July just came bursting on in today, so it’s time to set some new goals for this month! The new letter from Yoshi-P has set release for the next FFXIV patch on August 11. So new patch content is not going to be a concern during July — I have plenty of time to try to catch up on things like relic crafting.
So what are my plans for this month? Mostly to finish up the things I didn’t get around to in June, to be quite honest.
FFXIV Goals
Role Quests on Main for Healer
Job quests for:
Monk
Scholar
Astro
White Mage
Level Samurai via Beast Tribes
Crafter Relics
Ishgard Restoration Quests
Amon – Dancer Quests
Amon – Hildibrand
Zuri – Progress through Stormblood
Most of this really shouldn’t take that long if I just sit down and space it out. Well, everything except progressing through Stormblood yet again.
Aside from that, still playing Animal Crossing daily, and messing around in Second Life as well. Might hop back into the Sims again, too.
It was the first month I got back to doing gaming goals, and things went along pretty well. I didn’t get everything on the list done, but I did get a few pretty solid goals met, including getting another alt current in Shadowbringers.
So what did I accomplish?
Finish earning final mount in Moogle Event ✓
Job Quests on Main for:
Summoner✓
Scholar
Dancer✓
Bard✓
Machinist✓
Astro
White Mage
Role Quests on Main for Healers & Melee DPS ✓
Job Quest for Amon – Dancer
Stormblood Hildibrand for Amon
Progress Tai through Shadowbringers ✓
Crafter Relics for Main & Amon ✓
Daily Beast Tribes for Main’s Monk leveling ✓
Check out Ishgard Restoration Quests
I did get a whole set of role quests out of the way, which felt really good. I still need to buckle down and work on healer roles/jobs. I plan on doing that next.
I just hit 80 on Monk last night, and started leveling Samurai using beast tribe quests. Finished up a few relics for crafters, but this is something I need to focus on a lot more next month.
Also, earned all the mounts I wanted from the Moogle event. So, really, did get quite a bit of what I wanted to do done with plenty still left for next month. We may see a new content release next month as well, so I’m not sure how much in the way of goals I’ll actually get done. It just depends!
This was one of those things that shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to finish, but I just ran out of steam in the middle of doing it. I finally got Tai through to the end of the current patch in Shadowbringers!
Considering that when Shadowbringers launched, he was still stuck mid-Stormblood, it was quite a way for him to go. When I finally got him to Shadowbringers, I thought it would be quick and smooth sailing, especially with Trusts to get me through all the dungeons. And that part was true.
Of course, I still had to go through the three trials in groups, which turned out to not be quite as painful as I feared. Aside from Titania, all trials were pretty easy to clear on the first shot. I think I had some pretty excellent PUGs though.
Since Tai is geared up with the crafted level 80 stuff, he should be good to go into the next patch as-is. I don’t plan on doing any Tome grinding for him (or any of my upcoming characters) because doing it on my main is more than enough for me. I’m glad for the option of crafted gear because that makes my life with alts so much easier.
Speaking of alts in general, most of my other alts are stuck in Stormblood limbo right now. Unlike Shadowbringers, you still have to group to run all the dungeons through that story, and that is really what’s holding me back from getting my alts through it. Well, that and the fact that I find going through Stormblood yet again tedious.
My next character – Zuri – is currently in Yanxia, moving towards the Steppe. So she’s made some progress into the expansion already. I’m also quite interested in moving Tad and Ben through this content eventually. I’m not sure which one I’ll decide to work on now that Tai is finally done, but I do want to nudge myself to do a little bit every week to at least keep progress going.
In this month’s goal post – the first goal post I’ve created in several months – one of the things I noted was the fact that I’ve (once again) amassed a number of job quests on my main. Unlike previous expansions where every job gets a long quest chain, Shadowbringers traded this out for Role quests instead. Then, at level 80, once you’ve finished the Role quests, each job gets a single quest.
These job quests are mostly fluff. It’s just checking back in with the NPCs that relate to that particular job and seeing how things have developed since your level 70 quest.
Some of these quests are a bit more stirring than others. For example, I really like the Bard and Dancer quests – they were fairly inspirational. On the other hand, the Machinist quest was alright, but felt mostly like just a way to get some screen time for the NPCs related to that job.
The Role quest system has helped me out quite a bit in this area — since that means that instead of doing a long quest line for each job, you can cover several jobs in one role. I’ve been notoriously bad at keeping up with job quests for the longest time. It’s a sad fact since usually I do enjoy these quests once I finally sit down and scrape out time and focus on them.
Aside from that, I’ve put time into working on a few of my crafting relics – which was also a goal for this month. I’m not as far along as I’d like to be on this (I have all the Oddly Specific mats), and hope to put more focus into it in the next couple weeks. I have a feeling that getting this done before 5.3 will make the progression a lot easier.
And then there’s the fact that I’m also pushing my alt, Tai, through Shadowbringers as a whole. I’ve been really lax at doing this, but have finally unlocked Amaurot last night. Once I clear that and get through Hades, the rest is catching up with patch content. All of these dungeons can be cleared with Trusts. So really, after Hades, the hard part is over for me.
I was right in thinking that writing out some goals for this month would help motivate me to get stuff done. I’m at the point where I just need to work through the Healer role quests so that I can finish up all of my healer job quests. Then, it’s just a matter of getting a tank leveled and doing my job quests as my melee hit 80.
Still plenty to do, and I’m going at it pretty casually right now.
I mentioned in a previous post that I was reassessing whether or not I’d pony up for a subscription renewal for Second Life this year. I wrote about how the price hike for the sub was a bit of a turn-off. Though to be honest, if you pick up a year’s sub, you’re only paying $8.25 a month for a premium account, which isn’t all that expensive as far as MMO type games go. It used to be $6 a month, though.
I also discussed selling off my old land, going to a rental plot, and playing around with claiming one of the new Linden homes. Seeing that owning land is the major perk I pay a sub for, it was really going to come down to how much I liked the Linden home that came with the sub.
I tried out a traditional house style, and it was alright. I was curious, so I released that house to try one of the Victorian house styles — this was a bit cooler with some wall coloring features the traditional didn’t have. But really, Victorian is not my vibe.
It’s pretty, just not my thing.
They released some really cute campers, and I would have loved that style. But the problem was, these were only 512 lots, using only half your land allotment, and gave you half the prim count. Sure, I could have gotten two at that rate, but I’ve always felt more prims was better, and would have rather had my full 1024.
So, as it was the last time I wrote, I was still up in the air about what I was going to do.
Along Came the Cabins
The day after I wrote that post in February, the new log homes were announced for Second Life. This caught my attention as it’s much more the style of home I was interested in. However, it wasn’t until April that the log houses were actually released, so that was a good month of waiting to see if this was something I wanted, and hoping to even get to snag one at all.
Well, I was fairly lucky in that when they released cabins, instead of being a trickle of areas like it had been for the others, they pretty much dumped a huge amount of land all at one time for people to claim. It actually took a few days for people to snag these houses, though now you won’t find any again unless someone has abandoned or there’s a zone release.
I abandoned my Victorian and did a bit of hopping the first day — you can only claim 5 houses in a day, so you have to be careful how many times you abandon. I even hit my limit that day — some of the log houses were nice, but either I didn’t like their location (sandwiched between two other houses) or the name of the area.
I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be houses left in 24 hours, but thankfully there were. That’s when I got my lot at Chuckle Pond. I love the name of the area, first of all, and I lucked out to actually have a nice natural pond across the trail in front of my house. The lot is also on the corner, so I have a bit of privacy.
All in all, I was happy with my catch, and have sat on it for a few months with only some sparse decoration. Then, June rolled around and before I knew it, I was facing the question of whether I was going to release this house or sub again.
I guess the title of this post clued you into what happened. I decided to keep it. Not only that, but I decided I was really going to go all out in decorating it, too.
While I’ve owned several places in SL over the years, I can’t say that I ever really customized and decorated a house in full. This was because my prim limit was often taken up by things like breedable pets or a little shop.
That’s not the case this time. While I do have a few pets on the lot, I’m not breeding much anymore. And Linden homes are residential, so you’re not suppose to set up a shop.
Therefore, the total prim count can be focused on decking the halls. And that’s just what I did.
Welcome to my cabin at Chuckle Pond!
Living Room with two cats that represent my IRL cat (RIP Sebastian).Living Room – RL cat photo on the wall!Betta tank with actual swimming fish (I’ve always wanted one).Peeking into the Entertainment/Gaming room.Gaming PC setup – while I tried to keep most of this kinda rustic, I let that slide here.TV, Including several oldskool Nindendo consoles.Oldskool stereo system too!Rustic Kitchen.Bedroom in the loft. Not sold on that rug, might change it.View from the stairs – the bathroom is through the door.Somewhat rustic bathroom with a fluffy rug.Rustic potty for the rustic bathroom.I even have a Switch, personalized with a screenshot I took in Animal Crossing!
And outside…
A little gardening porch.And a garden in the back…A deck/patio with a woodstove, hot tub and Greedy Greedy game table.The underside of that deck serves as stables for my horse.Woodstove.Hot tub… or in this case, cool tub – you can turn off the steam effects for the summer.
And that was a quick pictorial walk through of my cabin in Second Life!
So, despite the fact I tell myself I don’t need any more new games, I just dropped some money on this huge and amazing bundle at itch.io. I know a few bloggers have been talking about this already. But if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, there’s still three days left as of this post’s writing.
First of all, it’s for a good cause. Second of all, it has a number of good games – some that I own, but also some that have been on my wishlist for a bit. A sample of some…
But even despite the games that I know on glance, there looks to be a lot of really neat games I’ve never heard of before. Not only that, but there’s also some pretty cool game making assets and even coding engines. And some things you probably wouldn’t even expect – like this Hex Kit – need to make maps for your tabletop RPG, it’s got you covered. Pretty cool!
Anyhow. I have no idea how I’m going to sort through this bundle and find time to play these. This library now completely overshadows my Steam library, which already felt huge. On the other hand, I’ve been wanting something to springboard from to get myself blogging here again. So maybe I can pull together a plan to explore this bundle and get back into the swing of writing again.
Most of the time I spent the last few weeks in FFXIV was centered around obtaining the Mogtome mounts for this event. There were several of them across two characters I wanted to achieve.
I also wanted to finally finish up my ponies on my main, which I set out to do right near the beginning of the event. It’s nice to have those done finally.
Aside from that, I needed the Demonic Lanner, Reveling Kamuy and Ixion on both my main and my RP alt. This was the first time they included one of the wolf mounts in the event, and I was excited to finally get my hands on one of them.
I’m really looking forward to the one that gives the Lakshmi wolf because I have yet a third character who really needs it for story reasons. I’m not quite to the point of having my bird collection done on either of my characters, but I’m slowly getting there.
Of course, I chose Praetorium as the means of gathering most of my tomes, which was a bit of a slog. I knew that going into it, though. What made it twice as sloggy was the fact that I hard-queued for it, and wait times for DPS ran from 15 to 25 mins each run. Seeing that the run itself is over 40 mins, and I was doing it twice a night sometimes, that was a lot of waiting and cutscenes!
Thankfully, I had Animal Crossing to keep me company during all this!
Anyhow, all the farming is done, and I’ve achieved all the mounts I wanted back on Monday night. So now, I’m somewhat just taking it easy in FFXIV, finishing up job quests and working on crafting relics.
I put gaming goals on pause back in February, and I think it was a good move for me at the time. I needed a little break from things, and I’ve taken one.
So here comes June rolling around, and I thought maybe it’s finally time to get back to having a few more structured goals. I’ve been pretty casual about my FFXIV play lately, though I have been hammering out at least one (sometimes two) Prae runs for the Moogle Event. I should be finishing that up this weekend and I have that heavy feeling of a lot of unfinished things hanging over my head now.
Mostly? Job and role quests. Yep. I’m right back to having procrastinated on my job quests, despite having completely leveled many jobs to 80.
Also: Crafter relics. These are now a thing. And while I’ve been amassing the materials you can buy with scrips, they’re just sitting in neat stacks in my inventory due to me doing absolutely nothing with them. On two characters. FFXIV doesn’t have enough inventory space to be doing that.
One final thing: I’ve been making progress in Shadowbringers on Tai again. Last night, I cleared the Well, unlocked flying in a zone and moved on to the next zone. I’d love to progress him to the end game before the next patch. We’ll see if that’s a reality, though.
FFXIV Goals
Finish earning final mount in Moogle Event ✓
Job Quests on Main for:
Summoner✓
Scholar
Dancer✓
Bard✓
Machinist✓
Astro
White Mage
Role Quests on Main for Healers & Melee DPS ✓
Job Quest for Amon – Dancer
Stormblood Hildibrand for Amon
Progress Tai through Shadowbringers ✓
Crafter Relics for Main & Amon ✓
Daily Beast Tribes for Main’s Monk leveling ✓
Check out Ishgard Restoration Quests
On top of all this, I’m still playing Animal Crossing daily. I also want to pick up the new Sims expansion at the end of this week if it has pretty good reviews. I’ve also been dabbling a little in Minecraft on the side, as well as a Switch game called Bargain Hunter. So I have other stuff I want to explore this month, too.
Honestly, while this looks like a lot to do, aside from relics and progressing Tai, most of these I could knock out pretty quickly. I’m hoping putting it down in a post will give me the motivation to do just that!
So thanks to the newest Mogtomes event in FFXIV, I was finally able to finish up my pony collection last night, and get my kirin on my main. I’d already done this on my RP alt – he just ended up the character I did the farming on for whatever reason. And that’s going to be true of the bird mounts, too, when I finish them on him during this event.
I’ve just never been much for running Extreme content, and tend to skip trial fights whenever they’re optional. I still haven’t gotten the /hum emote on any of my characters yet because I’ve never run that trial fight. Maybe one day!
Anyhow, last night, I finished up a couple Prae runs to pick up the Shiva pony. Then, all I needed to finish my lot was the Ifrit one. I had been farming Ifrit a bit before they actually changed him to be easier to farm, but I had no luck in getting the pony drop, and eventually it slipped my mind to keep trying. Last night, it took me about 4 runs before the whistle finally popped up for me.
So now, after many years of playing this game, I finally have my pony collection completed! This Mogtome event will also net me one bird and the first of the wolves. I’ll still be missing the Ravana bird, however, so I’ll have to wait to see if that comes back into rotation next time, or drag someone into farming it (if I can’t solo it).
I’m not really in a rush to do it, though. Which is precisely why it took me this long to get all the ponies! 🙂
Like many folks, I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons since the day of release. I’m not sure why I haven’t blogged a whole lot about it, but I continue to play in some capacity every day.
Blue Rose Breeding
In previous AC games, I never paid much attention to flower breeding. In fact, I didn’t pay much attention to flowers in general. But this time around, I decided to look into it.
Of course, there’s the easy crosses you can make… then there’s the roses. It seems like roses have the most complex and deep breeding of any of the AC flowers.
I was pleased when I started getting black roses to decorate around my second character’s house. But then I saw something about blue roses. Blue being one of my favorite colors, I decided to give it a shot.
Roses are native to my island. So had a bunch of them already. I figured this was a good starting point, and I read up this guide on what to cross to get what color to move in the right direction.
It seemed pretty straightforward:
Yellow + Red = Orange
White + White = Purple
Orange + Purple = Hybrid Red
Hybrid Red + Hybrid Red = Blue
So that’s what I started to do. I dedicated pretty much all of the northern part of my island to fields and fields of roses. I never got a zoomed out screenshot, but I’ll just say, it took a LOT of watering.
Eventually, I got the purples and the oranges. They got their own field.
Then I started getting hybrid reds, which I put aside in their own field, too. The thing about the hybrid reds is that they look exactly like normal reds, so you have to be careful.
Bad Genetics
However, after a few weeks passed, my hybrid reds produced more hybrid reds and an occasional black. Most of the time, they didn’t produce anything at all. So I started to wonder if I was doing something wrong.
I also wondered if I should have been crossing the hybrid reds that spawned from other hybrid reds, or if that was messing things up. So I decided to do further reading to look for answers to my questions.
What I found was disheartening. Apparently, there’s a lot more going on with the genetics of roses than I knew. I ran across this video here…
And learned that there were such a thing as “bad” hybrid red roses and “bad” genetics that would just never produce a blue rose. And that several breeding steps, tests and weeding out bad genetics would lead to the highest chance at success.
Even if you do have two “good” hybrid red roses, according to the video, you still only have a 1 in 64 chance that a blue rose will ever spawn. This was all supposed to be taken from tests and data provided by the community who delved into breeding.
And every guide I ran across said the best way to ensure good genetics was to start with planting from seed bags. Because this was the only way to start with pure genetics.
Considering I just threw a bunch of roses together that were already on my island, I started to think that my chances were next to none in getting a blue rose at this point.
Starting Over
Last Friday, I started to dig up all of my breeding roses and start over again from scratch. That was a lot of roses. I kept the purples and oranges as decoration around houses. But tossed most the whites, reds and yellows that came native to my island.
But just in case, I decided to leave my hybrid red field alone. And I still watered it on Friday.
Saturday was my birthday, so I hopped in game long enough to celebrate my birthday with the animals. I didn’t think to check my flowers or water them at all.
Sunday, I came around to check the progress of my new roses, and went up to see the hybrid reds I had kept around. To my absolute shock, there was a blue.
The fact that it was already in flower means that the very day after I dismissed the chance of getting a blue rose this way, on my birthday, this blue rose spawned. I just didn’t find it until the day after.
I took it back to the center of my town where I’ll certainly be watering it hoping for it to multiply. After reading and hearing how hard it is to get a blue rose this way, I feel like fortune was seriously shining on me.
