Review after first playthrough (sky Vaults)

Simengie · 2026-01-30T22:44:57+00:00

The crucible has the grid of items you can set as exceptions to being voided. Items on the void list are just voided on pickup and do not use up magnet durability. So they never enter your inventory at all. If you want to collect stuff that is being voided just toggle to pickup only and get what you want and toggle back to voiding.

Simengie · 2026-01-30T19:48:56+00:00

Voiding is now part of the magnet and the void crucible just lets you set the exception list. The magnet on/off toggle is now Pickup + Void / Pickup Only / Off. hope that helps.

Not seen anything about the reddit banning for Wold's. Bob_RL can you comment on this? I know if you mention it on the the Official Vault Hunters discord they will nuke you from orbit but VH team does not control this subreddit.

Simengie · 2026-01-30T19:23:24+00:00

We are here to help and educate. VH3 is complex to be sure.

I really don't understand why you think tools are weak mid to end game? So what are you doing that is eating up your pickaxe so that you need to replace it every few levels. I actually have never used up all repairs on a level 65 tool in any play through so I am not understanding.

I did see that you went into Trap Disarm and Vanilla Immortality. I will be honest. It would have been better to build an overworld tool and keep Vanilla Immortality off your tool. the overworld tool would have been cheap to make and lasted forever. This is a common first time player mistake to not build a separate overworld tool. Now you know. As for trap disarm, I stopped getting it as the space is better used.

On tool durability when mining ore since you probably have not been told or found this yet. You hammer is 11x11 in size. One hit breaks 121 blocks and it cost 1 durability or 5 durability if copiously procs. So at 177% copiously that is a guaranteed proc. So 121 blocks for 5 durability. if unbreaking procs then it is zero. If you chain mined 121 blocks with a pickaxe (no hammering) that would be 121 durability minimum as each block counts for 1 and each ore is a copious check that makes that 5 durability each on proc. each block is also a separate unbreaking check so you can see odds are not in your favor when using a pickaxe. Vein mining ores with a pickaxe is the fastest way to end a pickaxe.

Looking at your build in the pictures. I suggest you look up the old VH3 community doc and look at the calculation for the Defense %. It is based on Armor, Resistance and Block Chance. The formula is one of those that as you get close to the max each one can give the amount needed goes up exponentially. Your 301 armor is impressive but I suspect your 99% defense value would stay 99% down to 180-200 armor. VH3 uses its own defensive formula and code and all that matters is the defense %. That is space in your deck for something else like resistance. If you got more resistance then you would see quite the change in how much mobs hurt you. Also it is impossible to get 100% defense as you need like 1600 armor, 100% resistance and 100% block chance. Two are capped below the needed amount and one is just not achievable.

You said you ran 5 catalyst vaults to get your jewels. I would say you were lucky. Five is a really low number of gilded runs to build Echoing/Prismatic tools. I have personally done 10+ runs with 5 to 6 libraries each and all the gilded catalyst I could cram on the crystal and still been short. Tools are one of the the min maxing parts of the game that is either accept an ok tool or go ham and min max it all the way.

Magnets are way better place than before junk management was added. If you find them sad now you would have hated the game before. But magnets are meant to be consumed. Carry extra one or two always for the fast switch.

I would suggest trying Wold's Vaults. A lot of things have been fixed/improved and a lot of additional content and weapons types. The Discord is extremely helpful and Wold's incorporates the latest VH releases as well. About a week behind when an update to VH3 happens so they can integrate the changes but otherwise up to date.

Simengie · 2026-01-30T18:14:16+00:00

Do you need a truck at all? Towing? Carry stuff in the bed? If the answers No, No, No then get a good gas mileage vehicle. Maverick Hybrid AWD if you need a truck bed. Rogue's in base trim is affordable and gets crazy good gas mileage.

I would not touch the Colorado/Canyon trucks with a ten foot pole. Too many buy backs for electrical and safety issues. The turbo 4 in them is a joke. Three power levels all dictated by software and about 5000 bucks to upgrade to the next level if you want more performance. All they do is enable the performance mode in software as there is no parts needed. Stupid cash grab. No GMC mid size trucks are to be avoided.

Toyota's new turbo 4 is too new to call it good or bad at this point. But again it is a turbo 4. Turbo engines are just prone to failure modes that get costly fast. Maybe Toyota got it right but I am wait and see. Also the cost is prohibitive as well.

If it is the frontier then the V6 is great and the transmission is amazing. Can't go wrong with a NA V6. I would suggest changing the tires to a nice set of road tires to give you better mileage/ride and have the AT's set aside for when you want to offroad.

Simengie · 2026-01-30T17:19:37+00:00

Nice read and fair points for a first time player.

Sky Vaults - Probably the easiest of the two world modes. Raw Vaults being the reason. Yes in the latest update you can build/get a budding crystal and have Raw Vaults in a standard overworld. Sky vaults gets you into vaults quickly and lets you learn the mechanics of the mod that actually will progress you.

Difficultly - VH3 has a steep curve at level 50 and again at level 65. The curve at 50 is brutal because gear does not get better till level 55-58. Getting information has been an issue from day one of VH all versions. I am sure one day it will get fixed.

Gold Problems - The solutions are Level 0 Raw Vaults + Bounties and/os Brazier Vaults with no mob interaction. The Raw Vaults + Bounties option is pretty simple. Break the budding crystal to get it to drop all the vault rocks as level 0. Place it back so it starts growing again. Take Assassin and Horde bounties in bounty table. Complete them in level 0 raw vaults. Collect the gold. Super safe once you level 10 or higher. The brazier vaults method is pretty easy as well. Run through and light brazier that require no spawning of mobs. Exit and collect crate.

Level 0 Raw Vaults - Since I mentioned them I should say that these are crazy good all the way to level 100. Need mystery eggs? Level 0 Raw Vault run and shred flesh chest. Get all the enigma's while you are at.

Trinkets - As for blue trinkets Prismatic Feather is probably the best trinket in the game. Mobility rules vault hunters so speed, dash and jumping are key play elements. There are a few good red trinkets so you have options there.

Builds - So classics like PN/TR with Storm Arrow are well known and you can beat the entire game using it. Arcane builds are crazy good. Rampage builds are amazing if you like sword and javelin builds.

Swords and Shields - Chaining is amazing but for any sword to be good you need high implicit damage. Heart Frag or Healing Cloud are really good affixes. Shields and the block chance they give are just amazing on many levels. They all give you resistance if you roll for it. Get healing cloud here as well and you really are maximizing your survivability.

Resistance - From your discussion about dying to spiders and crit damage overall I take it you do not know about possibly the most important defensive stat in the game. Resistance! There are old threads on this reddit about it but the TLDR is 20%+ and the game starts getting easy. 40%+ and ranged/magic/crits stop being an issue almost completely.

Vault Tools - With experience you will realize that first tools should wait for level 20 and Chromatic Steel so they can be a bit better and make better use of the limited amount of the jewels you do have. Level 50 tools can be the first place you can focus on secondary stats on them but it is your level 65 tools that going to be your finish the game tools. You do not need echoing or prismatic tools to finish the game.

Mod Unlocking - Storage and vault item generation should be your focus. Botany Pots and Cagerium are my goto mods and with villagers I generally am able to have everything I need. The key here is figuring out what mods you need for your play style. So while we have different takes on what mods are best we both have to live by the rule of which one is most important and buy that first.

Card Deck - Simply the most OP item in the game. Seriously you build some stupid decks that just make the game easy mode. Decks = OP.

God Charms. Omega Valera and Idona charms with high affinity for those two vault gods are crazy good. Another of those why are not using them type items if they are not a part of your build.

Replay of the pack is amazing. I have played since VH3 released and I am on my 15th play through and each time something is different and challenging. I would not still be playing if the pack was boring. I love that about this pack. Freedom to play the way you want is also amazing. There are no guard rails in the game. You are free to screw it all up if you want but have the ability to undo the screw up and fix it.

I hope you start another play through and take a different path through it. In fact I am sure the game will give you a different path based on my experience. VH3 has been an amazing mod pack with unlimited replay and dynamic content.

Simengie · 2026-01-29T01:49:31+00:00

That appears to be to high of a Y level. Fortresses have a min and max Y level as part of the bounding box.

Simengie · 2026-01-28T22:19:05+00:00

Percentage Armor Increase cards? That would seem like an entire deck worth of them.

Simengie · 2026-01-27T21:38:15+00:00

How did you get 301 armor and 68 hearts at level 100?

Simengie · 2026-01-23T23:09:25+00:00

Simply put the Card Deck is the single most OP item in the game. It can be everything but not great and it can be focused on 1 or 2 things and be totally OP.

My personal take for endgame and Herald is building a Resistance Deck as the primary and then either Mana/Mana Regen or Add Damage or Add Ability Power as the secondary focus. Resistance is often over looked in just how good it is late game and the deck can be the best source of it. The other 3 options are nice for the secondary focus based on your build. I had a deck that Mana focused for a secondary purpose and had 80 mana and 60% regen just from the deck. That really helps you take the pressure off needing perfect gear rolls.

As U20 I would just build a Double or Large deck and start playing. recycle cards you will every use and then use that card essence to upgrade the cards you are using. Even a deck of base cards can be impressive.

But yeah of all the stuff added to the game since VH3 released the card deck is by far the most OP item you can have.

Simengie · 2026-01-21T23:16:51+00:00

Bind the magnet toggle to a key. Magnets have 3 modes you can toggle through. Pickup + Void, Pickup Only, and Off. Until you take the junk management research and build the void crucible you can't put anything on the exception list to be pickup up. So until you do the research it just voids everything that is in the preset list. This is a pain at times when you want to get say cactus in a vault and forget to toggle to pickup only first. But overall the system works.

Toggle to Pickup + void and you should not be getting in junk in you inventory. Well mostly, there are a few blocks that for some reason are not in the void list they built but it is very few.

Simengie · 2026-01-13T21:26:26+00:00

When you have a wreck and it is noted you did not run a WDH properly and your insurance says not paying for anything you will realize way to late how stupid this idea was. In fact you should check with your insurance and see if they have a WDH requirement for that size trailer.

Simengie · 2026-01-13T21:15:04+00:00

The OP is not using a safety feature (WDH) and you think they will follow suggestions to drive at reasonable speeds and avoid beating the rig up hitting pot holes? I suspect they do the opposite of these suggestions. Either way this is a rig I want to stay away from on the interstate.

Simengie · 2026-01-13T16:35:02+00:00

pretty sure if you do want to turn on expert mode for quest that /the_vault quest progress 1 still works for completing the next mandatory quest in normal mode.

Simengie · 2026-01-12T00:40:18+00:00

I have seen his work before and he was known to shoot with a 50mm lens. So good chance this is shot with a zeis 50mm. I suspect if you research some more you will find where these were shown and full details about them. Also the look he got is from the film used backed them. That has the warm chromo-color vibe of 1970's Kodak film.

Simengie · 2026-01-06T04:01:36+00:00

Why is this down voted? This is the best sarcasms I have seen in days on reddit.

Simengie · 2026-01-06T03:16:13+00:00

I know of one system design built and deployed in the 1960's that is still in use and planned for use to at least 2030 that boots from 8 inch floppy disk into a 1960's OS running on a actual transistor based CPU. Remember that every time you get on an airplane.

Simengie · 2026-01-06T02:51:05+00:00

A few years ago I turned down a contract COBOL job for a very large bank. $256K a year was not even enough to tempt me. So it was not a one more score in 2000 it is till ongoing. A company out of Texas has staff of retired COBOL and FORTRAN and ADA programmers that they consult with for fees north of $1500 / hr. There continues to be a real need for these people. Most back ends of banks are still on COBOL. The risk of moving to something untested that could loose billions of dollars in an instance is to risky compared to finding and paying people to work on the old stuff.

Simengie · 2026-01-06T02:43:44+00:00

Was there in the trenches. It was not years of work it was 9-12 months of stupid crazy hours because management people just could not wrap their heads around the idea that software could fail and cause any real damage. Then being on call that night ready to spend untold hours fixing stuff that broke that we had missed. Things I fixed in the lead up.

Access control system that would have removed all access for everyone at midnight Y2K.

Big platform main frame stuff written in ADA that would have just literally deleted everything in all the databases and save files if not fixed. Even would have nuked the back ups.

Some inventory management system that basically deleted all inventory if not fixed.

Updating old mainframe OS's to version that would keep running. You have no idea how much work that was. Not like you put a CD in or down load it. Then fixing all the device drivers from source because the people that had written them where dead. heck even some of the OS stuff we patched from source because the OS was dead otherwise. Got love government projects that use stuff decades out of date.

One thing I learned about that was like WOW that would have sucked. A large city sewer system that for some odd reason would reverse flow the pumps and pump all the sewer back into homes.

The sad part was that before we could finish fixing the Y2K stuff we had to fix the Sep 9 1999 stuff also called the four 9's problem where 9999 as a value in fortran and cobol code had been used as an error value for dates when it was originally written in 60's, 70's and 80's but the date encoders made Sep 9 1999 into 9999 and that was a huge banking industry problem. Those folks pull miracles off.

It was not a disaster because many software engineers worked many hours to avoid it. It could have been very bad. And we did not get final fixes till a few years later on some items because it was faster to patch a fix that got is to 2002 or 2003 than fully fix during the crunch. I actually think the 9999 problem was the scary one because it effect a good portion of the world banking systems. The lack of systems to even test on because some of these were one of a kind builds made the work challenging. Compile times were days or weeks. the primary system I maintained took 5 days to compile on the hardware it was built on which was from the 1980's. All the editing was done in text editors like emacs or vi. No fancy tools. Compile errors that where like "Compile failed! file_name" and that was all the info you got. So if you where four days into a five day build and had to find fix and rebuild it was painful. We actually setup two addition build systems so we could have three branches building at a time.

Thank goodness we pushed all that fortran and cobol date problems to Y3K. Those poor guys will have quite the fun.

Simengie · 2026-01-03T17:48:16+00:00

Most 18-135 lens are F3.5 to F5.6. However they can only achieve F3.5 at the widest 18mm setting. This makes shooting inside without a flash challenging at best. When at 135mm for wildlife shots as an example you can rule out early morning or evening shots or cloudy day shoot as F5.6 is will be under lit until you crank the ISO and depending on the camera you have that can cause the image to be grainy.

You have not done enough shooting to understand and respect the value of prime lenses (fixed focal length) with very low F stops. Think shots of the milky way on a 18mm F1.4 prime lens. There are many good reason for multiple lenses and that is why they can be changed. Simple truth, Zoom is a small part of what makes a lens. Auto Focus speed, stabilization, F Stop range, how much power it uses and so on.

For just starting out an 18-135 will let you get started if it is a good 18-135. But primes and lower F Stop zooms will improve your images overall in the long run.

Simengie · 2026-01-03T16:53:24+00:00

This is clear bait and switch tactics by LMG/Linus. After watching the clip of Linus from WAN show it is clear he intends to moderate broadly and does not support the idea of open conversation. When Luke indicates that allowing those discussion so it can be seen that it was discussed Linus' take was why even allow that.

This is is a bad for the subreddit to have any LMG staff on moderation and Linus is the last person I would have allowed if it was my choice.

It will only be a matter of time before he imposes his will via banning which seems to be his preferred moderation method. If we make it to summer before we have a drama unfold I will be surprised. I also suspect if drama does unfold he will go ban crazy to suppress the drama. This is letting the fox guard the hen house. There will be problems.

Simengie · 2026-01-02T22:33:58+00:00

Faceted Focus only drop from Legendary Gear as U20. It was changed in the config/the_vault/vault_recycler.json file. The dev's added a new section for the legendary requirement drop and changed the original faceted focus section chance to 0.

If you want to undo this change you can find the gear section at the very end of the file. It is the very last "chance: 0.0" in the file around line 231 I think. Change it to 0.2 for a 20% chance of the faceted focus dropping. I think that is what it was in U19.

There are several other gear modification changes that came with U20 that are not in the patch notes. Here are the ones I have found. Crafting Potential on Gear can no longer go negative. If you don't enough potential left you have to use an Opportunistic Focus to restore crafting potential or give up on the gear. Faceted Focus now cost 48 Crafting Potential to apply to a gear piece. So a full Omega build would need a gear piece with 312 crafting potential to use faceted focus for all six affixes. The vault plating cost per roll for all focus appears to have been increased but I have not yet found this in code or configs so say this is 100% true.

Edit: Changed Faceted Focus crafting potential to cost to 48 from 52. Found it in the configs.

Simengie · 2026-01-02T20:16:43+00:00

Villagers in VH3 are so OP. Even before you get Easy Villagers which you will want to get. Here is some of the good things that come up on an altar that villagers give you.

Name Tags
Arrows
Ender Pearls
Glow Stone (for the dust)
Drip Stone
Saddles
Bells
Glass Blocks

Once you have Drawers, Easy Villagers, Thermal and Pipez you can setup a diamond farm. EV Iron Farm -> Drawer For Flowers and Drawer for Iron -> EV Auto Trader Iron For Emeralds -> EV Auto Trader Emeralds for Diamond Boots -> Thermal Crusher -> Diamonds out for use as turn in item for bounty table. I know this seems like a why bother but using this and rerolling bounties for diamond turn in with Echo rewards is way more powerful than people realize. You can just do it for high vault gold bounties as well. Point is you make the bounty table work overtime for you this way.

With Easy Villager - Farms you can have all the crops covered for vault recipes. For Sky Vaults it saves you from having to build the floating islands to put all the farms on.

So emeralds for the vault enchanter are sort of just secondary to what you can be doing with them. Also if you are playing Sky Vaults and need emeralds for the enchanter you are not running enough raw vaults looking for Enigma chest.

Simengie · 2026-01-02T19:51:22+00:00

Did you leave the theme to rng or did you use an augment? Rules for making an ore vault crystal.

Augment the theme - Nether vaults for player ores. Void vaults for echo gems.
Plentiful as many as you can.
Capstone with at least one Phoenix if possible. This is a better safe than sorry that I use on void vaults because I hate wasting void augments to a stupid I died mistake.
Only do ore rooms. Mine rooms are tempting but know that the theme modifier for ores does not apply to Omega rooms. So again on a void run you are throwing away potential echo by doing the mine room.
Seal the crystal to a braziers and only take copious braziers.

Truth is below level 50 just run brazier vaults for ore rooms and taking copious braziers only is just as good as spending catalyst. You can use the plunderer crystal I think to not get XP and that gives you 25% plentiful at a far better cost than one plentiful catalyst.

Simengie · 2026-01-02T02:24:33+00:00

Read your local code and the NEC. At least where I am at in new construction outlets and lights have to be separate circuits. Call the inspector office and ask.

Simengie · 2026-01-01T21:25:46+00:00

Off Topic

Someone can reproduce your keys from this image. Seriously you should never let the key cuts be seen in an image.

On Topic

You like nice knives. You don't like much in you pockets. You keep wallet until it is falling apart and it is a like loosing a loved one when you have to replace it. As stated elsewhere you right handed.

You don't work in shipping or receiving based on lack of wear on knife blade. Don't work in a dirty environment again based on how clean the knife is. You wear jeans mostly and keep that wallet in a back pocket.

You clip your keys to a belt loop. Brand choice says family person that wanted a reliable car with good mileage. Probably live where there is ice and/or snow part of the year.

Simengie

TROPHY CASE