The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog.  Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash.  65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better.  So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again.  This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks.  A serious improvement… if it is true.  The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs.  So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result?  I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

Direct traffic as a source in April 2024

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December.  Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site?  Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April.  Welcome random person from Palau!  I hope you found something interesting!

First new county in a few years

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time.  I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games.  I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking.  All versions I looked at were playable in some form.  I even went and played Civilization VI.  I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas.  I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic.  We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers.  Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five.  Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary.  They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER.  Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away.  Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight.  Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed.  The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about.  I was not a fan.  Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS.  “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon.  The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month.  The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal.  And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further.  And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP.  And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back.  I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline.  Brisc opted to stay away from that.  And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual.  Hilmar was starting on something about player retention.  And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers.  There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got.  There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets.  We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth.  That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done.  I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras.  Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date.  I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off.  We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out.  There was a video.  Then there was the CSM9 vote.  At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC.  I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points.  There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out.  SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running.  While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away.  But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts.  The instance group finished up Zul’gurub.  And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away.  He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now.  There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one.  Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue.  My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions.  SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network.  But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time.  I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.  I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

• PETA was planning some event in WoW.  I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
• In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
• There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
• There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
• I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
• After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
• And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer.  After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole.  Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US.  Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America.  This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan.  Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
2. WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 Kicks Off
3. Wake up sweetie, Cataclysm Classic is Almost Home…
4. Now Playing – Balatro
5. Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
6. Ahbazon Fight Sees 100+ Dreads Destroyed over Fortizar Hull Timer
7. The Contested Seat – Every Vote Counts
8. Pokemon Go Now Lets You Use a Lucky Egg at Friendship Milestones
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
10. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
11. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
12. EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided.  I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

• Conan Exiles – 29.56%
• WoW Classic – 23.75%
• Balatro – 21.81%
• Valheim – 13.00%
• EVE Online – 5.50%
• EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game.  That ate up some time.  I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind.  The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month.  Many hours were invested.  We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded.  It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month.  That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month.  I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life.  But I haven’t been all that invested.  The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses.  Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I.  At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

• Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks.  Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive.  Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game.  But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I.  I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this.  I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down.  Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting.  But still I get on and ride.

• Level – 27 (+1)
• Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May.  Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic.  The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th.  The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online.  I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May.  They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning.  But it is a thing.

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Welcome to The Dregs

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

Potshot collapses on the seal

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Hey, neat trick

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

Here we go

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

The first open area

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

This one was pre-marked with what we needed to do

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

Potshot didn’t make it up on this go

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

Oh, here he is

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

Victory in The Dregs

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

Well, that isn’t good

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

There is the croc

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

Oh man, corpses again

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

Spider on the mesa

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses at one of the puzzle sections

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Spider down, ready to be skinned… also I seem to be throwing up

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

The big room at high tide

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

At the end of the instance

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Welcome to The Dregs

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

Potshot collapses on the seal

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Hey, neat trick

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

Here we go

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

The first open area

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

This one was pre-marked with what we needed to do

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

Potshot didn’t make it up on this go

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

Oh, here he is

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

Victory in The Dregs

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

Well, that isn’t good

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

There is the croc

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

Oh man, corpses again

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

Spider on the mesa

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses at one of the puzzle sections

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Spider down, ready to be skinned… also I seem to be throwing up

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

The big room at high tide

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

At the end of the instance

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire.  The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale.  I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world.  Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off.  I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies.   This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away.  This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced.  Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers.  It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title.  But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.)  It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye.  Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them.  But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now.  It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time,  We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing.  I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us.  And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal.  As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire.  The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale.  I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world.  Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off.  I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies.   This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away.  This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced.  Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers.  It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title.  But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.)  It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye.  Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them.  But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now.  It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time,  We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing.  I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us.  And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal.  As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.