Category Archives: Minecraft

Time To Dust

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Wow, this place is a bit out-of-date, huh? I kind of want to do a bit more writing, so it’s time to tidy it up a bit, I guess…

I can’t update with everything I’ve played since the last update, (as if I could even remember it all), but I can cover some of the major highlights:

  • I cancelled my WoW subscription, mainly over the reveal of the sexual harassment by high-ranking employees and the poor treatment of the workers in general. I thought that I’d return once they’d cleaned up their act, but it’s been several years now and…I don’t really feel an urge to return? I was just kind of spinning my wheels in it, just doing solo activities and tedious grinding, and I don’t really want to return to just doing that.

    That also means giving up Diablo IV, but I’ve been kind of curious about trying out Path of Exile instead. PoE2’s still in early access though, and I’d prefer to wait until it’s ‘done’.
  • I played a fair bit of modded Minecraft, in particular the Omnifactory and GTNH modpacks. Part of my Omnifactory journey was documented on Twitter, which I no longer use and I’m kind of loathe to link now due to…reasons, but if you’re curious, it starts here: https://x.com/halibutbarn/status/1413289134869737476

    I still play some GTNH now and then, but progress in it is a lot slower and it’s harder to find time for it.
  • I’ve done a bit of streaming on Twitch, but only something like 5 or 6 times now, mainly of No Man’s Sky and Minecraft. It’s kind of a weird feeling, though; I watch a whole lot of Twitch streams of other people, but I’m also kind of reluctant to stream myself because it feels invasive. Having other people spending their precious time on Earth watching you sets a certain amount of pressure on me to not waste that time, and makes me wonder if I’m up to the task. But it feels like something I should do just for the act of reaching out, like it would help to just talk and force me to articulate myself even if there’s almost nobody listening.

    I’d like to do more, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a block of time to specifically dedicate to it, with a plan of what to do, prepare the necessary tools, etc. If anyone’s curious, I can be found at: https://www.twitch.tv/halibutbarn/
  • The only new console I’ve gotten is a Switch, which I used to play a ton of Animal Crossing New Horizons, and…not much else. I haven’t really done much with the PS4 either, besides God of War and Disgaea, and I haven’t really been interested in a PS5 since there’s not much left that’s exclusive to it. I’m still a 99% PC gamer, really. Speaking of which…
  • My PC sucks now. The CPU is like 10 years old and the GPU is 6 years old, and I’ve had a couple of hard drive failures that have forced me to smaller and smaller drives so I’m now running off of an ’emergency install’ on an old 1TB spinning disk. I’ve been putting off buying a new system for too long, and now I’m tempted to delay it even further with the mess that the release of the new Nvidia 50×0 card has been, and the AMD cards aren’t out yet and…

    I normally assemble my own systems, but I’m tempted to just grab a prebuilt and call it a day, except when I look through the listings I always find some kind of problem. “Not enough RAM.” “Too many LEDs.” “Not enough VRAM.” “That part’s a generation too old.” I know, I’m too picky…

If I can think of anything else I’ll put it in a new post, but for now, it’s essentially a fresh start, I guess!

Time Flies

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Boy, it’s kind of embarrassing to have the posts on the front page cover a five-year span. I’ve had…issues, but that’s not for here.

I’ve certainly been playing games, but of them all, Minecraft still dominates a lot of my playtime. I hardly touch vanilla anymore, just modpacks nowadays, and over the last few years I’ve tried:

  • Age of Engineering: A gated progression pack, where you proceed through a series of ‘ages’ where each age unlocks a new tier of machines and you progress to the next tier by crafting a certain item. Each age depends on stuff produced by the previous age so you can’t really skip ages, and many recipes are changed to make mods more interdependent on each other and more difficult to make. Can get a bit grindy, but I actually stuck with it all the way through this one and ‘beat’ it by crafting the hardest item in the pack, a creative vending upgrade, at which point you basically have infinite resources. Even if my base kinda looks like a hot mess…
  • Sprout: I had high hopes for this one since it’s by the author of Regrowth, another really good modpack. It is very well-crafted, as all of the mods fit together well and create a nice, coherent world…but I couldn’t really get into it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more goal-oriented like Regrowth, but this one has only vague, nonessential quests.
  • Craft of the Titans: A challenge pack where your goal is to survive an extremely hostile world (lots of new and aggressive monster spawns, even in daylight) and eventually get strong enough to work your way through defeating various bosses. I eventually got tired of this one before beating all of them, but did make it fairly far.
  • Project Ozone 2: Also a challenge pack, though not as hostile (just the occasional blood moon) and with more intermixing between the mods. Did almost all of the quests in it aside from killing the Chaos Guardian, which I gave up on after a while.
  • All The Mods Expert: Anther progression pack with customized, more-difficult recipes where it takes quite a bit of effort just to get to the basic sets of machines like Ender IO furnaces and grinders. No real end goal to it, so I stopped after I had a base where most processing was almost fully automated.

There are a few other packs I’m tempted to try out, like Modern Skyblock 2, Divine Journey, and Forever Stranded, but I think I might be kinda sick of Minecraft, for a little while at least…