the bonemass war

newbie and HGR have reached Bonemass, the boss of the swamp. Apparently, in the newbie/numbers world, they just kinda walked up and killed him, no sweat. It doesn’t work that way on Very Hard. Thursday night I watched newbie and HGR progging the fight for about 40 minutes. I say “progging” but on HGR’s end it was basically just 40 straight minutes of corpse runs, many of which were unsuccessful. newbie usually managed his corpse runs, but then spent all his time kiting hordes of random mobs. Many foods were eaten. Virtually no damage was done to the actual boss.

For starters, visibility is poor due to the swamp mood lighting, and exacerbated by the boss’s passive, which makes it constantly rain in a large radius around him. (Vikings hate being wet. It is the worst thing for a Viking to be wet.) Footing is treacherous; step into the water and you may find yourself falling into a deep sinkhole, or being attacked by killer leeches, or both. Also, the base spawn rate of the area is high. During the 40-minute session I watched, there were two abominations in the boss arena, multiple starred draugr, and an entire menagerie of riff-raff. newbie tried to spawnproof the area by placing crafting benches in advance, but Bonemass is wise to that trick and destroyed the benches while newbie was busy running from the locals.

So times are tough on the front lines. But things are great at home. We’ve now moved into the Iron Age, which means we get stonecutting and the hearth. I spent a couple hours on Thursday working on a new house with an indoor hearth. Previously, our cooking fires were outside the house, along the back wall so they could still warm the bedroom by proximity, and our cooking facilities were all in the backyard. If HGR were playing this game solo he’d just have backyard cookpots forever.

Meanwhile, newbie and HGR figured out the spawnproofing strat: you summon Bonemass at a huge skull, and they put a crafting bench atop the skull. It’s too high for enemies to destroy. So spawns stay out and you can fight the actual boss. There’s also an anti-snowball effect, because if you aren’t dying all the time to random spawns, you don’t have to do corpse runs, meaning you don’t drag in enemies from outside the bench’s radius. Friday night they beat Bonemass with the skull bench strat, and it sounded like they had a much easier time of it overall. Now they’re off to the mountains.

newbie asked me to predict which biome HGR will complain about the most. It’s gotta be the mistlands imo. Like I don’t see it being a contest. Though newbie did point out there are deathsquitoes in the plains. Well, I guess we’ll see.