Day Fifty And The Game Begins

 Of all the dozens of games I could be playing, it looks very much as though the one I am playing is Valheim. I don't know why. Maybe someone would like to explain it to me.

I already had about 390 hours played. It's my most-played game on Steam and almost certainly the non-MMORPG I've put the most time into, ever.  Now I have 405 hours played and it's not going to stop there. What is it about this game?

The really weird part, though, is what I've been doing there. I started the whole thing up again on a whim, when all the publicity about the game finally getting an official release re-ignited my interest. As I posted at the time, I set everything to the easiest difficulty with the intention of seeing what it would be like if I ignored Odin and his annoying bird buddy, shrugged off all his unreasonable demands and just settled down to a quiet, pastoral afterlife in the meadowlands.

That was the plan. But you know what they say about plans. 

Last time, we left Califlora the inauthentically-named viking "stuck on a cold, rainy island far out at sea" after what turned out to be the first of many ill-advised sea trips. Here's what happened next.

 

The first archipelago turned out to be very small with hardly anything going for it other than peace and quiet. It was mostly Black Forest with a smattering of Meadows, making it pretty much a microcosm of the place she'd just left. 

The whole point of getting on the raft in the first place had been to find some nice, warm, sunny Plains so Califlora could build a house and live out the eternity of her afterlife in relative comfort. She certainly wasn't going to hunker down for forever on a lump of rock in the middle of the ocean but traveling by raft isn't so much fun you want to get right back on the logs and do it again right away so she put up a shack, lit a fire and got a good night's sleep. Next day it was back on the raft. 

I really got to hate the raft after a while. It's slow and cumbersome and hard to control. I could never figure out exactly how to steer the thing. Mostly, progress went by a series of small zig-zags as I constantly over-corrected. That's when the wind let me go anywhere at all. 

When I'd worked out how to set the thing on auto I just let it go and went and did something else for a while before coming back to see if we'd run aground anywhere. With everything set to be non-aggressive about the only risk was falling off. Califlora was a lot safer if I had my hands nowhere near the keyboard.

 

The next landfall came at another small archipelago. Smaller, in fact , than the first one. This time, though, she could see land further to the west. It looked like it might be something more substantial. Obviously she got back on the raft and sailed over to see what it was. Right? 

Nope. That would have been the sensible move. What she actually did was set up home on the island. First she built a substantial house near the shoreline then, when she'd made it all nice and cosy, she started making repeated trips across the bay by raft to explore and exploit whatever she could find on the opposite shore before sailing back to the island with the spoils. I don't know if she was reliving her Viking raiding life or if she was worried about getting a bad sunburn.

It was indeed Plains that she could see, over there across the narrow strip of ocean. Lots of Plains and a few small strips of Swamp. There was even a patch of Mistlands that Califlora kept well clear of after stumbling into it one evening as the sun was going down. With no option to apply mods to the game on GeForce Now's servers, it's very unlikely I'll be paying much attention to any biome beyond the Plains.

 

I spent days on that island. Days and days and days. Real life days, not just in game. I took Califlora up and down the coast, exploring and raiding Fuling camps as she found them. It was a peculiar experience.

The whole game becomes quite strange with aggression switched off. The Fulings gibbered to themselves but never did anything to stop her as Califlora opened their chests and rummaged through the contents, helping herself to anything she fancied. They didn't even react when she started smashing up their tanning racks. 

That wasn't mindless vandalism. She needed a lot of flint to make various crafting stations but even though her hut was in a small patch of Meadows, after she picked up the first few shards, no more ever spawned. I looked it up and supposedly flint respawns every four hours, real time. Not on that island it didn't.

What did spawn there, unexpectedly and incongruously, were two Fulings. The island had no Plains anywhere on it at all and although the other shore was close enough to cross by raft in a few minutes, it didn't seem nearly close enough for the biomes to overlap. But there they were. 

 

It's unnerving to have two Fulings wittering away a few feet from your door. Even if you know they aren't going to do anything, there's still the worry that you might accidentally target one while chopping wood and then you'd know about it, alright. 

Califlora tried to push them into the sea. Valheim has full collision so with aggression off you can shunt mobs around. You have to if you want to explore the crypts. The skeletons block the tunnels and they don't move if you say "Excuse me." No ears, you see.

The Fulings went into the sea when pushed alright but then they came right back out again. If I'd had a pick I might have dug a hole and pushed them into that. But I didn't have a pick because, as I'd completely forgotten, you have to kill Eikthyr to get the antlers you need to make one.

I only realised that after I'd built a Smelter and a Kiln next to the house on the island. Doh! I could have left it there because I hadn't been planning to kill any of the bosses but Valheim being Valheim I'd gotten the bug by then and I couldn't let it go.

 

That was all my decision. Califlora would have been fine, living on her island, sitting by the fire, roasting boar meat, eating honey and berries for pudding and watching the gorgeous sunsets. She could take a trip over to the Plains on her raft any time for some sunbathing. Not a bad afterlife. 

But no, I had to take her back to where she started so we could kill bloody Eikthyr. That did not go well.

Oh, killing Eikthyr went well enough. Califlora made sixty fire arrows, kited him around for a while and he went down nicely. Took less than five minutes and she was never under half health. Of course, the difficulty was on Easy but Eikthyr never has been hard. 

 

No, the hard part was getting there. Geez, that raft trip. Talk about boring! And miserable. Most of it happened at night, in the rain. The wind was frequently against her. She retraced the same route, spent a night in her old hut, made it back to shore just before dusk and managed to find another of her old houses to sleep in pretty close by.

The fire was out, though, and she didn't have any wood so she went out in the dark to get some. And a tree fell on her. A classic Valheim death. It would have been funny if she hadn't still been bound on the sodding island!

Califlora has only died twice so far. The first time she foolishly attacked a bear just to see how tough it was. A lot tougher than her as it turned out. The second time a tree fell on her because she was out cutting down trees at dusk and sit was too dark to see which way it was leaning. Even when nothing's out to get you, something's going to get you all the same.

I was pissed off when I realised I had no option but to revive back on that damn island. I was even more pissed off when I realised that, even with the death penalty set to Easy, you still leave everything in your inventory on your corpse. I gave the game a rest for a day or so before I carried on after that. It was giving me EverQuest corpse recovery flashbacks.

Before she could go anywhere, since all she had left were the leathers she was standing up  in, Califlora had to grub around looking for stones just to make an axe to chop wood to make the raft. It's amazing how few stones there are when you're on a tiny island. She got it done eventually and a new raft got built but it was not a fun time for either of us.

This time, she took the raft a different way, landing in Black Forest to the west of her original site.  She then made her way back, once again, to where she'd started, making it a priority to find a hut along the way, refurbish it sufficiently to keep out the rain, light a fire and put down a bed. Then she set her spawn point and we could both finally relax.

By this point I'd been playing for around forty-five game days. In real time, about fifteen hours. And what had I achieved? It's tempting to say absolutely nothing but there are the skills. Califlora's Run skill is in the high twenties and her Woodcutting in the mid-thirties. Her Swimming is coming along, too. 

Other than that, though, the game has pretty much only just started, now Eikthyr is dead. I made the pick and mined some tin but all my means of production are an hour away on the raft and I'm sure as hell not going back to get them. Califlora is going to have to start over from scratch where she is, by which I mean where she started. 

All the things I stole from the Fulings are on the island, too, and quite a lot of stuff Califlora couldn't carry is stashed in chests in their camps. All of that was a complete waste of time although I suppose we might get back there eventually.

The real question isn't why did I waste so much time getting nowhere. It's why I'm not about to stop. Yes, I know it makes no sense but I am going to carry on. The bizarre thing is that, for all its purposelessness and pointlessness, and even though I've done it all before, more than once, and even though it's often tedious and frustrating... Valheim somehow always manages to be fun.

I am thinking I might want to try a different survival game soon, though. Isn't Enshrouded about to come out of Early Access? Maybe I'll give that a try next...