wait for him and just made my way to the ridge I had picked out and tried to guide him there with the map. He finally joined me and finally became useful. While I began to work out where I needed to start he left to explore a little more making dumb comments about all the resources that could be found around the location. Like, yes, there was a reason I chose this spot in particular, no, it wasn't for the pretty view. Sometimes I wish I could reach through the computer screen and try and slap some sense into him, but he did find a good amount of the next resource we would need for the next level of weapons. 

Anyway this brings me to my next problem of the day. I had designed the new base in my single player game and taken some screenshots with Steam's screenshot function. So I minimised the game to go find said pictures and found my Steam library to be completely unresponsive. The rest of the client was fine, but without access to my games in the library I also couldn't access any pictures I had taken. David helped me to look through the program files by using his own, but for some reason our versions of Steam had named things differently. This meant the only solution was to restart the client and hope it solved the issue. This also meant closing down the game. It was a very long and frustrating process as Conan does not like to shut down or start up, it may be a fun game but it has been terribly made and has a lot of issues, especially with the time it takes to load. Anyway, doing the rest did the trick and I quickly found the pictures I needed and copied them onto my desktop so I wouldn't have to go through all that again. 

Finally, at last, I could start building. It took me the rest of the evening and I'm still not sure I got it perfectly right, the angle is very slightly off so I ended up shortening the design a bit so as not to have to build off of a cliff face. But I think it looks pretty good, at least for a basic start anyway. What I have realised is the amount of resources I still need to finish it and the amount of time it's probably going to take. But it will be good once done, and hopefully nice and defensible. There are only really two directions a purge can come from unless they spawn inside, but that shouldn't happen, I hope.