In a brooding burning funk because my game is fucked up in a couple of ways and it is causing me stress.

On the technical side, there’s this part of the game that is full of hot bubbling glowing molten lava that stretches off into the distance, and in said distance a four storey tall lava monster is wandering around like an absentminded Godzilla enemy.

And apparently, my computer can’t handle animating all that, because it keeps crashing. Crashing to desktop, mostly, which is a refreshing change from it crashing and hanging my entire computer, forcing me to reboot.

So refreshing that it is, in fact, kind of sad.

My standards are so low.

On the game side, the game clearly wants me to cross this insane field of bubbling lava. The area can be three things : ash, fire, or lava, and it shifts around in that order.

But not all at once. In a patchwork fashion which I find to be utterly chaotic and functionally .unpredictable and when I get it wrong my character dies screaming in a fire, so ya know, kinda stressful.

I have also worked very hard to get to this thing in that area called the Adamantine Forge, which is supposed to be able to make super awesome weapons and armor from the substance “adamantine” (hence the name), and I have collected three of the moulds for the adamantine to go into but none of the stuff itself.

And I have no idea where to get it, either. I have a terrible feeling that to get it, I have to have blasted a rockfall out of the way and “rescued” this drow called Nere.

I say “rescue” because the guy is such an evil bastard that the first thing he does when I free him from the poison gas filled chamber behind the rockfall is start murdering innocent people in horrible ways just because he’s in such a pissy mood.

So obviously I have to kill this motherfucker. HARD.

But that’s impossible because he calls on all his evil minions to kill my ass and there are just plain too many of them. I can’t kill them before they kill me.

And that’s kind of what battle is all about.

And it’s not through lack of trying. I have attempted that fucking fight at least a dozen times if not more and I can’t find a way to win it. There are no defensible positions for me to exploit to compensate for their numbers because almost all of them have a ranged attack that can nail me from almost anywhere and those that don’t can run fast enough to reach my position and overwhelm me.

I can’t even use my thief to sneakily assassinate the bad guys on the periphery commando style to thin out their numbers before the assault because somehow, if any of the bad guys are attacked, they all know instantly and come running.

Ergo, if winning that fight is needed in order for me to go forward, I am not a happy camper at all.

I am not entirely out of ideas as to how to do it. But if I continue to fail it I am just going to have to activate the nuclear option and move on to the next chapter of the plot.

You know what would really help in that fight? Adamantine weapons.

But that’s not going to happen either, is it boppers?

More after the break.

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What is lava? Baby, don’t hurt me

I think I am learning.

I was about to try to cross the lava field again when I said to myself, “Wait a minute. What if there’s a way around this?”

So I looked around, and of course, there was. There was a way to bypass the lava entirely via the Jump command.

This is why I send Karlach on these solo missions. She’s my big bad barbarian queen, and my personal fave, and she has the highest Strength, so she jumps the furthest.

Plus, if she stumbles into a combat situation when I am using her to explore, she is such a righteous badass that she might well be able to take them.

Or at least live long enough to run away, run away,. run away!

Oh, and I found some ore to use in the crucible of the forge. Smashed a huge rocky deposit and got one teeny little piece of mithral ore. Go fig.

I suppose that is what you get when you mine via sledgehammer. Was mad awesome seeing Karlach smash that deposit, though.

So I put the ore in the crucible and pull the lever. Big piledriver comes down to give the crucible a whack. Very cool, very heavy metal.

And the platform the forge is on elevates and clicks in to a new floor, and the game tells me that mould and ore are not enough, the process needs lava to bind it.

And oh look, the new floor has a big wheel-type valve control that opens the floodgates and lets lava flow into the forge chamber.

Unfortunately, this also wakes up a huge hulking automaton of some sort. And all during his introductory cutscene, I was hoping against hope that we would not have to fight it.

But of course, we do. What’s more, parts of the forge chamber flood with lava at the same time, and woe betide any of my characters standing in the wrong place.

Kind of a dirty trick, if you ask me.

That’s where I am now. I am resting at camp in preparation for fighting the fantasy equivalent of a mecha monster and pondering who I want with me when I ffinally ight the fucking thing.

This means Nere dies. For some reason, the second I go to camp, he dies.

He will not be mourned. But I worry about what the evil Duergar (the dwarf equivalent of the fucking Drow) will do to their gnome slaves in retaliation.

I’m coming, little guys! I just need some extra firepower first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.