The More You Don't Know...

Here's a problem I have with blogging. It's quite specific to me, I think, but do please chime in if it affects you, too. 

I seem to play quite a lot of games no-one else in the blogosphere is playing at the moment. Sometimes it seems like I'm playing games hardly anyone else is playing. If they are, they certainly aren't writing about them. 

Quite often, they're new games. They're likely to be either MMORPGs or, increasingly these days, the plethora of survival/MMO/cosy hybrids that seem to be popping up all over. It reminds me of the WoW clone era, except it seems to be going a lot better, so far.

The games that make it are no trouble to post about. Palia, for example, despite a bit of side-eye for perhaps opening its doors to the world before it was fully prepared, has generally been well-received. Lots of people tried it, plenty are still playing and some of them are writing about their experiences. 

There are also plenty of guides to Palia. If I was writing a post and wanted to look something up or fact-check it before I hit publish, there'd be no problem. 

Well, actually, there might. That's down to the way I like to play my games. I straddle an uncomfortable fence between not wanting to spoil my own fun and not wanting to waste more time than I have to, which means I tend to try and work out how to do things on my own before looking them up, something I try to do only if and when I get stuck.

I find that works very well for me in terms of engagement and immersion. One of the big reasons I play so many new games isn't that I have a butterfly mind and can't settle anywhere; it's that a huge part of the fun for me is uncovering and understanding the systems and mechanics that make the games work. 

I kind of think there has to be a way to cook more than one sausage at a time but if so, I just don't know what it is.

It's all part of being a primary Explorer archetype. I don't just want to explore new worlds, I want to explore new systems and processes and as something of an academic manqué I also want to compare and contrast what I find with what I've seen elsewhere and maybe even draw some conclusions.

All of which is fine, when I do in fact understand what's going on. Often, though, I really don't. I muddle along, making assumptions and playing the game as I understand it, all the time not realising my understanding is flawed. 

It wouldn't matter so much if I wasn't continually committing my mistaken impressions to print. It still doesn't matter a lot because almost no-one who reads them will ever know they were mistakes. They'll never play the games to find out for themselves I was wrong.

Nevertheless, I am conscious of the very slight chance that someone googling for information on a game that no-one else is talking about might end up here and leave with the mistaken belief they'd found a source of useful information.

To be fair to myself, some of it is useful. The bits where I've gotten it right, anyway. I don't do guides as a rule but I do include factual information in reviews and tell stories that have descriptions of how I got past obstacles that were preventing me making progress. Someone might find some of it helpful.

Not if it's plain wrong, though. That's just annoying. I've done it a few times myself, gone to some website that seemed very authorative and tried to follow the advice there only to find it didn't work, either because something in the game had changed since it was written or things had never worked that way in the first place.

I found this giant, stone ball you can roll around but I have no idea why you'd want to. Treat it as a metaphor for this entire post.

That's why I tend to caveat a lot of things I write with cautionary warnings about my ignorance.The least I can do if I'm aware what I'm saying may not be wholly accurate is to make that clear up front. Only, as I said, when it comes to games no-one else is playing or writing about, that's not always as easy as it should be. If you think you're right you're not going to think you might be wrong. Or say so.

It's been a particular problem with Noah's Heart, a game about which almost no-one seems to care but me. If you try to look up information about even the most obvious parts of the game, like which are the Phantoms you should be trying to five-star, an absolutely basic piece of data about any Gacha game, you'll be lucky to find anything at all. 

Only, naturally, I just did. In typical sod's law style, the last time I checked I couldn't find anything more recent than last November but today I found this guide, written on August 15. Honestly, reading it does not fill me with confidence about its accuracy but it's something, at least.

In general, though, I think my point holds. For smaller, less popular games, the information available is both harder to find and harder to trust when you do. 

Dawnlands isn't quite as obscure as Noah's Heart. There's a fair amount of traffic around the game. Almost all of it seems to come from the mobile side, though, and not surprisingly it's mainly in the form of videos on YouTube.

YouTube videos are really handy when you want to research something like how to handle a boss fight. It's easier to understand and copy tactics and strategies for something like that when you can watch someone doing it. When it comes to things like how to plant and grow cotton, though, watching someone doing it for a few minutes doesn't feel like the best use of your time. Especially when it comes with a rinky-dink backing track and no commentary.

That video I embedded above, however, while it doesn't really explain all that much, is immensely helpful in revealing some potential aspects of the building systems I wasn't even aware existed.

Maybe I haven't just reached that part yet but nothing in the game itself has introduced me to the concept of Blueprints or the Advanced building techniques. Not that I plan on going to the extremes this guy has but it's as well to be cognizant of the possibilities.

Even when the game does include instructions, I don't always follow them. I tamed my horse when I was told but I never made the hitching post to tie him up to because, as I said in an earlier post, all you have to do is press "Y" and he appears right beside you.

Yesterday I got an achievement for something or other and when I claimed my diamonds for doing it, I happened to notice that all I needed to round out the whole section was to make that hitching post. So I made it and discovered it's not just a decorative addition to your home, as I'd assumed, but the item that provides functionality for your Mount collection.

Clicking on the hitching post opens the Mount interface, where you can see the stats of your mounts, name them and swap between them. It also makes it clear, if only by implication, that mounts vary in speed and robustness, so I've been doing myself no favors by sticking loyally with the first one I happened upon. 

I feel an unreasoning loyalty towards mounts that have their own names. Naming them is almost always a mistake.

There are horses in each of the biomes so it seems logical that they'd improve in quality as the difficulty levels go up. Again, though, that's an assumption. If I state it here as a fact, I'm doing anyone who reads this a disservice. A quick Google on "Dawnlands mounts" brings up almost nothing of value so the only way I'm going to know for sure is to go tame a Plains horse for myself and compare it with my current Grasslands ride.

Once I've done that, if I write it up here in any kind of detail, as likely as not it will be the only account available. I mean, if there was another I wouldn't be doing it, would I? Whether whatever I say about it will be comprehensive or even correct is another matter. It'll tell anyone who reads it what I know about the topic but that may not be much.

For example, I thought I knew a fair bit about how the instant travel system works. I wrote about it in some detail in this post, where I also talk about mounts (And probably get most of that wrong, too.) Here's how I thought it worked:

 "As far as I can make out, there's a network of Teleport Beacons you can find and, if necessary, cleanse of corruption so you can move between them. The Teleport Beacons are very few and far between, which would be highly restrictive if it wasn't for the fact that you can also teleport to all kinds of other locations as well - any of the icons marked on the map, in fact, which in practical terms means just about everywhere. 

Unfortunately, teleporting to any of them requires a Teleportation Potion every time. The potion is consumed on use and the only place I've found them is on vendors in the Shelters. They're cheap but there's only one vendor in each village, each vendor only has five potions to sell and they're never restocked. If there's a recipe to craft them, I haven't found it yet."

Bits of that are correct but some extremely important aspects are flat-out wrong. For a start, you do not need Teleport potions to travel between Shelters, Activated Teleport Beacons or pretty much any of the large icons on the map that represent some kind of portal or special event. All of those are free and they have no cooldown, either, so free, instant map travel is widely available.

I'm not going to try to be any more specific because there may be limitations I don't know about. I really don't know exactly how it all works. What I do know is that The key thing to remember is that when you click on any icon on the map it will open a panel that tells you if you need a potion or not. If there's a Teleport button and no picture of a potion next to it, travel is free. How it took me so long to notice this is not a subject I wish to discuss.

My original plantation. It's three times the size now I know how to port to and fro for free.

This discovery, inevitably, made a huge difference to my gameplay. Before then, I'd been spending long periods riding between locations, often finding myself away from shelter at night and having to fight a lot of monsters I didn't want to be fighting. I'd been ruing the lack of craftable teleport gates like they have in Valheim, when in actuality the functionality was already baked into most of the locations where I needed it, especially my house and all the vendors I needed to visit.

Now I can just zap myself instantly between my home in the Grasslands Shelter and the vendor in the Plains Shelter to buy seeds as and when I need them, then back again to plant them in the garden I've laid out right down the main street. It makes life much easier.

(And just to prove the point, since I wrote this post I've learned yet another very significant fact about teleportation options, which will now have to wait for yet another post I'm planning... None of which would have happened if this had been a game everyone else was playing, because someone would have put me straight in the comments weeks ago.)

Another feature I know a little about but don't even begin to understand fully are trinkets and the tinkering station you can use to merge and change them. I've just been throwing stuff in and pressing the button like we used to do in the Mystic Forge in Guild Wars 2 and I've had a couple of succeses.

I got some goggles that mark the position of animals on the mini-map and an anchor that increases sailing speed but as this video, by the same YouTube creator, Kazeyo, shows, you can make a huge range of much better trinkets. 

The problem with the video is, it doesn't really explain very much about how to control the process beyond merge blue trinkets to get purple ones. If there's a way to control the outcome or get the effects you're after, it's not clear to me what it is.

This is just the kind of thing that could be explained more helpfully in a written guide. I'm not saying I'd want to write one but if I knew how the whole thing worked I could at least give a few examples from experience that might be of some help to somebody.

As must be clear, though, Dawnlands is a very complex game. They all bloody are! That's both the joy and the terror of it. I played Chimeraland for weeks and never really understood much of what I was doing. Noah's Heart is a lot less complex and I've played it for a year but I still don't feel confident to talk in detail aboout some of the systems it employs.

None of this is going to stop me writing about the games I play but I am going to have to keep adding warnings that even if it sounds as if I know what I'm talking about, I most probably don't. I'm more interested in keeping a record for myself about what I've done and trying to make it entertaining for anyone who happens to read it. Giving people useful tips on how to play the game comes a distant third.

And if anyone can tell me what good "Accurate Time-Telling" is on a trinket, I'd love to know. I've got two fob-watches that buff it and I have no idea what it even is.