My Palworld Impressions

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There have been plenty others, but this one is mine. Can I call it an impression if I’ve already sunk 50 hours in to it before I got around to putting my thoughts down? To answer a question with a question: Sure why not?! It’s certainly left an impression on me and has sucked up almost all of my free time this last week or so. I can’t remember the last time I sat down to play a game and got up with the hours just passing by. Well…I’m sure I could find a post about such a game around here somewhere… 
 
I had grand plans of writing posts as I went to really capture all that excitement and discovery. But I never could never put it down to write when all I wanted to do was play. Ah well, maybe next time…The mix of creature collector and survival game is a more potent combination than I imagined. The two game-play loops of collect more monsters and collect more stuff to collect more monsters feed in to each other so,so, well. 



I’ve been keeping an eye on Palworld for, what feels like at least a few years. I remember stumbling across the trailer on Steam late one night and instantly sharing it with the squad in our Discord. We all agreed, we had to play it when it came out. From the trailer, it looked like not much more than a meme game.  Shoot (not)Pokemon! Then use your (not) Pokemon to craft you more guns! And take along your (not) Pokemon and your gun to fight more (not) Pokemon! It looked like something we’d play for a weekend, laugh about it, shelve it, and pick up some other game to play the next week. It was quite a shock when it released and broke records as millions of people flocked to play it.
 
The creature collection and map exploration is more of a draw for me than the base building part. The base is just a necessary step to capturing more pals and seeing more of the world. I have spent almost no time designing anything. For the most part, I  plop things down where they fit when I need them. Which has led to an expanding pile of crafting tables, beds, and machines.

What’s nice is that if and when I find I need to move something, there’s no resource penalty. Everything magically comes back to your inventory. Even so, I haven’t moved my first base set up which is located 50 feet from where I started. There are better areas but I can’t be bothered to move *all that stuff!!* The only reason this base has any walls is to a) int erupt the pathing of enemies during raids which makes them take a very long way to get to me (unless they can fly…Then it’s not much help) and b) to stop my Pals from wandering where they get stuck all the time.
 


 I set up a second base next to a nice ore spawn. I tried to optimize this one more to have a steady income of ore, which you need all the time, but never quite got it the way I thought it should work. It’s simply just too slow even with Pals with good mining skills. I could mine the ore manually with a good pick axe faster than any of my current pals.
 
 Which surprised me, really. It seems like Palworld wants to have an automation thing going on. I mean, it’s got assembly lines for crying out loud! But it doesn’t provide good tools to set this up and Pal’s actions really limit how much you can really automate. For example, they’ll only pick up materials on the ground and bring it to a box. They won’t pick up the material and bring it to a crafting bench and craft a thing. They just pile it up into a box until I pick something to craft. Then they’ll help but they won’t bring the crafted materials to a box. So really it’s more like they slapped a Pokemon on a crafting timer and said good enough.


The world is fun to explore though. It’s compelling to set off to an undiscovered part of the map and see what’s out there. You’re always running in to obstacle that you need to craft your way around. Higher level pals need higher level weapons and Pal sphere’s to catch, some areas need heat or cold resistant armor, and some areas just need a better Pal companion to ride on to get there. There’s a very strong feeling of progression which has kept me engaged for quite a long time.
 
 More thoughts to come I’m sure. Maybe even better screenshots, if I can figure out how to hide the UI…

What a Year

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Hello out there! It’s been a while hasn’t it? Well, more than a while, actually. More like several months of radio silence. But the thing I’ve come to learn over the years is that this blog is always waiting for me when I’m ready to write again. No matter how long those gaps are in between posts.

2023 was a year and am I glad to have it behind me. In April, the company I work for laid off 20% of their employees. I kept my job, thankfully, but I watched a lot of my friends lose theirs. It was a bit of a wake up call to start studying for some certifications I’d been putting off and focusing on more professional development in case I end up out of a job.

I also too a break from gaming in general this year. I spent more time reading and chasing a toddler around than I did at my PC. Less gaming, of course, means less to write about. I always come back though…and what really brought me back was a much needed upgrade to my PC. Or, in this case, a whole replacement of my PC. My 1060 was really starting to show it’s age, especially after I upgraded to 2K monitors earlier this year. I manged to snag some good deals on parts and upgraded to a 4080, with a Ryzen 7 processor, and 32 gb or RAM, and 4Tb of storage. It’s really renewed my interest in gaming, especially VR,.It should last me a good long time too before I need to upgrade anything again..

Much like last year, I spent most of my time in December in the cockpit of my Diamondback Explorer out in the middle of nowhere looking for cool things to take pictures of. But this time in VR, which looks so much better than it did before! I’m sure I’ll have more space ship pictures to show soon…

Oh look, here’s one now.

I would like to make more of an effort to write here this year. At least, more than I did last year which turns out to be the least I’ve written for the blog since I started 6 years agao. We’ll see how that pans out going forward but I’m hoping for a less chaotic year ahead.

Audio Drama Sunday: Red Valley Season 1

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I’ve started getting back in to listening to podcast recently so I thought I’d bring this feature back and give myself a place to talk about what I’ve been listening to.

This week, I’ve been listening through the first season of Red Valley which explores the concept of hypersleep, specifically, what it takes to achieve that kind of technology and the experiments that need to take place before it’s perfected.. The show follows Warren Godby, who works in the Accounts department of a tech conglomerate. He’s been tasked with finding out about the Red Valley project, which appears to be a seed vault of sorts. But after meeting Gordon Porlock, in the Archives department, Warren quickly learns it’s not seeds Red Valley has been freezing.

It’s a solid near future, corporate, scifi mystery that can get a little dark but is punctuated with a small dose of humor. The cast is small, but the acting and sound design are top notch.

The first season was short, only 6 episodes, but kept me hooked the whole time. I felt like it could have benefited from an extra episode or two to explore the Red Valley project some more as well as Warren’s past. I think it would have made the big reveal at the end hit a bit harder. However, I felt the four episode mini series “While You Were Hypersleeping” explores both of these nicely.

Overall, I’m loving this show. The ending of season 1 has me clambering to start listening to the next season. Season 2 looks like it’s longer, 8 episodes in total, and Season 3 is incoming later this year!

SPOILERS AHEAD

If you haven’t listened to the first season of Red Valley and you’re interested in listening, I recommend not reading ahead.

There was one thing that confused me about the show. At the end of Episode 3 Warren Godby is checking in to a hotel in his hometown. The woman at the front desk, Laura Hambling recognizes him as an old school mate but Warren doesn’t seem to remember her. Then we hear Warren entering his room. Except when he enters we hear Clive’s voice saying “Evening Gordon.” Here I though we might be dealing with Warren having two personalities. Maybe Gordon doesn’t exist at all and he’s Warren’s subconscious giving him clues and leading him to Red Valley. As the show continues, this is further supported because we don’t really hear Gordon and Warren interacting with other people at the same time. Warren even leaves in Episode 6 to go off to Red Valley by himself and Gordon is trying to find him in the woods. He asks Warren how he knew how to get to Red Valley and Warren says he doesn’t know.

It isn’t until the end of Episode 6 when Clive is prepping Warren for hypersleep and Gordon is talking to Bryony Halbech that I realized they are, if fact, two separate people.

Red Valley has the transcripts of every episode in a script format, which I must add, is extremely helpful for reference. So while I was writing this I went back and read the last scene of episode 3 to see if I missed something. There’s the exchange with warren and the woman at the front desk and then there’s this: “Cut. Gordon’s Flat. A knock at the door. Footsteps down the hall. Gordon unlocks the door.” Ah ha! This would explain things. It seems my confusion was spawned from a limitation of the format. I didn’t catch the transition in scene’s because the knock at the door, footsteps down the hall, and a door unlocking sounded just like Warren walking down the hall to his hotel room he just checked in for.

After listening to the final episode of the season it makes sense why Warren doesn’t know who the woman at the front desk is even though they went to school together. Warren doesn’t remember much about his past life so it makes sense he can’t remember Laura Hambling.

June 2023 in Review

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June has been a solid month. Summer is in full swing which means lots of pool time, outdoor activities, and ice cream. But it’s also been the month where I’ve found myself actually playing a games again. The first few months of the year I was kind of obsessed with Elite: Dangerous but once I fell off of that I hardly played anything at all until this month.

Games Played in June 2023

GameTotal Playtime %
Horizon: Zero Dawn79%
Brotato14%
GRIME7%

I just finished up Horizon: Zero Dawn at the end of June. While I enjoyed my time with it I definately need a break before I try the Frozen Wilds DLC. I wasn’t rushing the main story and took time to explore and do side quests but by the end of the game the combat was wearing thin for me. I do want to see where Frozen Wilds will take Aloy and hopefully learn more about the Baruk tribe which hardly seemed to get any screen time in the main game.

Brotato was a total impulse buy for me this month. Though with a price tag of $5 it’s hardly breaking the bank. It’s like Vampire Survivor except instead of one continuous 30 minute survival effort you only need to survive 15-90 second waves with a break in between to buy upgrades. I mainly bought it because it looked like a good Steam Deck game and it didn’t disappoint. Each run feels unique and there are a ton of characters with different constraints that keep things fresh. I’ll definitely have to write a full post about it sometime soon!

GRIME was my Blaugust Reviews Humble Choice game this month. I was expecting to bounce off of it very quickly but it surprised me with it’s twists on the souls-like formula. I didn’t go back to it after writing my post on it (and at this point I probably won’t) but I enjoyed my brief time with it.

The blog has been pretty quite this year and I would like to change that starting in July. There has been just one thing after another that has really limited my gaming, and subsequently, my blogging time. But it appears things are starting to even out (fingers crossed) so I can spend some more time doing fun things. I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

Backlogged: Horizon Zero Dawn

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Every once and a while I’ll get around to playing one of those critically aclaimed games that’s come out in the past 10 years. I have an amazing propensity to avoid spoilers and/or forget spoilers by the time I get around to playing or watching something. Horizon Zero Dawn was everywhere when it came out. At the time I had a PS4 but didn’t actually pick it up until the Complete Edition came out and it was on sale. I think may have been the last thing I ever bought at a Gamestop and it was definately the last physical game I ever bought.

I think I played through the prologue of the game up until the Proving. I distincly remember baby Aloy’s disproportionate head and the seeds of an interesting story and world about to be told. But this was also around the time I was moving away from consoles and over to PC. My interest in playing a game on my TV was waining and I left Aloy in the middle of the Proving not knowing the story was just getting started. Fast forward to now and I’ve just finished up the main story in about 35 hours on PC.

This is a weird one for me. Typically, I list out things I liked about a game and things I didn’t enjoy as much but with Horizon: Zero Dawn much of what I liked about the game is also what I didn’t . I’m conflicted because I want to say this game was amazing but there are somethings that are holding it back.

Things I Liked:

The World

The World of Horizon: Zero Dawn might just be one of the most unique and immersive open worlds I’ve come across. I liked the mix of giant robot machines contrasted with primitive human society. Everything from the architecture, to the clothing, down to the dialog options line up so well to the world they’re a apart of. I especially enjoyed the clothing with it’s beautiful mix of textiles woven with machine parts.

The side quests really explored what everyday life is like for peoople in the world of HZD. Sure, it’s got they’ve got the typical open world quest structure (help people with trivial tasks, save people from monsters, solve a mystery or two) but they excel at telling convinving stories from the people who inabit the land

And then there’s the lore! I don’t typically take the time to read all the pieces of writing that fill up some sort of notebook or codex in RPGs but I enjoyed finding the texts and audio files from the Old World that, bit by bit, explain what happened to get us to this point. I even liked finding the scrolls and other pieces of information that explain the more current events and cultures. I was always on the hunt for a new entry

The Story

The story didn’t grab me right from the get go. Like I said, I have played the beginning before and fizzled out right in the middle of the Proving. But this time around, once I got past that point, I was hooked. I wanted to dive into the mystery of how the world came to be filled with giant machines, why human civilization had been essentially reset, and why Aloy resembled Elisabet Sobeck, a scientist from thousands of years ago. Every subsequent story quest provided a little more info but always left things on a cliff hanger. I was compelled to see the next quest almost right up until the end of the game but we’ll get to that later.

The Combat

Our main character, Aloy, essentially becomes a super hero as the main story progresses but she is still just one woman. The combat in Horizon: Zero Dawn reflects this quite well. No matter what level Aloy is, she’s always just squishy enough that she won’t be taking on multiple machines head on. This forces you to play a bit more tactically and use the tools at your disposal. By tools I mean sneaking around taking pot shots at machines with your bow until they’re dead or luring them into some bushes and stabbing them with your spear.

I particularly enjoyed that machines will lose interest in you fairly quickly if you’re hiding in bushes. It makes sense right? They’re machines, they walk on set paths unless something disturbs them, like a flaming arrow or three to the face, then once the threat appears to be gone they go back to doing what their programmed to do.

It’s pretty easy to abuse. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get into places where big machines couldn’t or how best to use the environment to hide from them. But that was part of the fun for me and has the added benefit or explaining why Aloy is able to take down whole swaths of dinosaur sized robots by herself.

Things That Could Have Been Better:

The World

A common complaint about open world games is that the world feels empty. This isn’t one of those games, the world is actually quite full of machines and wildlife but it lacks people. For as lived in as HZD’s cities and towns feel the world itself is mostly devoid of people.

I get that it’s dangerous out there but Aloy can’t be the only one out there. There should be other hunters looking to gather materials, maybe a caravan or two traveling the roads. The only people you’ll run into are bandits in their camps. And you obviously need to kill all of them because they are bandits and that’s what you do.

Other than that, people only show up during quests and it makes for a lonely world indeed.

The Story

As compelling as I found the mystery of how this world and the machines came to be I can’t say the same for the parallel story about the Carja and the fate of the world in the present. It’s kind of boring, the cultures that have emerged aren’t all that interesting, nor are the conflicts between them.

Once I learned what the Zero Dawn project was, why there are robot animals everywhere, and who Aloy is it was kind of a slog to finish the story. I knew where it was going and how it would end 5 hours before I faced the final boss.

Overriding Machines

There’s this whole mechanic where you can override machines and use them as mounts or have them fight for you. It was cool at fist the mounts seemed to get lost a lot when I wasn’t on them . It’s just enough of an inconvinience to get another one that after the first few got lost I just walked everywhere.

Overriding machines to fight for you seemed like a cool idea. That is until you realize you can’t override corrupted machines which are 90% of the machines in the main story quest. Sadly, I didn’t get much use out of this either.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn. While the story went on a little longer than I wanted it to it had an awesome story to tell. By the end of the game I was a bit burnt out on the combat so I’ll probably wait a while before I try the Frozen Wilds DLC but I do want to revisit it soon.

GRIME: A Souls-like Where You Won’t Lose Souls

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For this months Blaugust Reviews Humble Choice I took on the task of playing GRIME, a souls-like, metroidvania developed by Clover Bite. I played GRIME for just over two and a half hours which, honestly, was about an hour and a half longer than I thought I’d spend on it. I don’t typically last long with games in this genre. They tend to end up uninstalled out of frustration.

Now everyone get out their souls-like bingo cards and let’s see what we’ve got here:

  • A currency gained from killing monsters that you’ll use to level up and buy weapons that is called something but you’ll only ever refer to them as souls…Check
  • A level up system that requires increasingly more souls for every stat increase…Check
  • Weapons that scale with your stats based on the letters….Check
  • Enemies that respawn every time you reach a checkpoint or die…Check
  • A green stamina bar that depletes far too quickly with every attack or dodge action…Check
  • A barely coherent story set in a dark world that you’ll either find incredibly interesting or ignore completely….Check
  • Losing all of your souls when you die…No, actually. That’s odd.
Capital letters on a red banner….Check!

There are a few things that make GRIME stand out from your average souls-like game. The first is that last bullet point, you don’t lose your souls when you die. This is a wild departure from all of the other various souls-like or souls inspired games I’ve played over the years. Some would say it’s a core mechanic of the genre. How can you be a souls-like if you’re not punishing the player at every turn?

Instead, you lose a currency called Adore, which you gain from killing monsters as well. This is a multiplier of sorts that determines how many souls you get per kill except for bosses. This feels way less punishing if you die before getting back to your body. But don’t worry, GRIME has replaced this inconvenience with a limited healing ability. So while your not going to lose your souls you are going to die a lot more without a handful of healing flasks to cover your mistakes!

This brings us to GRIME’s other interesting mechanics: absorbing enemies. You see, whatever it is that your playing has appears to have a black hole for a head, which is cool, and also useful. Your able to absorb enemies by countering an attack right as they hit you. On the small enemies this will usually kill them outright and on the big enemies it will take a chunk of their health out. It also has the added benefit of filling your healing ability back up after about 4 absorptions.

When you absorb a new type of enemy a few times passive abilities are unlocked which can help you steer your build towards a particular play style. The passive abilities are unlocked with Hunt Points which are obtained from killing large prey. These are bigger than your average enemy but not quite a boss and don’t respawn when you reach a check point or die.

Overall, GRIME is a solid game. I don’t typically like hard games but there was something compelling about the gameplay and exploration that kept pushing me to play a little bit more. GRIME isn’t easier than other souls-like metroidvania’s that I’ve played in the past but it feels less punishing. It plays at a slower pace and when I died I always felt like I knew why. Mostly because I’m wasn’t patient enough. I enjoyed my time with it and if I wasn’t actively playing other games I might have dove in to this one further.

So is GRIME worth buying June’s Humble Choice for? Well if you like this sort of thing then there’s enough of an interesting take here to try it out. It also just had an update which adds a new new game + mode so there’s a decent amount of content to get in to. I wouldn’t buy the this month’s Choice specifically for it but it’s a welcome addition to the other games.

Demon Turf – March 2023 Humble Choice

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I like 3D platformers as a concept but, admittedly, I haven’t played a ton of them. Which is why I chose to take a look at Demon Turf for this month’s Humble Choice. It has an interesting ascetic and I thought it would provide a fresh gameplay experience. I played about two and a half hours and managed to get through the first set of levels and the boss fight.

The first thing to note is Demon Turf is a 3D platformer with 2D character models. It’s a weird juxtaposition that works better than you would think and gives the game unique style. The environments and the characters all look a little off kilter and the 2D/3D mix adds to that quite a bit. It’s not distracting or overly jarring but it did feel a little weird until I got used to it.

The game world has a cartoony style and almost a hand sketch look to it. I usually like this look for games but the muted colors throughout the hub world , Forktown, and the first zone make the game look dull and very, very, orange. I did check out the second zone and the color pallet is more what I was expecting with some nice and bright colors.

Demon Turf uses the familiar plaformer formula: A zone with a few levels in it, a few optional items hidden in each level to collect, and once you’ve completed enough levels you can take on the zone boss level to unlock the next zone. The levels are short but well designed. It’s fun hunting around for the optional sweets on each level before finishing it. They’re also short, at least in the first zone, which makes this perfect for the Steam Deck or as something to play when you don’t have a ton of time.

The mechanic that I’ve found the most interesting so far is the ability to place your own checkpoints. You’re given four checkpoint flags on each level to wherever you’d like, barring some seemingly arbitrary restricted zones. Most of the levels I’ve played only needed one or two flags placed to get through so there’s a few I’ve used in particularly tricky areas. The only downside is, once placed, they can’t be picked back up but it’s still a cool feature.

If there’s one thing that really shines in Demon Turf it’s the soundtrack. It’s weird and quirky but fits the whole theme of the game perfectly. It’s also feels like a tribute to some older 3D platformer soundtracks as well.

My favorite track so far. It’s some really fun boss fight music.

It’s worth mentioning that there is an alternative gameplay mode called the Tower which seems to take place after the main campaign but can be played at any time. In this mode, Beebz is hexed by the Jester an loses all of her powers. She has to take on a 50 floor tower where every few floors she gets some of her power back like double jumping and placing checkpoints. I tried the first few floors and with only a single jump it was challenging. It offers a fair bit more content if you want to put your platforming skills to the test.

So is Demon Turf worth picking up March’s Humble choice for?  I definitely think so. It’s a solid game that’s fun to play in short bursts. It might not be the most amazing 3D platformer experience you can have but it does 3D platforming very well, has some great level design, and a lot of content. It’s regularly priced at $24.99 so Humble Choice’s $12.99 price tag is a nice 50% discount as well.

Fallout 76 Frustrations – February 2023 Humble Choice

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One of the reason’s I like Humble Choice is getting to try out games I wouldn’t have bought in the first place. I’ve found a couple games this way that, at first glance, didn’t look like my thing but turned out to be really fun. Sometimes those games just don’t click for me. Fallout 76 is one of those games this month.

I tend to reserve judgement on games that the wider internet labels as “bad” until I play them. I’ve found too many that have been fun for me over the years that didn’t appeal to the masses. I figured Fallout 76 would be one of those. I remember there being all sorts of drama around it’s launch 5 years ago and then the game seemed to fade away all together. No one I knew was playing it and I kind of just forgot about it until it appeared in this month’s choice. In the spirit of trying new things I decided to take this one for this month’s Blaugust community review.

Here’s my initial impressions after about 2 hours: If you want to play a Fallout game there are better options. If you want to play a survival game there are better options.If you want to play a multiplayer Fallout game this may be your only option.

I came away frustrated from those 2 hours of gameplay. For one, the game kept crashing on me. It crashed on startup, it crashed during character creation, it crashed to desktop while I was playing. Could it be something with my setup? Sure, but there sure was a lot of crashing going on. It didn’t make for a great experience.

Then there’s the inventory system. For a survival crafting game with a lot of materials and items to manage the inventory is beyond clunky. What I want for a survival game is to see my inventory at a glance and it is very hard to do that when your inventory is text based and in one long list. Not only that but in order to find anything you have to sort between the item category tabs. The keyboard and mouse controls don’t make that real intuitive. I get that a Fallout game needs the Pip-Boy in it but it just takes way to long to do anything in your inventory through that interface.

My hastily constructed base.

The whole game was clearly built for consoles and controllers in mind. The keyboard bindings are super weird without a lot of re-binds and even then they can still be awkward. The controls make the building system particularly clunky to use. Keyboard and mouse have awkward bindings and even with a controller it just feels like it takes forever to do anything. I’m not much of a builder in these games but I usually try to give it my best effort. This time I didn’t even attempt to make my base look nice.

It’s not all bad though. The few quests that I did had that signature Fallout style of writing. The combat feels solid and the exploration is fun. The map is large and it seems like a game with a lot to do if you can get past the awkward controls and interface. I can’t, or more accurately, I don’t want to so I’ll be leaving this one collecting dust in my library.

Is Fallout 76 worth buying this month’s choice for? It’s one of the “big” games this month after all. You can probably guess my answer…In my opinion, it’s not worth buying February’s Humble Choice for and, honestly, it’s not worth playing if you do pick up the bundle this month.

February 2023 Goals

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January was all about Elite, Elite, Elite. I didn’t play much else and I defiantly did not write about anything else. Last month I started my career as a Commander, I took a trip out to the Eagle Nebula and found a prison colony, I talked about some third party tools I’ve been using, took a detour to on my way home and stopped at a few more nebulas, and supplied my home station with literal tons of landmines.

Top Played Games of January 2023

Game TitlePercent of Total Playtime
Elite: Dangerous80%
7 Days to Die13%
Pulsar Lost Colony2%

It’s not often that I fall down a gaming rabbit hole quite this hard. There’s just something about it that has captured my imagination in a way games haven’t in a long time. As I’ve gotten my bearings back and I’m getting more established in the game I feel that initial excitement plateauing but that was bound to happen. I don’t feel like I’ll be dropping it anytime soon but I may find some time to play something else this month just to switch it up.

I haven’t written to much about my ongoing 7 Days to Die game with Brother. We’re on Day 23 and are just becoming self sufficient on food and medical supplies. I can’t believe we’ve been playing every week since November and that I’m still having fun with it.

Pulsar Lost Colony

The squad decided to play Pulsar last weekend which I hadn’t played since February of last year. I forgot how much fun it is as a multiplayer game and we’re looking to play it again soon.

February 2023 Goals

Unlock the Engineered Detailed Surface Scanner: If I had posted this yesterday, getting the Engineered FSD would have been a goal too but I just unlocked that last night. The engineered detailed surface scanner is the last module I want before I go on another trip out into the galaxy. It increased the scanning radius per probe which will make mapping planets faster and more efficent. This should be a quick goal to complete. I only have a few more raw Niobium to gather before I’m able to unlock it.

Travel Outsided the Inner Orion Spur: The Inner Orion Spur is the region of the galaxy where Earth and the rest of the Bubble are located. There’s 42 regions in total but I don’t think I want to go too far from our home region. Maybe a region or two away to do some exploring. The only thing I still have to figure out is do I want to go towards the galactc core or away from it.

Participate in this month’s Humble Bundle Community Review: I kind of missed the ball on this one last month and forgot to sign up. I ended up picking up the bundle anyways because I’ve been wanting to play Grow: Song of the Evertree for a while now since it’s from the same developers as Yonder

Read Two Books: My interests between reading and gaming fluctuate every few months where one takes over the other. I feel like I’m in the middle of that interest transition where I want to do both and sometimes I just don’t have time to do that. February is a short month but I think between audiobooks and reading I can knock out two this month.

You Want How Many Landmines?

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This week I’ve been hanging around my adopted home station, Aleksandrov Gateway, in LHS 115. It’s a small station in a small system with about 10.4 million inhabitants. However, it’s got a lot of ships available and modules available in one place so I’ve parked all of my ships here for the time being.

I’ve been working on gathering the materials I need for the pre-engineered FSD and DSS that are available at the human tech broker. The best way to do that seems to be running missions and taking the materials reward and using the material trader to convert materials I don’t need into materials I do.

When I returned home and handed in all of my explorarion/exobiology data I instantly became allied with the stations governing faction C.O.N.T.R.A.I.L which happens to be a player faction. I hadn’t run many missions out of Aleksandrov Gateway so I had very little reputation with the other factions. Better reputation leads to more missions with better rewards being available at any given time. I started taking missions from everyone but C.O.N.T.R.A.I.L to increase my reputation and expand the available missions so I had a chance of getting the materials I actually needed.

At first, I was tasked with running data to other stations, picking up food for the station, and delivering goods that the station produced. As my reputation increased, I started getting missions to source minerals and raw materials, presumably whatever industry needed in the station to make goods. It was like this for a few days but at some point things started to take a darker turn. The factions started feeling more comfortable asking me to get some military gear. Where I was sourcing and returning consumer appliances now I was asked to source some armor or non-lethal weapons. I didn’t think much of it as these requests were from the military faction on the station. Maybe they were serving as the stations security force.

Welcome to Ferreira Control where the only thing they sell is guns, landmines, and hydrogen fuel!

Then I noticed non-military factions started wanting things like personal weapons brought in. They offered materials I needed in return so of course I’d go source them some guns. They may not be legal on the station, strictly speaking, but I had a great relationship with the guys in charge so a few fines wouldn’t be a big deal if I got caught.

Now that I’m friendly with almost every faction on the station they all want one thing and that’s landmines. Why? You might ask. Landmines don’t seem like something you would want to use on a space station. Probably not even something you want on a space station and yet it seems to be the number one requested item to import into our little station. It’s not just one faction either, it’s all of them, they all want landmines and they’re able to pay with high grade materials for them.

We’re not just talking about a few either. Cargo capacity is measured in tons so when someone asks me to source 107 landmines that’s 107 tons of land mines. I don’t know how much your typical landmine weights but that seems like a lot of landmines. But like I said, they pay with high grade materials and the factories that produce the landmines are only a jump away. So the runs are quick and the materials flow in and so far I haven’t been caught smuggling them in.

At this point, the station may have more landmines on board than people.