Death Only Makes Me Stronger

I imagine most people have better things to do on the last weekend before Christmas than read several thousand words about a game they won't be able to play for years, so I'll keep this short. Well, short for me, anyway.

I only managed to make one of the two remaining Stars Reach tests this week and that only for about an hour, so I was more than a little surprised by how much progress I made. As I suspected, it does help if you come in with a goal in mind and stick to it instead of wandering around all over the map, doing the first thing that comes to hand.

Since I knew I didn't have long, I decided to try and craft myself something useful that I could use next time, when I might have longer to play. My first thought was some of those banana plasters I was talking about last time but I couldn't figure out what I needed. 

Thinking about it now, I imagine you probably need to go down the Botany line and buy the recipe there but what station you'd use to craft a plaster I have no idea. When I placed my camp I could only see two -  the Lathe and the Toolmaker. 

I could have sworn I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in someone else's camp in one of the earlier tests but now I think I must have imagined it. You probably just craft food and supplies through the general UI.

Shelving that plan, I moved on to the Instaformer. This is the thing you need to make to make the things you need to make to raise Civic Engineering, the skill you need to make houses. Need, make, need... Damn game in a nutshell.

I died so many times I became a ghost for good. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature.

I already knew I had two-thirds of the mats necessary: Tier 1 Metal and Gemstones. You need twenty of each and thanks to salt counting as a gemstone, I had plenty of both. 

The ingredient I was missing was Inert Gas, which drops inconveniently and in my opinion ludicrously from non-terran animals. Basically, if it looks like something you might see on a walk in the countryside, on a farm or in a zoo, it has a chance of dropping a canister of Reactive Gas when you kill it but if it looks like a six-year old child dreamt it up in the throes of a fever, it might drop canisters of Inert Gas instead.

I seriously hope this gets changed before the game goes before a live audience because it's very hard to justify on any level. For now, though, that's how it is so we have to deal with it.

It's not just the aesthetic I find objectionable, it's the gameplay implications too. As a player, I don't like the way crafting and construction are connected so directly to combat. When there's a functioning economy, players who enjoy the thrill of the chase will be able to handle the killing, while crafters and builders stay at home and buy the mats they need at market. Then it won't be a problem but for now, when player-to-player trading has barely been implemented in even the most basic fashion, if you want to craft you have to hunt.

And hunting is hard. Or, I should say, it's finicky. I've seen it described favorably as "arcade-like" but I just find it irritating. I'd far rather use a melee weapon than a ray-gun anyway so I'm already miffed before we get to the mechanics. I hope there will be melee options eventually.

Since there I had no choice but to use the gun, I upgraded my Omniblaster to fire three shots at once. That completely did for the Jackalopes but despite not being an actual, real-world animal (Shope papillomavirus doesn't count.) they didn't drop Inert Gas. Or maybe that was Jackrabbits. I know the one turns into the other but which I was killing I couldn't tell you.

Run, Catgirl, Run!

Luckily for me, right next to where I'd set up camp was a spawn of Ballhogs or whatever the floaty airbag critters are called. Unluckily for me, it was a really big spawn. Even more unluckily, Ballhogs seem to be a lot less susceptible to Omniblaster fire than Jackalopes.

To be fair, when I first started in on the Ballhogs I was buoyed by my success with the rabbits - and even they'd managed to kill me once. The Ballhogs killed me over and over again. 

That, however, was my plan.

On my first death it had occurred to me that, since I was able to respawn at my camp, mere meters away, it might be feasible to get my Inert Gas by way of suicide. It was taking me mere seconds to get back to collect my gravemarker and dying reset my health so it seemed like it might work. True, dying did also reduce my maximum hit points but I was curious to see how low that would take them and this seemed like a good way to find out.

I'd also spotted that loot, which you have to run over to collect, hangs around for a while, so as long as I could kill at least one Ballhog before I died, I'd be able to get back and pick up whatever it dropped before it disappeared. Neon was what I was after but it isn't a guaranteed drop. I had one already and the recipe asks for ten so I was estimating I'd need to kill fifteen or twenty Ballhogs to get what I needed.

Don't ask me how many I killed in the end. Don't ask me how many times I died, either. A lot is my best estimate for both. I can say that my maximum HP stopped going down somewhere around 50% of where I started. Stamina fell too but not so far.

I had a pattern going but there was an interruption to the routine when my camp timed out and vanished, meaning I respawned at the center of the zone instead. It took me a few more deaths and some annoyingly long corpse-runs runs before I figured out what had happened but once I'd re-made my camp things went back to normal.

I hope this is worth it.

On the majority of attempts, I failed to kill any Ballhogs at all. They freeze you and kill you while you're frozen, one of the worst pieces of design in any MMORPG. Everyone hates it. Most games that use it end up dropping it. 

I realise there's probably something you can craft to stop it happening but in my book any penalty that can be removed by applying a fix should never have been in the game to begin with. Gameplay that relies on returning something to a neutral state can never be either fun nor satisfying.

Sometimes, when I did kill a Ballhog, I either didn't get back in time to loot it or couldn't find the loot that had dropped. Other people were hunting the spawn so I don't know if they might have picked up my loot. I saw other players' loot lying around but I was too polite to go see if I could steal it. I guess I should at least have tested that once, at least. I keep forgetting I'm not playing a live game.

A few times I managed to get a bunch of Ballhogs dead in my sights and blast them with the triple-ray. That got me a few kills. One way or another, my Neon collection slowly built up and after I'd been at it for maybe half an hour I had the ten canisters I needed. I also had a canister of Helium, another Inert Gas, but if it's possible to mix-and-match them to make up the required total, I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Back at camp I opened up my Toolmaker, popped in my metal, gas and gems, pressed Craft and out popped my Instaformer. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself by then, even though I'd gone about the whole enterprise in the most primitive, brute-force way imaginable. 

I was looking forward to finding out what my new toy could do, when the server suddenly came down. I hadn't been watching the clock. The test was over.

Next time, whenever that is (After Christmas, presumably or maybe even after New Year.) I'll be ready to get to work on raising my Civil Engineering skill so I can start building myself some kind of shack. Always presuming there isn't a wipe, of course.

Please don't let there be a wipe. I'm not sure I could go through all that again.