I think perhaps some of our respective differences come down to how methodical we are in our respective approach! Mine sometimes being to just throw myself at a problem and hope for the best, at least when it comes to gaming, so I'll go "argh!" if it doesn't work and maybe come back (much) later. But I think even though I now understand the basic strategy for getting through this stage, there're still way too many variables for me to ever be comfortable with it.
Now I need to find a useful save point to go and explore the rest of the world in the dev console. The final one in Aleroth doesn't seem so useful from that point of view and I did wonder why my previous "exploring" save was at level 35, which is because there's nothing much to explore otherwise.
In other developments, my dv2 program now compiles on Linux, so it's also usable by anyone not using a FreeBSD system: I'm aware Linux is a lot more commonplace and "most" people probably have one handy. It involved having to write my own version of nftw(3), so this morning saw the creation of vftw ("Vometia's file-tree-walker") which is mostly compatible and importantly it compiles and runs correctly on Linux! Thanks to that, the program now weighs in at over 2,000 lines of code which is slightly larger than I'd anticipated, but it seems to work nicely. Benchmarks on my FBSD system for just over 600MB of data (the contents of Patch.dv2 and various things I've fiddled with) are 0.37 seconds to read the files (as there're almost 1,000 of them that's probably just the OS time to deal with them as my drive array isn't that quick!) and 0.31 seconds of CPU to generate an uncompressed archive, 9.65 seconds' CPU to compress them all, based on a Ryzen 2700.
