Anyone Have A Really Big Can Of Tuna?

Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, what with all my talk about the busy summer of gaming ahead. Now it's here and I find myself with more to play than I have time for and no time at all to blog about it. Maybe not ideal with Blaugust coming up...

For example, I have about a gazillion things I want to say about Once Human, some of which I don't even think I've said already, but it would take hours to write them all up in the kind of detail they deserve and I'd really much rather just play the damn game. Which is just what I have been doing, to the extent of fifteen hours so far.

Full disclosure: at least half of that has been spent working on my beach house and most of the rest was foraging materials to build it. I have done a goodly amount of fighting along the way but only because pesky mobs keep jumping me when I'm exploring abandoned factories and shopping malls in search of plastic, beryllium crystals and the like.

I have at least managed to get far enough through the story to kill the first instanced boss, the Ravenous Hunter. I've done that fight at least four times since the first beta I was in and I'm happy to report it's much easier than it was at the begining. 

One of the unfortunate - or possibly fortunate, I'm not quite sure - side-effects of having done most of the early content in beta is that I know where everything is already so half the time I've been getting quests telling me to go explore places I've just come from. Luckily, the game is excellent at giving you credit when you do stuff out of sequence so it all works out the same in the end.

What I probably ought to be doing, if I was going to play the game properly, is concentrating on the current Season and the Scenario in progress, along with all the many attendant Events. There was a lttle of that in the betas I was in but now the game is Live there's one holy hell of a lot going on, way more than I can follow. We're already on Phase Two and I don't think I intentionally touched Phase One.

Once again, luckily for me, a fair bit of it seems to be filling itself in as I potter around doing whatever takes my fancy so I'm not entirely missing out. At some point, if and when I figure out how the whole thing works, I might try and write something about it but for now I'm quite happy to just let it all wash over me like weather.

One thing I can confirm is the number of people currently playing. When I logged in this morning there was an in-game mail waiting for me with some rewards attached in celebration of Once Human hitting a high-water mark of 300,000 players all logged in at the same time. The Steam charts show a Peak Concurrency of just over 231k so they would seem to have the bulk of the trade so far.

As I mentioned last time, there may be a lot of people playing but I hardly see any of them. It's weird. I definitely saw far more people running around in beta. I think that must be why I was able to snag the really excellent spot I picked to build my house. 

It's not just by the sea, it's on the beach. I've been spending most of my Memetics on building and crafting and yesterday I unlocked the one that gives you a much bigger plot of land so now I own most of the beachfront. I even have the tables, chairs and umbrellas that were already there, which add a lovely holiday touch to the property.

Building in Once Human is top class although getting parts to snap together can be a tad fiddly sometimes. It always works in the end but it can be frustrating in the moment. Still, that's part of the fun of these things, I always think. It gives you that spurious sense of achievement, when you get the parts to fit. Something you'd never have it all went perfectly every time.

I had to extend my home significantly because I have guests. Quite a few of them now. 

In beta, I never paid much attention to the Pet Collecting mini-game. I knew it was there but it didn't seem to have anything like the breadth and depth it does now. I do wonder if the incredible success of Palworld might not have something to do with the way it's grown. 

Whether that was the inspiration or not, I have to say I like Once Human's interpretation of the theme much better. It's simpler, more elegant and aesthetically much more stylish.

I had to build a whole wing onto my house just to find room for the containment facilities to hold the Deviations I'd collected. I have seven already. I had to spend a Memetic on increasing the number of display cases I could place from five to ten just to give them all somewhere to live. I suspect it won't be too long before I have to expand again. I think the maximum is twenty.

Among my collection I have several Deviations that can help me in combat, none of which I've used. At Level Ten I'm still happily slicing things up with the machete I got in the introduction. I wore it out and had to repair it. I don't believe you can craft another and I like it better than the baseball bat so it's just as well it can be fixed.

The time may come when I'm grateful to have a little buddy alongside me in a fight but for the moment I'm more interested in the ones that help around the house. 

There's one really useful one that absolutely everybody seems to have, a
Minecraftesque homunculus known as the Digby Boy. He trots about in the area around my house, bashing rocks with his tiny pick. Somehow he manages to get copper and tin out of them in considerable quantities. I've hardly had to go mining since I got him. Another, the Disco Ball, makes potions that extend the duration of Whims, which I'm sure will come in handy if I ever I get any.

My favorite so far, though, is the Extradimensional Cat, a cat the size of a carthorse, who wanders around your home being generally cute and cat-like, if also somewhat terrifying. You can pet him and pick him up and move him about but the best part comes when you go to sleep in your bed, something you need to do periodically for practical reasons. 

Once you lie down, the giant cat comes wandering in from wherever he was and curls up beside your bed. It's just as well he doesn't try to get on it with you because he's bigger than either you or the mattress! You do get a buff from him when you wake up but really they could have just gone with the animation and that would have been more than enough reward.

And that's where I'm going to stop because for once, I really would rather be playing than writing. Not just Once Human, either. I'm very much enjoying Solasta and I'm missing Wuthering Waves quite a bit since I haven't logged in for a couple of days. 

Nice problem to have, if you even can call it a problem...