Busy Doing Nothing Very Much - Life In Hethereau Goes On

 A lot has happened in Neverness To Everness since I posted about the game last Wednesday and yet nothing has really happened at all. Nothing by way of story or character progression, anyway, those being the twin pillars of the form, supposedly. 

No, everything that happened was decidedly, shall we say, horizontal. Or perhaps it was alternative. One of those ancillary lines of progress that keeps people busy without moving them up the difficulty ladder, anyway. 

Ah, yes. Difficulty. I've been playing, pretty regularly, since launch, we're just coming up to the six-month anniversary and I still have no clear idea how the vertical progression system works.

There seem to be three types of level: Character, Hunter and Appraisal. The level caps are 60 for Hunter, 7 for Appraisal and, as far as I can tell, 80 for character. Flora is currently Character Level 50, Hunter Level 46 and Appraisal Level 5. 

I think that's pretty far behind par for hours played but she was Character Level 40 until I went into the game to check some details for this post and remembered you have to do the leveling up for Character yourself by pressing a button. And she's effectively Appraiser Level 4, too. You can set it to one level lower if you want.  It makes mobs weaker (And rewards inferior...) I did it as soon as she was first allowed to, back at Appraiser Level 3 and the setting carries over every time she levels up, unless I switch it back.

See how confusing it is already? Well, it's way more confusing than that. Every last little thing has to be leveled up or Ascended or some such twaddle. I gave up thinking about it months ago, when it became obvious that none of it mattered. 

If you've been following my posts about the game, you'll have noticed I haven't been complaining much about the fights. Mostly I don't even mention them and when I do it's usually to say there weren't many or that they were quite easy. That is true. Mostly.

It's not always true. There are occasionally fights that I, theoretically, need to win just to work my way up some ladder or other and a couple have been too hard for me. I'm stuck at Tycoon Level 20 because of one of those. 

Oh yes, Tycoon Level... that's another ladder and quite an important one, at least in terms of the rewards it gives. Although I guess it's horizontal, even though it's a ladder, because it doesn't have anything specifically to do with making your character better at killing things. And that's all that really counts, right?

I had just been thinking how I probably ought to do something about getting past that speed-bump, when Hotta, out of the blue, added a direct alternative to Tycoon in the form of the Puka Membership Program. Like Tycoon, there are 45 levels and you can switch tracks between the two options at will but you can only progress one at a time.

I immediately swapped over to the PMP and now I'm Level 3 in that one. Apparently the rewards are very comparable. I imagine most people will have finished Tycoon anyway and be glad to have another 45 rungs to climb. My plan is to stick with Puka until I hit some barrier I can't clamber over and then decide which of the two is going to best reward some actual effort. If any.

While I was fiddling around, trying to figure all of this out, I spotted a few other progression systems I'd been ignoring, some of which I have literally forgotten again already, just a few hours later. I do remember one... 

I had what looked like a few dozen decorative items that I hadn't "Collected" because I'd forgotten you needed to. That had progress bars and rewards because of course it did. I collected them, filled a few bars with whatever weird xp variant it gave and got a bunch of stuff back as rewards that I probably need for some other progression mechanic. 

Also now, presumably, I have a load of furniture I can use. I'll have to go back to my house - one of my houses - or my cafe - one of my cafes - and check how that works.

Speaking of cafes, I figured out how to play the "Serving Customers Yourself" mini-game. I'd been ignoring it because if I find the idea of managing a coffee shop unappealing, you can imagine what I think about serving in one. In the end, though, I wanted the Fons and having read up on all the options it looked like the least-worst.

Sidebar: Given my active antipathy to games where you pretend to be a shopkeeper or a cook or a waiter or any kind of retailer or hospitality functionary or business person at all, really, I find it highly ironic I've ended up doing it it two games at once. At least it's mostly notional in NTE and not that important. In Nivalis it's a lot more work although I believe once you get past a certain stage your businesses mostly run themselves. In both games the part I liked best about running an eatery was going out each day to buy the supplies. It's doing anything with them afterwards that annoys me.

And guess what? Serving customers in my cafe on Moomin Street is actually fun. (It'd be even more fun if we could all dress up like Moomins. Now there's a collab waiting to happen...)

Well, it is now I can do it reliably, anyway. Not so much before I knew what I was meant to be doing. I read a few guides, upgraded the social skills of some of the characters I have working for me (Another form of progression, there.) and practiced for a bit until now I can spend all my City Stamina in about ten minutes. That gets you a million or so Fons and you only have to do it once a week so it's fine. 

At this point I think it's probably becoming obvious that the line between vertical and horizontal progression in NTE is blurred almost beyond recognition. I tend to mark everything that makes combat easier (Or harder for that matter.) as "Vertical" because that's how it used to work in the olden days but I'm not sure it makes sense any more.

For a start, I can't quite see why you need to get any better at fighting at all, now the main story quest has barely any fights and the few it does have are easy. The hard fights I've encountered all seem to have been in content required for progress in some other system, which then filters back to give non-combat rewards. 

For example, if I was able to beat the mob I can't currently manage for Tycoon Level 21, my reward would be access to Personalized License Plates for my vehicles. Since I ride a bicycle now, that's not even anything I want but even if it was, it certainly wouldn't help me kill faster. 

And, in fact, I don't really have any sense in this game that killing mobs is that important anyway. I go hours and hours without killing anything and even when I do it's purely by choice. Combat seems almost like an optional mini-game now.

What I've mostly been doing for the last few sessions is trying to win enough Puka Stars on the sideshows to buy first a boat and then a glider. At least, that's what I was doing until Hotta dumped a whole, new progression system into the game, based around doing everything there is to do in Pukaland and made it give retrospective credit. 

I'd already made enough under my own efforts to buy the boat but just claiming all the new rewards I'd  earned by doing it gave me more than enough Stars for the glider. (It's fricken' huge, by the way!) After that, I went through all the various tick-boxes in the new event and crossed off as many as I could, without actually putting myself out, of course, and that was most of them, so I have even more Stars now.

It reminds me of 999 Nights except it's much faster. Where completion there took me a couple of weeks, Pukaland looks like it might take less than half as long. There are a few pesky "S-Class" wins on some of the sideshows that could be problematic but I'm not sure I'll bother trying to finish the whole thing just for the sake of it. If those don't happen naturally I'll just forget about them.

And now, because I like lists, I'm going to run through all the sideshows and attractions and give my reviews of them, with comments on how easy it is to earn Stars. There are videos all over YouTube doing that but none of the ones I've seen did I find very helpful so I can't do much worse.

It's going to make this post very long if I just go straight into it, though, so I'm going to make it into a post of it's own. It's only fair - that is what I sat down to write about in the first place! 

I might do it right away or I might leave it till tomorrow. 

A cliffhanger ending! How about that?