Category: PC Games

From BBs to Bags: Inventory Full

Posted in Death Stranding, Guild Wars 2Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments

Death Stranding: Director’s Cut edition was one of the singleplayer games I recently revisited before Janthir Wilds launched.

Someday, in another post, I will wax lyrical about the mood and atmosphere it creates, which sates a particular need for a certain kind of feeling when I play it. That sense of solitude and self-reliance and lone wolf style wandering, of being on the border or boundaries between, nowhere yet somewhere; while still doing something for other people and contributing to some kind of community, and in so doing, helping oneself by still being connected to a network of other persons.

Except when one ends up third wheeling in the corner. “Cool, guys, can you sign off on this already?”

Logical sense-making and a plausible storyline are only tertiary considerations for Death Stranding, which can make the whole game feel somewhat liminal and uncanny valley, but boy, is Hideo Kojima GOOD at symbolism. Death Stranding is less understood, but felt.

Everything is a symbol, layered several times over. Beaches are boundaries between land and sea. The ubiquitous horizon is a boundary between land and sky. Many things in the world are caught between life and death in some way, shape or form. There is just so much BETWEEN.

Strands are everywhere. A line drawn from one place to another. A rope. Some kind of connection. A black vertical line in the sky. A zipline. An umbilical cord.

Pick any symbol deemed important to the game and you’d find so much to write about that it could fuel several dozen literature essays. Probably already has. Death. Time. Aging. Sticks. Strands. Fetuses. Hearts. Tar. Beaches. Extinction. The list goes on and on.

But no, today’s post is about something far more prosaic.

It’s about Death Stranding managing to teach someone like me about inventory management – a skill rather directly transferrable to other games and maybe even to real life.

I am terrible at this. Learning how to organize is a skill I’ve only been cultivating since adulthood and the advent of the internet for personalized tips and ideas that are less ordinary than the typical minimalist declutter everything hide-it-all in closed organizing solutions found in most books.

One was never really taught. One of my parents has distinctive hoarder tendencies and never throws away anything, and the other usually too busy dealing with their partner’s messes to worry about actively teaching me how to deal with these things. I mostly learned through negative example that I should neither be keeping things forever in large dirty rusting unsorted heaps that would accumulate dust, pests or mold nor should I be over reacting and throwing -everything- in sight away or piling it sight unseen behind closed doors and drawers to deal with at some later date that never comes.

It’s something much easier said than done. My default tendency is to defer and delay decision making about things, especially when one doesn’t have sufficient physical space to deal with various objects. The hoarder gene runs true, I guess.

Death Stranding, however, simplifies the process of decision-making and yet makes it abundantly clear that there are consequences for infrequent review of one’s things.

If you don’t go over what you really need and store the rest, you’re going to be carrying every single one of them on you during your next trek.

Are these things already used? They’re now junk. Recycle them.

Based on your next goal, what do you actually need to accomplish it? Going somewhere vertical?Should you bring a ladder or climbing anchor or two? Is it snowy or rough terrain, should you switch your exoskeleton to match?

Are you building something? Don’t forget your PCCs and materials to build the thing or you’ll be crying later out in the wilderness without something crucial.

Passing MULE territory? Better make sure you have a weapon to deal with them. Ditto BT territory, have you loaded up on enough hematic grenades?

There are formulaic answers for certain obstacles but it’s on you to ensure that they are brought before you leave and unnecessary things put away or junked in the recycler.

It’s not mean about it. For the hopeless hoarders among us, ie. me, there is the ultimate defer it stopgap of the private locker, to which I consign things I probably will never need in this playthrough…but just in case.

It does, however, make assessing one’s active inventory a simplified task of reviewing oh, maybe ten or fifteen items or so. Do I need this now? If yes, keep. If no, put away in private locker or junk if useless. Add whatever else that is immediately needed. Rinse and repeat at the next stop.

Simple. Manageable.

Good practice for graduating to something like this…

What people don’t tell you about Guild Wars 2 is that it can also be known as Bag Wars 2.

Inventory management in this game is something I regularly fail at. On the regular. Always. Forever.

There are never enough bag slots. The bank is jammed tight. Material storage gets full. It’s probably at least half designed that way on purpose, so that people feel a certain pressure to spend gems to solve the issue. I don’t really begrudge this, I also bought plenty of stash tabs in Path of Exile to stay sane.

But what happens when you max out your bank tabs, reached a certain limit of material storage slots that doesn’t seem smart enough to go further (there are only so many material types that one will logically exceed 1500 quantity in), are unwilling to buy too many extra bag slots off the gemstore at the prices they are selling for (especially when one has to pay even more gold to fill it in with a larger slot bag) and basically decide that further storage solutions should only bought when on sale and when one has the spare gems for it?

Clogged characters. That’s what.

Clogged characters lead to clogged gameplay. To start and stop awkward pauses after a meta when everyone else is running after a dozen chests, and you’re stuck on chest number 3, frantically depositing all and trying to salvage things piecemeal so that you can cram one more chest in. 8 more chests to go.

It’s likely 40% of the reason why I lost motivation and the will to play more GW2. People don’t like to pay RL money when they’re unhappy to begin with. Without gems going into some kind of slot purchase, it’s hard to begin the process of unclogging. Vicious cycle of unhappiness. Throw things away wholesale? The prospect sounds even more unhappiness-inducing.

The Janthir Wilds expansion was a helpful cycle disruptor. Picking up the Ultimate edition is a happy way for a sales hound like me to feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of a gem package. Normal expansion is $25 USD, Deluxe sans 4000 gems is $50 USD and Ultimate with 4000 gems is $75 USD.

4000 gems is essentially $50 USD, if just bought with RL money at any time. So Ultimate is basically picking up normal and the gems, but with a few more freebies like an additional character slot worth 800 gems and some other nice to have but not uber essential things.

Pair that with finally being online and semi-interested in GW2 during their August anniversary sales, means that I managed to catch storage slot ‘sales’ – not exactly steep discounts, just 20% off here and there, but better than nothing.

After waffling a ton, I bit the bullet on one more material storage expander since it was on sale. I honestly don’t think it’s necessary to exceed 1500 (I thought that way about 1000 too, once upon a time). The reasoning went, it currently costs less than $10 USD and that is probably worth the peace of mind in being able to shove more things in mat storage.

A rather surprising number of slots on my main opened up after that, easily around ten of ’em. So maybe I was wrong. Anyway, decision deferred about quite a number of those things that slid easily into storage until they fill again.

For me, 170 out of 218 is already pretty good. 48 slots for random junk to come in and get sorted and processed every now and then is great.

The plan for the extra character slot was like all other free slots I’d picked up over the years from expansions: extra storage mule space. It’s the cheapest source of slots for one’s buck and comes with bonuses like birthday gifts and expanded alt parking capabilities.

The plan didn’t quite survive contact with the actual character. Faced with 80 nearly empty slots, it was easy to transit her to the role of unidentified gear opener and give her artificier to be able to compress all those lucks that result. My prior unidentified gear opener lacked that crafting specialisation, so that smoothed out my current process of salvaging gear quite a bit.

The best news was that bank tabs were getting their max limit increased and were on sale. I picked up the two I was missing and got a big boost of white space instantly.

And now for the hard part.

I know the theory now. Look at each item individually. Figure out what it is. Wiki if you don’t know. Try to remember what plans you had for it. Bank it if you still want it someday. Keep it if it’s useful for the character. Use up stuff that’s not super important. Trash things that are decidedly not that crucial to keep.

With legendaries, I’m getting better about hanging on to free skins, just in case I might want to transmute them someday. Legendary transmutes are free. I do WvW now and again, so have plenty of transmutation charges for ascended gear. So they can actually go, regardless of how pretty they look – the wardrobe access is always there.

I have a weakness about certain ascended and exotic items that are marked unique or from story or seasons though. They’re sentimental in some fashion. It’s hard to salvage those. The solution, really, since I have plenty of characters, is to transfer them off actively played characters and on to more ‘display’ storage mules. That’s a work in progress.

Hell, most of GW2 inventory management is a work in progress.

I got my two most actively played ‘mains’ decently cleared, to the tune of a few dozen empty slots. Enough to run around metas and accumulate chests and loot without pausing. A week or two later roaming Janthir, they’re getting cluttered again.

But at least I have a tiny bit more breathing room now.

144 out of 218 is pretty darned insane for me. Can things be improved further? Of course. It just depends how much time and effort I want to spend on it. But I can actually move around on these characters without feeling clogged now.

Is there a moral to this story? Anet should have more storage slot sales, that’s what. If they want people having the mental bandwidth to play their game without drowning in stuff and choking.

And I suppose I should keep working at cleaning things out and actually doing some of the stuff I was saving all this junk for.

#JustOnePercent – The Easy Way Out, aka I’m Done

Posted in General, PC Games2 Comments

Krikket’s got a cool challenge up on her blog recently, fueled by a grumpy bitter tweet about too much damn content on the interwebs (aka too many indie games on Steam.)

We’re challenged to go and try 1% of 10,000 new indie games in a year. That’s a “mere” 100 games a year, says Krikket.

Eesh, says I. That sounds scary. Terrifying in terms of time and monetary consumption. That’s trying a new game every 3-4 days for 365 days.

Me, I can’t even keep a monthly habit or completion project going before my “oooh shiny” ways will have me meandering off to something else. A yearly commitment seems bonkers.

But hey, if someone else can do it, hurrah! Because downer people who say things like:

No. Nobody does. If you tried, you would surrender in despair within a month.

with absolute certainty need to be shown up. Just to prove that not everybody is like how they think the world is. Depressing.

If you make it, they will come. Possibly not as many as you expected, but some will. Why not do it for them? Since you wanted to make it for yourself to begin with, I’m presuming. Anybody else is a bonus. And some will like it. There’s lots of people in this world. You won’t reach all of them. But you will hit a few.

Gee, kinda sounds like blogging, doesn’t it? Or any kind of creative act, really.

Speaking of which, the personal update is that the air conditioner is temporarily fixed – in that the repair people pumped it full of coolant, and it’s anybody’s guess as to when it will run out. Could be weeks or months. Keep fingers crossed, I suppose. Leak identification would take a lot more work and time that we’re not up for right now, so that’s a “later” plan.

Bad news is, I’m really out of the blogging habit, so I’m unlikely to post as frequently either. The good news is that I have been playing games. All the games! And reading books. And still hooked on the Wandering Inn (so much for me thinking LitRPG was weird.) And watching all the Youtube videos (Cats! Food! Coffee! Games!). And Netflix (Arcane, whee!) And Amazon Prime (The Legend of Vox Machina!)

The current Jan 2022 obsessions are Minecraft: Oceanblock and Dark Souls Remastered on Switch, with a hopeful soon(TM) side of Monster Hunter because I suddenly am craving to hit things with a longsword/katana. Plus some miscellaneous tapas game trials on the side.

I was procrastinating on blogging so badly that my 2021 retrospective got put off since the beginning of the year. Till now.

Because Krikket’s challenge has suddenly provided the perfect format and sufficient impetus to beat the list of games and played time durations from ManicTime into submission, and get them in some semblance of order.

We won’t be talking any impressions of the games I played on this post. Mostly because it’ll take too long for me to write and no one will read it in the end.

Instead, I thought, why don’t I actually try to figure out which of the games I played last year were “indie” and count how many of them are there?

Maybe I’d hit a healthy amount (obviously not 100, but maybe half, two thirds?) of indie games taste tested last year, without actually trying? Enough to say, hey, not really trying for the challenge here, but I do play a healthy amount of indie games, so there?!

Caveat: There is this following deviation from the challenge. They are not all “new release” games. I am a patient gamer. I do not understand this “new release” phrase. I am also cheap and miserly.

Instead, I buy a shitton of games on sale and bundled, many of them indie, and play them at my own time, pace and choosing. So they may not be 2021 new releases, but many are “new” to me. Even if they are three or more years old.

I am part of the long tail, and if you are a game developer, you will just have to deal. I do have 2015 (no, not a typo – I guess I’m going to exceed the current year in games this year) games in my Steam library right now, so it’s not like I’m -not- supporting indie games here. Not as much as you’d hope to earn, perhaps, but well, supply and demand. It is very much a gamer’s market right now. And my wallet is far from limitless.

The glut in indie games may not be great for individual game developer profit, I’ll grant. But hey, the point is that if -some-* people want to keep making them, -some-* people will play them.

* exact numbers of -some- may vary

So, let’s have a look at what I was up to last year:

“Indie” was defined completely non-scientifically by typing in “is (Game Name) indie” and seeing if the first page of hits contained:

  • Someone else (e.g. a reviewer or journalist or Wikipedia) calling it an indie game
  • An “indie” or “independent” adjective attached to the name of the studio that developed the game in some website description or other

Also, if the game was made by one person, I shoved it into indie by default, usually without bothering to Google it further.

“New” means it’s new to me that year. It’s the first time I played the game. It ranges from 30min taste-testing to ooh, new shiny, suddenly obsessed for months.

“Revisited” means a game I’ve played before and suddenly feel like revisiting. Could be nostalgia or just checking it out briefly, stopped halfway through and giving it another go, or another full playthrough or run, endless games, that sort of thing.

I did still end up with some hair-pulling regarding borderline or questionably “indie” cases.

The obvious example is Minecraft. It -used- to be indie, starting out with one developer, before more glommed on and everything blew up in popularity to the point where Microsoft buys the game and takes over, at which point we can quite confidently say, it’s not indie any longer. But then, if you’re mostly still playing with the Java version and fan-created modpacks, that’s pretty durned indie-style gameplay, isn’t it?

Then there’s Klei Entertainment, which -was- an indie video game developer from Canada… Then Don’t Starve took it into the limelight, with a whole bunch of other games following, until now they’re owned by Tencent, which is about as big corporation as it gets.

But then you have Hot Lava, the passion project of a single person, before he was hired by Klei and given support to take it further. Surely that’s pretty damn indie. (Google agrees, by the way, since it is tagged “indie game” in its Genre classification.)

Cooking Tycoons 2 is a cheesy casual mobile-ish cooking game that I picked up on the Switch Store at steep discount, because I’m a sucker for simplistic cooking games with pretty food pictures. For all intents and purposes, it certainly feels like an indie game – it’s simple, casual, focused on one main gameplay schtick. It’s certainly not mainstream triple AAA open world. But my first page Google definition lacks any description of it as indie, nor do the developers call themselves an indie studio, so…. guess they’re not? Or they don’t want to be associated with the word?

Cook, Serve, Delicious 3 is another hair-puller. The first game is unquestionably indie. Then it blew up. And the studio got bigger. But it’s still fronted by creator David “chubigans” Galindo and it’s still technically a small team and independent studio. But it fails my front page “is it indie” Google test. But Steam still tags it as in the indie genre. Oh, I am so confused. Maybe? Probably?

For sheer entertainment value, try “is death stranding indie” and go down the Google rabbit hole for that one. Ha.

In fairness, mostly due to its ridiculous production values and open world map, mainstream buzz and Sony backing, I’ll say “no” for this count. For pure auteurness of concept and unique vision, I’d personally say “yep” but y’know, let’s be fair to the single person created games for this post. There’s no way they’re on the same level.

Yea well. Whatever. Ultimately, define your own “indie”; it probably doesn’t match mine.

Final results, if I tallied this up correctly, is about 75 green “definitely indie” games + 10 orange “kinda sorta indie” games.

Plus minus a handful for “do you call this indie or not.”

For a grand total of 85 games last year that I have time-tracking for (not inclusive of a few console games that I don’t, but certainly remember playing and can approximate how long it took).

In addition, I bought these 16 Choice of Games text adventure games on Steam last year (so sayeth the Steam purchase records). I play them on iPad though, after getting them registered to my CoG account, so time-tracking is a little iffy on that front.

All of them were at least played through to the demo chapters for sure, since that’s how I judge whether they’re worth buying. In brackets is what I vaguely recall of my progress through the games.

  • Wayhaven Chronicles: Book One (Completed)
  • Wayhaven Chronicles: Book Two (Midway)
  • Fallen Hero: Rebirth (Completed)
  • Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale (Midway)
  • Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven (Midway)
  • Evertree Inn (Demo)
  • Sordwin: The Evertree Saga (Demo)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road (Completed – Multiple Times)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Out for Blood (Midway)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Parliament of Knives (Completed)
  • Werewolves: Haven Rising (Completed)
  • Werewolves 2: Pack Mentality (Completed)
  • Wraiths of SENTINEL (Completed)
  • Keeper of the Sun and Moon (Completed)
  • Keeper of the Day and Night (Demo)
  • Ironheart (Midway)

And in 2022, I picked up Pyre, Silicon Dreams, Liberated, Griftlands and Inscryption. All five of which are kinda indie.

Of which, I’ve finished Pyre, and played the demo of Silicon Dreams and gotten a little further past the demo bit of Inscryption.

Liberated and Griftlands still in queue for now, so I guess I can add 3 to the final count.

That makes 104 indie-ish games from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022 – 13 months or so.

*ahem* Thankyouthankyou.

No challenge or scary time commitment needed. This is apparently just how I game.

P.S. If you want me to play 100 “new release” games, ‘cos this is cheating, please buy them for me. #broke

Thermal Management Challenge aka Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Lately

Posted in General, No Man's SkyTagged , , , , , 1 Comment

Regular readers (all ten of them? am I being optimistic?) might have noticed a sudden textual silence from this tiny corner of the interwebs.

The family and I are *crosses fingers* still doing fine, still sheltering from the pandemic, still getting needles in arms as soon as we can get them, and hope to stay that way, god(s) and fate and whatever-you-believe-in willing.

No, the main trouble has been the lack of regular maintenance causing random things to fall apart around the house and a general reluctance to invite in outsider repairmen to breach the Covid “bubble” unless it’s a true emergency.

Especially since our local government has been leaning towards the more laissez-faire end of the scale lately to bolster those who have been suffering economically and mental health-wise. Which is all very well and understandable, but our personal situation is that we’ve more potentially vulnerable persons in our household than average, so we’re being more careful than most. So it goes.

One of the latest machine casualties has been the air conditioner in the room housing my PC.

This has been tragic from a temperature management standpoint.

The local outdoors temperature is a toasty average 30-32°C (86-90°F) most days. Humidity runs in the 60s-90s. The equatorial sun blazes down on surrounding concrete walls, which then cheerfully radiate excess heat into the night time hours, causing descriptions of weather and environment to veer away from lovely phrases like “pleasant and balmy” and into “sweltering muggy swamp” territory.

Now, I know that in theory, PCs ought to be able to manage just fine at 60°C and below. For all my fretting, PC temps have only been hovering at 40-59°C regardless… Still, it’s about 10 degrees higher than it normally runs, when in an actually climate-controlled, air-conditioned room. And my PC is seven years old and not getting any younger. AND I need this PC for work-from-home purposes.

NOT TO MENTION, THE AMOUNT OF HEAT GENERATED BY A 49″ MONITOR PLUS A CPU RUNNING AT 42°C AND A GPU RUNNING AT 59°C TURNS THE ROOM FROM “REASONABLY BEARABLE, WITH A FAN DIRECTLY AIMED AT OCCUPANTS” INTO “SAUNA, DO NOT PASS GO.”

Suffice to say, it has been a lot more comfortable for both peace of mind and peace of body to have the PC on, only when needed, for a couple hours at most, preferably at night when ambient temperature drops a few degrees, and not running anything graphically intensive.

I’m sure we’ll eventually get a repairman in, preferably when more family members have been boostered up, but eh, this recent omicron variant news hasn’t done anyone any favors. So it goes. More weeks of this.

The good news is that this has induced some variety into one’s leisure/gaming habits. The portability of the Nintendo Switch and iPad means the ability to retreat to cooler areas of the home, even rooms where the last air conditioners are still functioning (and being conserved like a precious resource.)

Library ebooks are a thing. Youtube on a smart TV is a decent substitute for what usually is playing on one side of the screen while I game on another.

I even got the old Playstation 4 running (last played, 2018) and realized that I might actually get to enjoy some games I’ve been putting off for ages, like Death Stranding. The original hope was to play them in PC form, on a a brand new spankin’ PC, but well, graphics chip shortage and all, we know how those kind of plans have gone this past year. A PS4 version of Death Stranding now… isn’t that old news? And aren’t old games discounted?!

We’ll see. I found a pretty amazing deal from a local online platform this last Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, from a vendor that kinda looks legit (as in, officially from the Sony Store), but it did literally say “one copy remaining.” So all manner of things could go wrong, from “oh, we didn’t mean to post it at that price” to “we’re out of stock and can’t find that last copy” to “there is a copy, but the disc is scratched and we can’t replace it so here, have a refund instead.” At which point, I’ll be back to square one on a lack of Death Stranding, but eh, there’s always another sale and another discount. Especially with December on the way.

The one exception to the “let’s not stress the poor, aging PC” rule has been a quick three day push for No Man’s Sky, Expedition 1 Redux.

I bought NMS at the start of November, having a sudden whimsical impulse to fly around in a spaceship sight-seeing and resource-harvesting. It fulfilled that impulse quite respectably. I was making slow and steady progress, 1-2 hours on sporadic cooler nights, before sweat pouring from my brow encouraged me to retreat and let the PC dissipate heat somewhere where I wasn’t.

The most monochromatic planet I’ve seen… so far

Then at the end of November, came the announcement that No Man Sky’s was re-releasing something called Expeditions, for those that missed them. Seeing as I’d only joined this spacefaring cohort at the beginning of the month, I’d definitely missed those.

A brief read suggested that they were basically seasonal special content, where you could unlock rewards. Ah. We’re quite familiar with those. We play GW2, Warframe, Path of Exile and a whole lot of other games with that kind of thing.

These Redux Expeditions were on a two-week time interval, which, to be honest, is my favorite time scale for such seasonal content. Just short enough to kick you in the butt and conquer procrastination and not overstay their welcome, and long enough to not stress out too much if you can’t play for a couple days. As long as all the goals and milestones are scaled for most people to reasonably complete in a week of normal play, then with one extra week’s worth of leeway, it’s Goldilocks just right for me.

Fortunately, the goals for this expedition 1 redux were indeed scaled just right. It felt fairly similar to GW2 achievement tab chasing. Go for easy unlocks on day 1, plan the next sequence of actions to unlock more moderate goals over the subsequent days, clean up on the hardest goals at the end. All in, I got it done in 3-4 days of relatively more hardcore, obsessed play (albeit with periods of surrender to let the PC cool down when it crashed on contact with freighter battles, et. al.)

Huzzah, achievement get!

I’m not 100% convinced that this is a fun way to play No Man’s Sky – I preferred the more relaxed solo pace I was playing at – but I did get a sort of accelerated overview to aspects of No Man’s Sky I hadn’t yet come across in my solo game.

Unlike Aywren, I’m not especially impressed by the intrusion of other players into my peaceful little corner of the galaxy. Particularly when their naming conventions are things like “DarthKiddo’s Planet” and “HA I RENAMED THIS FIRST SO YOU CAN’T.” They make the garbled syllables generated by the base game look good. I’ll take Geistc XVII any day.

Everyone starts at the same point in an expedition game. The starting planet was an Icebound Planet called Keignto Anzai. It sounds fun in theory, have all players begin in a shared space, but y’know, you get the MMO problem, players who don’t know how to roleplay (aka ALL OF THEM) break immersion (in the lore, headcannon sense of the word.)

Then again, when everyone’s starting planet contains interesting fauna like this hopping around… why bother?

I did eventually jump through a black hole, which tossed me some 1 million light years away in goodness-knows-what direction, and a couple more random hyperspace jumps brought me to some pristine undiscovered systems that no one had ventured to yet. There, I got the rest of my goals done in peace and quiet, and set up some tiny bases to bookmark the area, only venturing back to the more littered lands for the Rendezvous Point goals (and boy, were they littered with communication stations, whose only purpose was to state XYZPERSON WAS HERE.)

I’m a little bit nervous to pop back into my solo game now, since installing some patch for Win 7 systems that allowed No Man’s Sky to connect to their discovery servers and get the expedition running. Will my previous systems still be there and untouched, or will I discover to my horror that someone else has been to this part of town and named them all some kind of verbal graffiti? There’s always getting into my spaceship and flying off someplace else, but I’m not sure I can take the dismay. We’ll see.

The PC is always threatening to overheat and there’s always a lot of non-PC things I could be doing instead – especially since I went a bit crazy this Black Friday topping up on discounted iPad, Switch and PS4 games. I can always put it off for later.

Now I Know Why Everyone Spends So Many Hours in Valheim

Posted in PC GamesTagged , , 2 Comments

69 hours later, day 156 or thereabouts:

Moder is down, the blast furnace, windmill and spinning wheel is up, what’s left is dealing with the plains, sniping and kiting the Fuling villages, maybe Yagluth. Possibly a lot of repeating iron and silver runs.

Runs. *sighs*

I have a feeling that a good half of those hours were spent on travel time.

That’s my main pet peeve with Valheim, besides the resource and boss hp grind that feels balanced for multiplayer over singleplayer: the ridiculous amount of time one spends traveling anywhere – either running in start and stop bursts, or sailing, which is fun for the first couple minutes, and then shortly turns into zoning out while blasting Youtube tunes (bonus points if it’s Viking-related music.)

At first, one has no portals, so besides naked smiting boars and deer, one has to run everywhere in a sea of unchanging green. Meadows, Forest, Meadows, Forest, Forest, Meadows. Back and forth. Getting stuck on various bits of scenery along the way. Barely any resource variation, maybe some mushrooms or berries if you get really really lucky.

Don’t even get me started on this useless piece of wood.

I had thought to sail around the continent on my way back home, when it became patently clear I would travel faster running. Especially with a bit of Eikthyr boost.

You can see how far I got exactly in the southwest space – the raft was built at Camp West Shore, and the southmost landmark should tell you all you need to know.

Then you get portals, and before you can get portals, you need to spend time running TO burial chambers (replace with Surtling Spouts once you hit the swamps), running FROM burial chambers, running TO get fine wood, running BACK to base to build one, then finally, running TO the spot you want to set up the portal, in the hopes of finally eliminating the former repeat loops.

The Meadows and Black Forests were especially bad because there was little reason to invest in significant infrastructure. Once you clear out a burial chamber, why would you want to travel back to that locale? Why spend time clear a road through it? Running is more efficient, but boy, is there a lot of running, just to and from different places.

Death recovery runs were the worst.

My first Swamp seeking attempt nearly broke me.

See the tiny amount of Swamp on the left hand side of the map? I backed off a respectable amount of distance to set up an outpost with bed – because I’m not an idiot and wasn’t going to run into the Swamp without some nearby insurance.

Alas, night fell, Greydwarves were everywhere, they pulled two Draugr in the midst of me trying to set up the outpost and long story short, I died. Flat Meadow Camp was the previous camp spawn.

There were a LOT of naked runs and deaths by various sources – greydwarves, the pulled draugr, a boar I didn’t see, while I struggled with the Take All UI.

I ended up leapfrogging a series of THREE outposts along the coastline just to get the initial foray into the Swamp outpost built. (Shortly after, I discovered that Swamp biome was a thin strip of nothing. The real Swamp was on the continent directly opposite. Sheesh.)

Eventually I figured out that whole “night” thing, and learned to build two points of insurance – one at continent landing, one nearer to final destination, and yes PORTALS, to make the whole process less onerous. But at the former point, Surtling Cores still had to be saved for the first smelter and kiln, alas.

Ah yes, the Swamps.

Surprisingly, I liked the swamps. I might have scored a lucky seed (Yggdrasil – naturally), but the one I ended up settling on had 5 crypts. Travel through them was more engaging, because there’s at least varied danger. With 5 crypts and all that slowdown from wading through water, there is more motivation and reason for me to invest time building a short straight bridge to at least the center of the five crypts, in order to make the run back and forth a little less annoying.

But yes, there were still a LOT of runs back and forth.

Sea travel on a Karve or Longship is about the most enjoyable type of travel there is, but it gets tedious after the first couple of minutes and realizing via the map that there’s still three quarters of the journey to go.

You know the sail speed is too slow when you’ve cycled through a bunch of Stupendium songs on repeat loop and still haven’t gotten to your destination. (It’s also ridiculously ironic when you run through three plays of The Data Stream, a Cyberpunk 2077 song, just to make the Viking commute more interesting.)

Would it have killed Valheim to amp up the travel speed by about double?

(Yes, I bring portal mats to set up a portal on landing. I don’t think I could maintain sanity otherwise. Once one-way is enough. And a return trip for ore, if really reaaally necessary. There are a ridiculous number of Karves littered around the place on my map, as I would much rather build a new Karve than sail one back and go again. Alas, it still means running somewhere for Fine Wood.)

I stayed in Troll Hide armor for ages and only switched to Wolf and Padded when it became obvious the armor I was losing out on was about double the number, and I -still- find it slow going.

Maybe mods will eventually smooth this out.

I never found traveling in Minecraft that boring, even though the speed is slow, probably because there are so many varied biomes and resources and potentially useful stuff to collect and hoard (once you mod it with something like Biomes of Plenty and Pam’s Harvestcraft).

The issue with Early Access Valheim for now is that useful resources are few and far between. You run huge distances to collect thistle and berries. You run for eons to find un-regenable Birch and Oak for fine wood. Burial Chambers and Crypts and Silver Veins are sparse and spread out.

This is all very well for a logistics game of either shipping a collated amount of resources or processing the stuff at the source, but then the logistics game should be a little exciting and have some obstacles – like in the swamps with water and enemies. Not just running slowly through heaps of pretty but effectively barren space.

Either fix the slow or fix the barren. I think I could cope with one or the other, but both together is not okay.

So, is there anything I like about Valheim?

Besides the admittedly masterful use of lighting and color to create a wonderful aesthetic, I think they’ve hit upon something interesting with the building system.

It’s slightly less finicky than ARK, approximating more of that easy-to-stack-and-build structure of blocky Minecraft and its ilk. The anchoring to the ground and gravity stuff helps to encourage building in logical, structured patterns, while still allowing room for some loose ridiculousness here and there.

Well, how else was I supposed to get Gunk off this tree?!

The screenshots of other peoples’ builds are, as usual, far surpassing anything I could ever dream of building. This is not a new thing. Been that way since Minecraft.

It’ll be nice if mods eventually get some of those player-built structures into our own worlds, similar to how modded Minecraft has player-built structures.

It’ll cut down on the boring sameness of running everywhere with nothing interesting in between.

Kill It With Fire: It’s The Only Way To Be Sure

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For anyone who has picked up this July’s Humble Choice bundle, the virtual spider-destroying game Kill It With Fire has proven to be quite a delightful little palate cleanser in between longer, more serious games.

It’s taken me around 5 hours to complete the game from start to finish, all achievements included, so anyone less completionist can probably get by with less play time.

True arachnophobes may or may not want to apply – the simulated spiders are not photorealistic and quite polygonal with pixelated green blood, so may or may not be tolerable to different individuals – but for anyone else that may have dreamed of taking a flamethrower to some creepy crawly critters, Kill It With Fire is a humorous catharsis.

Your goal: Kill spiders.

Since it’s all virtual, collateral damage is perfectly acceptable.

This is shortly pushed to delightful absurdity, but hey, when you’ve got a radioactive spider in a waste basket, firing an RPG into it is a perfectly justifiable reaction.

Or laying out cheese puffs as bait, which the spiders are somehow attracted to, so that you can pick them off with your six shooter.

Yes, the bathroom had undergone a preliminary cleansing with hairspray and a lighter, but there were a few more. There are always more of ’em.

Why yes, that is some C4 in the laundry room and my shotgun pointed right at it. See that black spot on the washing machine? That has to die.

There are around ten-ish short mission maps that build up towards some hints at how the whole situation came to be, a bunch of challenge objectives and a bundle of unlocks that serve as direction and goals. But really, it’s just an excuse to smack spiders satisfyingly.

Fun as a quick change of pace in between longer games.