Inspiration Point

I was completely adrift over what to post today. I still have a couple of music posts in mind but they need research and I had neither the time nor the inclination for that. Plus it's probably too soon after the last music post for another, anyway. 

I toyed with the idea of getting one or more of the AIs to do put something together but it's a bit of a myth that you can save time and effort by handing creative duties off to ChatGPT or Bard. They're good for raw material you can spin up into something interesting but it still takes a good deal of actual writing and editing to turn what they come out with into a coherent post.

I still hadn't thought of anything and it was getting late in the evening but I didn't want to skip two days in a row. Then I remembered that good old standby, the screenshot post. But screenshots of what?

Well...

Since I started playing Noah's Heart last summer, I've taken well over a thousand screenshots. I've taken some specifically to use in blog posts and back when I actually travelled around and did stuff in the world I took lots of photos of intersting or curious or beautiful scenes and places. I also take a screenshot of every new Phantom, when they drop, as well as loads of selfies of my character in her various new outfits as she gets them.

But I also take loads and loads of posed shots for a weekly quest called "Planet Traveler". You have to complete ten out of a possible thirteen activities to get the final reward. One activity is always a race. The others are always four sets of three: Inspiration Seeking, Collecting, Express Delivery and Tour. You can mix and match any ten from the four categories.

The names of the categories are reasonably self-explanatory although they can be a tad misleading the first time you see them. "Express Delivery" is exactly what it says; you take an item to an NPC somewhere in the world. The item automagically appears in your quest bag and you can usually teleport and autorun straight to the NPC, at which point the item is handed over equally automatically and you recieve a reward and a tick for that activity. 

Sometimes, the NPC is standing somewhere inaccessible, like the battlement of a castle or a suspension bridge over a ravine, and the autorun ai gives up and tells you to find your own way there. Even then, all I usually need to do is open the map, locate the nearest teleport pillar, port there and then run the last few hundred yards.

"Tour" isn't quite what you'd imagine. It does involve travel but the key element is taking a nap. Even that isn't quite what you might expect. When the instructions tell you to "Go to Gulf Stream City Bar Shelf and take a nap in Chair" it doesn't mean you actually have to sleep. You just need to find the chair and click on it to activate the sitting-in-chairs animation. That gets you the reward and the credit for completing the activity.

"Collecting" generally means either finding insects or animals or going fishing, all of which are specific mini-games. You can't autopath to the locations where these creatures are found but you can click on the request and have the map open and show you where they are. Once again, all you have to do is find the nearest teleport and then jog over to the spot.

Once you've caught your fish or your scorpions or your butterflies, you then have to deliver them to a specific NPC. That means that collecting requires double the effort of any of the other activities, which is why I tend to avoid it, unless I happen to have the collectable items in my bag already. If that happens, the game is smart enough to recognize it and skip straight to the next stage, which then effectively makes it the same activity as "Express Delivery".

The final activity "Inspiration Seeking", is my favorite and the reason I'm writing about Planet Traveler today at all. The way you're tasked with seeking inspiration is to visit some of the many designated "Scenery" locations, spots where a pop-up appears, asking if you want to take a photo for your album.

Again, autorun will take you to each of the three required inspirational settings, making this a very quick and easy option. It's also fun because the locations are - surprise, surprise - very picturesque and charming. There's no obligation to save the photos you take but I always do.

And those are the photos I've chosen to illustrate this post. Just a few of the dozens I've taken over the past few months. For these shots the player has no say over the pose or the lighting or the weather; the game sets them all and each location always uses the same pose.

In that way, my character has been caught over time, posing in the same places but wearing different outfits. It's going to make for a very nice record of my fashion journey when I eventually move on from the game, something there seems little chance of my doing any time soon.

And now, it seems, it also makes for a jolly little post when my own inspiration fails. Who knew "Inspiration Seeking" would turn out to be so well-named?