This Summer's Fashions Arrive Early

If it seems much too soon for another post on my latest outfit in Noah's Heart that's because it is. It's been barely two weeks since I last wrote about adding another outfit to my collection and all along I've been saying the fastest I could manage it was around once a month. So what happened?

Well, I didn't make any extra effort, that's for sure. I didn't grind or quest or play the game more than usual or any of those things. I also didn't get my credit card out and spend any real money. 

In-game money, though? Ah, now we're talking!

Like most modern mmorpgs, Noah's Heart has far more currencies than anyone can begin to care about, or should. Most of them I ignore although, as I've mentioned before, Noah's Heart has possibly the best-documented UI of any game I've ever played, so I can't pretend I couldn't immediately find out what every currency was for and where to get it and spend it if I wanted to.

Even if I don't go looking for them, there are certain currencies I can't seem to help piling up. One of those is the imaginatively named "Home Coin" which, among other things, autogenerates from owning and upgrading a house. You can spend it in the Home Store and at the merchants who regularly appear in various rooms around your demesne without invitation, just like they do in Chimeraland, although at least in Noah's Heart they stand demurely in a corner and don't sit preening themselves at your dressing-table or crash out on your bed.

Because I'm naturally frugal by inclination, I've never really bought all that much from these stores, preferring to hoard my imaginary coins while picturing myself rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck. A week or so back, though, for no particular reason, I found myself in a spending mood, so I bought every recipe the store had to offer.

One reason I'd never bothered before was that I didn't really know any use for food other than to give it to my Phantoms to try and make them like me better. Once I had several recipes to make the highest Affection food, worth three hundred points, there didn't seem much point having any more.

Shows what I know! When I looked at the foods I could now make with the recipes I'd bought, I discovered I already had huge stockpiles of the ingredients. They needed things I'd previously had little use for but also they used a wider range of mats for each dish but fewer of each individual item, meaning what I already had in stock suddenly went much farther.

Freed from any need to go foraging or slaughtering for a while, I took to using all my available energy every day to make the new dishes I then force-fed them to my chosen Phantom, Sanada. Fortunately, battle-hardened tribal warrior that she is, she has the digestive tract of a goat, so she loved it. And, increasingly, me as well.

That on its own still wouldn't have been enough to have me writing this post today. I'd fixed the hitch in the pipeline caused by running out of mats but I still had to deal with the bottleneck of my daily Energy allowance.

Until last night, when I happened to be browsing the game's many, many stores, I came across a fix for that. 

There are more than thirty storefronts accessible through the UI alone, not counting who knows how many attached to NPCs. The one I was looking at was called The Mall.

It's  one of the cash shops where you can spend both Ori-Crystals, the currency you buy with real money, but also several in-game currencies like Diamonds, Gold and Shells. I'd scanned the items on offer there, cursorily, a few times before but never with much attention. 

Mostly I go there to buy Seasoning, a cooking material I get through in prodigious quantities. It's almost the only thing I ever buy with my Diamonds but this time, as I was scrolling through the available stock, I noticed there were Ornate Gift Boxes on sale for 1000 Diamonds apiece. 

Ornate Gift Boxes are something I get very occasionally from a Home Merchant's lucky bag and once a week or so from the Planet Traveler mini-game. Inside the box there's an item worth a thousand Affection, the most you can get in one hit, so far as I'm aware.

As with most things in Noah's Heart, the Ornate Gift Boxes in The Mall come with a purchase limit but it's a very generous fifty a week. I only needed another thirty-nine thousand points of Affection to persuade Sanada to hand over her recipe. I checked my Diamonds. I had a hundred and ten thousand. So I bought forty Ornate Gift Boxes.

In the time it took me to open them and hand them over I had my new recipe. All I had to do was make it. I had all the mats but I was a little down on Energy. Fortunately, The Mall also sells Energy recovery in units of five-hundred at even weight for Diamonds. Another thousand Diamonds and I was ready to sew.

I wouldn't say this is a game-changer for me. It so happened I had a large stash of unspent Diamonds to hand but I have half that many now and they don't rain down like Gold (Of which I have in excess of eighty million coins and no clue what to do with them.) I'd have to make quite an effort to earn enough Diamonds to claim my permitted fifty Ornate Gift Boxes every week.

It does add another option to gameplay, though. With the new recipes and the ability to buy at least a few thousand more points of affection every week, I ought to be able to count on a new outfit every two to three weeks instead of every four or five.

Now I just need to work out whose affections to bribe my way into next. It's no longer the full signature appearance of a given Phantom I'm after, more the individual pieces I can put together to make some looks of my own. Not all Phantom outfits can be used as separates and those that can sometimes have other restrictions. Working out what will go with what takes research but it's fun to do.

In fact, it's arguably the most fun you can have in Noah's Heart. Certainly the most fun I'm having, anyway.