Today in Townscaper: Learned that garden paths exist! And how to make them!

Some special debug modes in Minecraft require pressing F3+some other key, which is a real mess for accessibility; function keys aren't meant to be modifiers of other keys, and the Minecraft folks have some explaining to do on this.

That said, my son came to me with a problem: He wants to do something called "showing chunks" in Minecraft, which requires F3+g. Pressing F3 on his 60% keyboard requires using the _fn_ key, so if he presses another key while holding that key, it also activates the alternate function command mapped to the second key. Without some kind of reconfiguration, his keyboard literally cannot send the combination of fn3+g.

After banging my head around forums for a while, I was surprised that nobody seemed to have posted a working solution. So here's what I came up with, using the key programming available on the Ducky One 2 Mini:

We're going to set the left shift key to imitate F3 without needing to press fn:

1. Press and hold fn+alt+2, to enable the second keyboard profile. This will separate the keyboard abuse we're going to inflict from the main profile.
2. Press and hold fn+alt+tab for several seconds until the keyboard blinks
3. Tap left shift: this selects it as the key to be programmed
4. Press fn+3: this selects that combination as the input to map to the newly-programmed key
5. Press fn+alt again to save the macro
6. Press and hold fn+alt+tab again to exit macro recording mode

Try it out: left shift+g should now emulate fn3+g and toggle the "show chunks" setting on and off. Importantly, this key is bound to profile 2; after using it, swap back to profile 1 with fn+alt+1, so that left shift works as expected again (or just bind it something that makes more sense). 

Today in Townscaper: A series of terraces lead steeply upward from the pier, to a tower where either a wizard or a coffee shop overlook the town.

I started playing with Townscaper last night. It’s a city-building toy that lets you paint colorful houses and buildings over an empty seascape. It’s absolutely delightful.

I’m getting incrementally better at Star Wars: Squadrons. It has cross play, so if any micro.friends are down to try blowing up some capital ships together, well, Red 5 is standing by. 🎮

Aaah, I made a fatal mistake on what would have been my first world win in Star Renegades because I overlooked a modifier. That’s so demoralizing. An Into The Breach style undo would be welcome.

I started playing Star Renegades today. It’s great! On PC game pass, gang. 🎮

Mechanical keyboard update: I’m now a guy who swaps from the one with blue switches to the one with brown switches when I go from work to games. 🎮

🎮 After hearing more chat about it on this Monday’s Waypoint Radio, I started playing Remnant: From the Ashes again. I had tried it previously on console and found it frustratingly hard, but I’m glad I picked it back up on PC; it’s really good!

Previous updates:

• Dear Destiny - a play log
  
• Alan Plays Destiny: My Season 3 Summary
  
• Note - Feb 22, 2020

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It's been a while since I did this, so here's another set of revised win/loss numbers and weapon stats for my Destiny 2 play. The final Iron Banner -- a week-long competitive PVP mode -- of the current season concluded last week, so I thought it was time to wrap up this edition of the perpetually-open fish shell and R Studio session and get on with making a picture of my data. 

Iron Banner holds a lot of fun, nostalgic memory for me from the first Destiny. It was one of the events that offered a chance at loads of high-powered loot that one could use to upgrade gear, and diving into it broke my reluctance to spend time playing in PVP game modes. The current incarnation of the game mode is not quite the same loot-fest, but it's still a game type that I generally have fun with, so I look forward to playing it when it comes around. It's also a nice discrete mode to use as a lens into my game data. Here's a big picture of my games since the launch of the last big expansion, Shadowkeep, last fall:

And the summary of all that data says that I perform pretty similarly across all three of my shooty space dolls, with the edge going to the Warlock. (Which surprises me, actually.)

class  Outcome #Games Avg K/D
------ ------- ------ ------
Hunter  Defeat   51     12.92
Hunter  Victory  57     12.72
Titan   Defeat   55     13.64
Titan   Victory  58     14.41
Warlock Defeat   41     13.95
Warlock Victory  61     15.49 

This last completed Iron Banner was the first such event in a long time where a non-Erentil was anywhere close to my use of that precious voop-shooter; I had a really good time experimenting with a fun change-up in my loadout, which is probably a good finding, since Bungie will be sunsetting all my favorites in seasons to come. 

Tune in next time, when I might, finally, complete writing up the chain of tools that I use to make this data. If you made it this far and need a buddy in-game, I'm playing on Xbox and on PC these days; let's splode some aliens sometime from our respective quarantines.