This week has been all about getting myself set up to take on combat in Melvor. From the onset, I had an idea to level one combat style at a time for a bit of a challenge. I chose to start with Range in homage to my original Runescape character way back in 2007. Of course, I chose one of the more involved styles in terms of gearing. It might not be optimal to do it this way but here I am.

I started with leveling Fishing right off the bat. For one, it’s an idle skill that continues collecting while I’m offline and I also know I’m going to need a lot of food.. The added benefit Fishing first is the chance to receive “junk” instead of fish. Selling the junk early on lead to some decent gold gains so I could purchase more bank slots to…store more junk….

At Fishing level 20 I was able to fish in Lemvor Pier which gives a base 1% chance to fish up a special item. These have been gems so far but there was a tooltip that said some special items can unlock additional fishing areas. Since I didn’t have the crafting level to use the gems I sold them for gold. I spent that gold on better fishing rods so I could fish faster and so the cycle continued. I’m currently sitting at level 68 Fishing and 8k food items after letting it run overnight.

Once I had all of this raw fish I needed to cook it. I had saved all of the fish I caught from each level bracket in hopes of leveling Cooking without having to go back and fish lower level fish. This worked out nicely and my Cooking level has kept pace with my Fishing level. With 55 cooking I can now cook Raw Fanfish which is the highest level fish I can catch in an area with a chance for special items.

With the food situation taken care of, I turned my attention to Woodcutting and Fletching. One of the things I’ve always loved about Runescape, and now Melvor, is how skills flow into each other. I needed to level Woodcutting to gather wood to use to fletch arrow shafts and bows. I needed to level Mining so I could gather ore to use for Smithing to make arrowheads. I ended up getting all of the above up pretty high over the week and I can now make up to Mithril arrows. Those should be a nice mid-tier ammo to start fighting the higher combat level creatures.

The last piece of all this was Crafting. If I had gone with melee I could have been progressively improving my armor and weapons through Smithing. That would have given me 4 tiers of armor and weapons to go through. Unfortunately, there are only 2 tiers of ranged armor: Leather and Hard Leather. Leather was pretty quick to get but the full hard leather set requires getting Crafting to level 50 which took me most of the week. Leather can be bought in the shop but it was a bit expensive when I first started leveling Crafting. So I did dip my toes into the combat system since cows drop up to 3 leather a kill. Cows have a combat level of 2 so after the first few they weren’t much of a challenge. It was just a matter of waiting to kill enough cows and making sure my loot inventory didn’t fill up.

So with a full Hard Leather armor set, a few thousand Mithril Arrows, and a Maple Short Bow, I’m ready to check out combat this weekend!

I had put NIMBY Rails on my Steam Wishlist a while ago before it released back in 2019. I had mostly forgotten about it until I saw an email from Steam pop up on my phone at the end of January.

NIMBY Rails is a railway management sandbox game made by the same devs as The Spatials: Galactology. It gives you the tools to create passenger rail systems anywhere in the world using Open Street Maps. It’s a niche concept but one that I’m finding endlessly entertaining right now. I’ve always been fasinated with maps so building on a detailed world map had been fantastic.

The game is in early access right now but is very playable and has gotten a lot of updates in the 2 weeks it’s been available. Right now, there are two ways to play: with money and with unlimited money. If you want to play a tycoon-like management game playing with money is the way to go. You start out with a loan of 1 billion dollars and can start building anywhere in the world. The goal is to pay off your loan and turn a profit to expand your rail networks. Unlimited money offers more of a creative mode but includes all of the management options as playing with money. It even gives you the accounting stats. Unlimited money seems geared more towards people who want to create real-life rail systems as opposed to imagined ones.

Until recently, playing with money was a bit tedious unless you were building in highly populated cities like Tokyo or Mexico City. The time multiplier only went so high so when you ran out of money you’d just have to wait or leave the game running overnight to generate enough capital to start building again. It turns out rail lines are very expensive. A recent update boosts the game time speed up by x10000 and then throttles down depending on what your CPU can handle. This makes building in smaller areas way more viable as the days pass by in seconds instead of minutes.

I appreciate the simplicity of the game so far. A lot of times with niche simulation games you’re given a lot of complex tools and I spend most of my time figuring out what does what. Which tends to get in the way of actually enjoying the game itself. NIMBY Rails gives me all of the tools I need right off the bat to start creating and offers a short quickstart guide to explain the basics.

There are 3 structures you can build: stations, tracks, and depots. Each structure has 4 types: Groud, Viaduct, Tram, and Tunnels. Each type offers different trade-offs in speed, cost, and placement. For example, Tram tracks and stations can be placed anywhere except over water. They’re the cheapest option but have a max speed of 45 km/h. Ground tracks, on the other hand, have the fastest speeds but overpasses need to be built each time they cross a road which adds another 500K for each overpass. That can rack up quickly, especially when getting into or out of cities. There are plans to add more complex tools like single tracks and signals. For now, I’m enjoying the simplicity.

Once you’ve laid some track the management side of things kicks in. You build lines to carry passengers from one station to another. You set the price for the line, adjust wait time intervals so trains don’t run into each other, and constantly have to balance passenger (pax) satisfaction. The happier the pax, the more of them will show up in stations to ride the trains and the more money you’ll make. I’m finding the building more fun than the management right now. But again, the management tools are powerful without being too complicated.

To top it all off there’s multiplayer. With multiplayer, you share a map and, if you’re playing with money, a budget. Everyone can build anywhere but the time multiplier only goes to x30 right now. You can get around this by taking the save into single player and maxing out the speed. The majority of my playtime so far has been spent in multiplayer with Greg. He has a huge interest in trains so when I told him this game existed with multiplayer he immediately bought it.

When I reflect on the beginning of this year it feels like the distant past. I was playing through Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and that feels like ages ago now. When I take a look back at Goodreads there’s some books I could have sworn I read last year that I read in January and February. But in a lot of ways it was a completely different time right? No masks, working in the office, going out in public regularly and eating in restaurants are a thing of the past now.

But through it all there have been some amazing games that kept me sane this year, kept me in touch with friends, and kept my mind off things when I needed it. In no particular order here are my favorite games of this year.

GTFO

GTFO was my group game for a good portion of the year. We bought it back in April and played it once a week until around November. After 43 hours I can say its a good game but one that doesn’t respect the players time. You need at least 3 people but preferably 4 to complete the levels. And with no saved checkpoints, losing after spending 2 hours stealthily clearing the map feels really bad. But the challenge and the almost clears is what kept us coming back for so long. The level switch ups every few months helped to keep things fresh but we never did complete a rundown.

Phasmophobia

This one has become another staple of our Saturday nights. At first it was creepy, it was atmospheric, and it was so different from anything I’d ever played. The first time the ghost talked on the spirit box and the first time the EMF detector hit level five is something I’ll remember for a long time. After 35+ hours the game is no longer scary but it is fun to see how fast you can find the ghost. Finding different ways to harass the ghost, and scaring my friends by throwing balls down the stairs.

Warframe

The last big group game this year was Warframe. We all got really in to it over the summer. I hit a 75% off coupon and bought the largest platinum package with gave me way more platinum than I’ll probably ever need. But when a free game’s given you 200+ hours it really does deserve some money thrown at it. For me personally, Warframe is an all in or all out game for me. When I want to play it I’ll sink in the time but when I’m over it I fall off hard. Our biggest achievement this time around was taking down an Eidolon.

Trove

Much like Warframe I’m either all in on Trove or all out. I played it a ton over the summer when the Delves update came out. I fell off of it in August and didn’t pick it up again until November. Trove is one of those games that always feels like coming home. I’ve spent 4 years with friends and it’s always fun to dip in to. I’m glad to see it’s still getting updates and I hope they continue into next year

Runescape

If you told me in the beginning of the year that Runescape would be my most played game this year I wouldn’t have believed it. Mostly because I tried playing Runescape in January and bounced off of it hard. I still have the post in my drafts and sadly never got around to publishing it. But In August I was introduced to Runelite and everything changed. According to ManicTime I have a 174 hours this year alone and that’s over a period of 3 months and doesn’t include the time I spent on my laptop or my phone. Yes, I even played OSRS on my phone…what a time to be alive.

While Old School Runescape started with nostalgia it passed that early on when I completed the free to play content and branched out into the members content. I was happily chugging along until the Trailblazer League started. To be honest, I went way to hard on the league and burned myself out on the game. I may pick it back up in January but there are a few games I want to get through before I start that journey back up.