Gaming

Palia – Getting to Know the Locals

Now that I have a house going and some income as a farmer, the next big step in this new world is to get to know the locals. Aside from building up your plot of land, you have the nearby town full of people to build an actual plot of story. Well, “full” is kind of a stretch. There are maybe 2 dozen or so people living there each more or less with a specialty of some kind, and each with some sort of eccentric personality trait. I’m not real sure how the economy here survives, or whom is buying and eating the mountains of vegetables I ship out daily.

I am not sure what the benefit is yet, but you can level up friendship with each NPC by giving them gifts and doing quests for them. Well, I know one benefit, you get more quests by having a higher level with an NPC. You can also “go farther” with some NPCs. You can romance some NPCs (generally, anyone who is an adult). I am not sure what happens there, maybe they move in with you on your plot. You also can pick someone to be your “Shepp”. Which is like a Mentor, but once again, I’m not leveled up enough to know what that even does, if anything. I do know, from what I looked into, it does not matter who your shepp is really. So I assume that means no discounts or anything. Which makes some sense because otherwise it’s going to boild down to “Who do you want the best discounts from?”

I’m not entirely sure the intricacies of the relationships between the characters, so I’m not going to vouch for the accuracy of any of this in the long term. I am also not going to mention all of them.

Zeki

I interact with Zeki quite a bit. Or at least, his shop. Zeki sells seeds and bag upgrades. He is also, inexplicably, the only cat man on the island. At least, the only one I have encountered. No one else really trusts him, he is apparently a bit of a con artist. I hope i am getting the best rates on seeds if that is the case, but buying seeds is way easier than crafting them. The Seed crafter takes an eternity to produce a tiny handful of seeds. If I could queue up several types of seeds and run it each night so my seeds were ready in the morning it would not be so bad, but the game doesn’t work that way.

Also buying from the store gives lucky coins, which are basically free loot boxes. Sometimes there is near decorations in them.

Eshe

The Mayor’s wife, I think. She is generally just bitch and for that, I kind of hate her. I mean, she has not actively wronged my character really, she is just rude. She hates Zeki, and at one point I helped Zeki steal some stuff from her, which was fun. She also has a daughter who sometimes works the register at City Hall where they sell building parts and land deeds.

Hassian

Almost as bad as Eshe is Hassian. Another rude dick for no reason. Fortunately, so far, there isn’t much reason to interact with Hassian. He sells hunting supplies and equipment, and more importantly, he has a dog, who is nice. I think I’ve had a few quests from the Dog so far.

Sifuu

Something something death by Sifuu Sifuu. I think she is Hassian’s mom. She runs the blacksmith shop and sells some mats I think. I have not had to really interact with her much, but she seems alright.

Jel

I am not real sure what this guy does aside from hang around the shrine on the edge of the map. He’s less rude and more just, a stick in the mud. I suspect he has something to do with The Order maybe. Do not trust his friendly standoffishness.

Elouisa

Elouisa is absolutely batshit crazy and spouts conspiracy theories constantly. Though they seem like the kind of “conspiracies” you encounter in a world like this where no one believes them, despite living in a “magical land” and they end up being true. She doesn’t sell anything, but seems to be involved in a least part of the main quest plot line. She also has a sister who may be a twin (I should probably actually read some of the text these characters spout at me). her sister is a lame prude. You want to have fun, go find Elouisa.

She is probably my favorite character aside from maybe Reth.

Reth and Tish

These two are siblings, also also two I’ve interacted with quite a bit. Everyone hates Reth for being a bit spastic and unreliable, but he seems alright. Tish is just friendly all around. Reth is basically the goto for the Cooking skill, and as Cooking is gardening adjacent, I’ve interacted with him for recipes and story points.

Tish sells furniture plans. Which you need for crafting to fancy up your house. I kind of feel bad for her a bit though. She will carry maybe 3-4 “starter plans” for different furniture types, but you only need to actually buy one plan. You will eventually learn every other piece as you continue to craft things. So, hopefully her brother’s cooking business can help keep her a float, I guess.

Also, I didn’t realize they were siblings at first and thought they were a couple. Can we say, “How do you do step-Palian?”

Whoops.

Palia – Getting Established

Apr 22nd, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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So I’ve established a house, next order of business is to fancy things up. Well, more to start, leveling up skills. In order to be able to fancy things up. One of the main aspects of this game is crafting, and almost everything you gather feeds into this. There are several different skills to work on and level, some seem to be more useful than others.

Tree Chopping – Almost everything needs wood or minerals to be constructed. Seems like there will be a lot of tree shopping going on.
Mining – Like chopping, mining is a pretty regularly needed activity.
Farming – As near as I can tell, this is the easiest way to make money. You put out some soil, you throw down some crops, you water them, if you check in intermittently throughout the day, you can make pretty good money each day. Also useful for Cooking.
Cooking – Some of the food seems to sell for a decent amount, but the real benefit here is making food to eat to fill your energy bar thingy. Doing tasks with the energy bar filled gives bonus experience on that task. It’s easy to fill too.
Hunting – If you want you can wander around hinting animals. This is useful for getting fur to make leather for some construction. I find it to be a little dull honestly, partly because the mechanics are so wonky. You shoot an animal and either one shot it, or startle it, which causes it to run around in this weird, too fast, sort of manner.
Fishing – Apparently it’s good for a quick buck. It seems most useful for unlocking a special door thing, which I’ll probably get to in a later post.
Bug Catching – Fishing but it’s on land, with some of the annoyance of Hunting added in.

Each of these skills has it’s own tool, and each tool can be leveled up to make the tasks easier with better rewards. One thing I’ve learned pretty quickly, make sure to keep repair kits around to fix tools. Creating and using Repair kits is way cheaper than rebuilding a broken tool from scratch, from a material’s standpoint.

The starter plot had a nice supply of rocks and trees to farm but at this point I’ve mostly exhausted what I can use there. I need a better axe to chop down more trees.

Which leads to another kind of weird frustration, I can grow trees, but eventually, they become too large for me to chop down. Fortunately, I can move planted trees, so I now have a collection of trees piled in one corner of my lot, one day I’ll be able to chop them down for profit I guess.

Not having local nodes means going out in the world for most materials, which slows things down a bit. The game definitely loads you up on early materials, but not so much on higher-level materials.

I’ve spent most of my time lately farming. I am sure there is some sort of real pattern for maximizing out the little bonuses each type of crop gives (better yield, better water retention, less weeds), but so far I’ve been sticking to doing little 4×4 plots with 4 types of crops. My main frustration is that everything grows at a slightly irregular pace. My desire to keep things organized is seriously clashing with the 4 or 5 crops each harvest that are not finished by the end.

Do I replant and just skip those spots? Do I scrap them and dig them out? i may try that actually, maybe see if I can get things to grow a bit more uniform again.

The watering can (the tool for farming) is a little odd too. The initial one does one crop at a time, the next one up says it will do 3 at a time, but sometimes it does 5, and sometimes just one, and it’s not clear how the watering works with the higher-tiered can. Also, anything being watered indirectly fills at about half speed, so it’s not like everything gets watered at the same speed.

Can I just craft a sprinkler system please?

I’ve been pouring my money into adding a second room to my house. I want to add a few more smaller ones as well. There is a sort of plot to this game, but a lot of it is centered around just, building your little plot of land.

I’ve also spent a lot of time crafting furniture. I kind of wish you could sell furniture, or maybe dismantle it to recover some of the mats or something. There are a lot of different styles of furniture, that seem to mostly correspond to different skill levels. For example, the “Log Cabin” line seems to match with level 1. Each time you craft an item from a particular type, you get the choice of unlocking a new thing to build from that line.

I’ve moved beyond the log cabin style, but I went ahead and crafted one of each item, so I could get the experience points from it. I know I’ve crafted it all because it stopped giving me the option to pick a new item to learn.

Most of the Log Cabin lines uses unrefined wood, but the higher levels require planks (crafted from wood) and often Clay or Copper (refined from ores). This means they take a lot longer to make since you have to farm these mats, then process them.

It’s not a problem, it’s just, a little tedious over time.

Anyway, my little house is starting to slowly become a big house.

What I’ve Been Playing – Idling For Hats Edition

Jan 6th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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A new year, a new time to try to build new habits. Hah ha ha, yeah right… probably. Anyway, I picked up a slew of new-ish games over the holidays in various sales, and I look forward to forgetting that I wanted to play them over the next few months. Off the top of my head, I picked up, yet to really play, Spider-man Miles Morales, Alan Wake 2 and Alan Wake Remastered, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Plus some cheapies in bundles or randomly, A bunch of Oddworld Games, Need for Speed Payback, Tron 2.0, Karateka. This doesn’t even include the whack of free games from Epic, though of those I only really care about Saints Row, Deathloop, and Guardians of the Galaxy.

I might be a bit slow getting going on these though as I’m doing some work-related training in the evenings 3 nights a week for most of January.

Spider-Man Remastered

I bought this one back at the start of December. I’ve since finished it. I started on some of the DLC, but I’m not really sure I’ll bother doing much more. I really enjoyed the gameplay in this one, but the combat is kind of super repetitious. It’s just the same 3 or 4 enemies in groups but in different outfits depending on the stage of the story.

The game itself is fun, the story is decent, I made the stupid assumption about the end boss not being in the game because, unlike all the other big villains, there wasn’t an explicit achievement. It did a pretty good job of weaving together several unrelated subplots all into one larger narrative. Swinging and running around the city is fun, but it starts to feel a bit slow after a while.

Spider-Man Miles Morales

If I am going to do more of the same Spider-Man, I may as well mix it up, which is why I’ve started on the “Not number 2 but still a sequel” game of Spider-Man Miles Morales. Miles shows up in the first game, and you play as him a few times, as not Spider-man. There is a subplot that sets up Miles gaining his powers and then this game lets you play as him. It’s the same map with a few changes, and the same basic combat with a few new additions, but it’s basically more of the same. I’ve only done one major mission and the game says I am 22% done with the main story, so I guess it’s pretty short compared to the first.

The first isn’t that long either really, it just has a ton of optional mini-missions you can do scattered across the map.

Deathloop

I decided to give Deathloop a quick try, it was a freebie from the holidays. In the 10-15 minutes I played, it kept losing the controls. Repeatedly. I don’t know if it’s something I was doing or if it’s just THAT buggy, but the experience was pretty awful.

Hogwarts Legacy

I played a bit of Hogwarts Legacy again. I really enjoy this game, but it’s taking up space on my drive, and I want to uninstall it, but I need to play up to the last achievement with a Ravenclaw character. It’s really odd just how tedious replaying this is. I am not real sure why it’s like that, but even skipping the cut scenes and rushing, I just don’t want to keep going. I think it took me like 2 hours to do this as Gryphondor and Hufflepuff, but somehow this last run is just so annoying. But I don’t want to reinstall it, I want to finish this and be done.

Fortnite

The game I am not playing, but making progress on. I’m super burnt out on Fortnite, but because I had a screw sub from the last season, I got this season pass. Most of the skins are pretty meh, but it has Solid Snake or will have Solid Snake. A lot of people are going crazy for Peter Griffin, but I don’t care about that at all.

I also have not written about the new Rhythm game or Race game, because both are pretty lame. LEGO is, ok, I’ve gotten a bit better hang of it, but it’s still pretty tedious. The new modes are great for leveling up though. I’ve never leveled so fast in a season ever. In Fortnite LEGO and Fortnite Festival Jam stage, you can load it, and walk away and gain about 5-6 levels a day, for EACH mode. I’m already something like level 165, but I’ve stopped for now until Snake drops. Also, occasionally I kind of need to drop in to catch up on the Weekly quests for those item drops.

It’s like back in Team Fortress 2, when you could idle for hats.

All I wan to add is the pricing on the cosmetics, especially for the new modes, is fucking bonkers nuts. You can buy a Lambo in Fortnite and play their mediocre Mark Kart clone, or for the same price you could buy Forza Horizon 4 (on sale), and get infinite Lambos and a real racing experience on a large, open-world map. The music tracks are like 3x the price of buying the track itself in MP3, and the game mode needs some tweaks to make it playable (lanes should be different colors).

Sky: Children of the Light

I’ve shifted into a weird phase with Sky. It’s brought on by the Steam version being available. I’ve now shifted to alts and mechanical farming mode. I’ve got like 5 or 6 total accounts now, one being my main account. I spend a short bit each day, generally in the morning when I would have been eating breakfast (which I am not at the moment, but that’s for a BI post later), where I’ll log into each account, send my main a Heart, and farm out 3-4 candles, to replace the candles I’ve spent on the heart. Two of these accounts have a pile of reserve candles now because the season ended, so if I am feeling time crunched, I’ll just eat into those.

Hearts are one of several in-game currencies. The only way to get them is to be sent one from a friend, at the cost of 3 candles, once per day, or to gather bits of light sent from friends, which I think takes like 60 bits. Getting these normally, is a pain, even with a lot of friends, because half the time, they don’t send you anything even when you send it to them, because who wants to spend their candles on strangers? You can only get like 20-25 candles per day, and Candles are the main currency.

Anyway, I did some rough math, to complete just the main tree, none of the Traveling Spirits trees, I need like 1000+ hearts. Even with 4-5 accounts feeding me hearts daily, that’s 200 days. You start throwing in events and Traveling Sprits, it’s easily a year of farming.

I will probably give up before I get there, but it’s a little nuts. Granted, the bulk of this is the handful of Ultimate Capes, which tend to run 100-200 Hearts each.

I may look into automating the candle and heart farming with some automation tools later, so it just sort of, happens. It would be pretty easy to use some sort of input macro tools to log in, run to a handful of regular candle sources, and send the Hearts.

Part of this exercise in creating accounts also meant running through the game some to unlock areas. Twice now, I’ve done a no cape run, once as a test, and once recorded, which can be viewed in it’s entirety below.

Retroid Pocket 3

Apr 3rd, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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So, I’ve been pretty heavy on the programming push lately, but it’s not all I’ve been up to. So, back around the start of the pandemic, I started work making a PiGrrl handheld emulator device. PiGrrl is basically a Game Boy Clone that runs with a Raspberry Pi at it’s core. I ordered a bunch of parts and a case, I already had a Pi (I have several), and then the Pandemic caused my parts to take forever to arrive. Plus I probably spent more on it than I really should have.

Then I got a little bored and it sat for a bit, but I did eventually solder everything together, and it didn’t quite work, so I did some corrections and got bored of it for a few months again, then eventually, I got it working. Sort of, some emulators work, others don’t even launch, I am sure it’s a software issue a this point.

So, after a bit more trouble shooting, I got a little bonus at work like I occasionally do, so I just ordered a Retroid Pocket 3. A nice pre built solution that’s configured and well, just works. I mostly play gaming on PC, but for consoles, most of my playing in the last 20 years has been on handhelds. I am pretty sure I actually played and finished almost every DS game I have bought (including GBA), and the completion rate for my 3DS games is also very high. The point is, my follow through rate for hand held games is staggeringly high compared to PC and traditional Consoles. I mean, I bought my PS3 and it came with The Last of Us, which I was excited for, and I still have yet to play it even once.

Anyway, the Retroid Pocket is essentially an Android device with a controller and case wrapped around it to make it look like a PSP or a Switch. I considered the Retroid Pocket 2+ but I wanted the wider screen, so I went with the Retroid Pocket 3. So far, my experience with it has been pretty excellent.

There is a bit of trickiness in tracking down the BIOS files needed but there are guides and resources out there. Anything older than say, the SNES/Genesis era plays flawlessly with ease. Which is pretty expected, since it’s all basic 2D gaming at that point. I’ve had a lot of luck running PS1 and PSP titles as well.

Nintendo 64 games are a little touchy but there are some settings that I believe I can adjust to make it work better. Right now everything has screwy transparency. There are options for some more powerful systems but I’ve not had luck yet getting things like PS2 working. I’ve played several WiiWare games but the Wii itself has the motion controls which don’t translate super well to a handheld device’s controls.

Overall, I am extremely happy with this purchase, it’s really invigorated my interest in older games and gaming again.

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

Dec 12th, 2022

by Ramen Junkie.

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# What I’ve Been Playing Recently

I like the idea of this sort of regular, generic post, but I don’t really want to give it a schedule, so I’m just going to throw em out whenever, for now, I think. Considering this si the “first” one, it’s also not clear what “Recently” should mean in this context. It’s my post, my blog, my rules, so I’m thinking, whatever I want to mention really.

Fortnite

Roughly a year ago, I decided I wanted to give Fortnite a go. It’s been popular for years, and i was looking for something relatively mindless to play as a filler game to fill the void left by Overwatch. So I decided to try Fortnite. I had no idea what I was doing, though I managed to win my first match, which felt really cool, until (much later) I learned that all the matches for the first ten levels or so are against Bots. It was Christmas season, so I got a few free cosmetic items, and I even enjoyed it enough to buy a few skins. i also opted to go for the Battle Pass, which I completed to level 200.

I’ve taken a few breaks, but I’m still playing a year later now. Chapter 4 just started, which means a fresh new map to play on. i am pretty sure the new map is a lot smaller than the last one. Honestly, in general, it feels like Epic really wanted to try to break people out of the “Run around and hide” all match mindset. Everything is righter and faster and you’re forced into more encounters. I’m not sure I like it honestly. I usually moved around the map a lot, but I also generally would avoid conflicts. I’ve actually been playing a lot of Bot Matches just so the games are more chill and less stressful.

Something that’s a bit annoying, I actually kind of prefer playing random, NON Battle Royale maps and modes. I played a TON of their Among Us Clone, in the Imposters Mode. Though that got old because groups, completely break that mode. Groups will just tattle on who the Imposter is to their friends. I also do a lot of “Death-run” Obstacle course maps, though there are a lot of these that feel really uninspired these days. Probably my favorite are the Musical Soundwave Series events.

Sky Children of the Light

This one is a super chill “Relaxing” movile game, though it recently came to Switch and Playstation. It’s made by the same folks who made Journey and definitely FEELS a lot like Journey. You float around this world collecting candle wax and meeting people and doing little Spirit Quests. There is only one zone in the entire game where you can be harmed, outside of The End zone. I have not been able to bring myself to attempt The End yet. I hear it’s really hard, plus you lose everything, by default, and start over, after completing the game.

Currently they are having an event themed around the singer Aurora, which was part of why I started playing the game in the first place.

Retroid Pocket

I want to do a proper write up on my Retroid eventually, but I’ve been playing old games on this as well. Nothing in particular yet, I’m still kind of in the “Mess around and see what it can do” phase. Mostly I’ve been playing Genesis and PlayStation Titles, with a few PC Engine games thrown in. I am trying REALLY hard not to fall into my usual Emulation Trap of just playing Zelda and Mario…. again… for the ten thousandth time.

Overwatch 2

File this one under what I’m NOT Playing. I got so tired of Overwatch and it’s unbalanced mess. I quit a year or so ago and every attempt to come back failed within days or hours of every reinstall. I came back more hardcore for the end of Overwatch 1, hopeful that Overwatch 2 would be a fresh, new beginning. I even bought the Battle Pass. Oh boy I was disappointed. I expected nothing and it was worse. Every single match, almost without fail, is a complete steamroll win or loss, and neither is fun. Experience is a slow pain int he ass as well, I gave up on the Battle Pass around level 50 I think. I was not having fun and I didn’t want to grind out 30 more levels. I don’t even care about winning, I just want the game to feel enjoyable I never win in Fortnite and I always enjoy playing. Overwatch should be like that.