On the heels of the announcement of WoW’s Wrath of the Lich King Classic, a number of recent posts have taken up the topic of WoW’s dungeon finder due to be added to the Classic version of the game. Wilhelm has some thoughts here, Rohan has a good post here, and a series of interesting somewhat related posts from Bhagpuss and Shintar, got me thinking.

We’re not playing WoW at the moment, but readers of TAGN will know that our little group of ageing adventurers have returned to Valheim after setting WoW Classic aside and exploring a few other games– New World and Lost Ark specifically. Part of what propelled us back to Valheim, for me at least, was the loss of a sense of place, of “worldliness”. I’ve been down this road before.

I play these games to be removed from this crazy world to spend some time immersed in that crazy world. Experiences are what I take away from these games and exploring and adventuring in a virtual world to me should be a unique experience– even if that experience is potentially very similar to that of another player’s– the pathway, choices and timeline are my own.

The recents posts weighing in on the WoW Classic Dungeon Finder debate, damage meters and dps rotations (and or the demise of “support class” play) struck a chord. These games have evolved from being a world to explore to largely being a single “story” line to experience, largely at the exclusion of all other kinds of gameplay.

I’d add a big third item to Rohan’s two ideas about Dungeon Finder– Dungeon Finder destroyed the “world” of WoW. In the guise of solving the group formation problem, a whole host of changes ensued which led to many of the issues Shintar and Bhagpuss discuss. The advent of the DF feels like it was perhaps the first big obvious manifestation of a new and shifting philosophy of game design.

As Wilhelm discussed, DF required that instance related quests were now placed within the instance itself rather than the instance run being the culmination of a world-based narrative quest line. I always trot out the Van Cleef/Deadmines story line from WoW Classic being the epitome of the before times.

The “world” became irrelevant and needlessly time consuming. As the bar for accessing and experiencing content was reduced to logging in and clicking the LFD button, world questing and travel went out the window. With instanced content being simultaneously the easiest content to access and the repository for the best gear needed to progress to the, er, next best gear, an endless cycle of class and dungeon content revision and optimization ensued. The DF made adventures like this unnecessary.

The success of the new bite sized instance based experience depended on channeling players into set roles to feed into the DF to provide a predictable, homogeneous and optimized experience. Rotations, damage meters, gear score, “cleave” runs, etc. all grew out of this fundamental shift.

Likewise, the primacy of effectively lobby based instanced content in these and only these roles effectively killed off any other modes of game play. Crowd control? No longer needed. Stealth? Hardly. Unique “builds”? Need not apply. Specialized group buffs or other “support” activities? That went out with high buttoned greaves. Gear score too low? Pass. DPS checks? Yup. Fast travel to any and all points? Check. Don’t even get me started on “phasing”…

And all of these changes, some incremental, some more earth shaking, took us from somewhere close to the 1999 Everquest virtual world experience to something much more like Lost Ark’s fixed character archetypes, linear maps and story lines.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Lost Ark for what it was, and before that, our re-exploration of Diablo II. But what those experiences didn’t offer was an individualized character that I could relate to and take into a world to create experiences for that character. Fewer or no choices, no individuality, One True Way to gear and play.

To me, that cascade of detrimental changes fundamentally started with the DF whose original mission was to solve a quality of life problem– how to facilitate group formation for instanced content. Very soon after that, the tail began wagging the dog and my how much wagging there has been.

If the difficulty of forming dungeon groups was the problem, the DF wasn’t the only solution. WoW certainly could have taken other tacks tried in other games. Scaling dungeon difficulty to group size or other indicia of “power” (i.e., gear score, level, etc.) could have been one way. LOTRO essentially went this route.

Mercenaries could have been another. Need two more to fill out your party? Hire a merc. Everquest and other games have taken that approach. Either of those alternatives wouldn’t have done any true “violence” to the core idea of an explorable world in which instanced content serves a role to move story forward and provide for progression.

When I look back at the games I’ve spent the most time in over the years (or had the most affinity for), the ones that I have stuck with for the longest– WoW, LOTRO, Everquest, Minecraft, and to a lesser extent, Valheim all have (or had at the time I was playing them) a true sense of place, of worldliness.

I have memories of those places and experiences as if I had visited them and spent time there. These are entirely unlike the memories I have of reading a novel or watching a film. For that matter, even the experiences of separate characters in those worlds have their own unique recollections.

Are there any virtual worlds left to explore and experience any more? For the time being, I’m entirely content with the sense of place and worldliness I’m finding again in Valheim.

Holidays in online games… I usually rely on Wilhelm to keep track of these sorts of things. Some love them, some hate them. For me it definitely depends on the game, the holiday and how inspired the developers decided to be.

What I wasn’t expecting was Zwift to get into the spirit of things. I like me some whimsy too, so huffing and puffing around London on my Big Wheel was just the thing I needed to break up my day.

Wonderfully wobbly back wheels, but sadly no handbrake for those bootleg U turns of our youth. Nicely done, Zwift.

If I only had more time, I’d have loved to see people climbing the Alpe Du Zwift on their Big Wheels. For today though, a ride across Tower Bridge at sunset was enough for me.

Life in the Bunker

Continuing from last time– During the spring while the supply chain was stabilizing somewhat– at least it seemed like we weren’t likely to starve in the near term, much of everything else remained in a state of precariousness.

On the work front, management’s initial denialism from January and February was overtaken by the events of lockdown. I make the distinction here between leadership and management. We had plenty of the latter and scant little of the former.

Fortunately, when the lockdowns began rolling out county by county (and thereby potentially impacting our offices and all of the employees differently depending on where they lived), our former leader was recruited back to a temporary position of de facto leadership to help guide our organization through these existentially dangerous straits. A little demonstration of leadership in a crisis goes a long way. Particularly one that remained clear eyed, rooted in factual reality, capable of communicating and cognizant of the fact that human beings were involved in the process.

We found ourselves with a business, far from “essential,” with about two thirds of its employees unable to work. The pandemic and lockdown prevented all but the most rudimentary activities in our offices, and most couldn’t do their work remotely in any case. Temporary layoffs were the order of the day.

The rest of us were desperately trying to work for our customers whose lives and businesses were thrown into chaos as well. It wasn’t even clear how any of our customers were going to survive the disruption (and frankly, whether we were ever going to get paid, and thus whether we would survive in any recognizable form).

Painful austerity was the order of the day until the path forward was more clear. All (real) businesses rely on their cashflow to survive– they do what they do, they sell/bill for it, collect, and pay it out to vendors and employees. Something that my colleagues and co-owners seem not to have learned or perhaps may have forgotten. If customers can’t pay you, you can’t pay yourselves regardless of what you might think your skills are “worth”.

Not that we had much say in it of course. See my rant above about management versus leadership. Our group, being rather conservative on the fiscal front, continued in the austerity posture for quite a few weeks. It was becoming clear to me in side conversations with several of my colleagues that many of them appeared to be stretched financially by the sudden change of fortunes.

There’s an opportunity here that I won’t take to pontificate (subjectively of course) on the relative world views (and relative financial condition) of the boomer generation at or near retirement age, the Xers living perpetually in that shadow, and the Gen Ys, Gen Zs, Millenials and whatever else the younguns are called these days. Too broad of a topic for this post, but suffice it to say where you fell in those cohorts radically impacted your perspective toward the pandemic, austerity, risk and your ability to weather the storm– a fact that seemed lost to management.

For the record, being born in 1965 places me either in the latest definition of the boomers or in the earliest of the Xers. I tend to identify more closely with the social and financial circumstances of the Xers rather than the boomers.

Very early on in the crisis, I had to stop and do the math to reassure myself that true implosion and disaster was not imminent. Perhaps its a survival mechanism I developed, but when confronted with a crisis or difficult situation, I need to visualize and model out the worst case scenario or I tend to be consumed by the great black unknown. If I can attempt to mitigate or compensate for that– or failing in that effort, at least identifying the number of milestones on the road to oblivion– I tend to be more clear eyed, pragmatic and level headed in these situations.

With the “mystery” of a disaster scenario having been explored, at least some of the anxiety dissipated and that energy can be repurposed into seeking to mitigate or avoid those same disaster scenarios. It may happen, but it wouldn’t be a surprise, and as bad as it might be, we’d have some semblance of a plan for it. At least that’s the way my mind works.

Disaster Planning

Hoping for the best but needed to plan for the worst, I paused to take stock and assess the BIG PICTURE. As adults(…), we’ve tended to live within our means, with a penchant for having a decent rainy day contingency fund just in case.

At my prior employer, we called this “FU Money”– That’s the amount that you’d need to be able to comfortably say “FU” and walk out the door when any day when you finally couldn’t take it any more– the antithesis of the golden handcuffs that many with undergrad or grad school debt would suffer. Since the Great Recession, we’ve adhered to that policy.

Most of the U.S., and apparently quite a few of my peer, middle-aged colleagues, do not. I could tell they were getting stretched and the anxiety and fear was creeping into their voices. Big mortgages, slightly too expensive cars, leased or bought on credit, lifestyle choices that didn’t include “paying yourself first”, etc. had many of them pushed to the edge.

As April turned to May then to June with the future unclear, I was concerned people might start heading to the exits as few seemed comfortable enduring extended austerity (and by “extended austerity” I mean a nearly complete suspension of salary without a clear plan forward). Where they might think they could go was a mystery to me given it was bad everywhere.

Relief efforts, for our furloughed employees and their families, for those of us still working at starvation wages, and for our customers started to trickle through the economy and by July, it began to appear that our company and most of our key customers would survive the year at least. Perhaps not thrive, but post-COVID the measure of success was lowered to “still standing.”

Waiting to Exhale

Lockdown hit almost literally on the first day of Spring. Winter in Northern California isn’t exactly Siberia in January, but still the weather was improving as we all learned to live within our four walls.

We don’t have children, so I cannot imagine what parents must have had to deal with attempting to work from home and handling remote school for the kids. Based on my own experiences, I’m confident I would have gone insane. I’m sure many if not most simply didn’t have the physical space to create dedicated adult office space as well as a school/study place as well. It was just the two of us and I was still going nuts.

Attempts to break the cell block confinement mindset were fraught with peril. Transmission rates were still very high and information regarding transmissibility was still very much unclear. A few years ago, we had moved to a new development in which decent houses were placed on small lots which surrounded a park, some walking trails and was adjacent to some open space. All that with no yard maintenance.

With everyone locked down at home then, the sidewalks and pathways were log jammed. After a week or two into the lockdown, we gave up going for our afternoon walk because we found ourselves constantly ducking and diving to maintain social distance from folks. Add to that everyone coming and going in both directions (and no mask protocol in effect at that time either), and going for a walk was becoming anything BUT a relaxing break.

We began exploring a few alternative locations to find some open space to walk, perhaps with some nature, and most importantly with a minimum number of people. We settled on a levee trail near a creek on university land that we could access within a few minutes drive.

Daily, we would escape and get a few miles of walking in and, as a result, watch the landscape change as Spring marched toward Summer. There was something reassuring about seeing nature carrying on seemingly oblivious to the unfolding drama around it.

Even so, a relaxing walk still wasn’t exactly plain sailing. Social protocols, especially outdoors, were uncertain. Should a jogger or cyclist wear a mask? Should they announce when they were approaching someone from behind? Should walkers wear a mask? Should/would everyone move to keep at least 6 feet from other groups?

Still, seeing green, breathing the air made a huge difference in how I slept and my overall physical shape. More subtley, it started to realign some priorities in my head.

Plan B

I mentioned in my first post that we had begun vegetable gardening in earnest in our very small apartment sized yard. Of course, few or no garden centers were open (and even if they were, it may not have been worth the risk), no seeds were available online so we resorted to collecting seeds from supermarket produce, searching through those ancient opened seed packets that we had leftover from years ago and developing propagation strategies from any plants we had.

With pots and grow bags were steadily filled our space with greens, basil, peppers, beans and a few others. We pretty much filled our small outdoor space. Gardening was becoming a place of refuge where we could at least attempt to seize back control over some small aspect of our lives in the pandemic.

These efforts along with feeling a bit boxed in at our home started percolating through my mind. The idea of finding a new abode with some more buffer space as well as true garden space became a stronger and stronger impulse. If the pandemic were going to be with us for a while and the work-location paradigm was shifting, a new situation might be a better fit, notwithstanding the risk and chaos associated with purchasing a home, selling a home and moving during a pandemic.

In our small town, housing inventory is always a bit constrained because of the impact of the university. Add to that our relative proximity to the Bay Area (with substantially more affordable housing prices) and many larger companies permitting a permanent work from home situation made for a constrained and limited housing market. What little was becoming available wasn’t exactly compelling, anything that looked remotely interesting was getting multiple cash offers over asking price and were going quite quickly.

Suffice it to say, we found an older home on a decent sized lot in an older part of town and after a small bidding war, we prevailed. Nothing about the transaction was easy– getting a loan with uncertain and variable income was a challenge to say the least; viewing any property was biologically dubious; and managing a move minimizing any third party involvement was fraught. Still, the move was only a few miles across town, we didn’t have that much stuff, and we were grateful for the assistance of trusted friends who were in our COVID bubble to accomplish the move.

By the beginning of September, we were getting settled building our new base which includes a large backyard vegetable garden that has become our new daily focus. As an added bonus, moving into an older and yes, perhaps a bit neglected, home, we are never wanting for repairs and improvements which is something I actually enjoy.

Having things upon which to focus your efforts (particularly if they are physical and leave you exhausted) has been a good thing both physically and psychologically during the pandemic. Being able to get outside and work in the yard without being cheek by jowl with everyone else is a gift.

Settling in to the New Normal

Throughout the fall, coping with COVID was becoming something close to normal. We had our routines– deliveries were available for many things and for those where it wasn’t, curbside pickup was on offer from many retailers. Relief resources, meagre as they were, trickled through the economy and activity (and work) returned to something more like normal. It became clear that financial disaster for my company and most of our customers was not going to happen, but what the future looked like remained uncertain.

Instead of COVID anxiety, electoral anxiety became the focus for the fall and as everyone knows persisted into the new year up to inauguration day in January. Too big a topic for this post.

With the prospect of vaccines on the horizon, political stabilization and the functional persistency of COVID coping strategies in place, a bit of hope if not cautious optimism seems to have returned. Many seem to be ready to turn the page on the pandemic and start planning for “Life after COVID.” Too bad there ain’t no such thing. There is only “Life with COVID” now– perhaps with less impact on our daily lives than during the height of the pandemic, but persistently, with variants and continual coping for the foreseeable future.

Change and disruption is hard, yet once disrupted, we seem to find our new equilibrium states relatively quickly, no matter how bleak or desperate the situations. Speaking for myself at least, its almost the change moreso than the circumstances that creates the greater anxiety.

As the pandemic was unfolding, adapting to the evolving situation was precarious and psychologically difficult. Once a new relatively safe routine was re-established, life became manageable again. Now with vaccines rolling out, new variants circulating and companies and governments planning for relaxations of the lockdown restrictions, we are entering into a new phase of change and disruption.

How do we leave our pod bubbles and revive in some form the world we left behind? Will that be any safer or more dangerous than the lead in to lockdown? Vax no vax, mask no mask, office no office, all the time or some of the time, etc. Personally, the foreseeable end-of-lockdown-as-we-know-it is starting to revive many of the anxieties and concerns that were only just tamped down to a manageable level.

Still, the extended lockdown has left its indelible mark on me and all of us some in ways we are only likely to understand in the years to come. In the next post, I’ll reflect on some of the things taken away, given to us and lessons learned so far.

The Gathering Gloom

It was just about a one year ago when the world here changed. The COVID stay-at-home/shelter-in-place, call it what you will measures began rolling out just about one year ago now, catching many flat footed.

I live and work in Northern California just outside the Bay Area. About a year ago, the Bay Area counties announced their lockdown and surrounding areas were rapidly moving in that direction too. We were expecting something any moment.

We had been following the developing situation for weeks with increasing trepidation. While up north Seattle was becoming a local hotspot, transportation and network connections were distributing COVID globally in now fairly obvious ways, but at the time in ways that certainly didn’t seem direct. From abroad to an elder care home in Seattle seemed pretty indirect and frankly terrifying. There was no good news. Only bad news and worse news.

It only took a few degrees of separation to cross the globe from a viral hotspot to your front door. A case in point– Americans on a cruise ship that had been quarantined in Japan were repatriated to a nearby Air Force base here in California. It was clear from reporting that quarantine measures implemented there were woefully inadequate all but assuring community spread in the vicinity of the base and beyond.

Critically ill cruise ship patients suffering from COVID were transported to a local regional trauma center/university teaching hospital very close to my workplace. My newest co-worker, starting only weeks before lockdown, had recently relocated from the east coast with their significant other, a critical healthcare worker, who was on call at the hospital receiving the critical COVID patients.

From China, to Japan, to California to the office next door to me in the blink of an eye. The small town in which I reside is a university town with students and faculty routinely coming and going from all points on the globe. Nothing particularly unique about this situation, but a stark reminder of how interconnected our world is. At the time, of course, little was understood about transmission, what precautions to take, whether transmission was airborne, by surface contact, etc., so it was just one giant anxiety ball of chaos.

As the situation evolved in an increasingly alarming way through February and into March 2020, the pandemic-not-yet-in-name was starting to hit close to home– I had a conference scheduled for May in Portugal. Ordinarily, I’d book travel and accommodation quite a bit in advance. With COVID looming, I hedged. I’m glad I did. The conference got cancelled in late March along with most everything else.

I participate in two different fantasy baseball groups which get together, in person, to draft players in mid-to late March before baseball season starts. Some of these folks have been playing in the league for more than twenty years, so its a bit of an annual ritual/reunion that we all look forward to. Many of them are at retirement age or beyond with attendant health complications.

Right up to the lockdown order, we were discussing whether to cancel the draft. The vast majority of team owners (particularly the older ones) said better safe than sorry. Its too risky to put 25 older people in a conference room for 4+ hours to draft baseball players.

Fortunately, I can work fairly effectively if I have a phone and the internet. I saw the writing on the wall and advised several of my junior colleagues that they might want to take home everything they needed to work that night, including stealing more office supplies than usual, in the event that we would not be able to return to the office.

I collected some things, put my office phone on out of office, grabbed some work files, a few stacks of extra folders and reams of printer paper and walked out of my office. Our local lockdown was ordered the next day. I haven’t returned in over a year.

The New Not Normal

The lockdown was not unexpected, but all the same, it came very quickly and caught most unprepared. Workplaces and the supply chain hiccupped and choked. Protective measures and procedures at critical services were hit and miss. Different counties and cities were implementing different rules.

The most immediate impact and concern for us was continued uninterrupted access to vital things like being able to obtain prescription drugs and groceries without having to put oneself in mortal peril. Everything else really didn’t matter that much.

The first week or two was the most precarious. With most everyone home, restaurants and workplaces closed, and the general, when-in-doubt-horde response to an existential crisis, grocery stores were crowded, having trouble keeping even basics in stock, and valiantly trying to maintain some kind of safe environment (whatever that meant then or now) without clear guidance or support from government or an over abundance of we’re-all-in-this-together-so-lets-not-all-go-nuts-just-yet mind set.

I (used to) work outside the house, so it was usually most convenient for me to just swing by the grocery store on my way back home in the evening to pickup whatever was needed. Over the years and with the benefit of having a good grocery store 1/2 a mile away, we evolved to keep minimal stock on hand at home. Buy just what we need, fresh, in season, when we need it and avoid waste unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.

Increasingly, stores were becoming crowded and supplies were becoming dodgy or straight up nonexistent. Literally shelves empty of items that would never sell out in a typical year. Most had never witnessed anything like it before and if anything it fueled urge to horde. Anything that was a pantry staple was becoming impossible to obtain (roll file footage of toilet paper shortages/hording/arbitrage), and narrow, crowded aisles were becoming biologically hazardous. Masks were not universally a thing, nor had they become fully tribal yet either.

The anxiety of shopping in a crowded panicked store became unbearable, so I began shifting my shopping forays until the last thirty minutes of the stores hours in the evenings when crowds were lightest. Shelves tended to be barest as well, but the tradeoff was well worth it. After the trip through the hot zone, everything went through a decontamination process at home just in case.

When the lockdown hit, we found ourselves a bit flat footed without much of a supply buffer. Just-in-time doesn’t handle supply chain disruptions very well. And of course to build up that buffer to smooth out any hills or valleys of availability was essentially hording by any other name.

Slowly, we began to build up a bit of a buffer so a grocery run wasn’t required every few days. That of course required storage. With stories of the production of major food processing facilities being shutdown due to outbreaks, I broke down and bought a small freezer from an online retailer so we’d have a buffer. Unfortunately, inventories were low or nonexistent for these too, so I had to drive about 40 minutes to go pick one up. Fortunately, the retailer had just implement “curbside” pickup. Op success. Long term storage obtained.

I found myself reliving my parents’ depression-war era youth of frugality, scarcity and self-reliance. We barely had a back yard at our house, but we started growing vegetables in planters, pots and growbags. Seeds were all but impossible to come by as were transplants, so we saved seeds from the produce we purchased and planted those.

After several harrowing weeks of grocery shopping in the bleak and desperate stores, I began searching for alternatives. I generally eschewed gig economy companies because of their fundamentally exploitive nature, but given the masses suddenly out of work and the risk associated with the stores, they filled a gap, and I could at least even up some of the economic unfairness by tipping the driver heavily. Capitalism still wins, but at least we all would lose a bit less.

This was not terribly economic and it was still a bit of a lottery to see if you would get anything even remotely like what you ordered due to outages. The few stores that had tentatively waded into the delivery space choked on the new volume. Including some surprisingly large ones.

I finally found a local store chain in a nearby town that actually had a robust website that offered curbside pickup. Safer for the customer, safer for the workers, the money stays in the community and fewer patrons clogging the aisles. I have to drive 10+ miles to get there, but its become my once a week ritual.

With groceries sorted, the immediate existential crisis lessened a bit and things began to settle somewhat into a new hunker-in-the-bunker routine–assuming things didn’t get disastrously worse. Work was radically impacted do to the lockdown and remained unsettled. Being locked down, having an existential crisis in your face 24/7 and continuous access to the internet with its nonstop torrent of doom, gloom and unmeasurable human suffering wasn’t going to be a recipe for staying sane without some coping strategies. Figuring out how not to go nuts during an indeterminate lockdown would become the next order of business.

Those and other scintillating topics to be addressed in the next post.

You can find part II here.

Ever had one of those days? I guess technically in Valheim, every day is one of those days which is sort of the point I guess. Working from home during lockdown has at least one advantage lately and that is being able to duck into Valheim at lunchtime and potter around a bit.

Valheim, being Valheim, I know not to set my lunchtime ambitions too high. Something mundane is usually safe like gathering and replanting some wood or tinkering around with base improvements. Of late, I’ve been anticipating making a new and improved dock for a soon to be launched longboat now that we are comfortably in the iron age. Some surveying and head scratching needed to be done, so a lunchtime look around and think seemed just the thing.

Until a troll raid started that is. There’s always a troll. Or this time, two trolls.

There I was down at the dock site with a cart full of materials outside the wall, no food (I was only feet from the main base after all) when I here the noise and see the ominous screen warning “THE GROUND IS SHAKING”.

Trolls being trolls, they made a beeline for the just finished crafting building in the compound. Hearing that gut wrenching crunching sound, I left the cart where it was and sprinted up the hill to the backside of the base only to see the pallisade come down and a troll in the compound wailing on the roof.

Fortunately, it was daytime, I had arrows and I was able to aggro the troll and kite him out of the base. His friend came along, but I had to keep doubling back to make sure I kept him interested too. I kited him a good distance away, plinking and running until I finally had the first one down and then turned to number two.

With only one to dodge, that went smoothly. I returned to the carnage.

Well, with the compound cracked open, there was nothing to be done but start picking up the pieces. The court yard is the new hub for ore operations. Ore can carted in the gate and unloaded into a chest which protrudes through the wall next to the smelter. Likewise, there is a chest next to the charcoal kiln on the same wall, so loading and unloading is quick and easy and the workflow inside the crafting hall is quick and easy being able to transfer wood to kiln, then coal from kin to smelter or coal storage chest without having to move.

Likewise, one can feed ore from the ore box into the smelter, collect the iron bars and deposit them into the chest next to the forge without having to move. Elegant efficiency. Until trolls show up.

The boxes of wood, coal and iron ore being pretty full, when the trolls attacked, they went for the smelter and kiln destroying the holding chests which leaves a rather untidy mess to clean up. And because of the weights involved, there’s quite a bit of shifting of materiel to be done.

Well, that’s the way the palisade crumbles some days, so I became resigned that my lunch hour would not be engineering a new dock and lighthouse but rather repairing what I just finished building yesterday…

With all restored, I still had a few minutes to get back to the dock project. I must have been back down there all of two minutes when the SECOND TROLL RAID began…

Mrs. Potshot across the house heard me shout, “you’ve got to be kidding…” Back on troll patrol, I was better able to handle these guys and distract them before they got any real damage on the base.

Base defended, I logged off until just before dinner while I was waiting for the bread to finish. If there’s a second good thing about lockdown, its been the opportunity to rekindle my bread baking, but that’s another story entirely.

While the house was filling with that fresh bread smell, I finally got to work on the new dock. That’s the screen shot at the top of the post. The storms rolled in and the seas turned angry. Out at the end of the dock, mountainous rollers would sweep the end of the new pier while I was working away hoping that lightning strikes weren’t a thing in Valheim.

After running low on stone and with time short before dinner, I decided to hop on out to our Dieppe base– see Wilhelm’s blog for the story there– to retrieve some supplies of stone that we wouldn’t need there.

Through the portal I went, I filled myself up with stone when “THE GROUND BEGINS SHAKING” again… Of course this troll went straight to work on the palisade wall and guard tower. Unfortunately, he didn’t lose interest and the compound was breached. My third troll raid today…just as my oven timer went off…

Running low on arrows and stamina, bread hopefully not burning in the oven, timer incessantly chirping at me just out of reach, I gambled that I could defeat the raiding trolls before my bread burned and for once the gamble paid off. Trolls dispatched, bread out of the oven, it was time to rebuild the Dieppe base defenses before dinner.

Maybe this evening I’ll finally get to that dock.