I Love Video Game Farming

No, I don’t mean like farming worms in Angmar to get that extra point of Valour for your virtues or farming the Turtle raid to get that little pet turtle housing item. I mean like simulation farming – til the soil, plant seeds, wait for stuff to grow, harvest, rinse repeat. I don’t know why. I like gardening in real life as well, but I know logically video game farm simulation does not make a whole lot of sense. But I find it immensely pleasing.

When my college roommate got me to start playing Minecraft, setting up a little wheat farm was one of the first things I did. At the time it was very limited, but now you can breed and capture pigs, cows and chickens (and in the next update horses!) and you can maintain a farm of wheat, potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, melons and netherwart. It’s definitely much better than it was, but it’s not quite enough for me.

So today I was browsing through Steam Greenlight. For those who don’t know, it’s a system on Steam that allows budding game creators to post screenshots, videos and descriptions of the games they are making. Then Steam users get to vote on if they would buy the game or not. If a game gets enough votes of “Yes, I would buy this game!” it gets the Greenlight and gets published on Steam for people to buy and play and all that good stuff. And today I discovered a game there called Stardew Valley.

So far, this game has lots of elements that appeal to me:

  • Farming with a wide variety of plant types
  • Ability to shape and build your farm and farmland however you want
  • Customizable character creation
  • Multilayer opportunities
  • Seasons!
  • Retro-y graphics with a pleasing color scheme
  • Nice music!

There’s also the exploration and mining elements reminiscent of Minecraft. Also some of the underground dungeon exploration from the video reminds me a lot of Towns, which I posted about a while ago. And of course story elements as you interact with the NPCs in your town. Apparently there are also 10 NPCs in town that you can marry – regardless of your or the NPC’s gender, which is not something you see very often in games. The character creation seems quite robust – you choose gender, skin color, eye color, hair color, clothes, cat or dog preference, etc. Definitely something to play around with which is nice.

So basically, I am looking forward to this very much and hope it gets Greenlit. For any Steam members who are interested, here is Stardew Valley’s Greenlight page.

A Hunter in Dunland

Sagewood has made it to level 67 now and is almost half way to 68. I finally was pleased enough with her deeds to start questing in Enedwaith again. I’ve only ever taken one character through all the quest in Evendim. And that is still true. I left part way through Mincham’s quests with Sagewood and made my way down to Dunland. This time I decided to do the quests in the Bonevales, which I had never actually done before. Navigating the Bonevales was okay. But it was kind of like Trollshaws-lite. Not a big fan. But at least it was something I had never done before. That is one good thing about 65+ leveling: there is a huge glut of content for those levels. Sagewood didn’t even step foot into Mirkwood. And she definitely won’t finish all of Dunland. But that’s perfect! It gives you lots of opportunity to quest where you want rather than be stuck on a linear path.

However as I was leaving Dunland I decided to stop by at Harndirion and check out the barter vendors there. The ‘Of the West’ sets are now purchasable with marks and medallions (at least the lowest tier anyway), rather than Medallions of the Northmen. So of course I decided to have a look and see if there was anything I wanted for cosmetic purposes. And of course there was! I also made use of the near-by skirmish vendors and got some Dol Guldur armour to go with some of the items I got from the Harndirion vendors. And here’s what I came up with for Sagewood:

Ceremonial Voice of the West Robe – umber

Lesser Blade of the West Leggings – umber

Ceremonial Doom-hunter’s Boots – umber

Ceremonial Secret of the West Gauntlets – olive

Shielf-Master’s Shoulders – umber

Ceremonial Doom-hunter’s Helm – olive

Cloak of the Grey Company – olive

I’m especially in love with the shoulders (from the guardian set of Dol Guldur armour), but the champion leggings are really awesome as well. I was originally going to make the outfit mostly brown and use different boots, but the greenish tinge to the mail in the leggins inspired the olive accents.

Herefara and Milkthistle

I haven’t posted in almost a month! Sorry! It’s not for lack of time, just lack of anything to post about really. I’ve mostly been working on deed with Sagewood, and so haven’t had much excitement in the land of LOTRO. Also been playing quite a bit of SimCity (60+ hours logged at this point). That game is pretty fun but the way the AI behaves and deals with problems gets annoying after awhile. But generally I think I got my money’s worth out of it.

Anyway, yesterday I had been deeding on Sagewood and dropped by Bree to process ore and hides I had picked up along the way. While exiting the vault I stopped by the mannequins and notices the Minstrel and Captain sets “of the West” were available so I decided to see how much they were. To my surprise, you can now buy them with Mithril Coins! And not just that, but 20 coins gets you the whole set. I have no idea if this is actually a good deal (I didn’t check to see the price of coins in the store nor the price of the outfits with TP, if that’s even a viable option now). I decided to buy both sets since I have a whole ton of coins from all of my characters that I don’t see using much…. except for outfits now I guess! So the outfits gave me an inspiration for a new outfit for Herefara. I also decided to use the TP I won from the LOTRO Fashion Contest to buy her some warsteed colors to match the new outfit:

Herefara:

Spear-shaker’s Jacket – white

Sturdy Westernesse Leggings – white

Ceremonial Cry of the West Shoulderguards – white

Ceremonial Secret of the West Gauntlets – umber

Threadbare Boots of the Dunland Healer – umber

Milkthistle:

Blond Hide

Tan Mane/Tail

Hunter’s Caparison – umber

Hunter’s Saddle

Most of the inspiration for the outfit came from the look of the captain “of the West” set, although I ended up only using the shoulders. I thought about using the chest piece as well, but it seemed more appropriate to use a leather jacket for a warden. I might switch them back again, but for now I really like this outfit. And Milkthistle matches splendidly!

Back to Scheduled Gaming

As you may have noticed, I have not posted for quite a few weeks. That’s because Nav had finally come over for his visit and then we were in the process of packing up all my stuff and trying to shove it into suitcases (but making sure they weren’t over 50 pounds!). My parents still have to send me a majority of my stuff unfortunately, but not til we get a house. I’ve been in New Zealand for about a week and a half now and my computer is finally up and running. It had been up and running soon after we got here…. but then my CPU died :( We had decided to take all the innards of my PC out and pack them in my suitcase and just buy a new case in NZ (because it would be cheaper than shipping!). We thought that had worked but it seems some or one of the pins of the CPU got bent. We noticed something weird was going on because when we got the PC back together it was running about 40 degrees (Celsius) hotter than it normally did. But now I’ve got a nice shiny new CPU and everything is going great.

To celebrate getting my PC back again finally, here is a new outfit for Sagewood! I’ve been doing a lot of deeding with her the past few days on Nav’s computer while he’s at work. Since she’s 65 now I decided I’d update her outfit to something more ‘level appropriate’. After all, she’s not just traipsing around Bree-land anymore. She’s been questing in Enedwaith so she needed some real armour. I had been saving up TP to buy the Steed of the Khundolar, however I realized I wouldn’t have enough by the 28th of February and I just don’t have extra money to spend on TP right now (since I’m currently looking for a job here!). Instead I decided to splurge on the Ceremonial Secret of the West set and some extra wardrobe storage (which is always needed… and I promptly filled it, too!). Using pieces from that set I made Sagewood this grey-based scout outfit:

Ceremonial Doom-hunter’s Breastplate – grey

Westernesse Protector’s Leggings – black

Ceremonial Secret of the West Boots – black

Ceremonial Secret of the West Gauntlets – grey

Ceremonial Secret of the West Shoulderguards – olive

Ceremonial Secret of the West Helmet – grey

Fine Quiver – grey

Swift Greywood Bow (for photoshoot purposes!)

In other games news, SimCity 2013 comes out in less than 24 hours now. When news and screenshots were first coming out about it, I was quite skeptical of it. It seemed cartoony and simplistic. But after multiple beta events and videos have come out, I am very excited about it and will definitely be saving my money up for it. I think the thing to keep in mind though is that it is not just an updated SimCity 4. SimCity 2013 is a reboot of sorts. The most frequent complaint I’ve seen about it is that the city size is too small. For me personally, that’s not a problem. I always used the smallest city tiles in SC4 anyway and didn’t like the bigger city sizes. Also, the aesthetics of the new SimCity are phenomenal! If you get it, let me know what you think!

Middle-earth Cosmetics – IRL!

Similar to my love of cosmetics in-game, I also have a love of cosmetics in real life, though rather than outfits my focus lately has been on makeup. Recently an indie makeup company named Shiro Cosmetics came out with a new line of eye shadows inspired by The Hobbit: There and Back Again that perfectly ties together my love of Middle-earth and makeup. I didn’t purchase the whole line, only six of them: Attercop, Attercop; Lingered in Twilight; There and Back Again; An Unexpected Party; When the Thrush Knocks; and Chiefest of Calamities (seen below from Left to Right).

My apologies for the blurry picture. Honestly my plan was to actually put some on my eyes and take pictures of that as well, however my camera lens decided to stop functioning! The above pic is around when that happened. But I had had a really nice combination of When the Thrush Knocks, An Unexpected Party and Attercop, Attercop on yesterday. And today it was When the Thrush Knocks + There and Back again.

I really love the quality of these shadows as well. I’ve never ordered from an indie cosmetics company before so I was a little uncertain (but totally certain of how much I wanted to own Hobbit eye shadows). Based on the past two days of wear, it seems like you need very little actual powder to achieve the really vivid colorings – and vivid they are! Especially Chiefest of Calamities and There and Back Again. Apparently this is the most ‘toned down’ set of shadows Shiro has released, which makes sense as Middle-earth is a much more ‘realistic’ fantasy world.

The other nice thing is that I got two free samples and some candy with my order! I got Fifteen Birds in Five Fir Trees and War of the Five Armies. I’m excited to try them out as well. I also got a Dove dark chocolate heart but uh… I kind of ate it immediately :S

Since my camera broke and I only have these pictures for you, here are some pics from other makeup blogs that do a good job showing off the eyeshadows:

Swatches from Rock, Roll, Glam:

A really awesome look/tutorial using The Wandering Wizard and Lingered in Twilight from The Dark Side of Beauty:

In related news, the indie nail polish maker, Nerd Laquer has finally come out of her long nailpolish-making/selling hiatus and has come out with three new nailpolishes based on Lord of the Rings! (By the way, TDBSLWCHSHITD stands for “The Dwarf Breathes So Loud We Could Have Shot Him In The Dark”)

 

Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

I mentioned last week that I had finally left Moria with Sagewood and started tackling the orc camps around the Mirrormere. I really miss questing in Moria now. The contrast between the revamped quests of Moria and the old outter Lorien quests is quite noticable. Whereas in Moria there is very little back-and-forth between the questgivers and the questing areas, in the Mirrormere it is all about back-and-forth! It really is tedious.

But here are a few shots I took just before leaving Moria. I really like the one with the Balrog – the quest line of traveling through the 2nd Hall and figuring out what happened to the Bridge of Khazad-dum is a really good way to end Moria. The 2nd Hall in general is, I think, the best looking place in Moria. The Gardens are gorgeous as well, but the stone trees are what does it for me I think.

On the other hand though, it did give me an opportunity to change her outfit from that black stalker’s outfit Sagewood had been wearing throughout the long dark of Moria. I decided to go with something Elvish (since it is Lorien after all) but not all-out Elvish. Sagewood doesn’t like Elves very much. I specifically got the Poacher of the Protected Woods title for her by doing the quest-line to kill various protected animals in Lorien.

Bear Hide Jacket – umber

Ceremonial Trousers of the Learned – violet

Ceremonial Town-saver’s Shoulders – umber

Herald’s Gloves – umber

Ceremonial Doom-hunter’s Boots – olive

Trech-helm – olive

I also was able to get in a bit of play-time with my kinmates this weekend. Quite a few were on, including Farwing who I haven’t seen on in ages. Two years ago I got the opportunity to go visit her IRL in Australia. It was super fun! I always love hanging out with my kinmates in real life. Here are the two of us hanging out in Rohan, tackling warbands together:

Knight in Shining Armour

The past week I’ve been tinkering a lot with the White Captain outfit for Cithryth. It always feels like it’s never quite right or perfect or good. And then everytime I make a new one I announce how it’s the perfect White Captain outfit and inevitably I change my mind again. However this time I’m sure this is the perfect White Captain outfit!

I had always tried to stay away from the Rift captain set. It is gorgeous, however there is a very famous captain on Windfola named Annoula whose female captain is always dressed in the full Rift set with the Cloudbane cloak. Annoula has been wearing that since basically forever and I believe has achieved the Fashionable title for it. Finally yesterday I decided to just not worry about that and decided I would make it unique looking somehow.

I ended up using the champion Rift shoulders (partly because I think the captain Rift shoulders look freaking ridiculous and WoW-like). I also used my absolute favorite boots: the Potent Battles Boots of the Mark. I’m only disappointed that they have a warm undertone to them compared to the pale blue undertone of the Rift set. So I had to dye them a blueish color to keep the color scheme cohesive. I also opted for no cloak and instead went with the signature Winged Circlet.

Ceremonial Breastplate of the North Star – white

Ceremonial Leggings of the North Star – white

Ceremonial Shoulders of the Gloom-bane – white

Ceremonial Gloves of the North Star – white

Potent Battle Boots of the Mark – Evendim blue

Winged Circlet

And of course I had to make a warsteed that matches. This took quite a lot of tinkering to find a warsteed look I liked. Honestly it was quite frustrating because some pieces don’t dye quite the way you’d expect or want them to dye. Last night I eventually settled on using an all black steed with black barding. But then today while doing my daily warband runs I switched to all white with navy and it turned out really well!

Solid Hide and Simple Tail – white

Light Caparison of the Norcrofts – navy

Captain’s Halter – white

Captain’s Leggings

Burglar’s Saddle

Burglar’s Gear

At the point the only change I think I would make for the warsteed is to put the Champion’s Gear on instead. That is definitely going to be the next steed I purchase because I have been coveting the Champion’s Gear for too long! It’s the most fitting Gear accessory I’ve seen, or at least one of the least ridiculous. Some of the gear in the Store is quite lovely, however I feel a lot of it is made useless by its coloring and the lack of the ability to dye it. For example the gear that comes with the Heavy Norcrofts set bundle is cool… but it’s also a heinous yellow color that wouldn’t match any kind of character or warsteed outfit I would ever put together.

 

In other news, my hunter Sagewood made it to level 60! Woo! I actually stayed in Moria until level 61, which is absolutely unheard of for me. I’ve taken 4 other characters through there and I’ve always left around level 58 or 59. The Moria revamps were amazing and made me like questing there! I love the quest auto-bestowal system. I enjoy exploring and that system definitely works with an exploration based playstyle like that.

Rough Rider

I’ve not been playing too many games the past week or so it feels like. I’ve been slowly going through stuff in my room – what to take with me when I move, what has to get shipped later, what I’m just plain getting rid of. It’s very tedious and not super fun. I wish all my stuff could just sort itself! I also ran my first 5k race this weekend. My mother is very into running and triathlons, so for her Christmas present I agreed to run a race with her. My time was not so great so I’m not going to share it :P I ran about half of it and walked about half. I’m not in the best of shape, I’ll admit!

Nav finally got to level 74 though and that was very exciting because it meant Rohan time for Herefara! Nav and Herefara are both 75 now and we have our warsteeds. I am very excited to learn another class’s mounted combat system. Nav, though, does not seem to enjoy it quite as much. He still clings to the way of controlling the travel mounts and finds the warsteed very ungainly. It’s too bad because I love it so much! Hopefully with time and practice he too will learn to love riding down his enemies.

Most of my kin, Windriders of Rohan, also got together and completed a skirmish for the first time in ages! It was awesome. I remember when I first joined, we were doing Moria instances almost every night with our allied kins. Now it’s lucky if two or three people are on at the same time. So it was very serendipitous when six of us were on! Me, Nav, Swiftly, Kharrn, Brie and Tryll all did the Storm on Methedras skirmish. We failed one or two times to start but we eventually got it. It’s always so nice being able to play with good friends again!

Other than that I’ve just been doing my Hytbold dailies (and missing a few days here and there… oh well). I tried starting up a new coffee and tea thread in the Windfola forums but so far only two others have taken it up as well. If you’re on Windfola, come say hi and tell us what you’re up to!

Today I made a new warsteed and an outfit to match. I don’t have a name for his horse. The general theme I suppose is a rough-rider of sorts, or perhaps a slightly armoured scout. It mostly started with me really liking the colors of the warsteed hide (dark chestnut) contrasted with black and went from there.

Character Outfit:

Pathfinder’s Jacket – black

Walnoth’s Leather Leggings – sienna

Potent Battle Boots of the Mark – black

Heavy Plated Dunlending Gauntlets – black

Hyrde-Axle – grey

Horse Outfit:

Solid Warsteed Hide – dark chestnut

Simple Tail – black

Burglar’s Saddle

Burglar’s Caparison and Leggings – both black

New Year, New Game – Towns

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to 2013.

I’ve been spending the last few days playing away at various games, mostly LOTRO, Minecraft and Blur (a really good racing game which you should check out!). However I have also started playing a new game: Towns.

Before I start talking about Towns, I want to talk first about how much I love city building games. Pharaoh was my first true PC game love. I have spent hundreds of hours playing that game since I was 10 when I got it. Pharaoh is, I would say, the epitome of city building games. I have yet to find anything that rivals it. Sure it has flaws (for example, how you need those guys in white hats to walk from the industries that need jobs to houses with unemployed people – very annoying!). Impressions Games, the company that developed Pharaoh, attempted to fix those issues with Zeus, Poseidon, Caesar IV, and eventually Emperor. These are all very good games, however nothing matches the feel of Pharaoh for whatever reason.

I am always looking for a nice new city building game to play. I can easily spend hours and hours playing them… if they are good enough of course. So with the Steam sale going on right now I decided to peruse the Simulation genre to see if I could find anything with a demo or that was pretty cheap. I found a game called Towns that had a demo and was on sale. I downloaded the demo immediately and started playing.

Towns is a very, visually, simplistic game that harkens back to a more pixelated time. The easiest way to describe the game play is this formula: Towns = Minecraft (sandbox, block building game with some RPG dungeon elements) + Dungeons of Dredmor (dungeon crawler “roguelike” with tons of different weapons to find as you go down and down deeper through the dungeon) + Settlers III (city building game that wasn’t quite “click and drop” style like Pharaoh – instead you had to instruct Settlers to gather resources and tell them to build things).

You start off a game of Towns with 11 civilians. You then get them to gather resources such as food, wood, stone, etc in order to build… well, a town! But the great thing about the game is, “town” is very loosely defined… actually, it isn’t defined at all. If you just want to build one big mega building/fortress with all your crafting areas, sleeping areas and market areas in one room or multiple levels, that works fine. If you want to build something that looks like  a more traditional town with separate buildings for each type of craft and everyone has their own house – that’s cool too!

My very first town… base… thing.

Like the other city-building games and Minecraft, Towns is a sandbox. There is no “win scenario”. You just keep going until you stop having fun. The main idea of the game though is to build up a base/town/whatever in order to draw in and support heroes. The heroes are good for your city because they will go through the dungeons underground and clear out any and all monsters – which there are quite a lot of. Not to mention, the further down in levels you go, the bigger and badder the monsters get. The hero makes it easier for your citizens to mine the dungeons for resources.

Here are some of my villagers crawling the dungeon and killing baddies – this was before I found out how useful and important heroes are.

I can’t talk about Towns without talking about the reception on Steam of this game. Towns was Greenlighted on Steam, however if you look at the “Game Hub” page for Towns, it is riddled with people complaining about the game and saying how terrible it is. I’m not really sure why so many are complaining so adamantly. I mean yes, it is not a perfect game. People mostly seem to be upset that there hasn’t been an update or patch recently… but the most recent update was early November – barely two months ago. It’s not like the game is utterly broken and unplayable. Since I bought it 3 days ago, Steam tells me I have played 24 hours of Towns. Maybe that’s a bit much, but then again I have nothing else to do really. But my point is, I wouldn’t have spent that much time playing this game if it weren’t good.

The game is, of course, not without it’s flaws. There are five maps types (Normal, Jungle, Desert, Snow, Mixed) and you can only have one saved game per map type. Not too awesome if you want to try out a new town style but have a saved town you really like. I’ve also found that getting more villagers is quite a task. This may be due to my play style however. I play more to the aesthetic end of things – I want my town to look like a town, or at least something that looks cool anyway. Many of the screenshots on the Game Hub page show very effecient setups… but to me efficiency is only good as long as it looks good while being efficient. Another problem is the tutorials in the beginning. They teach you how to gather, how to farm and how to turn civilians into soldiers but there are key elements of the game it glosses over or does not mention at all, namely building and heroes.

Screenshot found in the Steam Towns Community Hub – I only hope to build stuff this epic one day.

Overall though, I really recommend this game. It’s at 50% off for the next 11 hours. Or you can just play the demo. Either way, if you like dungeon crawling and simplistic city-building games, this game is worth a shot.

Norcrofts Captain

Happy Yule everyone! Sorry I didn’t make a blog post this past weekend. I finally graduate from University and have moved back home for the holidays. I am super full already and have only eaten the first course of our Christmas dinner. At least there will be lots of leftovers!

Although I haven’t been posting, I have been playing. Sagewood is level 56 now, Herefara is 74 and Cithryth is getting closer and closer to completing Hytbold. Speaking of Hytbold though – what’s the deal with the Captain’s Hands of Healing Hytbold set? It makes no sense. Tons and tons of might but hardly any vitality? Quite a few of the captain’s healing skills requires a sacrifice of the captain’s own morale, or at least the main single-target heal. Very strange! So I’ve gone with a combination of Hands of Healing and Leader of Men pieces from the Hytbold sets.

And thanks to some very generous friends on Windfola, Giggles and Sparthir, I was able to get the boots I’ve been trying to get for ages to complete my new outfit! I don’t have a metalsmith and I’ve only ever seen the teal critted versions of the boots on the AH (selling for 20g!). So I tried getting people in GLFF to make me some with payment, however they were less than helpful (only response I got was someone telling me to get armour from the Classic skirmish vendor, even though I specifically said I wanted these boots for their looks, not their level or stats). Giggles and Spar saw my pleas on twitter and Spar logged in and made me some free of charge! That’s why friends are awesome! So thanks to Sparthir and his metalworker Spardor, here is my newest outfit, the Captain of the Norcrofts:

Character Outfit:

Helm of the Eastemnet

Commanding Battle Pauldrons of the Mark – green

Elfmar’s Cloak

Combative Eastemnet War Armour – olive

Vigilant Eastemnet War Gauntlets

Potent Battle Boots of the Mark – olive

Warsteed Outfit:

Tobiano Warsteed – black chestnut (with black chestnut Simple Tail)

Captain’s Halter – olive

Light Caparison of the Norcrofts – Rivendell green

Burglar’s Leggings

Guardian’s Saddle

Burglar’s Gear