Tricks for making a bag lunch

Taking your lunch to school can be more exciting than dry peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In fact, the lunches can be healthy, colorful meals that every kid would crave.

We are looking for a parent or two who makes an art of making their children’s lunch for school so they have a healthy meal to get them through the day.

We would like to feature you and your meal making tricks in our August Discover 361 magazine. It will be published just before the start of school so it will provide ideas to other parents as they send their children off to a new school year.

If you have tips you want to share contact Becky Cooper, managing editor, at bcooper@vicad.com or call her at 361-574-1285.

Diablo 4 tips and tricks guide for beginners

Looking for a guide to best Diablo 4 tips? We’ve got all the most crucial tricks for you as you dive into the devilishly good RPG game – specifically if you’re a beginner to the long-running franchise. Having said that, it’s been over a decade since Diablo 3, so if you’ve been out of the game some time and are looking for a little refresher before your next Diablo adventure, there might just be a tip or two here for you, too.

As you can see from our Diablo 4 review, the series’ latest brings Diablo back to its best, and is undoubtedly one of the best PC games of 2023.  We have every Diablo 4 guide you could possibly want, but if you’re just getting started, take a look at these tips we wish we’d known earlier. Give yourself every advantage and don’t get left behind as Lilith’s goons wreak havoc on you and your party with these Diablo 4 tips and tricks for beginners.

There are five Diablo 4 classes to choose from: Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Rogue, and Sorcerer, so you most likely want to choose a class that best suits your playstyle. Like to keep to a safe distance and do battle from afar? Then perhaps the Rogue or Sorcerer is for you. Want to go in heavy-handed and get up close and personal with your foes? Give the Barbarian a try.

You can have up to ten character slots in Diablo 4 though, so if you aren’t sure, then try them all out for a quest or two. With ten slots and five classes, you can even take them all out for a spin twice if that tickles your fancy. Try and add any more than ten, though, and find yourself facing off against one of the worst enemies of all – a Diablo 4 error code.

Once you’ve found your main and embark on your journey through Kyovashad, you might notice that not all of your hot bar skill slots are immediately available to you. Once you spend your first one or two skill points – with one skill point gained each time you level up – your two right-hand slots will open, meaning you can equip two skills. The remaining four are locked until you reach level eight, at which point they unlock automatically and you’ll be able to assign the six skills that make up your best build, like those in our best Diablo 4 Barbarian build.

Taking the above point into consideration, make sure you spend your skill points carefully in the early stages of the game. As we address later, you can respec, but you still don’t want to waste skill points unlocking skills you can’t or won’t use. As you progress through the first seven levels, consider spending your skill points leveling up your two chosen skills, rather than getting carried away unlocking more than you can assign. You can then reassign some of those points once you reach level 8. If you’re using one of our best builds, like the best Diablo 4 Sorcerer build, you can always stick to the skill points we’ve assigned.

If you do buy any skills you don’t want or don’t gel with and wish to change your mind, you can respec in Diablo 4, though this does cost some gold.

There are two ways to respec in Diablo 4: one is to completely start from scratch, which erases all of your Diablo 4 skill tree history, the other is to reassign individual skills. Unless you’re absolutely certain you want to select all new skills, we’d recommend the latter, which is done by right-clicking on the skill you wish to have refunded. If you want to start again, we recommend just starting a new character – while you’ll have to complete the same quests again, it will give you the option of switching between builds while you establish which skills you prefer.

While you can have success playing Diablo 4 as a solo player, there’s no denying that the best way to find success is to play with friends – not only is it just fun to play with a party of mates, but you need others for some of the more difficult Diablo 4 world boss and other challenges waiting for you on your adventure. Of course, you can play online with Diablo 4 crossplay, but we also asked if Diablo 4 couch co-op is available for PC players. Not only is it more fun to play with your friends, but each party member also gains an additional 5% experience bonus when completing missions and taking down enemies near each other.

The Diablo 4 map is key to your success and is thankfully one of the more user-friendly maps around. Your minimap is super easy to use and keep an eye on as you head toward your next destination, but you can make it even better by activating a waypoint. Open up your main map by pressing ‘M’, and simply right-clicking your mouse on the point you want to head to will set up a waypoint and the quickest path – even if that waypoint is on an area of the map you’ve not yet explored.

You will also spot some colored areas on the map, either blue, yellow, or orange highlighted sections of the map. These all mean different things, and it helps to know what’s going on if you find yourself in one of these zones. A blue highlighted area shows you that a side quest item or NPC is located within, so you don’t need to look outside its boundaries. Yellow areas are the same for main quests, while orange zones show you that a world event is taking place – a public, online encounter that you can join in with others.

Most skills, items, and aspects come with a status ailment of some kind, either positive or negative in effect, and these conditions can affect both players and foes. Knowing what each of them means and does is crucial to knowing how to use them to your advantage.

The PCGamesN hive mind has been deep in Sanctuary before its release; we’ve slayed thousands of demons and come up with a multitude of in-depth tips, explainers, and general guides to make your life a little bit easier. Here is every Diablo 4 guide we have at PCGamesN:

And that’s all we have for our Diablo 4 tips guide. Of course, there’s much more to the world of Diablo 4 than this list could possibly cover, but these are the most important things we wish we’d known when we were getting started in Sanctuary for the first time. While the list above has a lot to go through, you might also be wondering whether Diablo 4 is Steam Deck compatible, and, if you’re ready to think about it yet, what’s waiting for you in the Diablo 4 endgame to keep players coming back year after year, just as the previous games in the series have done so well.