Like A Finger Pointing At The Sky

Playable Worlds surprised us this week with a post-Christmas weekend testing schedule for the Stars Reach pre-alpha that packed a potential sixteen hours of uptime into a couple of days. It came in the form of four, four-hour playtests, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. 

That's a much better set of options for me, equating to afternoon and late evening-early morning in the U.K. If it becomes a regular event, I ought to be able to get some serious hours in. 

Unfortunately, for this particular weekend, I already had commitments for most of the slots. I was working on Sunday, so that knocked out one whole afternoon and also meant I couldn't stay up late for the Saturday evening either, plus I had things already planned for Saturday before I found out the tests were happening.

Even so, I managed to get about three and a half hours in altogether. Once again things turned out to be fairly productive. Well, in the second session, anyway.

The first session, late on Saturday evening, was a bit of a bust although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. I logged in with the intention of working on my Civic Engineering so I could start building myself a home but I couldn't remember what I needed to do. It had been a while since last time and I'd comppletely forgotten everything I'd learned.

Next time: less mining, more building!

I spent a while reading the in-game guides but they weren't as helpful as I thought they would be. There's a lot of information there but it seems a little vague at times. mostly, I wanted to know what buttons to press and the guide didn't always want to tell me. Or possibly the information was there but I was too tired to take it in. It was past my bedtime, after all.

Either way, I couldn't find what I needed to know so I decided to go do some prospecting instead. It seemed like a good choice since I knew I was going to need a lot of mats, even if I wasn't sure which ones. Metal and stone seemed like a likely bet so I set off to look for some. I didn't get far.

Wherever it was that I'd logged out at the end of the previous test (I rarely remember.) it seemed to be positively infested with vicious killer wildlife. As soon as I'd dug a few holes, a pack of Owldeer galloped up and started jostling me. I believe Owldeer may have been made less aggressive than they used to be but they're still ready for a fight when they can find one so I had to go on the defensive.

I swapped to the electric arc gun, the Omniblaster, and started blasting away, all the while backpedalling, which seems to be the preferred method. I wasn't doing too well until a couple of the deer fell into one of the holes I'd dug and couldn't get out.

Can't Climb. Can't Jump. Can run a little.

This amused the hell out of me, I can tell you. It also opened up hilarious possibilities for future gameplay, something I fully intend to explore when I have the leisure. I happily electrocuted the trapped deer and looted the corpses. Then I picked off the rest of the herd from the safety of the far side of some more rough terrain, leading the creatures into holes whenever I could get them to go the right way.

That was fun. Since combat was going so well and I was feeling bloodthirsty, I abandoned my mining plans and set about murdering as much of the wildlife as I could. I wanted to try using the FPS-mode central reticule to see if it made things any easier, anyway, so I thought it seemed like a good time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to swap between the reticule and the cursor. It's Tab. Everything is Tab, as I know now. That was a bit of a game-changer for me. It only took me, what, half a dozen sessions and over six hours to figure it out, too! I'm fairly sure most people worked it out in a matter of minutes. I wish I had. It does make quite a difference.

Not to combat, though, or not for me, anyway. Once I'd swapped to the reticule, I didn't find it much of an improvement. I found it hard to tell the difference, in fact, so I swapped back to using the cursor, which at least had the benefit of familiarity.

After about half an hour of steady slaughter, I'd accrued enough Combat xp to buy everything that was left on the Combat tree. I already had most of it from all the fighting I'd been forced to do in earlier tests. Again, most of it hasn't improved things any so far.

That largely because most of what you get for your points are crafting recipes. A few options, like the triple-attack, take immediate effect but mostly they just give you recipes for things you have to make. And there it's the same old story: I never have quite the right mats.

Nighttime. Better get to bed. Sun'll be up in five minutes.

Realising that, I decided I'd had enough for that session. As I said, I was too tired to concentrate and I knew I had to be up early for work the next morning, so even though Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were asleep and the test had a couple more hours to run, I gave up and logged out.

The next night, Sunday, I was ready the moment the servers came up at 10pm my time. I logged in and the game crashed. I've had more crashes these past two tests than in the ones before Christmas but it was still only a handful and I was always able to get back in immediately, so not really much of a problem.

I wanted to go back to my original plan of getting to grips with the new Homesteading systems, which once again meant first reading the manual to try and remember what I was supposed to be doing. This time I had better luck, possibly because I was awake. 

I worked out, after some trial and error, that I needed specific, hard, rocky materials like Gneiss or Marble to make the blocks the Instaformer requires. Using the Instaformer is what gives you Civic Engineering xp but it's taken me all this time to figure out how to use it. 

I didn't have enough of any of the right rocks to make even a single block so it was off to the mines again. At least this time I knew what I was looking for. Sadly, I didn't know where to look for it.

My first thought was to go look in space because that's where I found all the good stuff before. Space, however, does not seem to be the go-to place for rock. I came away with a lot of metal and a few gems but none of the rocks I needed. On the positive side, I didn't run into a single space monster so it was quite peaceful while I was looking.

I don't know what it is but I don't like the look of it.

Back planetside, I decided just to wander around and keep my eyes open for anything that looked promising, like a cliff face or a big boulder. That has to be where the rocks are, doesn't it? Before I got started on that, though, I remembered that in a previous test I'd bought the option to survey the environment for minerals. That sounded like just what I needed. Might as well give it a try.

It turned out to be avery good decision, if not at all in the way I'd imagined. Trying to figure out how to use mt surveying and assessing skills led to a series of discoveries that, frankly, I should have made back in the second or third test. Things that are pretty much essential for playing the game buit which I've been doing without this whole time.

For example, anyone who's been reading Wilhelm's Stars Reach write-ups will have noticed he regularly talks about people freezing stuff or setting it on fire. I have been wondering how to do that ever since I started. Well, now I know.

I'm not going to tell you though because if you're in the test program you already know (I have to be the last person there to work it out, surely...) and if you're not it would just be a bunch of meaningless, technical detail. The important part is that I can now freeze lakes and set forests on fire along with the rest of them and boy, is it fun! No wonder people keep on doing it.

I can also turn back time, allegedly, although I think a couple of pages in the manual might have been stuck together when I read it. When I point the Suitcase Bomb (Not the actual name.) at a patch of land, the ground turns into lava and bubbles, then mostly cools down into the same thing it was before. 

Wouldn't want to be the guy who lives at the bottom of the hill.

I thought it was supposed to turn into something else. I expect I'm doing it wrong. Once again, though, it's such fun to do, I don't really care. This game is made for vandals and nihilists as much as it is for creators and collectivists, as far as I can tell. There are going to be some sparks flying between the two camps when it gets into the hands of players more interested in making either mischief or their mark than the current crop of testers, I'm fairly sure of that.

If this report sounds random and chaotic, it's because that's what the whole of my near-two-hour session was like. I kept discovering new things the tools could do, trying them out, finding out it was spectacularly destructive and carrying on just for the hell of it. 

I did so much Prospecting (Aka destroying the environment.) I earned more than enough points to fill out the entire Mineralogy Tree. I hugely increased the size of my Hopper (Don't. Please. We're all adults here.) as well as the yeild and the efficiency with which rocks melt. Then I used my newfound skills to  turn everything around me into a barren, pitted, smouldering wasteland.

So that was fun. And also surprisingly productive. I found the ability to Assess things to see what mats they contain, along with the skill that supposedly allows you to survey the area to find what you're looking for, both very little help but just blasting everything in sight with a firehose of purple energy bolts was fantastically effective. 

I stood well back and played the stream across any and every surface indiscriminately until I spotted something boiling out of the plasma that looked like it might be useful. That's how I discovered Coal and Marble and a few other materials I'd never found before.

Nothing worth having down here. Leave it for some other sucker to fill in.

Once I hit something I wanted, like Marble, I went after it like a rabid pit-bull. I ripped up the landscape and spewed the debris back onto the ground like it was Eastern Europe in the 1930s. It was glorious. Also wholly unforgiveable. Stars Reach is going to set the worst possible environmental example if it doesn't rein some of this in before launch. It's a good thing playing video games doesn't affect anyone's behavior or attitude in the real world...

After half an hour of that I had enough Marble to make a couple of blocks with the Lathe. It was also about then that I was thinking of giving up. If it took that long just to make two blocks...

Luckily, one block from the Lathe equates to twenty blocks from the Instaformer. Once I realised that, I was able to lay down enough marble to give me about forty points of xp in Civic Engineering. It seems you earn roughly a point per block extruded.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it takes a hundred points to buy anything on the CE Tree and two hundred to buy anything good. Back to the mines for more Marble!

In the end, I managed to dig out enough to get me 120 xp. Eighty more and I can buy the recipe for the Fabricator, the tool I need to start building an actual house. I think. I hope...

Meanwhile, without really meaning to, I seem to have stored up enough xp in most of the other skills to come close to maxing out their respective Trees. Again, that frequently just means acquiring recipes that need to be crafted but I'm slowly beginning to come to terms with how that works.

Ever hear the expression "One banana short of a plaster"?

For example, I now know that I was right when I said, last time, that I thought I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in a camp. There is indeed something called a Stove that apppears in your camp, whenever you set it up. How I couldn't find one in my camp, when I looked for it then, I have no idea. I found it this time with no trouble at all.

Still couldn't make anything on it, of course. Didn't have the mats. It takes a suprising amount of bananas to make a banana plaster. Or maybe, like blocks, they come in packs of twenty. When I get a few more I'll hit the Stove and find out.

Meanwhile, other people are clearly making far more progress than I am. That dinky little hamlet people were calling a city last time (So cute!) is now genuinely quite impressive. It's still more of a small town or a large village than a city but it's starting to look quite sophisticated.

A hell of a lot more sophisticated than my pathetic attempt at a Homestead, that's for sure. All I have is a lot of holes and a weird marble abstract that looks like some pre-schoolers tried to make a Henry Moore out of half-chewed Mentos. In a toxic waste dump.

The good thing about it (The only good thing, really.) is that I ought to be able to find it again next time. I even put up a flagpole so I can see it from far away. Don't have a flag yet but the pole is big enough to be seen from space. (Not literally from space. From space you literally can't even see the planet.)

Want to know what's keeping it up? A vitriolic hatred of all that's decent and good!

 It's my third Homestead, by which I don't mean the third I've made but the third of the three I currently own. The other two are... well, if you find them, I'd be very grateful if you could give me a hint as to where they are. I put them down, went off to do something, then couldn't find them again.

You can put down map markers to tell you where points of interest, like your house, might be but the flaw with that is that you have to remember to do it while you still know where they are. By the time I remember, it's always too late. I do think we at least ought to get a permanent "You Live Here" sign in the UI. And some way of abandoning homesteads remotely.

Fortunately for me, by the time I realized I was never going to be able to find my way home, I still had one deed left so I was able to start over, yet again. At least this time I've left a permanent marker in the world to show me where I live. 

If there isn't a wipe, when the next test comes, I'll carry on from where I left off. This time I'll see if I can't at least get some walls up. Maybe even a roof but let's not get too fancy.