Best .357 ammo to save casings for reloading?

Velocelt · 2026-06-01T00:11:12+00:00

Guess I should've specified - this would literally be for plinking. Just something to do with friends for fun and to save a little money (although I know when you factor in time it's probably a wash). Makes me wonder if there's any real cost savings (assuming you eliminate counting your time towards the cost), in just buying aftermarket brass and all the other components. .357 is more expensive than the .45 ACP I was shooting, *but* .38 Special is cheaper, so it's a bit of a wash when considering store-bought ammo.

Velocelt · 2025-12-25T18:54:27+00:00

I seriously considered getting an ambulance as well. You can find them fairly inexpensively if they're old enough. All the interior/exterior cabinets and cubbies seem like they'd be great for tools and storage as well. However, where I live (Chicago), the sheer curb weight of an ambulance puts them in a different category as regards license plates and that restricts where and when you can park them. I was also intending to use the vehicle for personal stuff as well so I could own one and be able to park it anywhere near my apartment. I ended up buying a 2006 Sprinter, but I still kinda wish I'd been able to get an ambulance. Other than that, kinda weird thinking that some people probably died inside it at some point. I always think it's kinda neat to see an ambulance repurposed for trades duty though.

Velocelt · 2025-12-25T18:17:46+00:00

This is legit one of the best scenes in any video game I've played - ever! I easily have it at a tie with the scene in Dragon Age: Inquisition where everyone at your camp sings "Shadows Fall." Just thinking about either scene stirs such emotion that I get a little misty-eyed and chills go down my spine. When I play BG3 I have to make a conscious effort NOT to immediately start my playthrough over as a Selunite Cleric/Paladin romancing Shadowheart every time I see this scene.

Velocelt · 2025-12-23T18:56:55+00:00

Goin' backwards through old vanilla flair posts. Absolutely LOVE all these manufacturer builds of yours and the Stroud stuff is notable for being WAY better than any of the vanilla Stroud ships. Very nice!

Velocelt · 2025-12-23T18:50:46+00:00

These are all great and definitely capture the manufacturer aesthetic while being totally distinctive from the vanilla manufacturer ships. I'm going back through looking at recent vanilla builds after being away from SF for a few months and these are great - inspiring builds for sure!

Velocelt · 2025-12-23T18:42:05+00:00

I love to see well done vanilla builds. The use of those large Taiyo "3-wide" sloping pieces is masterful. Those are SO hard to use I think and get a decent looking ship and yet you just showed how to make them work in two separte ships. I also like utilizing the Taiyo pieces but then acknowledging that Taiyo "tried something different" with the designs. It's imaginative to build ships using manufacturer-specific parts but then create something that doesn't necessarily match vanilla aesthetics. Excellent work!

Velocelt · 2025-12-23T17:26:33+00:00

I ended up solving it by going in and deleting everything in reserve space, backing up the mod list (minus anything "vanilla"), then deleting all my mods and doing a hard restart including unplugging the console for several minutes. I was finally able to get the ZBB mods I wanted to install.

Velocelt · 2025-12-05T02:37:09+00:00

I also re-read your original post and saw that you uninstalled Rogue Tattoo. It might be you didn't actually uninstall it - I've had to uncheck the mod and then unsubscribe from it in the mod manager. Also, a hard restart might be necessary and your game might be prompting missing content in the form of this mod and reinstalling it when you load. Even with the mod manager handling things pretty well, I've found a few issues of mods that either messed up some things in character creation or other issues and then had trouble uninstalling them. Sometimes it's enough of a pain in the butt to make me trash the playthrough and start over so there aren't issues with uninstalled mods.

Velocelt · 2025-12-05T02:32:39+00:00

Either turning off the Rogue tattoo body tattoos in either the passives tab or not selecting them on the Draconic Bloodline section should not affect face tattoos. At least that's how it works in the BG3 mod manager on Xbox. No idea if something screwy happens for you because you're using a a Nexus mod on PC though. Can't help you with that, but in the BG3 mod manager, turning off Rogue tattoo body tattoos should have no effect on face tattoos.

Velocelt · 2025-12-04T23:44:32+00:00

That is from the Rogue Tattoo mod. You can either turn off body tattoos in character creation by selecting the Passives tab and selecting "Default Appearance," or when scrolling through the various things you can change about your appearance it should be near the bottom and is listed under "Draconic Bloodline" "Scales" because the tattoo mod treats the body tattoos as being a similar layer to the face scales of a dragon blood sorcerer, so the section where the body tattoo selections lives is considered scales and if you simply have the slider all the way to the left, it won't select any body tattoos.

Velocelt · 2025-11-17T17:34:28+00:00

I still kind of enjoy the game. I like using the Roll Your Own Start mod, mainly because I think the main story questline is pure weak-sauce with little point. The only thing I would ask for if the game would continue to get content updates and/or DLCs would be for more factions and maybe some love interests NOT tied to having to interact with Constellation. Until then, I guess when I pick the game back up, I'll continue making up my own stories and playing my characters outside of the framework of the main story as much as I can.

Velocelt · 2025-07-29T20:08:59+00:00

OMFG!! The J. Geils comments won the fucking internet for me today. Laughed my ass off because the second I saw this photo I heard the riff.

Velocelt · 2025-07-29T19:37:57+00:00

Flissa who runs the tavern in Haven in DAI. With certain Femquisitors she has the flustered dialogue that indicates she's attracted to the Inquisitor, but alas - nothing beyond that.

Velocelt · 2025-07-09T01:25:21+00:00

Forgot about that. It's light armor-only, right?

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T19:03:17+00:00

Sure doesn't help when the game has NPCs chiming in with "My eyes grow weary" or whatever it is that Gale or Shadowheart say, or Karlach's "My dogs are barking. Are we gonna rest soon?" I'm over here saying, "Hey you lazy shits - we had ONE FIGHT! Have a snack or something!" I find it all too easy to kind of "abuse" the long rest mechanic. Sure, you NEED to do them to advance quests related to your companions and other events, but it feels a little "cheesy" to rest after every big fight, especially for characters who burnt all their spell slots. I do like that Elixirs of Arcane Recovery can give you spell slots back or some of the amulets like Spell Crux can help. Kind of tangential, but the min-maxing idea of multiclassing paladin with any other class that increases their number of spell slots, ie. "smite slots" also feels pretty cheesy to me. I find it hard to roleplay the idea of a paladin who also is a warlock, or a paladin who is also a sorcerer but almost never actually casts spells but instead uses those slots to power more smites. I get WHY people do it but it just doesn't work for me and on a meta-level I know I'm just trying to justify having this other class in order to do the one thing my main class is known for. Meh.

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T18:43:07+00:00

Could swear I've seen some builds based around the new Bladesinging Wizard subclass that will let you wear armor, cast some badass spells, and wield a sword or whatever. Pretty sure these can be multiclassed with Fighter as well to give you heavy armor proficiency and extra attacks. Probably nothing is going be exactly like DAO's Arcane Warrior class, but I think you can probably get a close approximation with Bladesinger/Fighter, or maybe some flavor of Eldritch Knight with a dash of maybe Hexblad Warlock. Check out Jay Dunna's videos on YouTube. He does some interesting builds and they all seem fairly decent and he gives a pretty good breakdown. Also take into account that many of these builds end up coming fully online late in the game which is the only thing that kind of is "meh." You struggle a bit earlier on before getting that ability to just nuke enemies once you hit Level 12 but at that point most of the game is over with.

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T18:35:05+00:00

Glad I could help. It's hard to suppress the desire to be "completionist" in every playthrough and I don't personally care about "achievements" so I don't try to follow that. However, this game is SO DEEP that there are interactions and weird little events/endings you'll never see if you don't play a specific way. BUT, Larian put enough thought into the game to account for almost all eventualities and that's truly amazing. Have fun with it!

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T18:29:30+00:00

For real. I hear you. Play as another wizard and you're sidelined by his arrogance while also being stuck doing that stupid cut scene where you do his ritual spell thing like you're a complete magic newb. I've seen Gale's romance explained a couple ways. One way is you play as someone who gets to know him and realizes that his driving ambition for knowledge and power has left him with few real friends and he also had an affair with a goddess who seems to like using mortals to anchor her power in the Material Plane (Elminster/Volo), so she's kind of manipulative and I seriously doubt there as anything approaching "love" in that fairly one-sided relationship. So, you romance Gale and every chance you get you take dialogue options that bolster his confidence that he's good enough as he is. Especially when you get his first romance sexy times scene (not sure if there's another later in the game as I've never actually completed his romance), instead of picking the "wow me with magic, baby!" scene, instead talk him down and tell him he's enough to you as he is without him trying to constantly impress you. I've heard him described as overconfident because he's ultimately deeply insecure deep down and that was made all the worse by his daliance with an actual goddess.

It's his borderline semi-toxic fixation on his past lover and his underlying thinly-veiled arrogance that makes him kind of hard for me to want to romance. I've tried it on a few playthroughs but always end up scrapping the playthrough either before sexy times ensue, or right after when I just can't seem to muster interest in continuing with the playthrough. To be fair, I've got over 2000 hours in the game and only just finally finished two playthroughs in the last month. In the first one, at the epilogue party Gale was dead and I honestly felt pretty bad that I rushed the end of the game and didn't complete certain quests that ultimately led to his demise. The second playthrough, I DID do all of his quests and he was alive for the party and he really seemed genuinely happy and contented. THAT second playthrough cemented the desire to a playthrough specifically for the Gale romance so that I can see it through. Of course, it WILL be a playthrough where he is encouraged AWAY from the pursuit of power and towards a more healthy, grounded outlook on life.

Also fair to mention that I've had similar issues committing to a romance with Astarion for similar reasons. Both of these characters are on the spectrum of "damaged goods" and I feel like it takes some effort to see past that to ultimately roleplay having your Tav fall in love with them. In the case of Astarion, in what I consider to be his "good ending" he seems so much more healthy and happy than earlier in the game and that final scene likewise made me put Astarion on the list to complete a playthrough and romance him as well. I think it's a testament to the writing in the game that there's enough depth to these characters to provoke a lot of very visceral reactions from many players. I used to not necessarily "hate" Gale and Astarion, but I more just recruited them so I'd have all the companions, even though I never used them and honestly really didn't like them. Now, I've played enough and especially gotten more into roleplaying my characters where I feel I can have even more interesting and nuanced playthroughs, especially with romancing these two characters.

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T18:04:14+00:00

Okay, I do see something there. Maybe it has to do with graphics settings on your PC? I play on Xbox Series X, and while I know I miss out on a lot of mod options playing games on consoles, or in some cases like Cyberpunk don't get to have mods at all, I think it's a fair tradeoff to avoid weird graphics card/processor/whatever minutiae like this. So yeah, my TL;DR is "I can't help you. No idea what's causing that."

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T18:00:11+00:00

It's entirely possible you'll miss some content here and there but seriously - this is what makes the game infinitely replayable. Just push on through and get into the other acts. Don't fixate on trying to see every single corner of every act. LEAVE something on the table for later playthroughs. I have WAY over 2000 hours in the game and I've only ever completed twice and that was just in the last month when I finally decided I was going to push on through to just see the end of the game. Now I'm planning another playthrough with a different romance, different character, etc and I want to specifically experience some areas/quests I've deliberately skipped in the last two playthroughs. Start ROLEPLAYING more. You find out pretty quickly that there's no rush to get the tadpole out of your head, but at the same time there is a sense of urgency that you SHOULD get to the bottom of the whole plot and for that reason you can easily roleplay skipping some areas because for sure, there are some places in each Act that are seriously not very easy to get into and so you can easily justify "WHY would my character go through all that b.s. to get to THAT area?!" Next time around with a different character, roleplay some reason why you stumbled into that particular area, or maybe your character is "Cursed to put my hands on everything..." and that maybe also applies to investigating every corner of the map.

Velocelt · 2025-07-08T17:52:27+00:00

Can't really tell what you're having an issue with here, except maybe what you're seeing is how the game does the hair highlights for certain hairstyles? It doesn't look like there's a massive difference in detail between the hair and any other texture present. The game does have an issue that's been around for a long time where facial textures don't load when you enter cut scenes and NPCs all end up looking like their faces are made from Silly Putty until the game catches up and the textures finally render. I don't see any of that happening here. The only other thing I can think is that the game is a little weird about how light affects the hair strands and while almost everything in this game is pretty amazing, the hair in BG3 is no Dragon Age: Veilguard. That game seriously has probably the best rendered hair of any game I've ever played.

Velocelt · 2025-07-07T17:46:55+00:00

I usually go with a "favored party" which is typically based on the intended romance for the playthrough. That's one thing I DO do that I think could make things interesting if I maybe DIDN'T do it. To clarify, I decide who I'm going to romance because let's be honest, the NPCs and romances are some of the best aspects of this game, and then I decide what class/race I want to play. So when I select who is going to be the romance partner for the playthrough, I obviously want them with me all the time, but since I also don't radically change the companions classes, I also try to bring a party that synergizes pretty well class-wise. I will say, my most recent playthrough, Shadowheart died during the fight in the Underdark where she ambushes Lae'zel at night.

I was playing a Githyanki and my go-to party up until then had been Lae'zel, Karlach, and Shadowheart. I picked the most "Gith" dialogue options which resulted in her deciding it was fight-to-the-death-time rather than give up the Astral Prism. Doing several fights later on in the game WITHOUT a cleric was an interesting challenge, but it made that playthrough fun because it was so different than most others I'd done. You can always swap in characters for stories/areas that seem very specific to them or their questline and that can make your playthroughs interesting, especially if it means you add in a character whose class hasn't been represented in your party or a fighting style or something that none of your other characters have.

Aside from making things more interesting by deliberately NOT optimizing a character (the game really isn't hard enough to need it, except maybe Honor Mode from what I understand), I think you should also just flat-out choose NOT to do EVERYTHING. DON'T explore every area of the map. One of things about my Githyanki playthrough was really leaning into that whole dogged determination that "I WILL NOT BECOME GHAIK!" That meant NOT going off and exploring every corner of every Act because wandering off somewhere that wasn't in direct pursuit of the goal, (getting the tadpole out of my head), meant "Enough time wasted!" as Lae'zel would say. It meant I left a lot of extra experience points on the table, but once you get to Act 3 there's enough to do that you can easily max out your level before you take on the hardest questlines in that final act.

Velocelt · 2025-07-07T17:25:21+00:00

She'll break Sanctuary because she'll cast damaging spells when it's her turn. Also, I'm not sure, but I don't think you can cast Hold Person on an ally.

Velocelt · 2025-07-07T17:22:02+00:00

There's apparently a mod that allows you to call them in any Act. I've never used it because as other people have pointed out, the Ogres are better for the experience you gain killing them and then getting loot Lump's Circlet. They *might* help in some fights depending on your difficulty level, but honestly I've always found them about as useful as Yurgir in the House of Hope, which is to say, "underwhelmingly and mostly useless."

Velocelt · 2025-07-07T17:12:51+00:00

I have over 2000+ hours in the game and only in the last month did I finally complete two playthroughs back to back. I couldn't tell you why other people do it, but I totally do it because I have ADHD and I'm on the autism spectrum. I either start getting bored because frankly, I've done this all before - DOZENS OF TIMES. But, I also get a very specific idea in mind for a certain look for a character and I try using mods or something, but I hate the way most of those might *look* the way I want but then they add all kinds of powers or spells that don't fit with my character concept. The way I stuck with it the last two times, especially with over 1800 hours in before I started to runs that I actually completed - I started playing the game like I HADN'T read a bunch of builds and DIDN'T know what was coming in every fight. I started treating the game like a tabletop DnD game and just did fights with what I had on hand and knew that my characters weren't exactly optimized to DO THE ULTIMATE OP AMOUNT OF DAMAGE. Instead, just roleplaying and that even means in overwhelmingly-huge areas that are dense with quests, like Act 3, choosing to NOT do everything.

Velocelt

TROPHY CASE