It's Not An Exploit If No-one Sees You Do It

As I mentioned last time I posted about Palworld, I'm doing my best to avoid not only spoilers but guides, walkthroughs, How To videos and just about anything that would be informative, save me time and make playing the game more efficient. With eight million copies sold (!) I'm absolutely certain the early game, at least, must already be subject to min-maxing, ideal strats and tactics, something I'll no doubt be very glad about at some point in the future, when I hit the inevitable skill wall. 

I did expect to run full-face into it on the first dungeon boss, a fight which, I now realize, represents the Tutorial's final exam. Beat that boss and you prove you've learned all you need to go it alone.

As must be obvious to anyone who's been here a while, I am not at my best with Boss fights. I neither like them nor am I good at them. If there's a way around them I will happily take it. That said, I do usually find some way through to the other side, if going through is the only option. The only game I can remember actually giving up on because I literally could not beat a gate-keeping boss was The Secret World, the end of whose storyline I have still never reached.

That, however, was a fight close to the end of the content that came with the original TSW. This was going to be the very first such fight in Palworld, an introduction to the concept. How hard could it be?

That sounds like a set-up, doesn't it? I'm either going to tell a story about how easy it turned out to be or spin a tale of woe about how unfairly tough it was. Well, I might have, if I hadn't have found a trick to it. As it turns out, I don't really know how easy or hard the fight would be if you did it properly because I didn't have to do much at all.

Oh yeah? So why are we looking at picture of my character standing outside the entrance to the instance, looking at the bag of gear with all her stuff in that drops when you die? I suppose I'd better tell the whole story...

I was playing Palworld last night and thinking about the post I'd written earlier in the day, where I said I'd been to the Rayne Syndicate Tower but hadn't gone inside. The more I thought about it, the dafter that seemed. What kind of explorer would I be if I didn't even take a look? What did I think was going to happen in there, anyway? Why would I automatically assume it would be too difficult for me to handle? It's part of the Tutorial, ffs! I'm not that bad at video games! Am I?

Only one way to find out. I ported over and went in. It was meant to be a fact finding mission, not a serious attempt, so I didn't change my team or kit myself out with consumables or make any preparations at all. I know the Tutorial rubric told me to "make sure your Pals and equipment are in tip-top condition" but that was just the equivalent of an "Enter at Your Own Risk" sign, surely.

The instance is timed. You get ten minutes to beat the Boss. About three minutes after I went in, I was back at my base in my starting gear.

Ah, but I'd learned a lot. I learned that the fight was nothing whatsoever like I'd imagined it would be, for a start. I've never played Pokemon but I've read plenty about it. When I saw people saying these instances were Palworld's equivalent of Pokemon Gyms, I imagined something along the lines of Pet Battles in World of Warcraft. I thought I'd be picking my Pals and sending them in to battle for me. I didn't expect to be doing the fighting myself.

The instance opens with a dramatic cut-scene, rather like the entrance of a Championship boxing match. In come Zoe and Grizzbolt. I don't know what I expected but it wasn't them. They're neither of them my idea of the leader of a bandit gang.

I also wasn't expecting to be thrown straight into a completely normal boss fight. It felt almost exactly like something out of Guild Wars 2 or EverQuest II or some other MMORPG that isn't even a sequel. Zoe and Grizzbolt chased me about, trying to kill me; I beat on them with my baseball bat, trying to kill them. There was no subtlety involved.

Unfortunately for me, they had 30,000 HP and I didn't. It was pretty obvious to me I didn't have either the DPS to beat them down or the armor class, defence or player skill to withstand their attacks. It was frenetic and chaotic and I was never going to win - but it didn't feel entirely hopeless. 

I had enough time to see that the pillars in the room blocked their ranged attacks and that they had a lot of trouble getting to me when I hid behind one. I had Foxparks out and he was doing good damage, a lot more than I was, but he was getting the worst of the attacks, too. By the time I died he was already out of commission, which is how I came to learn that when your Pal is down, ten minutes in the Palbox sets him on his feet again.

I was too impatient to wait ten minutes. I took the revive at my base, put Sparky in the box, took another Pal out and ported back. I was worried my gear would be in the instance under Grizzbolt but it was safely outside so I got dressed and went back to try again.

It went better the second time but it still didn't go well. I kept out of the way and concentrated on watching what Z&G were doing. I cycled through various Pals to see who did the most damage. None of them did enough. 

A couple of times, though, Zoe and Grizz seemed to get completely stuck on the opposite side of the pillar I was hiding behind. I waited to see if they'd get loose but they didn't. My Pals kept attacking but even with free shots they were never going to do enough damage in the time. I tried coming round the side to get some free hits in myself but that set the evil pair free, so I had to dodge back into cover again.

With about three minutes left on the clock and Zoe and Grizz once again stuck to the pillar, I gave up hope of beating them and pulled out my last Pal for a comedy finish. It was lazy, useless old Cativa, the slacker I was complaining about yesterday. 

OMG! I will never complain about him again! He turned out to be an absolute monster in combat. Okay, granted he was getting a free run with Z&G unable to respond, but he was doing ten times the damage of any of the others. 

As he repeatedly blasted them with his special attack, then charged in and pummeled them with his paws, that giant health-pool sprung a huge leak. I watched, first in surprise and then in delight, as the possibility of victory shifted from a glimmer of a chance to a racing certainty. Cat didn't even need the full three minutes. There were more than thirty seconds left on the timer when Zoe and Grizzbolt went down and I and all my Pals dinged.

We'd done it. Okay, we'd exploited a glitch in pathing to beat an opponent who couldn't fight back but so what? Take the win!

Apart from a huge chunk of xp, the main reward was five Ancient Technology points, giving first access to some powerful, craftable artifacts. There didn't seem to be a loot chest so it seemed like time to leave.

What happened next was weird. I exited the dungeon to find myself on top of the tower. There's a portal statue up there that you can only get to by beating the boss. Or by flying up there under your own power, I guess, but I don't have a flying mount yet so that's not an option. 

There's a fantastic view and it makes for a superb starting point for a glide. As soon as I make a parachute - or the gloves that let me use Celaray as a glider - I'm going back there to give it a try. 

With the first boss down, the Tutorial comes to an end. I no longer have anything on my on-screen To Do list. I don't have a To-Do list. Although there is still a very clear progression path along the Tech Tree and there's a separate set of Missions relating to Base Building, it feels like now there's an awful lot of sand and very little box. 

As for Zoe and Grizz, having crossed them off my list I did some googling to see how other people were handling the fight. I saw plenty of guides and suggestions but none of them were even close to the way I did it. Everyone says to use Earth Pals and kite. Some of them recommend getting to Level 15 before even trying.

Lucky I didn't know about that strat before I went in. I'd probably still be in there now.

One Down, How Many To Go?

It's been a whole week since the last time I wrote anything substantive about Once Human, not counting that Christmas Day squib about the santa hat. Rest assured, I have been playing every day. I just thought we probably all needed a break from the apocalypse over the holdays.

Yesterday I put in one of my longest sessions yet, almost four hours straight. I don't often play any game for that long without a break these days but survival games in general do lend themselves to rambling, extended sessions and this one makes those more immersive than most.

It does to me, anyway. When it comes to gaming, particularly the persistent, open-world RPG kind, I have a preference I don't think I've mentioned before, one that I'm not sure is necessarily apparent from the games I choose to play and write about.

I have said, many times, that I prefer, whenever possible, not to play human characters. I'd rather play animals, animal-human hybrids or, failing that, humanoids of dimunitive stature like gnomes or fairies. If I do have to play a human character, though, my favorite setting to play them in, by far  is contemporary or near-future. 

I find it much easier to connect with a human character who's able to wear clothes that look like clothes I recognize, not like medieval armor, which really doesn't figure in any vision of myself I've ever had. I also much prefer humans to wield weapons that look familiar, like guns or baseball bats or monkey-wrenches, not fifteen-foot long girders with lasers shooting out of the end.

I also have a penchant for modern buildings that have fallen into disrepair or ruin, something I very much enjoy exploring in real life, should I ever get the chance. It's evocative and fascinating to be able to wander through the decaying detritus of a dead or dying commercial sector or prowl around the dusty, tumbled furniture in a deserted suburban home. 

These kinds of environments tend to elicit more complex emotional reactions from me than the gosh-wow awe and amazement that comes from graphic artists' joyful renderings of royal palaces and stately homes. Not that those aren't fun, in their own way, but they don't resonate the way a beat-up filling station does.

Obviously, I like the pretty stuff, too, but given the choice I'd generally go for gritty, urban realism and sylised streetwear over fairytale fantasy and frou-frou frocks, every time. The Secret World is a long way from being my favorite MMORPG in terms of gameplay but it's been my benchmark for playing dress-up for over a decade and it comes in close to the top for set design, too. 

It's too early to say whether Once Human can topple TSW from either of those positions but it's got to be in with a chance. While I don't see any sign yet that it's going to compete with Funcom's game for leather-jacketed street cool, the depth of detail in both architecture and interior design look increasingly impressive the further I explore.

Which is not to say there's anything particularly ground-breaking or exceptional here. It's much more likely I just don't get to play many games with these kinds of settings. I mostly play MMORPGs, which as we know, are mostly fantasy or sci-fi. I'm fairly sure I'd have been equally as impressed, or more so, by any number of well-known titles, if only I'd played them, but since nothing I've noticed between TSW and this also came with a New Weird overlay, my points of comparison are necessarily limited.

That's a very round-about, long-winded way of saying I often find myself spending longer playing Once Human than I mean to because I take so much time gawping at overturned vending machines or staring at broken billboards as though they were exhibits in a gallery. I'd rarely stop and gaze at a sumptuous ballroom in a fantasy game the way I stare in delight at a run-down, out-of-town shopping mall.

Even so, my capacity for taking screenshots of urban decline, considerable though it is, has its limits. I wouldn't be spending this long going through every trash-filled room in every run-down building if it wasn't for the hook the game sets every time you enter a new location.

As soon as you cross the threshold of a named settlement, be it a farm or a factory or a mall, a set of objectives appears on screen. These are similar but not identical for each place you visit. Usually you have to kill a certain number of the inhabitants, find a "mysterious" but unspecified object, loot a couple of gear or weapons containers and maybe kill an Elite mob. 

It's astonishing how effective a motivator this can be. It turns every delapidated show house or deviant-infested repair shop into a hidden object puzzle. Not that the objects are hard to find per se. They light up or glow or stand out from the background, bordered in white. To be absolutely certain, you can press Q, sending out a pulse of energy that illuminates anything you may have missed. 

A recent patch added extra glow to chests to make them even easier to see. And if that wasn't enough, best of all, the game uses a very effective graphical trick to make life easier, one I haven't encountered before. When you enter a building, the ambient light alters automatically, effectively emulating the real-world experience of your eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. It's very effective and immersive, too.

All things considered, I get the strong impression the developers focused closely on encouraging players to feel good about exploring the environment, fitting the gameplay around the experience rather than the other way around. It's not so much that it feels natural - theres' nothing natural about braining a zombie with a monkey-wrench - as that it feels bizarrely comfortable. Very little is awkward or frustrating and yet it doesn't feel insultingly easy, either. 

I realise as I write this that I'm describing the whole experience very much from the viewpoint of the Explorer archetype we're all familiar with. This really is an explorer's world. It's thrilling to explore for the sheer fun of it. At the same time, all those numbered, tabulated tasks speak directly to the Achiever, the archetype which usually comes second for me in any of those Bartle tests I've done. It's no wonder I've been finding it so compulsive.

One thing I've been less happy about is the way the game follows what seems to have become the standard model for crafting progression in these kinds of Survival games, where each tier is locked behind a boss kill. I first encountered it in Valheim, where I didn't really like it much, then I saw it replicated verbatim in Dawnlands, where I liked it even less. 

Now, here it is again and I'm still not keen. It's not a pleasure, just an annoying necessity. Granted, a successful boss kill does release a momentary burst of endorphins but I'd happily forego the hit for a more straightforward, skill-based progression system, one bearing a more meaningful relationship to the crafting process itself. Mixing crafting and combat this way always seems counter-intuitive to me.

Still, if you're going to do it, at least make it manageable for players who prefer to craft rather than kill and therefore may not have the skills to handle challenging boss fights. That ought to be the rule. Again, it's too early to say whether Once Human achieves that standard - or even aims for it - but I can say that I have now killed the first boss and it went well.

The tool-tip suggests two level ten players for the fight so since I was going solo I tried to over-level for it. By the time I dinged 14, though, it had become apparent to me that, while you can keep on leveling up as long as you want, extra levels don't bring the same kind of innate, material advantages in this situation as they might in other games. What I really needed were better weapons but short of some exceptional luck with a Weapons Crate, I also needed the next tier of crafting to make them. Something of a Catch 22. 

I watched a couple of YouTube videos of the fight and it didn't look difficult. Long and tedious, yes, but the tactics seemed easy to understand and not much harder to execute. My biggest concern was finding a time when Beryl wasn't likely to interrupt me mid-fight. In the end, yesterday afternoon, with Beryl sleeping in the armchair behind me, I just got fed up of waiting, made myself a thousand rounds of ammunition, repaired all my gear, ate, drank and restored my sanity and then teleported to the location and went in.

It was, as promised, a fairly straightforward fight. It followed what I'd seen in the videos quite closely although as with all these fights, there are always small variations. Still, there were no real surprises. I was concentrating so hard I didn't even think of taking any screenshots so the only record I have is the handy Victory screen the game pops up for you as you exit the instance.

The fight seemed to take a long time but that was mostly because the weapons I had, a couple of handguns, did relatively little damage. The boss, the Foul Shadowhunter, recently renamed from the perfectly acceptable Ravenous Hunter for reasons that escape me, has a massive health pool but it dosn't matter because you mostly can't shoot him anyway. He's immune from attack for much of the fight. Instead, you have to shoot his gigantic gatling gun, which has its own much smaller health pool. 

When you deplete that to zero he drops the gun and just stands there like a lemon. You pick the gun up and empty the entire magazine into him. If you do it correctly, aiming for the head, it takes huge chunks off his health. When the ammo runs out, the dance begins again. There are a couple of other phases, where you have to run around destroying things to stop adds spawning but most of the fight consists of hiding behind barrels while the boss shoots uselessly at them, then popping out while he takes a breather to blast his gun until he drops it.

I got him down with three goes on his big gun, which seemed pretty decent from what I'd seen in the videos on YouTube, where everyone clearly had far better weapons than I did. I didn't time it but it felt like eight or nine minutes. 

Longer than I'd have liked, sure, but not even close to being either as long, boring or annoying as virtually any instanced boss fight I'd done in a decade of Guild Wars 2's Living Story. I'd say it was about on a par with the first bosses in both Valheim and Dawnlands If things carry on like that way, it should be manageable enough. I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to the next boss fight but at least I'm not dreading it.

That, though, can wait for a good while. First I have a whole new tier of crafting to explore, something that will also require me to level up a few times to earn the requisite points to open all the options and learn all the blueprints. Beating the first boss also unlocks the Cradle, the device in your backpack where you store the Deviations you have to collect to give you extra abilities and buffs. 

All that, though, is for another post. There's so much to talk about! I haven't even mentioned my new Gacha machine. It plays Whack-a-Mole and spits out blueprints. I'd tell you more but I don't understand how it works yet.

I guess I'll have to save that for next time.

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.

Edith, Edie And Me

I have so much to say about Dawnlands, I don't know where to start. I could easily post about the game every day - and don't think I haven't thought about it. 

I say "easily" but that's not really the word I'm looking for. I spent a fruitless half-hour yesterday trying to get this post going but I had so many things I wanted to talk about I couldn't settle on any one of them so eventually I gave up and did what I really wanted to in the first place: I played the game. 

I've been doing that a lot; playing the game. I'm sixty-six hours in, making it my sixth most-played title on Steam, right after My Time At Portia, which it will probably have passed by the time you read this. What I've been posting about Dawnlands until now runs far behind what I've actually been doing there.

The cute post I put about about the charming house I found gives the impression I've just been bimbling about like Fotherington-Thomas, picking apples and waving at clouds. In fact, I've been working fairly determinedly on progression. 

Like just about everything in the game, progression in Dawnlands is modelled closely on Valheim, only more streamlined and with better structure. The developers didn't just slavishly copy their model; in some ways they improved on it.

As in Valheim, each biome has a boss who has to be defeated to open the next tier of crafting. Killing them results in an immediate flurry of new recipes, the materials for many of which can only be acquired using tools made with items dropped by the bosses themselves. Both games allow free exploration of all the biomes in their open worlds but you won't be doing much in any of them, other than admiring the view, until you've successfully eliminated the boss in the one that came before it.

Sightseeing is a very real option. One significant difference between the two games is that Valheim's biomes become much more dangerous each time. The difficulty gradient in Dawnlands is much shallower. Everything does get stronger and hit harder as you move from Grasslands to Forest to Plains but it's still quite possible to travel, explore and even hunt with quite basic gear. You just can't expect to mine ore or chop trees while you're there.

Until yesterday, I was under the mistaken impression that there were exceptions to this rule. I'd been turned back a number of times at certain points on the map with a message telling me I'd have to come back later. I assumed that meant I'd need to kill a boss to clear the path but I've since discovered it means that's where the map ends. Only five of the proposed ten biomes are in the game as yet. 

As the chart shows, I've at least visited all of them. The reason I've done so little in the Snow Mountain biome is, once again, the same as it would be in Valheim: you suffer recurring cold damage the whole time you're there. 

In keeping with the general tone of the two games, though, the damage in Dawnlands is manageable for brief periods, even without the protective gear for which I don't yet even have the recipes. I was able to make a few exploratory forays into the snows, searching for a particular plant that grows only there.

The plant in question is a Snow Lotus and it's needed to make Strong Wheat Beer. I needed the beer for my plan to kill Edie, the Plains boss. Edie is "a powerful conglomeration of scattered rocks" with "a childish nature". There's a backstory in which it's made plain that Edie is just trying to play but as a massive golem made out of rock it doesn't quite get how breakable humans are.

My knees are literally knocking together from the cold here.

On my first try Edie didn't even need its massive fists or the giant ball of rock it swings about on a chain made of steel hawsers to break me into little pieces. The undodgeable, unblockable laser beam from the golem's single, glowing eye did the job just fine.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before you can even attempt to "Seal" any of the bosses in Dawnlands, you have to collect a certain number of items to summon them. For the first boss, Kenda, it's just a couple of masks dropped by goblins in the Grasslands camps. For the Forest boss, Guya, it's three Crimson Eyes from Giants in the dungeons.

By the time you get to Edie, things have escalated. Not only do you need five summoning items, you have to make them yourself and it is not easy. Oh, boy, is it not. 

From the surprisingly charming Facebook page...

It is fun, though. Or I enjoyed it, anyway, once I'd done some research. This is absolutely one of those times when I'm glad other people are playing the game, not because I want to open my world and invite them in to help (Which is a thing you can do in Dawnlands.) but because there are plenty of YouTube guides and tutorials and at least a few of them are actually useful.

I did wonder why there were so many until I remembered there's been a competition running in the game since launch for "Creators" to make videos and put them on YouTube. There are in-game rewards. Since Dawnlands has video recording integrated into the UI, the barrier to entry is extremely low and plenty of people have taken up the challenge. I should probably do it myself before the event finishes.

Before I could take on Edie, I had to kill five "Edith Eyes". Edith Eyes are basically the laser in Edie's head, acting as a standalone security system in various, large ruins. There's a whole technological backstory going on here that I would love to see explained. 

I first encountered an Edith Eye as I was exploring along the coast a couple of weeks ago. It targeted me as I rode by and took about three-quarters of my health with a single blast. After that I gave the ruins a wide berth. Fortunately, you get a big, red warning before you come into range.

When the main quest sequence asked me to go into the ruins and investigate, I was a little disconcerted. Even more so when I found I'd need to kill at least five of the balsted things. I went online to look it up and found some interesting suggestions, one of which was to dig a hole in front of the ruin so the Eye couldn't get line of sight, then pop up each time after it fired and plug a few arrows into it.

I forgot to take any pictures of the Edith Eye but this is one of the ruins.

I did that and it worked, although it took me several tries to get the hole just right. As with Valheim, being able to alter the terrain opens up lots of interesting opportunities, so I was having fun digging my holes but after the first couple of kills it became obvious they were an unecessary complication.

The laser beam destroys most things it hits but it doesn't penetrate the rock the ruins are made from. All you need to do is move to a spot outside, where the Eye can see you but not quite get line of sight past the gateway. It fires at you and hits the pillar, after which it needs to recharge, giving you plenty of time for three or four targeted shots with the bow. Rinse and repeat until the Eye explodes then collect your Rockpattern Grudge.

I rode around the Plains until I'd found five ruins and killed five Eyes but that was just the beginning. Next you need to get hold of five Instability Crystals. You can't just go out and chip them off some node, either. No, you have to make them yourself by combining a Wind Slime Crystal with some resin at the workbench.

Wind Slime Crystals drop off Wind Slimes. Go figure, right? Luckily I'd been killing them the whole time I'd been riding around the Plains. They're aggressive little buggers. I had a nice stack of crystals and more resin in storage than I knew what to do with, so materials weren't a problem. 

The problem, if you want to call it one, was the cooldown on the recipe. You can only make one Wind Slime Crystal every two hours. This is the kind of thing some of the short-tempered ingrates on Steam like to call out as dodgy mobile practice, something that makes me wonder if any of them have ever played an actual game in this or any related genre before. Just about every MMORPG I've ever played, subscription or buy-to-play or F2P, has used these kinds of mechanics. Mobile games didn't invent time-gating, that's for sure.

I just got in the habit of making an Instability Crystal before I logged out then another when I logged in again, plus more whenever I happened to remember. I was done in a couple of days. So that meant I was ready to combine all my Crystals and Grudges and make the five Cores of Metamorphic Stone I needed to summon Edie, right?

There's got to be a Wind Slime around here somewhere...

Oh, no. That would be far too easy. First, I had to sanctify the Grudges. That's what I needed the Crystals for.

In the storyline, Dawnlands has been corrupted by some evil force, leaving much of the infrastructure in need of "sanctification". Hedi, the owl companion you meet right at the start, is able to sanctify most things but the Grudges dropped by powerful creatures and bosses have to be sanctified at "Sanctification Platform".

There's one in every Shelter so it's a simple enough process. The only problem is, whenever you attempt to sanctify a Grudge, it attracts monsters, who attack in waves and try to destroy the platform. If they succeed, the sanctification fails. 

The first time I tried it was quite a battle so I decided to make better preparations. The monsters all had to come in through the main entrance to the Shelter so I put a line of spiked wood barricades in front of it. That worked so well I just stood there waiting for the sanctification timer to complete, which didn't happen because a bunch of big goblins had apparently been damaging the platform through the fence while I was laughing at their pals by the gate. 

Kazeyo, a YouTuber who posts detailed video walkthroughs for Dawnlands, has some fairly baroque ideas about how the game should be played. He suggests a typically over-the-top solution to the "overrun by monsters" problem. You can see it in action, along with much of the process I've been describing, in the above video.

His idea is to use the hoe to construct a tall pillar then place a Sanctification Platform on top. I'd forgotten they were craftable, even though I'd had to make one during the storyline. For good measure, he builds his pillar next to a lake so he can add a moat around the base. Like many of the abstruse, complicated and arcane tricks and "shortcuts" I've watched when trying to figure out how to do something in the game, it's much more complicated than it needs to be but it looks hella fun to do.

After my failed attempt I just went all around the perimeter putting up more barricades and stood inside picking the attackers off with my bow. That worked perfectly. The failure consumed a Core so I needed a replacement but luckily I had enough spare components to make another. 

Pretty soon I had my five Cores. Time to visit Edie!

As I said before, that did not go well but since this post is already a couple of thousand words long, the rest of the story will just have to wait for another day, when why I needed that Strong Wheat Beer, along with many other things, will be revealed.

Can't promise it will be worth the wait but you have to build suspense somehow...

I Built A Treehouse - Take #2

Blaugust is doing strange things to my head. As I write this I have yet to hit publish on my last Dawnlands post, in which I talk about having played for sixteen hours. I'm up to nearly twenty-six hours now but by the time this appears it might be thirty or thirty-five. (Right in the middle, in fact. Just checked and as of 09.15 on the 24th I've played for 32.4 hours.)

Whatever the tally, it will very definitely have gone up. I'm finding Dawlands there and thereabouts as compulsive as Valheim and I haven't even started building yet. 

It might seem a little invidious to keep comparing the two games but I can't stress enough just how solidly Dawnlands is modelled on Iron Crown's break-out hit. This next part will be incredibly familiar to anyone who played Valheim. It's almost verging on Santayana's aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Today, I shut the door to keep Beryl out (It's okay. Mrs Bhagpuss was home to respond to any of the little princess's urgent needs.) so I could take another crack at the second boss, Guya of the Forest.

First, as you'll no doubt recall me mentioning in a previous post, I had to locate Guya's summoning spot (Or "Sealing" as it is in Dawnlands.) via a combination of questing and exploration. As sometimes happened in Valheim, I'd already happened upon one location even before I got the pointer to it and later on I found a second while out exploring, so that was no problem.

To wake Guya up so I could send her back to sleep again or whatever happens when you "Seal" one of these things, first I had to get hold of three Crimson Eyes. These drop off the Giant Goblins (Or maybe they're Goblin Giants.) in the instanced dungeons. 

There's one Giant per dungeon and they drop one eye every time. They're not cyclopses so I imagine it's someone else's eye. 

To get three of them, you need to clear three dungeons. I'm not sure whether the dungeons respawn. I haven't been in the same one twice yet to check. They don't in Valheim so they probably don't in Dawnlands either. The mechanics of the two games aren't always entirely identical. though, so I ought to test it to be sure.

It didn't take me long to find three dungeons and killing the Giants is ridiculously easy, for the simple but bizarre reason that they're too big to get through the doorways. I can't begin to imagine how they ever got in there in the first place. 

In every case so far I've just been able to stand outside the room and pump the Giant full of arrows at no risk whatsoever. Sometimes they just stand there and take it. Sometimes they rage and roar and swipe at me with their clubs. Either way, they die and I'm fine.

Some may see that as a bug. I see it as a feature. Games like this are as much about imprrovisation and using the environment to your advantage as they are about traditional gaming skills and fast reflexes. Valheim rewards preparation and planning ahead and so does Dawnlands. If you just rush in and whale away you're almost bound to fail.

So of course, when I summoned Guya for the first time, that's just what I did. Rushed, whaled, failed.

In my defence, it worked for the first boss, Kenda. I killed him on my first attempt without coming close to dying, just by tanking and spanking. That led me to believe, erroneously as it turned out, that regional bosses in Dawnlands were going to be super-easy. They are not.

This doesn't feel ominous at all...

Guya battered me and poisoned me and sent me to my resurrection spot in a matter of seconds. Since I'd not remembered to open the nearby teleport beacon (Didn't even see it...) I had to ride all the way back from my home in the Grasslands just to find that Guya had despawned.

Now that is different from Valheim. In the viking afterlife, once you call up one of those legendary creatures it hangs around until you send it packing. I remember The Elder stomping around for several days the first time I failed to kill him, knocking down trees and generally making the area around his summoning stone uninhabitable.

I was more annoyed to discover the three Crimson Eyes needed to call Guya back had vanished from my pack. Or at least I thought they had...

It was probably just as well I had to go kill three more giants for three more eyes before I could try again. Otherwise I'd almost certainly have re-summoned Guya and gotten myself killed a second time. I can be stubborn like that sometimes.

It took me a couple of sessions to locate three more dungeons, which gave me time not only to improve my armor and supply myself with some extra consumables but also to do a bit of research on the best way to go about killing Guya. Once again, what I found is not going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who got as far as Bonemass, the third boss in Valheim. Or, for that matter, anyone who read one of the many posts about killing Bonemass that peppered the blogosphere back in the spring of '21.

Yes, the trick to killing Guya is to climb up on something high so he can't reach you. Then you either fill him full of arrows or poke him with a spear. I watched a couple of YouTube videos of people doing it and of course I thought I could do it better. I mean, all these guys did was hop up onto some rocks. So primitive!

I forgot to take any pictures of my rockhouse so here's one of my raft instead.

I built a treehouse. Well, a rockhouse. I located a handy rock outcropping right next to the Sealing circle. I cut down every tree in the immediate vicinity. I traded in a few recipe pages to learn how to make wooden ladders, floors and walls. Then I started to build.

I was concerned that when I ran towards the rocks with Guya's poisonous breath hot on my neck I might panic and fall off the ladder, so I built a wide ramp all the way to the top. I even got out my pick and chipped away some of the rock that was jutting out betwen the struts. You could have ridden an elephant up there by the time I was done.

My next worry was that even if I got to the top safely, I'd fall off trying to get a good shot. The rocks were only just wide enough to stand on safely so it wasn't an irrational fear. 

I built a platform but I fell off that a couple of times as I was building it so I built some walls as well. Then I needed another ladder to get from one level to another because of course there were two levels. I put a couple of chests there to store stuff and threw in a workbench for good measure. That way  I could be sure I wouldn't run out of arrows and even if my Hunter's Bow broke, I could make myself another.

This kind of overthinking and over-preperation did me no favors in Valheim. You'd think I might have remembered that and you'd be right. I sort of did remember, but I went ahead with the plan anyway. Guess what happened?

If you said "It all went horribly wrong", give yourself a gold star. If you said "It all went hilariously, horribly wrong", give yourself two.

I also didn't take any pictures of the first attempt. Can you blame me? This is from the second.

Remember when I I said you could have ridden an elephant up that ramp? Well, Guya's about the size of an elephant. I summoned her, popped her with an arrow to get her attention, then legged it over to my rockhouse. I scooted up the ladder, turned round and got myself set, only to see Guya coming up the ramp behind me.

From there it turned into one of those chases Benny Hill used to end his shows with, a reference that's now so dated I really ought to retire it for good. I kept jumping off the platform and running around the rocks, trying to put a few arrows into Guya as I ran, then runing up the ramp, hoping he'd get stuck. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. Even if he did, he soon got himself free and carried on chasing me, firing poison bolts and summoning mushroom men, who joined in the chase like a much less attractive version of Hills Angels.

At several points I got stuck in the mezzanine I'd so unecessarily added and for a while it got so awkward I just tried to kite Guya around the open clearing. Nothing I was doing was making much of a dent in her massive health pool but I was rapidly running out of both hit points and hope. 

I died, of course. I had remembered to open the teleport beacon this time so I recalled to that just in case proximity would prevent Guya from despawning. It did not.

I was a tad annoyed once again, partly because I knew the fiasco was all my fault but mostly because now I'd have to go farm Giants for eyes all over again. Except, to make an increasingly lengthy story a little shorter, I didn't. 

When I picked up my backpack to recover my stuff, I was dumbfounded to see the three Crimson Eyes still inside. Either they hadn't been consumed this time or, more likely, they hadn't been consumed the first time either but I'd unwittingly auto-stored them in a a chest somewhere.

This post would be a lot shorter if I'd just stood on the stupid rock from the start.

Whatever the reason, it was great news. I set about knocking down most of the ramp to make it no wider than a single ladder. I was ready to knock that down too, after I got up to the top next time, but it wasn't necessary. Guya is too big to use a ladder and though she tries really, really hard, she can't quite scrmble up the side of a rock.

Even so, things didn't go to well when I resummoned her. I got up to my perch easily enough but the platform I'd built kept blocking either my line of sight to Guya or hers to me. If the former, I couldn't hit her; if the latter, she ran around the rocks trying to find a way to me and I couldn't hit her then, either.

We kept that dance up until I abandoned the platform and just stood on the bloody rocks like I should have done from the start. From there, we could see each other but I could hit her and she couldn't hit me, which ad been the plan all along.

Her annoying mushroom men could, though. She summoned them seemingly by the dozen, sometimes right next to me, sometimes below, whne they would run up the ladder on their little legs and swarm over me. They didn't do much damage but they sure were distracting and I kept targeting them by mistake. 

I also kept opening my storage chests by accident, filling the whole screen with a view of my inventory. Once, I even managed to open the workbench. 

The wooden arrows I was firing took the tiniest chunks off Guya's health so I swapped to fire arrows, which didn't do a lot more. I remembered the advice about using a spear and I also remembered I had one that came with lightning charges, so I tried that instead. It did a lot more damage but I kept almost falling off the rock trying to reach so I had to go back to the bow.

It was a mess, frankly. But I got the job done, somehow. Guya keeled over and exploded, leaving a pile of sparkling loot. I ran down the ladder to pick it up and while I was doing that, I died too.

Guya down! On we go!

I died three more times, respawning at the beacon, running back, looting my backpack, killing some mushroom men and passing boars, then falling down dead again. It was night and visibility wasn't great. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. It was making me pretty angry.

Then the sun came up and I finally found out what was doing it. The mushroom men Guya had summoned didn't despawn when she died and several had gotten themselves stuck inside the rock itself. They had been throwing rocks and poison at me without me realizing and even now I knew they were doing it, I still couldn't stop them because the rock was blocking my attacks.

Poetic justice! Karma! What goes around, comes around! All of that. 

So I got out my pickaxe and knocked chunks out of the rock until I could get to the little bastards and then I killed them. It's all about the improv.

With the second boss down, I now have access to Bronze Age tech, along with a breadcrumb quest to the next region which, in another rare departure from the Valheim template, isn't the snowy land I ventured into a while ago but the sun-baked plains.

I've already made an exploratory expedition, just to see the new Shelter and move the main quest along. The plains look stunning. I'd say I can't wait to explore them but actually I can. I'm going to take my time, find some more sheets and open up a lot more recipes before I start looking for tin on the plains to make myself a set of Bronze Armor. 

For that, I'll also need cotton, which I'll have to grow for myself. I've made a hoe and tilled some land. I've bought some seeds and planted them. Now I have to wait for them to grow. It takes eight hours, real time.

People have been complaining about that but I think it's fine. I'm in no rush. I played Valheim for nearly four hundred hours, after all. I've barely started in Dawnlands.