Elite Dangerous

What a Year

KluwesLeave a comment

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.

February 2023 Goals

KluwesLeave a comment

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.

Take Me to Space

KluwesLeave a comment

This weekend, I found myself with an intense desire to play a space game. Maybe it’s because I just finished Ghost Song and wanted to continue with the scif-fi theme. Or maybe it’s because I’ve finished two very long games over the past couple months and wanted to play something different. Maybe it’s just a whim of interest that my brain has latched on to. Either way, I wanted to play something in space! I have a fair few games in my library that fit that bill and so I set out trying out different ones to see what peaked my interest the most.

First up was Empyrion – Galactic Survival, a game I got from last year’s Yogcast Jingle Jam bundle and have been meaning to try out. Prior to the bundle, I had been eying the game for a number of years but never pulled the trigger as it seemed to be in a state of perpetual early access. Since I’ve been into 7 Days to Die lately, a sci-fi survival game sounded right up my ally.

I appreciate a game that let’s me shoot dinosaurs with laser guns

I had some difficulty getting it to run and actually load in to a game but eventually I was able to go through the tutorial. Unfortunately, Empyrion seems to be more of a sci-fi building game with some survival elements instead of a survival game with some building elements. It was also giving me some Entropia Universe vibes. I don’t know if it’s the look of the game world or the UI but I couldn’t help thinking about my time in EU while I was going through the tutorial. This wasn’t scratching the itch so I loaded up the next game.

No Man’s Sky is always good for some interesting screenshots.

No Man’s Sky is one of those games I’ve always wanted to get in to but after 10 hours or so I’m over it. It could be because I always start over when I come back to it. There’s usually months in between play sessions and I don’t remember all of the controls so a restart always seems best. This means doing the tutorial and retreading the same ground again and again.

I thought this time for sure I was in a place where I would stick with it. I jet packed around hoovering up all the materials to fix my equipment, started building a base, gathered all the materials to launch the ship, and took off for the nearest space port. As I was flying, I knew this was not the time I was going to get hooked on No Man’s Sky.I knew exactly what I wanted to play and this wasn’t it.

Elite: Dangerous was calling my name. The rest of the weekend was spent installing and updating the game, rebinding keys on my HOTAS, setting up VoiceAttack, and figuring out if the other third party tools I used to use were still relevant. I’ll admit, I did very little playing but now that everything is set up, I’m excited to get back in to it.