Last week, I upgraded my last piece of Crystal 5 gear to max which is a big step in my Shadow Hunter’s progressive. It also means I now need to gather new materials in the Long Shade Adventure world, which is the current end game area of Trove, to upgrade all my gear to Mystic tier.

I popped my head into the Long Shade to see how much damage I’m doing and it’s not nearly as much as I thought it’d be. I can do damage, and I can kill dungeon bosses but it requires using a health flask to activate my Martial Emblem to do 250% increased damage for 3 seconds. It’s slow going. I also don’t feel quite right checking out new (to me) content without Blades.

So while I wait for him to catch up in the upgraded gear department, I’ll busy myself with squeezing out some more damage.

The best way to increase my damage, now that my gems and gear are fully upgraded, is to increase my Light stat.

I know it increases damage but I didn’t know what it actually did until I read the wiki. The Light stat, decreases the effect of the Darkness stat of enemies. Great ,what’s darkness? Darkness, it turns out, is just damage reduction that only applies to enemies. Light comes from gear, gems, collected dragons, the star chart and Geode Mastery. I’m currently sitting at 11.6k light the majority of my missing light is from Geode Mastery.

That’s because I’ve been avoiding Geode for years.

Geode is a separate game mode, where you wander around a cavern collecting crystals and materials to craft upgrades to Geode specific modules. The more you upgrade your gear the longer you can survive in the cavern and the deeper you can go to find rarer materials.

I have mostly ignored Geode for the majority of my Trove career because it is a slow and tedious game mode but every level of Geode Mastery provides 10 light. I’m currently at 60 out of 100 Geode Mastery so I’m over halfway there!

The good news is, I only need crystals from Geode. Every other material needed to upgrade modules or craft collectables for mastery can be bought off the player market. It’s not cheap, but it saves a ton of time and I generate a decent amount of flux by just running dungeons to complete my daily star bar that I can log in for 20 minutes a day and have enough flux for materials.

On Mondays, the daily bonus includes triple crystal drops, so I’ve spent a few Monday nights on Geode runs. As a result, I was able to upgrade my Vacuum module (which sucks up all of the crystals in an area) to max. Not only does this increase the range but it has the added benefit of doubling all crystals collected by the vacuum.

I didn’t realize, until yesterday, that the majority of Geode Mastery comes from craftable collectibles and not, as I previously assumed, leveling up modules. I, wrongly, assumed I had crafted most of this stuff years ago. I have many costumes, allies, and tomes to craft that will give quite a significant boost to my Geode mastery. This was a relief because, compared to the modules, they’re all relatively cheap to craft. The only bottle neck, again, is crystals.

Now that I’ve been doing it regularly, Geode isn’t as bad as I thought. It’s something different to do to break up a play session and it works just as well for listening to a podcast. There’s also a chance to loot Crystal piniatas which sell for 40k a pop. So there’s some money to be made there as well. At least enough to cover the next upgrade/collectable!

The past month I’ve been back in Trove. I tend to revisit the game every summer to see what’s been added. Surprisingly, the game still gets at least one big update every year despite being run by Gamingo for the last 6 years or so. At this point, Trove’s been a Gamigo game longer than it was a Trion game.

The game turned 10 years old this year and there’s a month long, Sunfest event going on with a lot of rewards including new mounts styles and allies. Who would have thought it would have lasted this long? I’m pleasantly suprised every year that passes that Trove has evaded maintenance mode.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been playing Trove for a decade. For better or worse, it’s been my game. The one I come back to when I don’t know what to play or I want something to do while I listen to a podcast. It’s grind heavey, it’s got time gates for almost all of the progression, but nothing quite gets me in a flow state like Trove. It’s by far my most played game on Steam by multitudes. It’s mindless but it’s fun. Where else can you ride a shark who shoots lasers out of it’s head? Or a hot dogs with legs?

It also helps that Blades is just as enamored with it as I am. The best online game to play are the ones your friends play right? Trove brought the Welp Squad together nearly 10 years ago too. It was the first game we all played together and we played it almost exclusively that first year.We branched off to other games but we still get together every weekend to play games and that all started with our weekly shadow tower runs in Trove, back when those were the end game content. The squad doesn’t play this one together, outside of Blades and I, but those were some of my fondest gaming memories.

I’ve gotten a lot done in the past month. I hit 45k Power Rank which gives me a chance of getting Crystal 5 Gear from the Gearcrafter’s Vaults. It’s a low chance, but I typically get 1-4 chests per dungeon so they add up quick. I was able to get all 3 pieces of Crystal 5 Gear for my Shadow Hunter and I’m only one upgrade away from maxing them all out. There’s one more tier of gear, Mystic, but I’m waiting to figure out how that all works until Blades catches up with my progression.

I’ve also done some work on my Geode Mastery which I’ve been avoiding, pretty much since Geode came out. Geode is this mining mini game, there’s no combat, and it’s really slow, but Geode Mastery grants Light which increases your damage. So it’s kind of a must do at some point. I’m at that point now, it’s not so bad, but I’m only doing it a little at a time so I don’t burn out on it. I’m currently working on maxing out my Vaccumm so I can get crystals faster, which will in turn, make getting Geode Mastery even faster.

Blades and I have also been leveling up our Club. We’ve had the Club for 9 years but never knew how club xp worked. Leveling up the club grants access to fixtures that provide bonuses for everyone. It turns out, you get club xp from completing adventures from the club, something we had never done. We’ve been working on it this month and have even recruited a few people to join too. We’re up to level 6 and we’ve got a few fixtures in place. I think we might make it to level 7 before the xp requirement gets too high for two people to make any meaningful progression.

I’m planning on playing regularly until the end of the month when the anniversary event ends. Then I think I will have had my fill of Trove, that is, until next year!

I still look forward to Monday night Shadow Towers with Jay every week. Once again we were able to complete the whole Shadow Tower on Ultra getting the max rewards for the week. We’ve started to develop a small group from players we meet on Twitch. We’ve been trying to help out newer players with getting over the Stellar gear wall when we can and have been giving advice when asked. It’s great to be able to give back to the game’s community.

This week I got the 3 star, stellar, empowered, water gem I needed after 2 months. It even had the correct stats and everything. Currently, I’m pumping gem dust into it until it’s maxed level to swap out with my 2 star stellar. Once that’s been socketed, all I need to do is augment the gems and continue to ook for a crystal level 3 face. Waiting for the right empowered gem to drop was such a slog, at least these next steps I can actively work on without praying for good RNG. I may be able to boost my Power Rank to 30k which is the next milestone. He’s sitting at 29701 right now.

I was also able to replace one of my gem’s first hit stat with a % max health. This boosted my Dracolyte from 500k to 700kish health, and man does it make a difference. I’ve noticed my survivability in higher-level shadow towers was a lot better. Also, I’ve had to refill potions way less in U-10 Geode Topside. The less time I can spend refilling the more time I can spend looting.