Sun, Sea And Sand. Well, Two Out Of Three, Anyway

Today's the day Noah's Heart closes down but I already said my goodbyes there. Rather than log in for one last look I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer.

Unlike Noah's Heart, Dawnlands did get a relatively recent, very substantial update. Just before Christmas, developer Seasun added the following:

1. New Biome
2. New Enemies
3. New Outfits
4. New Followers
5. New Events

And now you know as much about it as anyone. That is literally the entire patch note for the update, apart from a couple of lines about network performance. 

They did post a video on YouTube.

The full and complete supporting text for that reads "Dawnlands new version update - Desert biome". It's almost like they don't want anyone to know they're working on the game, isn't it? 

Dawnlands is multi-platform, available on mobile and PC. It's possible that there are channels available to mobile users, where Seasun is communicating with players like, oh, I don't know... a company that wants to sell stuff and make money. On PC, though? Tumbleweed, appropriately.

Still, that video makes the new biome look pretty spiffy. I found myself wondering if you needed to progress in the game to open it up or if you could just up and go there. 

If it was the former, I was going to skip it. I've looked at the next big Boss fight I need to do for the level cap raise and the next tier of crafting and I don't much fancy it. Looks tough. And long.

Thinking back, though, I was pretty sure all the other biomes were accessible purely through travel and exploration, just as they are in Dawnlands' spiritual ancestor and inspiriation, Valheim. You might get your ass handed to you in a sack by the mobs in a new biome but there's nothing to stop you trying to play tourist if you don't mind taking the hits.

So I got on my horse and went looking. I packed the makings of a raft in case I needed to cross water but that turned out not to be necessary. I figured Desert would most likely be to the south of the map and since the Plains biome, which I'd already explored, is hot and dry, chances were the desert connected to it at some point.

Which it does. In Dawnlands you can teleport to various points of interest, once you've visited them and gotten them marked on your map. I ported to the most southernly spot I'd opened, which happened to be a dungeon of some sort. Then I got on my trusty horse and started riding. South.

It didn't take long. A few hills and the landscape began to change. More sand. Or, I should say, even more sand. 

I spent about an hour exploring and most of what I saw was... sand. And sun. Other than the lush oases dotted here and there, it's a barren, austere, beautiful region, full of emptiness and pain. By day the sun blazes down from a blank, blue sky. By night bitter cold chills the bleached bones of monsters, half-buried in the sand. 

And night or day, the sandstorms rage. It's a cheery place. I looked out for that cute little rodent from the video but I didn't spot him. 

I did see plenty of cute foxes, although one tried to bite me in the leg when I got too close. Also plenty of wizened mummies and altogether more sand worms than I was hoping for. To my surprise, the mobs were all quite manageable. Once again, taking its cue from Valheim, it seems that top-end armor from the previous biome is plenty good enough to get you started in the new one.

One of the many positive things I'd say about Dawnlands is that the biomes are H.U.G.E. I spent a good hour exploring the desert and barely made a mark on the map. I kept going south and eventually hit the "Turn back now" barrier that tells you you've reached the end of the known world. I tried to make it back to where I started but in the end I had to log out to go do something, so I ported home.

In all that time I hadn't found a settlement or a city or any sign of civilization. I did run across a few ruins, a couple of massive Mausoleums that needed a special item to enter, (An item I didn't have, naturally.), a teleport tower and a very interesting mini-dungeon full of traps. And scorpions. Of course there are scorpions.

I even found the spot where you summon the Desert Biome Boss, whoever and whatever it might be. I was feeling reckless enough to do it, too, just to see what came up out of the sand but when I tried I got one of those warning that goes "Are you sure you want to do this now? Wouldn't you like to think about it? Maybe come back another time, when you're a bit better prepared? Because, I mean, just look at you..." and I let myself be talked into behaving sensibly, for once.

Mostly what I did was take a lot of screenshots, some of which are in this post but none of which really do justice to the visuals in the game itself. For a start, you can't see the sandstorms that swirl up and whip across the desert, lowering visibilty and making the whole place feel claustrophobic despite being open to the horizon in every direction. Or the ever-changing color of the sky as day fades into night.

According to the big World Wheel there are supposed to be three more biomes to come. I'm not counting on the game lasting that long but based on the quality of the ones I've explored so far, I really hope it does. 

Meanwhile, I plan on going back and riding around the desert some more. May as well see what else there is to see. While it's still there...

One Hundred Hours And Whole Load Of Pumpkins

Yesterday evening I finally clocked up one hundred hours in Dawnlands. I'd been stuck at 98.5 for several weeks after I suddenly and entirely unintentionally stopped playing. I'd been logging ifor an hour or two pretty much every day since the game launched back in August and then just like that I wasn't playing any more. No reason for it. I just stopped.

And now I've started again and look what's happened while I've been away. They've only gone and decorated the whole place for Halloween! And what a great job they've made of it, too.

The first thing I was greeted with was a splash page telling me there were eight days of the Enchantment Night Gala left. It didn't tell me eight out of how many but I checked and it's ten so I only missed the start.

There are four main strands to the event, three of which revolve around the inevitable special event currency, Enchanted Night Candy.  It's for spending only. Don't try to eat it. You'll get sick.

Daily quests give candy as a bonus on top of their regular rewards and if you find yourself with too much candy on your hands, the ever-hungry Carromu will happily swap it for Diamonds. 

For the more active Warriors (We're all called Warriors in Dawnlands, just like other games call everyone Adventurers.) there's the opportunity to steal candy from babies monsters, specifically the pumpkin-headed ones who only come out at night. 

Technically, it's not stealing because the monsters stole it from us and we're just taking it back. Although it's candy that only monsters can eat and it's made specially for monsters. Just not these monsters. It's complicated. My advice is just kill 'em, take the candy and don't think about it too hard!

A very nice touch is that some of those pumpkin-headed monsters are the regular little goblins who've dressed up for Halloween. Not all of them, either, just a few, which adds a weirdly convincing gloss to the nightly murder spree. I pity the poor saps who got so excited by the thought of Halloween they couldn't resist getting all dressed up - they might as well have painted targets on their backs.

There are also some new, spooky, wraithlike creatures whose pumpkin heads look a lot more sinister. They're tough, as I found out when I attacked the first one I saw but not that tough. Or maybe it's me  that's tough now. Pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted to fight them when I was new here.

The final event is double yield when you grow pumpkins. I'm not sure I want that many pumpkins but thanks for the thought.

The candy gets you all kinds of season-appropriate items in the aptly named Candy Exchange. Although the new store stocks a few items that can only be bought with cash shop currency, there's far more you can get for candy. 

That seems to be how Dawlands usually works. I'm really not sure how they're making money on this game although it appears people are playing it still. I got a big message when I logged in, reminding everyone about the rules against botting and trading accounts for real money, so I have to assume there's enough interest in the game to fuel some kind of black economy. That suggests some level of popularity, at least.

There are a few things in the candy store I'd like. Furniture, mostly. A couple of recipes. Maybe one of the wearable pumpkin heads, although I've never been a huge fan of those. Prices range from a steep 100 candies for rugs and tapestries all the way down to just twenty for a pumpkin lamp hanging from a dead tree. 

Unusually for an event like this, there's a hard cap on how many candies you can collect during the whole event. You can only do three daily quests and the night-time killfests are capped at 60 per real-world day, 440 for the whole ten days. It's a clever way of reducing the compulsion to overdo things. 

So far I have about 160 candies. There were several new one-off quests that gave me about 40 or 50 and then I did the dailies two days running, which took me over a hundred. The rest are from kills.

I haven't worked out how many I need for the things I want but I'd guess even half of what I'm allowed would be more than enough. I'll be logging in every day to do the dailies, anyway. It's a chill, fun event and it's new to me so I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

The decorations in the villages are very impressive, if not wildly over the top. There are pumpkins everywhere. There's also a nice backstory about the lore behind the festival. It would be nicer still if the translations were better but I appreciate the effort that went into it, all the same.

All in all its a very solid effort for a first major holiday. Makes me wonder what they'll do for Christmas. 

I just hope the game is still around come December. I'm not done with it yet.

Fixer-Upper

I spent much of today in Dawnlands doing something I should have done long ago: tidying up my base. After about three hours of moving stuff around, about the best I can say is it's not as bad as it was.

Really, I ought at least to break everything down and start over. I should more probably move. I'm still operating out of the Grasslands Shelter, for the sole reason that very early on in the storyline one of the NPCs suggests you move in there and I did as I was told. It was fine for a while but it's far from convenient now. It's only the free, instant map travel that's kept me from doing something about it already.

As I posted a while ago, I have my eye on a sumptuous residence in a far more aesthetically pleasing location. It's all ready and waiting for me to move in but so far I've done absolutely nothing to make it happen. Instead, I've been squatting in a shack in a corner of the first village I washed up at, cluttering the place up with more and more crafting stations and storage boxes, giving no thought at all to what an eyesore I've created or how hard I'm making things for myself.

Something had to give and this morning it happened. I was ferreting through my dozen or so chests looking for something, when I finally snapped. I decided to clear the whole lot out and get organized for once. 

I began by making a whole load of fifteen-slot cabinets to replace my ten-slot chests. Then I made a wooden framework so I could stack them three high since you can't place them directly on top of each other.

Once I had that done, I moved everything from the chests into the cabinets, making more cabinets as I needed them. I also did something I really should have done from the beginning; sort everything into categories and put like with like. The game allows you to give each container an individual name so I labeled everything according to what was inside: Ore, Ingots, Herbs, Crystals and so on.

I invite you to imagine me, playing the game day after day, all the way back to the beginning of August, just dumping things randomly into unlabeled boxes, then having to search through all of them every time I wanted to find anything, which was all the time. 

This, of course, is what I always do. In most games I stop playing before I run out out of patience with the chaos. Not this one.

Everything was going very well until I hit an unforeseen snag. Dawnlands uses an excellent proximity search to populate a menu of all nearby storage, allowing you to select each container from a list rather than having to find its exact location. I was placing all my containers close enough to each other that the search would find everything, or so I thought.

It would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a previously unknown limit to the number of containers displayable in the menu, which weirdly seems to cap at 21. I had closer to thirty cabinets stacked tightly together before I began to notice some of them weren't appearing in the list. I'd packed them too tightly to be able to inspect them all directly so I had to split them.

Only there wasn't enough space. That's how I ended up moving all my heavy industry - kilns and smelters - out of the Shelter altogether. I got out my hoe and flattened an area just outside the perimeter. Then I moved the big crafting stations, which you can just pick up and carry, fortunately, and built a second framework for storage in the space that was left.

After a deal more fiddling I got all my inventory into the new locations. I broke down all the empty chests and then took a look around. It was better but still not good. Time for more drastic measures.

Last week, having tired, finally, of roasting meat one piece at a time over an open fire while watching the ten second timer tick down, before picking it off the spit and starting on another, I'd taken a tip from Kazeyo and stacked ten spits together over another fire, this one well away from my sleeping hut. 

That allowed me to roast ten chunks of meat in the time it had been taking me to finish one but it also meant I no longer needed the single spit. I'd just left it there out of laziness but today I broke it down for mats so I could use the space for something else.

Before I could put anything else there, though, the fire had to go too. It was still cheerily burning where the spit used to be. I knew I needed a fire close to my bed or I wouldn't be able to sleep so I couldn't just get rid of it altogether, which was how I came to have the bright idea of putting the fire inside the hut. I mean, there was plenty of room, now I'd gotten rid of all the chests.

I picked up the still-burning fire and placed it on the floor of the wood-and-thatch hut, which promptly burst into flames. As I'm slowly coming to realize, Dawnlands is much more complex than any F2P mobile port has any right to be.

I grabbed the fire and put it outside again before the whole hut went up in smoke. I got some wood and thatch out of storage and made good the damage. Then I picked up the fire and put it next to the hut, only this time on the outside. It immediately set fire to the door, which quickly burned to ash.

On my third attempt I managed to get the fire settled sufficiently far from the hut so as not to set it alight but still close enough to keep me warm and dry in bed. As I type this, though, I realize I've left the fire unprotected from the elements, meaning the first shower will put it out. When I log back in I'll either have to move it yet again or build a roof over it.

I could always put it back where it was but then I'd have to find a new home for my loom, which is now where the fire and the spit used to be. I moved it out of the hut I'd made to keep it out of the rain. A lot of things in Dawnlands don't seem to work if they get wet.

I'd put that hut up in a hurry when I realized I couldn't just plonk a loom down in the road and expect it to work in all weathers but I'd built it in a really stupid place. It blocked the path and made me have to go around it every time I left the Shelter, something I somehow just got used to doing. It's astonishing how easily you begin to treat these little inconveniences as something you just have to accept. I could have moved the damn hut any time. I just never did, until today.

With the hut gone and the windmill, also an obstacle to foot traffic, now re-located at the far end of the cotton field, the whole area looked a lot tidier. It still has the air of some kind of shanty-town, quickly thrown up after a natural disaster, but at least it's orderly and you can get from one place to another without literally going round the houses.

After all that work I find myself in something of a dilemma. I could carry on and complete the job, turning the whole place into a neat, functional base with everything just so, but that would only make it less likely that I'll ever leave. Or I could belatedly bring my Grassland Shelter era to an end and move somewhere more appropriate to my level, either the aforementioned house on the hill or perhaps some other scenic location, somewhere I can begin work on that castle I always planned to build.

I think the most important thing is not to make any hasty decisions. That's how I got myself into this mess in the first place. I'll take a while to think it over. After all, moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do. No need to make it any harder than it has to be.

A Progressive Attitude

I thought I might give a little progress report on where things stand for me in Dawnlands right now. I'm still playing every day, give or take. I first posted about the game on 10 August, when I'd just installed it. Just over five weeks later, Steam tells me I've played for exactly 82 hours, which averages out to a little over two hours a day; pretty close to how I've been playing.

There's no padding in those numbers, either. I've been scrupulous in not leaving the game running when I'm afk and I've hardly even tabbed out to look stuff up while logged in. If it says I was playing, I really was playing.

For all that time and effort, I've haven't even managed to complete 10% of the content. To be precise, my "Proportion Explored" stat currently stands at 8.43%. 

I don't know exactly what's included in that count but I'm guessing 100% would mean at least removing all the "fog of war" from the whole map and exposing all the marked Points of Interest. It could mean much more than that, like maybe unlocking every recipe, completing every achievment or even ticking every box the game would like you to tick. There are many.

Whatever it means, since only six of the proposed ten biomes are currently available and assuming an even distribution (It's not remotely even but let's pretend it is for now.) it's possible I've really only explored 8.43% of 60% of the content, which would be even less in absolute terms - barely over 5% of the whole thing - but more like 14% of what's actually possible at the moment.

Even if I have explored 8.43% of the entire map and/or consumed 8.43% of the total content, it's still not one hell of a lot to show for eighty fricken' hours! It's not even two per cent a week!

Someone might want to check my math there, by the way. I got Bard to do it but I'm not sure it entirely understood what I was asking. I know I didn't...

However much or little I've done, there's clearly a lot more left to go. According to the Sealing Progress charts, I'm almost done with Grasslands (93.5%). Plains (87.1%) and Forest (82.5%) are closing in fast but I've barely scratched the surfaces of Black Forest (15.2%), Swamp (13.4%) or Snow Mountain (3%).

Here, once again, I'm somewhat confused. Swamp and Black Forest are listed as separate biomes but they seem to be intermixed on the map and in the world. They either share the same Boss (Lynd) or one of them doesn't have a boss at all. They do each have their own progress ladder, though, so they definitely count as two, separate biomes.

In terms of the storyline, my next target is indeed Lynd, my first task being to find him (Her, Them, It. I mean, the thing looks like a tapeworm bursting out of an elk - the last thing I need to be thinking about is what pronoun to use. Except that's exactly what I am thinking about...) 

Black Forest by night. More like indigo, I'd say.

It really doesn't help that none of the "official" sources agrees on what to call the biome where Lynd lives. The game calls it Black Forest but the wiki uses both "Dark Forest" and, most confusingly of all, "Black Swamp". As it happens, I know where Lynd is because I stumbled across the Seal while I was looking for iron ore.

I also know what he looks and sounds like because I clicked on the Seal to see what items I'd need to collect to summon him and it turns out you don't need any! He spawned on top of me and started yelling threats so I ran the hell away.

After that little escapade I watched a few videos of supposed quick or safe ways to kill Lynd. None of them look very quick or safe to me so I'm not in any hurry to try. 

It's not like I need to move the needle yet a while, anyway. It's true that much (Although by no means all.) of the crafting in the game is tied to the Sealing process. You do need the new tier of pickaxe that becomes available after the death of each boss to mine the new ore you find in the next biome and you do need that ore to craft the next tier of armor. Despite all that, the game offers considerable flexibility in how you choose to progress.

A lot of recipes are tied not to the death of bosses but to your level. You get a drip-feed of new options as you level up. There is a hard cap on levels tied to each boss but I've never found myself short of things to do even when I hit that cap. In fact, it takes me all my time keeping up with what is available and even then I'm generally falling behind rather than surging ahead.

Swamp by day. Surprisingly pretty, isn't it?

As for handling the general difficulty that comes with a new biome, there's a big overlap that makes it perfectly reasonable to carry on in the armor you already have, provided you also take the trouble to upgrade it as far as it will go. Just this morning I finished my full, upgraded set of Refined Dark Iron Armor (Well, almost. Still need to do a couple more upgrades on the belt.) but I'm not wearing it yet.

The reason for that is item decay, one of the few things about Dawnlands I'm not completely sold on, although I think it's far less of a problem than some of the hysterical rants I've seen would like you to believe. All armor is repairable and although making repairs causes durability to decline, I've never yet had a repairable item reach the point where it couldn't be refurbished and put back into service as good as new before I'd replaced it with something better anyway. 

Nice set bonuses, too.

Repairs are instantaneous and free. You do need a workbench or anvil that's been upgraded to the appropriate level, which means going home to repair, but armor decays quite slowly. Unless you play every hour god sends and never go back to base, if you find your armor falling apart in the field you most likely have only yourself to blame. 

Added to that, the higher the armor tier you access, the further you can upgrade. My new Dark Iron set, can be upgraded from a baseline 250HP to 1000HP. The Bronze I'm wearing starts at 200HP and goes to 800HP (From memory...) At those levels I rarely need to repair at all and it's difficult to imagine that I'll ever need to replace any of the pieces now I've upgraded them. Even so, natural caution makes me reluctant to move on from an existing set before I have to and the Bronze still seems to be doing a good job so why swap?

Tools and weapons are a different matter altogether. Although you can still upgrade them in the same way, they are unrepairable. I've taken to prioritizing weapons and tools as soon as I open each crafting tier before moving on to armor. Fully upgraded, weapons last a good while but picks and axes feel like they wear down more quickly. It's probably identical but of course you do tend to hit ore nodes and trees a lot more times in a session than you hit monsters - or I do, anyway.

Given the rate of decay and the inability to repair, I tend to make spare tools and weapons so I can carry on when they break. I also swap my higher ones out for my lower ones whenever the lower ones are up to the task in hand and I try to avoid using my good axes as a weapons, although it's often just too convenient to resist. I really like axes.

The forecast said snow...

 All in all, I don't find the system too onerous. I wouldn't even remove item decay, given the choice; I'd just make tools and weapons repairable in the same way armor is. I do think that having decay and repair nudges lazier players like me into making the effort to go all the way down the upgrade path rather than, as I'm pretty sure I would otherwise, stopping at the minimum viable option.

In gameplay terms, it means I spend a lot more time planning and thinking ahead instead of just rushing off into the wilderness unprepared. It also means that much of my gameplay consists of looking for nodes or other sources of materials, collecting them, bringing them back to base, refining them and finally using them to craft and upgrade my gear.

It's time-consuming but absorbing. I spent two full sessions last week, scouring the entirety of the Grasslands and a good portion of the Forest for Phantom Crystals, a resource that seems plentiful in the early days but which rapidly becomes scarce. They're needed for part of the upgrade process for higher tier armor and weapons as well as for the starting gear so they remain in demand but because most resource nodes in Dawnlands don't regenerate, what started out as a trivial activity eventually becomes somewhat challenging.

Leaving aside the opaque Exploration percentages, what I do know is that I have two bosses left to kill and at least two more armor sets to make. There's a cold weather set that I've already started on but which I think will require items from Lynd to upgrade in full and a Mithril set that certainly will. The same applies to the mithril tools and weapons. There's also one locked and as yet unknown crafting station that probably won't reveal itself until I seal Lynd away either.

Based on my current rate of progress, I'd guess that could take as much as another forty or fifty hours, always assuming I could even manage to beat Lynd at  all, let alone seal the fifth and currently final boss, Niedner. He looks very tough and without him, there's no Mithril armor.

Something for every occasion.

I'm in no hurry. I have a lot of work still to do to get my complete set of upgraded cold weather armor and I haven't even started building a castle. That's not any part of progression but since there are a whole set of recipes for castle-building, it would seem crazy not to build one. 

There are also recipes for building a mining railway complete with working mine-carts. I'm not entirely sure if there's any practical benefit to doing it but once again, if it's there...

To re-iterate something I've said before, I've read quite a few critical reviews that talk about Dawnlands as some kind of predatory gacha game. While it does now have some gacha mechanics for cosmetics, it didn't at the time these comments were made. People see want they want to see. 

The non-respawning of nodes and the need for pages to unlock crafting recipes have also been cited as evidence of unreasonable monetization. After more than eighty hours, I have seen absolutely no sign of any of that.

With the sole exception of Phantom Crystals, which as far as I can tell you can't buy for real money anyway, every other resource remains far more plentiful than I can imagine needing. There are nodes everywhere in the areas I've explored and there are vast tracts of land I haven't even visited yet.

As for recipes, I've been able to buy everything I wanted immediately and I still have more than a hundred pages saved. Unless you want to buy every recipe as soon as it appears, just for the sake of owning it, I can't see what the problem is.

Well, yes, I think I can. It's a lack of patience. I guess if you have to have everything right away you might find Dawnlands a little frustrating. Maybe then you would try to buy your way out of the problem although I'm not at all sure you'd be able to; most of the basics aren't really for sale in large quantities and even the small amounts available only change hands for in-game currency.

It seems to me that the only real requirement for steady progress is to play the game, which suits me fine. I'm doing that already and very happy to do it I am, too.

Just Browsing

One thing I rarely cover in any real detail when posting about the many Free To Play titles I enjoy is the monetization that keeps them going. Not that they get any money from me. I am the absolute definition of a leech when it comes to these things. 

Developers must hate me. I've enjoyed many hundreds of hours of absolutely free entertainment at their expense. I don't believe I've ever spent a single penny on a fully F2P title. In almost all cases I've never even been tempted. It hardly ever feels like anything I'd want, let alone need, to do.

Very occasionally I toy with the idea of spending a small amount of money - five or ten dollars perhaps - almost as much to show willing as for any practical purpose. In every case, though, the feeling swiftly passes and I keep my credit card in my wallet.

The thing that really surprises me about all these games is that they can make money using these methods at all. It seems to me that F2P titles are, almost by definition, likely to attract people who either don't have the disposable income to buy higher-quality titles or who are, like me, simply too mean to spend money when they don't have to.

I'm aware there are those individuals we sometimes call "whales" who, either because they literally have more money than they know what to do with or because they have psychological issues that mitigate against self-control, are willing to spend extremely large amounts of money to get what they want, even when most of that money, thanks to the various lockbox and gacha mechanics the games employ, goes to waste.

I'm also aware there are people who budget their expenditure in video games in the same way they budget for eating out or going to the movies; people for whom spending ten or twenty dollars a week on a game they enjoy is a rational and reasonable expense. 

All of this I understand intellectually but emotionally it makes no sense to me. My experience of every F2P game I've found worth playing for any significant amount of time has always been that I get more free stuff given me than I'm able to use and that everything I need to fully enjoy my time is available purely by playing the game. 

When I look at the cash shops in most games, F2P or otherwise, I do wonder occasionally what it is that other people are seeing that I'm not. I played Guild Wars 2 for a decade and one of my constant complaints was that there was pretty much nothing in the cash shop I wanted. It's full of ugly outfits I wouldn't wear on a bet and utilities that offer no real convenience. I am very clearly not the target market for whoever designs these things.

Even when the cash shop is pretty good, which is the case with EverQuest II, I still find it hard to spend much money there. Experience tells me that when I do buy things like the Prestige Homes I never use them, so why bother? I'd have to decorate them and then live in them and I already have two huge homes I can barely keep in order, as it is.

A few years ago there seemed to be something of a convention among F2P titles to make at least some of their money by selling not just convenient shortcuts or fancy clothes but the bare necessities required to play the game at all. Allods Online, an excellent game in many ways and one of the early WoW clones deemed most likely to succeed, famously scuppered its considerable chances by employing a punishing death mechanic that required cash shop items to mitigate.

Allods also played the inconvenience card hard with some of the meagrest inventory allocation I've ever seen. Making players get their wallets out to solve the ever-annoying problem of running out of storage space has been a classic money-spinner for a long time and not just in F2P titles either, but it finally seems to be going out of fashion.

It's been a good while since I've found myself struggling to manage my inventory in a F2P game. The last three titles I've spent a lot of time playing - Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and now Dawnlands - all offer far more storage for free than I'm ever likely to use. Neither do any of them restrict instant travel or put up annoying barriers that need real cash payments to remove.

They don't use lockboxes, either. It's a while since I've seen one of those drop in any game I play. They're still very prevalent in older titles but the newer ones don't seem to bother with them at all.  

The current fashion seems to be for Gacha mechanics that are supposedly tied directly to progression. It's a mechanic that most Western players probably knew little about a few years ago but with which, thanks to global success of titles like Genshin Impact, we're all now quite familiar.

When I first encountered the draw mechanic I found it quite exciting, although never so much so that I wanted to pay for the thrill. Still, making my free rolls, watching the explosive animations and finding out what I'd won kept me happily entertained until the novelty wore off. 

The problem with a system that relies on building teams of characters and powering them up, at least from my point of view, is that I hugely prefer to stick with one set of characters that I know. I strongly dislike swapping characters in a team in and out as though they were weapons - I don't even much like swapping actual weapons ffs.

I am very much a set-and-forget player. I like to put in quite a lot of effort to get my character or team just right and then leave them to get on with their job, preferably for the entire time I play the game from then on. If I want to try another character I would much prefer to roll another character and start over. I'm on board with the old adage that you shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream.

That makes me a particularly bad bet for making money out of when you rely on gacha mechanics, although as I think I've made clear, I'm a pretty bad bet in most other respects as well. If you want my money as a game developer you're most likely going to need to make me pay for content, which these days seems to be the one thing all developers are happiest to hand out for free.

All of this makes it very hard for me to understand when game games like Dawnlands receive such virulent criticism for employing monetization practices derived from the mobile market, where selling overpriced cosmetics, inconvenience and power have long been considered normal. It always seems to me that even if such practices have been imported to the PC versions of the games, PC gamers ought to be able just to ignore them.

It's something I find very easy to do for reasons other than my personal preferences. For the most part, the promotions are sequestered in separate segments of the UI. If you aren't interested then it's quite simple not to click on the icons. It's like walking through a market; you're not obligated to stop and buy something every time a stallholder catches your eye. You can just walk on.

Of course, if you do have the willpower to resist completely, you'll miss out on a bunch of freebies. Most of the many events designed to separate you from your savings come with some kind of sweetener to get your attention. Increasingly, I'm finding that they also offer considerable opportunities to indulge while spending only in-game coin, too.

That's obviously intended as a lead-in to spending real money but in-game coin is where I stop. I spent much of the last twelve months doing all kinds of events in Noah's Heart, most of which could have led me on to buying premium currency so I could carry on, except of course I didn't. I just stopped when it wasn't free any more. 

It was noticeable that after a few months most of the free events in that game converted to payment-only, a move that merely highlighted what dull events they were and emphasized what a bad idea it would be to spend money on any of them. At the same time, my stash of unused Gacha cards for summoning Phantoms grew and grew. By the time I drifted away from the game I had more than seven hundred unused pulls. 

One thing all the newer games do is tell you the odds. No-one can claim they didn't know their chances of getting the exact thing they wanted were slim. Dawnlands has a very elegant and detailed breakdown of the exact percentages involved. As is common with these systems, it also tells you just how many times you have to fail before the game takes pity on you and throws you a bone.

Where the game differs from most is that the range of highly desirable items on offer is both very limited and worth having, although I realize the latter is a  matter of taste and opinion. This is probably a function of the age of the game. It's very new. Even so, a cash shop with only two outfits seems extremely restrained. 

Yesterday we got a new Event, the third since launch. The first event, which is still running, involves making a video about the game and publishing it on YouTube although, as I found out a couple of days ago, you get fifty Diamonds just for clicking through to the web page that tells you how it works.

The second event, also still running, features a friendly creature called Carromu who, as the event title tells you, is always hungry. Carromu doesn't like to eat Diamonds (Who does?) so he's happy to swap his for all kinds of stuff you probably already have lying about. He just turns up in your camp one day and sits there, waiting for you to feed him. If there's any way for that event to generate income for the developer I can't see what it is. I think it's just a clean, fun event.

The new event is the game's first try at persuading you to part with some cash. It's a Gacha sale. 

As a survival/crafting game with no PvP or PvE ladder competitions, Dawnlands doesn't really have the kind of structure that supports the gacha mechanics I've seen elsewhere. On the basis of the first event, it looks like the solution is to randomize access to the kinds of things that would otherwise be straightforward premium purchases in the cash shop.

It doesn't really feel like a Gacha mechanic so much as a lockbox with out the box. It even has a fricken key as the Gacha item! You can buy the keys with Diamonds, which are an in-game currency, so I bought one to try it out. Having read the odds, I wasn't expecting much and not much is what I got.

Protected by my psychology as already described, I will not be bankrupting myself trying to win any of the admittedly rather spiffy prizes. Not even the really rather fetching bunny costume, complete with carrot holster and carrots. Nor Dodo, the cute-looking, catlike Follower, who is, apparently, "a great helper when exploring unknown lands"

Those two plus a very fancy piece of furniture are the big ticket items, although I'd be pretty pissed off if I made the required 2% roll and got a glorified garden bench. Someone obviously believes home-makers are a major demographic in the game because the second tier (10% chance.) is all furniture too, as is more than half of the bottom tier (88%. Oh, you figured that out already...)

As with everything in Dawnlands, the whole event is beautifully presented. The game has a consistently delightful aesthetic. It makes browsing the menu a pleasure in itself even when you know you're not going to sit down for the meal.

I might indulge in the occasional snack, all the same but it won't be often with keys costing 80 Diamonds a time. That feels quite steep, even with the 10% discount you get on your first ten puchases. As for paying real money, forget it.

As an indication of the way monetization in the game is headed, though, I find it perfectly acceptable. I'm enjoying just looking at the items and admiring the designs and the images. In real life, I can usually get at least as much satisfaction from window shopping as from buying the stuff. In games I'm equally happy just to look.

God, those devs must really hate players like me...

Killing Edie

I had my five Cores of Metamorphic Stone, a stack of roasted meat and fifteen Strong Wheat Beers. What was I waiting for? Probably some kind of self-knowledge or at least a generalised awareness that when things sound too good to be true, they probably are. But when has that ever stopped me?

Let's backtrack a little. Two questions: how did I know where to summon Edie and what was all that beer for? To get drunk after the kill?

Nope. The beer was because while I was doing my research I'd read the Dawnlands wiki page on Edie and it said "Strong wheat gives 60% blunt resistance and renders Edie only capable of dealing 1 damage to your character. So you can just brute force your way to kill Edie with the cheapest weapon available". 

Now that sounded like my kind of strat! Brute force tank&spank with me taking no damage worth talking about. And I had much better weapons than the cheapest so it was bound to be over in no time at all. Which, to be fair, it was, just not in the way I was imagining.

As for where to go to summon the golem, Dawnlands has a rather elegant improvement on the way Valheim hands out that kind of information. In the viking after-life you have to find a runestone and read it to mark the location of the boss on your map. They're fairly common as I recall but you can be unlucky and not bump into one for a while.

Dawnlands also requires you to explore the biome but removes the random factor by tying a number of revelations to a progression mechanic called "Intelligence Collection". This accrues naturally from the sort of things you'll be doing anyway, like sanctifying corruption and clearing the fog from the map to reveal points of interest.

When you hit certain percentages, various useful locations are marked on your map, one of them being where to find the boss. As in Valheim, there can be multiple Sealing locations for each biome and you can just find the spot by chance while exploring. (As a side-note, I no longer believe Dawnlands maps are procedurally generated. The maps and locations I'm seeing in other peoples' videos look very much like my own. It's a hypothesis I still need to test, though, so don't take it as confirmation, yet.)

I hadn't happened across Edie's lair while out riding for the very good reason that it turned out to be on an island. When it appeared on my map it seemed like a great time to build that ship I'd been thinking about.

Once again, following in Valheim's footsteps, Dawnlands lets you build various kinds of ship and sail them. In the tradition of Dawnlands, it's a lot easier to do. I'm not sure how many craft you can make. So far, I only have recipes for a raft and a small sailboat but there are a few more locked recipes in the same category (Misc.) that I can't see, although they won't necessarily be for ships. I can confirm that the materials make ocean-going craft are easier to collect in Dawnlands than in Valheim and vessels are much easier to control when on the water.

For one thing, there's no wind to contend with. You can unfurl a sail and it just makes the ship go faster whatever the weather. Rafts, which can be made ad hoc from the basic crafting UI without need of a workbench, are much more stable and effective than their Valheim conterparts so as yet I can't entirely see the need for the ship, especially since it's not guaranteed to be there when you come back for it.

I've seen some complaints about that. It's possible it may be a bug but it did sometimes happen in Valheim, too. Monsters attack ships if left unattended in both games so it may be that when I came back to find my ship gone it had been sunk by goblins. They're always killing poor old Sparky, the bastards.

Of course the ship'll be here when we come back, Karrid. Don't be such a worry-wart!

While I had my ship, though, I was able to sail to the island where the map marker suggested I'd find Edie. Having found the spot and scouted the area, I teleported back to get on with making the Cores, which brings us back to where we started at the top of the post.

Annoyingly, there was no handy free teleportation point on Edie's island. The nearest beacon was on the shoreline of the mainland across a fairly narrow strait. The portal was in the water, actually. I had to swim to shore before I could make a raft, which seemed kind of ironic.

As usual, I had a plan. Before I found out about the wheat beer trick, I'd watched several videos of people fighting Edie. All of them had slightly different strategies, mostly involving a lot of dodging, kiting and scuttling about. It looked exhausting so I was happy to rely on beered-up invulnerablity to let me bull my way through.

I didn't expect to get it done first try so in the absence of a nearby teleport I decided to build a shelter and put a bed in it so I could respawn and run back in a few seconds after my inevitable death. I'd noticed that in all the videos I'd watched, when people died fighting Edie (As they often did.) the golem didn't respawn or regain health so they were able to carry on from where they left off.

I'd also watched a positively baroque strategy by the ever-inventive Kazeyo, which once again involved a lot of ground-raising and fortification. It looked like a lot of work and it didn't even seem to be all that effective but it did give me the idea of digging a hole to hide my bed. I figured if Edie couldn't see me he'd probably leave me alone. I imagine you can guess how that went. 

Once I'd dug in, made a bed, lit a fire, put a roof over the hole and placed a chest so I could clear my inventory ( A very similar strategy, you'll note, to the one that served me so very badly when I fought Guya.) I trotted off to insert my five cores and set the whole thing rolling. Although the surprisingly well-designed and informative official Facebook page recommends using a bow, most players seemed to favor blunt weapons. 

You can just see the edge of my excavation on the left.

Edie is weak to blunt damage while, being made of rock, taking very little damage from arrows, so that seemed to make sense. Also, for some reason, I had about half a dozen massive bronze two-handed hammers that I'd found in various chests or been given as rewards. It was nice to find a good use for them at last. I drank a strong wheat beer, picked up my hammer, inserted my five Cores and prepared to do battle.

About five seconds later I was dead. Actually, five seconds is being generous. 

I never got to find out how well the wheat beer softened the impact of the golem's massive fists because he never hit me once. He just looked at me hard with his one, glowing eye and that was that. In my hubris and believing myself all but indestructible, I'd forgotten about his laser attack.

I woke up in my bed and clambered out of my hole to see if Edie was still there. He was. He zapped me a second time as I ran in to grab my fallen belongings and I died again. Next time I poked my head out of my hole he was almost on top of me. He'd followed me and now he was spawn-camping my bed. Once again, I'd placed it far too close to the sealing spot. Will I ever learn? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)

There may have been a couple more deaths before I managed to get clear of the kill zone. It's all a bit of a blur. Eventually, I somehow managed to avoid Edie's attentions long enough to open my map and port the hell out of there, thinking to myself "Well, that went well..." 

Another very significant way in which Dawnlands is more forgiving than Valheim is that when you die, although you drop a backpack, it only contains some of what you were carrying. Everything equipped stays on you when you respawn and most of your inventory comes with you, too, although I haven't exactly figured out the criteria involved. I do know that, if you've been out mining, say, and your bags were full of ore, then yes, you will want to go back and recover it but if you've been fighting a boss, you can probably leave the pack where it fell for now.

Okay, he's gone. Now what?

Except in this case I had to go back anyway to find out if Edie had despawned. More importantly, if he had gone back to where he came from, did I still have the Cores to summon him again? They weren't in my inventory but maybe they were in the backpack I dropped when I died or even still in the summoning circle where I'd slotted them.

They weren't in either of those places or anywhere else. When I got back, using a valuable teleport potion to save having to build another raft, Edie had left and it looked like he'd taken my Cores with him. Bugger. Now I was going to have to go through the whole rigmarole all over again.

So that's what I did. It took me a while. Couple of days. And, surprisingly, it was fun the second time, too. That's another difference between Valheim and Dawnlands for me. Where I dreaded failing in Valheim because the consequences could be so dire, in Dawnlands messing up stings just enough to make me want to do better but not so much I don't even want to try.

By the time I was ready to go again I'd discovered a second Seal where I could summon Edie and this one was a lot more convenient. It had a free teleport close by for a start. I'd done yet more research and I felt I was better prepared. Yes, the wheat beer would help when I closed with Edie but I wouldn't be doing that until I'd seen him use his laser, which I'd learned could only be blocked by hiding behind the large, partially-shattered stone glyph that looked a bit like a giant ammonite.

It seemed I wouldn't be able to avoid a bit of dodging and kiting but I hoped to keep it to a minimum, doing all my damage with the hammer inbetween lasers. I'd seen someone estimate it as being a six-round fight, which didn't seem too bad.

Unsurprisngly, I didn't take any pictures of the fight. How about some scenery instead?

At least I didn't go down in Round One this time. It was more like Round Two. I managed to get behind the rock for the first laser and back in to whack him with the hammer. He tried to nail me with his rock ball and missed and I smashed it, which stuns him for a while, so I could take a few free shots at his rock-hard skull. Edie hit me a few times but the beer did its job and his pounding barely tickled. 

It looked good for a while until I was too slow getting behind the rock and Edie caught me with his laser. I respawned at the teleport beacon and ran back. He was still there, still damaged, so I went at him again but this time, when I tried to dodge I got stuck on one of the spikes that stick out of the ground nearby and he got me again.

This went on for a while. I had him at about 75% and in theory I guess I could just have kept going but I was making a real hash of getting behind the rock and every time I died I had to chug another beer, like some kind of macabre drinking game. It looked odds on I'd run out of beer before he went down and that would be the end of it.

I decided to teleport away, mostly to see if Edie would still be there when I came back. I'd watched Kazeyo do that repeatedly in one of the videos and it seemed to work. It was a risk because the whole thing might reset again but I didn't feel like there was much of an option.

Obviously, Kazeyo knows something I don't. Plenty, probably. I ported out, ported back and Edie was gone. Remembering what had happened with Guya, where I lost the Crimson Eyes the first time I failed to kill her but not the second, I searched optimistically through my bags for the Cores. Nothing.

In one of those "Have you learned nothing?" moments, I even checked the summoning circle to see if somehow the cores were still in place. They were not. And then, for no good reason I can think of, I pressed the "Start Challenge" button anyway.

The ground shook. Purple tendrils began to spread. Edie was coming!

Didn't even need those cores this time! Although you could have told me that sooner...

Feeling marginally ecstatic if completely confused, I ran the hell away so I could watch what was happening. Edie appeared and stood there, obviously wondering who'd challenged him. I stood there looking at him, wondering what to do next.

Well, I wasn't just going leave him there! I wasn't fully prepared, not having expected to see him again so soon, but I had some beers left and plenty of hammers. I thought I might as well give it another go, if only for practice. 

I ran in and engaged Edie, then dodged behind the stone circle to avoid the laser. So far so good. I ran back and clobbered him a few times then ran away again. It was going down much the same as last time and inevitably after a while he got me with his laser beam. Only this time something fortuitous happened. 

As I ran back to pick up the fight, I could see Edie jittering from side to side behind the shattered ammonite. He'd somehow gotten himself caught on it. This time, it was his turn to get hung up on geometry.

I'd seen a couple of people saying they'd been able to beat Edie when he got stuck on a rock. One person even had a strat for making it happen. It's the sort of thing that some people think of as an exploit but I'm not one of them. Edie was quite happy to pound on me when I got stuck. Turnabout is fair play.

Being stuck wouldn't stop him from blasting me with his laser or thumping me with his fists but I didn't plan on getting close enough to let him do either. One thing I'd discovered when killing all those Edith Eyes, which as I mentioned are basically the same laser weapon Edie uses, is that my bow has a greater range. 

He's at 20% Not even going to need all seventy-five arrows!

For all those complicated strats on how to kill the Eyes I'd read, no-one pointed out the obvious, which is that all you have to do is find the limit of the laser's range then stand a meter or two beyond it and use your bow. If you get it exactly right, the Eye won't even respond at all because the bow has a greater range than the Eye's aggro radius, too.

It seemed like that strategy ought to work on Edie now he was stuck. It would probably work on him even if he wasn't, which may be why the official advice is to use a bow. The problem there would be that, unlike the Eyes, Edie moves around. You'd have to kite him and it would be hard to keep him in that sweet spot, where he can't see you but you can still plink him. Get it wrong and once he sees you he'll charge like a bull rhino.

With the golem immobile, though, it worked like a dream. There were only two problems: arrows really don't do a lot of damage to rock and I hadn't expected to be using my bow so I hadn't brought that many arrows anyway. 

I did have some. I had all the special arrows I'd filched out of chests - lighning, fire, cold.... I also had about eighty copper arrows I'd found lying around in all those ruins where I'd been hunting Eyes. They're sometimes stacked agains the walls in quivers, presumably left there by adventurers who didn't make it.

I also had some of my regular wood arrows but not a lot. It didn't seem like it would be enough but I was too paranoid about making Edie despawn if I tried to port somewhere for more ammo. I thought I might as well see how it went so I started pinging arrows into him from a safe distance. 

It was like chipping away at a boulder with one of those little cocktail hammers bartenders use to break up ice. I could see tiny slivers of his health flaking away but it was obvious it was going to take a lot of arrows before he fell apart altogether. 

Job done! Oops! Spoiler!

The fancy arrows did a little more damage but I soon ran out of those. The copper arrows were effective but they were all gone in no time, too. I was very glad I'd taken the trouble to upgrade and reinforce my Brass Bow to the max. At least I could be sure that was going to go the distance.

I was getting through my wood arrows, which were all I had left. Edie was at half health or close enough. It was starting to feel like I was going to just have to risk it and go looking for some trees to chop down. Luckily, you can make basic arrows from just wood via the UI. At least I wouldn't have to make a workbench, too. 

Then I had a lightbulb moment. I'd been looking though all the cash shop tabs a while back, just to see what was there, and I'd been puzzled to find you could buy basic mats like wood and stone for in-game gold. Wood and stone are everywhere for free and gold is comparatively hard to come by, so why would anyone ever want to do that?

Well, maybe if someone found themselves standing on a barren plain with a boss stuck on a rock a hundred yards away, about to run out of arrows and with no wood and trees in sight, paranoid the boss might unstick himself if they moved even an inch away from where they were? I guess if someone ever found themselves in a situation like that, they might be pretty damn happy to be able to throw a little gold at the problem.

So I bought some wood from the store and made myself some arrows. The wood was cheap enough and I had plenty of gold. I figured I could keep doing it until Edie died. In the end, though, once was enough. I still had a few arrows left when he went down.

And that was that. Third boss over and done with, Sealing Progress to Level IV. I jogged down to pick up the drops, then ported back home to take a look at all my exciting new recipes. Next stop the Swamps!

Swampland, here we come!

I have to say I found the whole thing extremely enjoyable and satisfying. More so, probably, than Valheim, although it's so long since I played that game seriously it's hard to be sure. Much though I loved Valheim, it was not infrequently terrifying. The level of threat and challenge in Dawnlands is better suited to my preferences, which generally tend towards calm, meditative relaxation rather than adrenaline-soaked tension.

Whether I'll rack up anything like the three hundred and eighty-five hours I've spent in Valheim is another matter. Most of that was during the first, harshest pandemic lockdown, when I didn't have a lot else to do. Also, the entire survival genre was fresh to me plus I didn't have a dog to walk. 

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to find at least half of those hours were spent building and I haven't even begun to build in Dawnlands. The building options there look more sophisticated than Valheim's were back in 2020 and possibly than they still are, even now. Four hundred hours in Dawnlands may not be such an impossibility to imagine.

It's also instructive to remember that even those hundreds of hours I spent in Valheim would barely twitch the dial compared to the time we all spend playing MMORPGs. If I'd played EverQuest II or Guild Wars 2 through their Steam clients, my hours played wouldn't just be in the thousands, they'd be in five figures by now. 

Probably best not to think about it. For the time being, I'm excited to play Dawnlands. I'll ride that pony until I don't feel that way any longer and then I'll put it back in the stable and find another. Until then, you'll excuse me, I'm sure. I have iron to mine and wolves to kill. Two new complete sets of armor aren't going to craft themselves.