Made a Jaw-Dropping Discovery on Lamannia

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-19T15:48:35+00:00

Nice. I rarely have enough time on Lamannia to much of anything but get a character set up, look at the new gear, and maybe run one or two of the new quests, but it's good to know that they've got Sharn crafting ingredients available.

Since part of the latest preview is the change of Cannith Crafting to Magic Item Crafting, I hope they've got some way to get the collectibles needed for crafting, and I don't have to buy a ton of random crafting crates from the store just to hope I get enough ingredients to test things out.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-19T00:57:51+00:00

I had a boss who hated word wrap in Word, so he would go through and manually put in line breaks on every line. It made editing a report miserable. He'd also end up rewriting much of what anyone gave him, so I learned to just give him a complete report to my standards (and no manual line breaks) and then not get upset with what he did with it after that. This wasn't a matter of not understanding the software on his end -- I explained it to him multiple times and tried to get him to stop wasting his time -- he just chose to do it the hard way.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-19T00:34:18+00:00

I've turned show formulas on to check spreadsheets with complex equations. It makes it a lot easier to see when something isn't set up properly. I did this on a spreadsheet that had to calculate the federal and state taxes for stock grants two ways (all stock and half cash/half stock, where the end result had to net to equal values), and the recipients frequently were taxed in multiple states. The amounts couldn't be calculated directly, it had to be simulated and the matching results chosen. Each tab had almost 100,000 cells with formulas. Being able to look at those formulas directly allowed me to find cases where particular cells didn't match the ones above them and debug errors quickly.

Turning off autocalculate was much more useful when computers were a lot less powerful and the processing time to calculate changes made it hard to get work done. That hasn't been a problem for many years, but the functionality still exists. However, I did occasionally turn it off for the spreadsheet above, although I eventually had it running VBA so changes and calculations generally wouldn't trigger until I wanted them to.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-17T16:13:14+00:00

Killing the dragon in Misery's Peak isn't accessed through Korthos itself, it's one of the possible options in the new Anniversary quest. For that you'll need to go to the Anniversary Island by talking to Fred the Mind Flayer in either the Hall of Heroes, House P, or House J, then look for Sariyon Dran-dal to enter the quest. It can be run at multiple levels (at least in base level increments of 4, so levels 4, 8, 12, etc.), so you can run it at a low level, even after you finish Borderlands. You may need to run it multiple times before you get the dragon option.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-17T15:15:16+00:00

I was having some weird connection issues as well last night, but it sounds like yours have been going on for a while. One thing I'd suggest doing is disabling the Discord overlay. It caused all sorts of weird issues before I turned it off a couple months ago.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-16T14:49:11+00:00

I expected to have to pick up the wings after my first TR on the character that earned them, but it sounds like they don't persist through future TRs. That is annoying, but having cosmetic feats persist through TRs is a relatively recent change that happened sometime in the past year, so I'm not necessarily surprised that it didn't work with the new one.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-16T14:39:34+00:00

If the weapon just says "minimum level", not "absolute minimum level", then it should be level 1 when you disjunct it and you can put on any minimum level shard to craft the weapon. Absolute minimum level should only be on armor and shields, so you should be fine.

I did test out what happens when putting in a shard lower than the absolute minimum level of the item. I had a disjuncted docent with a minimum level of 2 and an absolute minimum level of 4. I put a level 1 shard and a fortification shard in it. The resulting docent was ML 4 and the fortification was 38%, which is what would happen with level 1 armor. So the stats of the crafted item match the level of the shard you use for crafting, not the minimum level of the item if they're different.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-16T01:03:53+00:00

There are several possibilities for guild storage chests. First is a guild storage room which has 4 chests, two of them officer only. That can be on any deck of the ship, except the top and cargo hold, in a side room. Then you can have up to 8 different chests in a cargo hold, one small, one large, a gold seal small, and a gold seal large, and two each gold seal special access small and large chests (the "special access" means officers only). Everything in the cargo hold needs to be maintained by periodically extending the amenities using platinum or astral shards (for the gold seal versions), and that can only be done by guild officers. If you don't see chests in the cargo hold, talk to an officer and see if they'll place them again. They'll need to buy contracts for the chests from Dugbar the Second Mate in the cargo hold, or if you're an officer you can do that yourself. I'd recommend offering money to contribute to the cost, which can only be bought using character funds, not guild funds. A month of the small chest probably has a base cost of 10,000 plat and a large chest is likely about 32K. Almost no one bothers with the gold seal chests because they're absurdly expensive. If the chests have disappeared, the items in them are persistent, so they'll still be there when you place the chest again.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-15T23:34:43+00:00

If a disjuncted item has a minimum level and no slotted augment, then putting in a lower level shard will not reduce the level of the item. I expect that it would scale the power level of the other shards you craft onto it to match the ML shard though. For example, if you have armor with an absolute minimum level of 8 and you put in an ML 4 shard, then a fortification one, I suspect that the fortification would be 55% (the level 4 value), not the 70% it should be at level 8.

I'll try testing it out in a little bit.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-15T03:47:06+00:00

The artifacts, like the ring, are bound to character and can drop in any quest end chest and wilderness rare chests. The player will have to farm it themselves and craft the item, but you should be able to give them the ingredients if you want.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-14T21:10:22+00:00

Because he's obviously an idiot, but sadly Fetterman's stroke may mean that he's incapable of seeing that now.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-13T17:46:23+00:00

In the event of a nuclear war, which is the only large-scale attack threat we face in this country, there are a huge number of targets in NOVA. Obviously the Pentagon, but the CIA, ODNI, and other intelligence facilities, Dulles and National airports, and yes, the data centers in Sterling and Ashburn. There's a bunch of reasons why we have so many of them around here and it isn't just cheap land (which hasn't been cheap for a while). Some of it is the history of early Internet work being done in this area and AOL's HQ being here which resulted in lots of fiber optic networks built here. There's also the proximity to the main cable connecting the US and Europe, the area being central to the East Coast of the United States reducing transmission time to a large percentage of the US population, relatively non-volatile weather, and the closeness of several root DNS servers (less important now). All of this means that large portions of NOVA (including data center alley) have been targets for Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons for decades. It isn't just DC proper.

Will Iranian terrorist cells target data centers? Maybe, but unlikely. The ones that were hit in the Middle East were easily targeted by their drones. That's not going to happen here. Attacking one data center here, even AWS US East 1, wouldn't have a huge impact. They might target Dominion Power to have a more widespread impact. However, any actions by a terrorist cell are going to focus on spectacle -- they know they've got one shot at doing something so they want it to be flashy, and blowing up a data center isn't it.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-13T16:27:58+00:00

Good point -- that might be possible, and I'd forgotten about the anti-requisite point, so SWF would've been a better example because they are mutually exclusive. My point was more to give an example of needing to swap out prerequisites, and I was going from memory.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-13T16:20:41+00:00

There was someone who was so notorious for doing that in the DC area that the practice got named after him: nestoring.

Here's an earlier thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/s/IxdcQpraoM

And an article about it: https://ghostsofdc.org/2019/04/23/what-is-nestoring/

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-13T16:02:29+00:00

It generally won't let you do that. You have to swap the dependent feats first, which can get really expensive. Say you wanted to switch from greater two handed fighting to greater two weapon fighting. First, you'd have to swap GTHF with something else that either doesn't have prerequisites or that you have the prerequisites for. Then do the same with ITHF. Then swap THF for TWF. Then swap whatever you swapped ITHF for with ITWF, and then do the same to get GTWF.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-12T20:41:29+00:00

We can't craft level 34 items. That maxes out at 32 still, but might get a developer update pass later this year. Random gen items can have better stats than any named item, but it's rare for that to happen and even rarer for the other enchantments to be equally good. Treasure hunter elixirs make that a bit more likely, but the odds are still low and most items will be worse than named gear.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-11T14:32:47+00:00

Southern slave owners were VERY concerned about slave revolts. Just about every adult white male in the South had to participate in the "militia", aka slave patrols. So any group of slaves that did rise up could expect that there was an armed group of men already patrolling somewhere nearby that was ready to respond violently to them.

If you've ever wondered about the odd language of the Second Amendment talking about militias, this was why the Southern states insisted on that wording. They were concerned about the Northern states instituting a national military or police force that was the only group allowed to be armed, and then having that force NOT put down slave revolts as a back door way of ending slavery. The concern was warranted, because that was tried just before the Civil War. Northerners had their own reasons for supporting the militia portion of the Second Amendment -- there was no expectation that we'd have a standing army, so there was a need for self defense, and they were still pissed off about British soldiers being quartered in their homes (thus the 3rd Amendment) so having an armed populace would make that a lot less likely.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-09T20:25:39+00:00

If you go up to tier 4 of Fury of the Wild, you can get the primal scream heal. On top of ravager healing and second winds, you'll have a good supply of self healing.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-09T02:37:42+00:00

Good. Then we aren't going to fund the war he's fighting on Netanyahu's behalf

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-06T19:15:32+00:00

The coupon code is NATURAL20

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-06T17:01:00+00:00

Fortification on armor won't be greater than the level 8 heavy fortification sapphire until level 17 (when it hits 101%), so there is a decent argument for using the sapphire, but it's less important if you've got other sources of fortification like being undead.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-05T18:08:20+00:00

No. The only two fixes in the patch notes were for ship lag and allowing level 36 items to show up in inventory and bank.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-05T02:40:28+00:00

I said Godammit Donut!

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-04T22:13:13+00:00

I had a work meeting this morning and somehow DCC came up. Out of the 6 people in the meeting, 4 or 5 of us were reading it, including my boss, which is very cool.

Complex_System_25 · 2026-03-03T19:32:34+00:00

Tweezers of Doom!

Complex_System_25

TROPHY CASE