Ingress: Recursion, Level 8. Back to normal.

I made it! The most exciting thing about this past level is that I made the top-most badge of the Umbra Deploy Challenge in literally the last minute. Seriously, 12:59pm (when it ended at 1pm), and I got it. That was exciting.

Other than that, next time I do a self-challenge for anything to do with fielding, I allow for glyphing. Trying to get the appropriate amount of keys without glyphing was insane, and I went through almost my entire supply of heat sinks. But the fielding itself was super profitable, and it was an easy 600,000 AP to get as a result. Here’s a small sample of some of the microfielding I was doing:

 

At this point I return to normal play. I have learned a lot about AP gain through this process though — my normal M.O. is to just go out and kill all green because it’s most satisfying to me to see the waves of boom go out. But if you have been following the blog and are in a position to notice such things — not a single one of the challenges involved taking out any green. So that was a very good learning process for me, and I will do more construction in my normal play in the future as a result.

But I really did miss booming all the things, and the first thing I did when I leveled was take out a bunch of green (SorryNotSorry MewTwosTrainer!) I really really missed that. Also, derping all the things. I love to derp. Derp derp derp derp. Please let me use up all the keys I don’t need by throwing all those derp links.

Thanks for following along on my Ingress Journey back to Level 8!

Ingress: Recursion, Level 7. Microfielding.

With the Umbra challenge going on, it turned out to be a lot harder to find uncaptured portals out there than normal! But I got my way through the spiking level, and even picked up the bronze Umbra medal on the way.

My next self-challenge is my final one: Microfielding, sometimes also called microstitching or field stitching. Originally I was going to have rules where I could only use portals I’d fully deployed, and all portals I fully deployed must be part of a field. However, with the Umbra Challenge going on, I would really like to actually participate in that, so I’m relaxing the rules a bit to allow me to also work on Umbra at the same time. So here are my rules for the microfielding:

1. I can use portals that are already blue, but I must upgrade them to maximum resonators as best as I can. I can also deploy mods.
2. I must use those portals in a field.
3. I cannot derp links, all links must be for a field.

This means that I’m going to have to pay attention to key collection here! And without glyphing! So this will be interesting. Fortunately I do have a lot of leftover multi-hacks and heat sinks so I can use those as needed.

Once Umbra is over, I’ll probably prefer to find clusters of white portals to do this — more AP! — but in the meantime this will mean I don’t have to handicap myself out of the limited time medal. Hopefully!

Ingress: Recursion, Level 6. Spiking.

OK to debrief the last level, I wanted to make sure I did a glyphing level in hommage to the legend of the person who recursed and made it to level 8 just glyphing. My hats off to that person, because that was hell just for one level. I finally found a place I could loop through a bunch of enlightened portals for about 20K AP at the end of 4 loops, so I did that a few times in addition to glyphing wherever I was. It was definitely grindy and I’d rather be doing something else with those green linked portals.

This level now is spiking. For those unfamiliar with the term, spiking is when I deploy just one resonator to a white portal to light it up to my team, but do not add anything further. This gains me 625 AP per spike. So I’ll need 480 of these to complete it.

Complicating (or perhaps complementing?) this is that we’re now in the Umbra Deploy Challenge, where everyone is challenged to deploy to unique resonator slots.  It is my hope to quickly get through this level so that I can do my next level challenge which will be much more in line with the global challenge. But at least getting me through this level will gain me the first level of the Umbra challenge, and a good bit into the second level.

Lastly, I’m off to Pittsburgh for the holidays, so I’ll be doing all of this from there. Well, I’ll hit a few places on the way out today, but it’s going to be interesting getting stuff done in the much less portal dense area (I’ve gotten used to Philadelphia’s portal density!)

Ingress: Recursion, Level 5. Glyphing.

So, I ended up with the flu — actual influenza version — and that took a week out of my Ingress time. Today I’m finally out of bed so I got myself up to Level 5. I did get to First Saturday, and deployed fully to 6 portals during the event, so I should get the uptick in my FS badge.

And for this level, I will be glyphing. Since this doesn’t have a definite point range, I can’t tell how many I will need. I do know that I have a maximum of three glyph hacks, so it’ll be 150+bonus if I get the max (with an additional 100 if I dirty hack). But I’m going to be glyphing any and all portals I see. I estimate it’ll be about 1000 glyphs, give or take, to get to the next level. Fortunately I’ll be in Center City tomorrow!

Ingress: Recursion, Level 4. Full Deploys.

Thanks to agents Mathematician, KingConstantine, and Onceamoose, I got enough mods to deploy out to the 200 portals I needed to push them onto (that’s 400 mods!) Onceamoose also kindly drove me around his area to find most of those portals, and made sure they were blue for me to be able to deploy to them.

So my next level will be full deploys. I was going to wait on this until later, so it feels like a bit of a cop out to do only 40 portals (including 80 more mods, thanks again Onceamoose!), but I needed to do something I can easily get the amount of AP I need for IFS on Saturday, plus I am going to do many of these deploys somewhere I can then use for the next stage…. but that’ll be later. I have PAX Unplugged to get to this weekend, so other than IFS, Ingress is being put away for a bit.