AxcaliBlog

Today I pre-ordered Final Fantasy XV Deluxe Edition from Amazon. Apparently connecting my Twitch account to Amazon gave me a discount on games, or perhaps it just made me aware of a discount I already had. In any case, come November 29, I should be getting the game, the Kingsglaive movie, and such in a bulletproof (maybe) case for around $80. Now I just need to get the PS4 to play it on, but I can burn that bridge when it becomes more feasible. (Perhaps I'll slow cook the bridge so it turns into charcoal first. Hmmm.) There were a few ways to go about this. Gamestop offers a limited edition PS4 slim with FFXVdx for $450, but when I saw the price of the Uncharted 4 PS4 slim bundle on Amazon for $300, the course became clear. I liked what I played of the first Uncharted. It's one I should get back to, but I've been playing Watchdogs lately instead. Updates: I played some of Soma, and like it. The robots are not frightening in the least. They try to unsettle you though wi...

 I took a long refreshing break from Minecraft, finally decided to formally announce my disinclination to continue map development, and now find myself getting back into playing the game. When I tried to boot up my latest attempt at the Axpack, I found that it was a bloated mess that crashed, even when I disabled most of the mods. So Bolz'tuit.... I'm making another one. Something far more compact, focused, and stable. It will be centered around Mekanism because I love it so and it worked this morning as the sole mods in the pack. So, here's the outline: The Essentials Damage Indicators Voxel Map NEI WAILA Treecapitator Fastcraft Obligatory CodechickenCore (NEI, Enderstorage) BspkrsCore (Treecap) Mantle (Natura) RadixCore (MCA) OpenModsLib (OpenBlocks) BrandonCore (Draconic Evolution) Selections from the Best Mekanism Extra Utilities Open Blocks Minecraft Comes Alive + RadixCore Pam’s Harvestcraft Cooking for Blockheads Bibliocraft Ruins Ocea...

I finally broke down and added Thermal Foundation and Expansion into AxPack4... doing without the Pulverizer got to me. I also added in Artifice and soon after messily ripped it out again, after I'd generated a bunch of chunks of course. I was all prepared to come on here and say it didn't screw up anything, but when I logged onto my main world to verify that... well. There was alot of this going on... and quite a bit of this. Ooh... diamonds! It was then I realized I didn't have a silk touch pick, so I marked them on the minimap and went back to the tower to make TC silky jewel to attach to my spare pick. In the process I realized that I did not have an applied energistics computer to put all my crap in. Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.... UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!! Like the smeltery in the beginning, this is a super tedious but obligatory process. Very flippin' tempted to just figure out the material cost, dump that in the bin outside my tower, an...

A while ago, I discovered a great tower (actually the surface of a rogue-like dungeon... which now that I think of it, are not rogue-like in any way whatsoever), It was a better tower than the one I currently inhabited, so I went with my tower envy and moved in. Goodbye, old and busted... Hello, new hotness! Mekanism Cardboard boxes are the best for moving. Ground floor after unpacking. Second level - Ars Magica Lab. Third floor living quarters. Botania re-retup. The dang movers broke the mana pool without using the mana first. Pissed. I still need to move over the blood altar and either pack up the Ars Magica spell altar structure or build a new one out of better stuff. Oh, and aside from Minecraft, I played a bit of The Lone Dark yesterday. Found a key that apparently gives you a flash of your coordinates. So I spamily abused it, trying to find myself on maps I found online... it didn't help. After exiting the game I found that it had filled my des...

This year has been too adventuresome so far. Stop it, 2016! Trouble with vehicles and bills. We are currently without internet at home. I researched a bunch of companies for alternate ISPs and phone providers, but the choices are AT&T or some form of satellite internet (which is not ideal for gaming) since we live in the boonies. Still, we can play on our home network, and the kids can do without Skywars and TF2 for a few weeks. Actually, the modded minecraft map we were playing on met with a terrible accident on account of a misfire with a Flan's mod explosive weapon. Lost several chests... and I did not have a recent backup, so I was unhappy. I think I may port the map into Axpack 4 using Worldedit. The custom pack we were using for that is experimental anyway, trying out Ancient Warfare, Immersive Engineering, Witchery, and various others. I've been considering adding Mariculture into Axpack 4, which requires Enchiridion, and is divided into a bunch of modules. I thi...

I've made some decent progress in Botania... having created the Terrasteel Agglomeration plate, I believe that surpasses what I've done before. It set up a wheat farm on my hill for the seeds required, automated by MF Reloaded Planter and Harvester. To make things more interesting and to pursue a few mods I was acquainted with, I decided to add in Ars Magica 2, Dragon Mounts, and Mo' Creatures. Ars Magica is a magic system I dabbled in before but did not make much progress in. It seemed more interesting than Thaumcraft and more intuitive as well. I have the basics set up on my second floor. Dragon mounts allows you to create eggs that the titular flying lizards bring into being. There are several types possible, IIRC based on the environment the egg is hatched in. Mo' Creatures is a mod that adds a bunch more things that want to kill you, but from what I've seen it's not unbalanced. The hp on the monsters are reasonable at least. As a result, the lan...

I have tested what I'm calling AxPack 4 for about a week now. A major snag with getting the mods to play nice was biomes o plenty having a tiff with Erebus over biome IDs, so I had to muck about in the config files. Something was borked, so I had to erase the configs folder, then uninstall both and add back Biomes O Plenty.  I don't know if Erebus will play nice now, but I don't feel like letting it back into the fold yet. Turns out Railcraft operates independently of Buildcraft now, so that's tidy. Actually, I didn't strictly need RC for the stated reason, Steel, because Mekanism's method works just fine. I've gotten into Botania but am dismayed that passive generation flowers decay and it can no longer be disabled in the config. The creator says it's to motivate upgrading to better flowers... fair enough. I am currently holed up in an Artifacts tower that I cleared. Troublesome clay golems in the basement. I actually ended up throwi...

Metal Gear Rising... I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin on the mountain side. That was the most satisfying game victory of recent years, and it was hard won. I started the prior battle against Metal Gear Excelsius with 9 health kits and the Armstrong fight with 7. By the end I was at 30% health, having used all of them. Looking forward to the sequel! Making adventure maps for Minecraft has been somewhat harrowing. Perhaps I shouldn't obsess over it so much, but the community of this game is supremely frustrating to say the least. I cannot discern what MC players are looking for. I can say that if it requires paying attention to detail... forget it! I suspect that most MC players go into adventure maps looking for a distraction (or self-promotion, delusions of grandeur "Youtube fame" nonsense). The apparent problem is that MC players expect no depth , so they don't recognize it when it's there. What they expect is an experience from which they derive ...