Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell. 

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Just a short update today (Well, I hope...) on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going. It remains both the only thing I'm playing and the thing I'm playing more than anything I've played for a long time but that isn't necessarily a recommendation. Also, why did I keep using "thing" there instead of "game"? I mean, it's not like if I wasn't playing BG3 I'd be playing the zither...

Steam now has me at 121 hours played. I have become a little more lax about leaving the game running when I'm AFK but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't account for more than a couple of hours altogether, so around a hundred and twenty hours seems fair. 

How Long To Beat has just the main story at a weirdly specific seventy-two and a half hours and "Main + Extra" at a hundred and fifteen, so I'm already past that. They have "Completionist" at a hundred and seventy-eight hours, which is still a long way off but my run so far is very, very far from being complete. Every time I change Acts a whole slew of quests get marked as "Completed", by which I think the game means "Unfinishable" and I have by no means found all the possible quests or even all the explorable areas.

What this tells me is that I'm playing the game wrong. Well, I knew that!

It is, in fact, increasingly obvious to me that Act 3 is a totally different game from Acts 1 and 2, not because of anything the developers have done but because the sheer attrition of having already played the equivalent of two, full-length RPGs even by the time I got there means I am no longer treating the experience even as something from the same genre, let alone as a continuation of the same game.

In Act I, I was pretty much invested in the characters and the storyline. I tried to roleplay most choices and avoid fudging the results as much as possible without actually having to restart the entire game. In Act II, I began to feel a lot more like I was playing a video game, where getting the best result was more important than staying true to the character I was playing, but I was still quite strongly involved in the storyline and the plot and I still wanted to keep things moving in a direction that felt honorable or appropriate.

Act III not only doesn't feel like the same game any more, it often doesn't even feel like a game at all. It feels more like a toy. It's full of big, set-piece battles that I find myself doing over and over to see if I can get a better result. And then I don't always even use the save from the good one when I get it! It's more like Kerbal Space Program than an RPG now, where you just keep fiddling with the controls so you can watch stuff blow up. 

The plot is still there, of course, but it's been a while now since I really cared about it. For a start, it's insanely complicated and I can't remember who is supposed to be doing what to or for whom anymore. It's like one of those Batman stories where someone blows a hole in the wall of Arkham Asylum and the entire Rogues Gallery comes boiling out, every one of them with a plot and agenda of their own. 

As far as I can remember, there are three Champions of Bad Gods, one of whom I killed at the end of Act II, plus at least two Devils, a Mindflayer going by the name of The Emperor, a Vampire Lord and a Hag. Then there are at least two Cults with countless members doing murders, a Thieves Guild and a Necromancer cluttering up the storyline and all of the above interact with each other in various ways.

It's ridiculous overkill and it's had the very negative effect of making it almost impossible for me to take any of it remotely seriously. The whole thing has devolved into a series of largely meaningless fights. I wander around the city looking for them and when I find one, it usually takes me all day. 

For a while I was still attempting to play the game properly, by which I mean coherently and in the manner of a table-top campaign, but that all came to an end after I spent literally a whole day - at least eight hours of gameplay - fighting through the very challenging series of encounters in the sub-plot where the PC tries to break into an Archdevil's storage vault in Hell to steal back the contract they foolishly signed.

It was a good day's play. I enjoyed it a lot. My party won a whole series of fights they really should have lost. I came up with some clever tactics and we had some lucky rolls and it all felt pretty good. Only, after every titanic clash, there was always another and there was never any real opportunity to rest and recover. In the end it just got to be too much.

When the final conflict between my team and the Archdevil himself started I knew there was no chance whatsoever we would win, even after Floradelle, who has a frankly insane Persuasion bonus, convinced one of the Devil's lieutenants to switch sides. We did indeed duly lose and the Game Over card came up and at that point it was plain no amount of retries would make the slightest difference.

I thought about it afterwards. In a way you could say it was a whole day wasted because I did end up going back to a save from before we even went to the Hells in the first place. On the other hand, as I said, it was a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting experience as a sequence of tactical battles in its own right. 

I came to the conclusion that it had been worth the time but only once. No way was I going to try it again, so that timeline was effectively null. It also brought down the final curtain on any lingering ideas I might have had about this being a roleplaying game. From then on it's all been about whether the fights are fun and pretty much nothing else. 

If they are, I keep doing them until I either get the result I want or I've had enough. I did the Hag fight about a dozen times yesterday, saving at every decision point in combat and reloading if I didn't like the way it went. 

As well as all the false starts and aborted attempts, I completed the entire thing three times with different outcomes. I killed the Hag but Vanra, who I was trying to rescue, died. That's actually very easy to do. The Hag barely got a spell off. Then I knocked the Hag out and cut Vanra out of her belly, which was harder but still not too difficult. Vanra ran off to safety and I thought I was done but unfortunately the Hag came back to life because I hadn't destroyed all her mushrooms and kept doing it even after I killed her a second time. 

After a reload, I spent ages trying to destroy all the mushrooms first, so the Hag would stay down, then knock her out and cut Vanra loose, and finally kill her while she was unconscious. I spent about four or five hours trying to do it but I could either get all the mushrooms or the Hag down but never both in the same run.

So I gave up. I'd saved after I freed Vanra so I reloaded and just had all my characters run away as soon as the Hag stood up. I got them all out into the city so instant-travel worked again and took them straight to Camp. As far as I'm concerned that's the Hag finished with for good. I hope never to see her again. 

Whether that will be how things turn out, I can't predict, even though I'm now using walkthroughs and guides all the time. I read several versions of how the Vanra quest can turn out but none of them cover my specific way of dealing with the situation so I have no idea if the Hag will come after us or not. I suspect that hasn't been scripted and she'll just hang about in her cellar until the heat death of the universe but I could be wrong. 

The issue isn't whether Larien has foreseen that particular tactical trick and accounted for it. It's that I really don't care. Further back in the game, I would have been concerned about leaving a threat like Auntie Ethel out there to make someone else's life a misery. To roleplay the character I'd created, I'd have felt obligated to Do Something About It.

Now I don't. It's not a real story any more, just a bunch of fights strung together. The whole thing has effectively collapsed under its own weight. Gravity has done it for gravitas.

None of which makes it a bad game. I'm still playing it. I'm still having fun. It's just that now it's the kind of fun you have when you line up all your toy soldiers and make them fight, not fun like watching a movie or reading a book.

Going back to how long it's taking me, obviously re-doing a lot of the fights multiple times is adding to the count but even without that it does seem to me that I must be taking a lot longer than expected to get through this thing. I'm not aware of taking it slowly but I do open just about every crate and that takes a while. I also find it very hard to follow the maps so I am frequently lost. I wish you could click on the map and just go there, like you could in the first two Baldur's Gates. I bet there's a mod for that but it's a bit late to go looking for one now.

It's almost certain I won't finish BG3. The fights are starting to become too difficult for me; too much going on and too many extremely tough opponents in quick succession. I can only assume the game will build up to a climactic battle at the end and I cannot imagine that fight being one I could win. 

I vaguely remember the first two games having a similar difficulty arc. By the end of BG1, which I did finish, I had a tactic that consisted almost entirely of summoning huge numbers of Monsters using the Monster Summoning line of spells and just swarming the bosses. Those spells don't seem to exist in BG3 so that's no longer an option, sadly. I can't remember how, or even if, I finished BG2. 

I could turn the difficulty down, of course. I'm playing on whatever the Default is but there's a Story Mode below that. And again I imagine there are mods that would make things easier. 

But I don't care enough to do any of that. Mike of The Works of Egan has a long post up about not finishing games and I have to say I think it's a healthy way to look at it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. I probably wouldn't be so blase about giving up on a movie or a novel but the time investment involved there is literally orders of magnitude less, or it is with this game. 

I am also quite looking forward to stopping just so I can play something else. There's an annoyingly addictive element to the tactical combat that losing interest in the reason the fights are happening doesn't seem to quell. I imagine I'll eventually hit the point where even the fights aren't fun any more but annoyingly I don't seem to be quite there yet. 

Whether this will be the last time I write about Baldur's Gate 3 is another question. I imagine I'll at least want to give some kind of summing-up when I finally log out for the last time. Or maybe this post will be my final word on the subject.

I guess we'll find out. 

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan. 

Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.

Woe Is Me!

Sometimes you don't know what you'll do 'til it's done, as Joni Mitchell almost said. Only yesterday I was whining on about how I always mean to play EverQuest II and never do and now guess what? I played EQII!

More specifically, I played some of the new expansion, instead of prepping for it, which is just about all I've done since Scars of Destruction dropped back before Christmas. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I logged in mainly to collect my monthly 550DBC stipend and on a whim I ported into Port Woe, the intentionally unattractive starting area in Sodden Archipelago, the expansion's equally unattractive opening zone.

Place names in the real world often reflect either their physical situation or the attitude of the people who named them. That convention holds true here. Unlike those really annoying games, where everywhere seems to have been named by upsetting a Scrabble board, Port Woe is unironically miserable and its hinterland undeniably waterlogged. Things do improve somewhat as you move further inland but at no point, at least no point that I've reached yet, does any of it start to look attractive.

This, it has to be said, is a risky strategy for a game to adopt. I was skeptical when the EverQuest Show attempted to spin the approach as both worthwhile and successful, claiming "... the direction of creating more realistic unique landscapes like swamps, highlands, and rocky outcrops is a much more demanding task, to do it well. And the artists do."

Yes, well, maybe. A more detached observer, however, might conclude that as a twenty year-old game whose graphics have not aged as well as they might have done, leaning into the things the tools are good at, like the vibrant colors and lush foliage seen in several recent expansions, might be a safer option than trying to make stagnant water and bare rock look appealing.

It's not all about looks, though, is it? It's about story and gameplay and progression. Isn't that why we come here?

Up to a point. I do like to have nice things to look at while I'm playing, all the same. So it is indeed a compliment to the devs that I found time zipping past this morning even while I struggled badly to find anything worth taking a picture of for the blog post I knew I'd be writing later.

If I'm going to be strictly accurate, it wasn't really the story that jollied me along, either. I think there is one but I'd be hard put to tell you what it was. Granted, I did the introduction a couple of months ago and now I'm back to do the follow-up I've forgotten the finer details but I have a feeling that, even at the time, I was never clear on why I was in Port Woe or what the Big Crisis was supposed to be.

Let's see if I can precis the story so far without looking anything up. Hmm....

Some bunch I never heard of before, by the name of The Open Hand, got in touch with me to go someplace I'd also never heard of before, to intervene in some sort of burgeoning problem that was going to be bad because... I have no idea why. 

When I got there the locals didn't like me or trust me. A bunch of adventurers had apparently turned up and started running around, riling up the indigenous bad guys, firstly a bunch of Teenage Mutant Turtle lookalikes and more importantly the inevitable tribe of militaristic orcs that shows up wherever you go in Norrath, with whom the Port Woeians were barely holding their own through a policy of kow-towing and forelock-tugging and basically keeping their heads down. 

Naturally, I got the job of ingratiating myself with the locals, trying to convince them I and my new best friends, who I barely knew, weren't going to cause a huge heap of trouble then vanish, leaving them to deal with it on their own. As always, getting on their right side took the form of doing menial tasks for anyone too busy or lazy to do them for themselves which, again as always, turned out to be everyone.

Along the way I was able to throw in a few noble acts, like finding unsupervised children, who should surely not have been allowed to go wandering about in the alligator-infested swamps in the first place, and rescuing a bunch of fishermen, who'd managed to get themselves captured by orcs. Isn't that always the way?

All of this eventually got the locals to think of me "kindly", at which point a different bunch of villagers, noticing how gullible I was, suddenly thought of a whole new set of chores for me to do. One of those was to go to some haunted village where all the Kerrans who used to live here died in some unspecified purge or pogrom or natural disaster (Or maybe it was specified but I forgot, which seems more likely.) to steal a baker's dozen of their totems, something that apparently was going to put the willies up either the orcs or the turtles or both.

That village turned out to be the first instanced "dungeon" in the storyline, although I don't think we call them dungeons any more. Very few of them are underground, anyway. This one wasn't.

I'll quit with the story-so-far at this point because, as must be clear, I have no clue what it is. The last time I remember there being an actual narrative, as opposed to a string of chores with some flavor text, was probably the first time I zoned in back in December. I'm trusting that at some point an actual plot will develop, probably with guest appearances from a few Norrathian celebrities and a climax featuring a demi-god or two. That is the go-to format for EQII expansions, after all.

What I will say is that the instance was fun. I really enjoyed it. I went in blind, didn't look anything up, didn't even have the Wiki open. I thought I'd try winging it, see how it went, then back off and do the research when things fell apart. But they never did.

There were five bosses. All of them were tank&spank or at least I tanked and spanked them all. That alone would earn the instance at least a B+ in my book. I wish every boss in every game was T&S or more properly T&S-friendly. I don't mind them having clever mechanics for those that like that sort of thing, so long as I can ignore them. I just want to stand there and hit stuff until it falls over and this morning that's what I did.

Which is not to say the bosses didn't have resources. Two of them did serious knockbacks that sent me flying high into the air and at least two also summoned loads of adds. Happily for me, I had my Featherfall cloak on, so all I had to do was gently float back down to carry on the fight. As for adds - I was playing my Berserker ffs. He thrives on adds!

Even better, not one of the bosses had any of the more irritating passive abilities used by devs in recent times to make the fights more "challenging". The one I really, really hate is the huge mana drain every bloody boss used to be given that meant I often ended up spending ten or fifteen minutes auto-attacking the buggers to death. That was fun.

The other, newer trick is for bosses to become invulnerable to all damage except what comes from Heroic Opportunities. That one gained currency right after the big HO revamp, surprise surprise. It's far less irritating than the mana drain but it's still hokey and trite so I hope we've seen the back of it.

With none of that nonsense in play I was able to explore the dungeon (Sorry, Instance.) at my own pace. Not that there was a lot to look at. Some instances in EQII can be genuinely gorgeous, especially the ones with a lot of tiling and statuary, but this was a long-deserted mountain village, originally populated by relatively primitive cat-people, so there weren't a whole lot of photo opportunities. At least one of the bosses had a model I hadn't seen before. though, so that was nice.

As far as mobs went, there were a lot of undead Kerrans and a lot of rats. Really a lot of rats. At one point I was swarmed by what looked like a dozen or so and that was one encounter. I haven't seen a mob of mobs like that since the deer in Thundering Steps. It was novel.

It was also easy because it seems all that work I did prepping has paid off. In the past, the first instance in an EQII expansion has sometimes been a little rough. They have been tuned a little high at times and anyone going in unprepared tended to have a difficult time of it. Since they added the Tishan's Box at the start and put in a tutorial to make sure you make full use of it, that's improved a lot. 

I also had good food and drink, the new mercenary, mount and familiar and I'd had my Jeweller make me Expert level Combat Arts for most of my main attacks, so I was about as well-set as a casual was likely to be. And now I'm better set even than that because three of the five bosses dropped upgrades I could - and did - use.

The other two dropped items a Berserker can't wear but those will be passed on to someone who can. I have someone who can use everything, pretty much. I was happy to see all the boss chests were metal this time around. Last expansion there was a disheartening switch to Treasured quality drops, something I did not appreciate, even though the stats may have been the same. It's the look of the thing, don't you know?

I'm trying to do the Adventure and the Tradeskill questlines at the same time because there are some welcome synergies. The Crafting line is much shorter and faster and you get to fly in the expansion zones as a reward for finishing it. It relies on gaining faction with Port Woe, though, as does the Adventure line, and Adventurers gain that faction much faster.

With a bit of swapping I should be able to make each of them feel easier and therefore more fun. Easier is always more fun for me. I used to wonder about that but I'm pretty convinced now it's true. 

There is a sense of satisfaction from overcoming more challenging content, I'll not deny it, but after decades of playing games like this, I'm convinced a fleeting sense of satisfaction rarely compensates for the hours of frustration experienced achieving it. 

It's the old banging your head against a wall thing, isn't it? Lovely when it stops but surely better never to started all that unnecessary head-banging in the first place.

And since I've clearly wandered off the point and clambered onto my soapbox, I'll leave it there. It's nice to be back on the old horse, anyway. Let's hope I don't fall off again before I get where I'm going.

Like A Finger Pointing At The Sky

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: less mining, more building!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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