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?”
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.
A while back I wishlisted this game on Steam called Palia. It kind of feels like, Stardew Valley but 3D with MMO elements. There isn’t any combat though. It’s commonly referred to as being a chill and cozy game. This actually came off as kind of appealing in the same way Sky:CotL is appealing. It’s recently been released and I have jumped in to check it out.
The story starts out, with your character, a human, mysteriously appearing in this shrine where you meet the first of several locals in the area. You can tell they are not humans because they are all purple-skinned. Though they all kind of just, look like purple humans. After a bit of talk, it was time to head down to the town to meet more locals and get set up.
It feels a little weird from a plot standpoint. They seem to both consider you, as a human, unique, but also seem to acknowledge that humans keep popping up in this world. Like the plot is at odds with its online world nature.
Anyway, after getting set up with with a basic little plot of land in a little mountain Crater area, it was time to start my life in Palia. It almost feels like they don’t really trust me but hey, I am contained in case they decide I am not useful anymore I guess. The people also provided some starter elements for some of the basics of the gameplay loop. A basic axe for chopping trees, a basic pickaxe for mining, some plots of soil to grow plants in, a simple tent and crafting table.
Like I said, it’s kind of like Stardew Valley. You get land to build on and upgrade, and you work with a variety of townspeople to do little quests.
The starter tent is the most annoying bit here, I am not sure if it’s intentional, but you can’t place crafting equipment in the tent. Which feels like from an aesthetics level, would be the ideal place for it.
The tent didn’t last for long though, after a few quests I gained a house! Or at least, the foundation for a house. Which also lead to needing to work with some more advanced crafting like turning wood into planks and ore into bricks. After collecting the appropriate materials, and waiting 8 hours, I ended up with my first house, which is a little small and boring. But over time it will be soon spruced up a bit I hope.
I’ve finished up watching season 2 of this show. I really hope it gets a Season 3. With COVID and the strike and everything else, who knows. It hasn’t officially been renewed but also hasn’t officially been canceled. I’m not sure what that means overall besides it will probably be several years before the story continues, which kind of sucks. I really love the whole short-season aspect of modern TV, but I don’t understand how that means it also takes 2-3 times longer to make the seasons.
There will be some spoilers for the series in this little write-up, though I am not sure how major they are, mostly because the plot is alright, but it’s nothing super unexpected overall. If anything there may be spoilers for the future via discussion of the game plot.
But enough about that, let’s look at the show itself. And to some extent Halo and the Halo lore. I had some doubts and worries after the first season. I have less doubt and worry after the second season. i am also not some sort of “hardcore” Halo fan, though I’m not sure there are any real die-hard Halo Fans, at least not in a way that would really affect any enjoyment of this show, especially after season 2.
There are reasons to dislike the series I suppose, especially based just on season 1. It does not directly follow the game lore being one. I have not read any of the books, I’ve just played through the games. From what I have read online, the books mostly work with the games and the show isn’t a direct adaptation of any of it.
The game timeline has it’s major beats. The UNSC headquarters planet is taken by the Covenant, commonly referred to as The Fall of Reach, Master Chief (John) then uses data from Cortana to go to the first Halo Ring. The Flood is discovered on the Halo ring and is awakened. Master Chief destroys the Halo ring by overloading the Pillar of Autumn’s core. That’s just through the first game and the later released prequel Halo: Reach. Eventually, there is a civil war inside the Covenant and there are more Halo rings and the Forerunners who created it all get involved etc etc.
The series, so far, has only barely made it to the Halo Ring itself from which the series gets it’s name. The first season sort of just amounts to setting the stage and introducing all of the characters of the series, and their relationships. The second season actually starts to get into more familiar lore. I can only speculate, but I do wonder if this was the original plan and direction, or if they steered this way after some of the iffy backlash from Season 1.
I’m reminded a bit of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. The trailer for the first movie was revealed, and everyone HATED the design for Sonic. The studio went back and fixed Sonic’s look and the movie came off much better for it. Despite that Sonic was now “less realistic”, he still, just worked, and was familiar, in this world of humans. The plot was still a bit iffy, but they tried. And they learned. The second Sonic movie, was much much more thematically closer to a Sonic story than the first movie and, while the humans were still present, they were literally relegated off to the side by sending them all off to an island, only to have them check in occasionally.
Somewhere, someone learned that for a video game adaptation, while a straight adaptation in many cases won’t work. Who would watch a movie of a CGI Sonic just running fast and collecting rings. Sticking tight to the core concept and aesthetics helps a LOT.
Which is one thing that I think helps the Halo series a lot, especially in Season 2. It really sticks to the aesthetics of Halo. They didn’t give Master Chief some goofy sleek black stealth armor or something, they didn’t turn the Warthogs into Jeeps or something they could use as ad placement, they didn’t change the Covenant to be some weird human-looking aliens in armor so something to make the CGI easier. Everything, visually, is very much Halo.
Though I keep feeling like the CGI budget really is holding things back a bit here. I know, that probably feels odd given just how much CGI there is, but a lot of the CGI is static backdrops and cityscapes. There is action, but it’s often set up in a way that masks the, likely expensive to produce, Covenant. This is a lot more obvious in the first season. The series spends a lot of time getting people to talk in rooms, or have fights between humans.
Which kind of brings up probably the most controversial part of this whole series. Though it’s one that is fairly easy to get over.
Master Chief removes his helmet. Not only that he removes his suit. We see him completely out of his suit more than we see him in his suit. I can already see how they will remove him from his suit in Season 3 by having 343 Guilty Spark do some repairs on the armor or something after the climactic battle at the end of Season 2.
In general, it’s kind of a necessary evil for a few reasons.
One, unlike the game, where Master Chief serves as an avatar for the player, here, he has to stand on his own. Like the Sonic example above, just having Master Chief shoot aliens for 8 episodes each season wouldn’t make for a very compelling series. A series needs characters and drama and interaction between them to keep engagement. Of course, it’s easy to point to The Mandalorian as a way to make this work, but even there, he takes off his helmet. He shows us he is a man underneath. He also has Grogu hanging around to provide visual context to the audience for reactions the main character cannot make.
But then, this is a game series, where there is a scene, of Master Chief removing his helmet, to reveal, a SECOND helmet underneath.
I went through the fake outrage moment of the helmet reveal, and I still feel like there are several places where “Maybe you should have kept your damn armor on John” in the story for sure. But it’s honestly, easy to overlook because it helps us care about this Master Chief.
And that’s kind of the key, It’s “This Master Chief”. He is not the Master Chief of the games. Heck, this Master Chief feels almost like someone the game Master Chief would see as a villain. The game Master Chief kind of felt like someone who was gun-ho patriotic with the UNSC but this Master Chief is rapidly transforming into a sort of rogue agent outlaw.
His lack of armor also helps keep the story interesting. Master Chief is undoubtedly very very strong when armored up and at full strength. Almost unstoppably so. He is still strong without it, but it helps create that conflict and drama that the show needs. Because Chief can’t just walk into any room and destroy everyone inside without breaking a sweat, he needs to rely on his team and his friends. It helps push that he is a good leader. In the games, you pick up plenty of faceless marines along your journey to serve this purpose, but this really doesn’t work in a show format for the same reason Sonic just collecting rings for 2 hours doesn’t.
I’ve started to ramble a bit, but I want to shift gears a bit to some other changes. One of my biggest problems with Season 1 was the character of Kwan Ha. Not so much because she is a bad character, but because she kind of felt like her entire plot line was just, completely random and had nothing to do with anything. If my previously mentioned speculation is at all accurate, it feels like maybe the showrunners ended up realizing this as well. Kwan sort of feels like she gets a bit of a new direction in Season 2. There is brief mention that her planet, Madrigal has fallen to the Covenant early on, but she was made out to be too important to just be dumped, so she lives on as a character living in the subplots of the show. There is some “mysterious things” going on with Chief and Makee (more in a bit) and the Covenant and the Forerunners, etc. It kind of feels like maybe Kwan Ha is being set up to fall into this Mystery as well. She ends up being kind of important to working with Miranda Keys and Halsey on unlocking some key plot points that will certainly become important in the future. I see why they can’t just write her out, and hope they can make her a bit more interesting and meaningful though.
Then we have Makee. I actually completely forgot what happened to Makee in Season 1, though they mention that she was assumed dead by Kai’s hand. Apparently not. Makee is another “show only” character. She is kind of the only real major “show-only” character besides Kwan Ha. Sure, John also has his Spartan Team, but Spartan Teams are not uncommon, and giving Master Chief a team with personality isn’t really that weird. Makee is still kind of weird. She is basically like John, a human with Forerunner genes. But it’s not super clear why she continues to hang out with The Covenant. The Covenant clearly do not want her around beyond manipulating her for control of the Halo. Most of them just want to go ahead and off her. She seems to have to spend a lot of effort to manipulate the Covenant into thinking she is worth keeping around, and it kind of feels like simply, defecting to the humans would really be the better option.
Granted most of the Humans in charge are kind of shitty assholes. I mean, they are trying to actively kill Master Chief and all and… well, maybe defecting wouldn’t actually work out any better… I guess.
She just strikes me as a weird character in a weird place, and half of her purpose is to maybe eventually be a love interest for Master Chief because the showrunners don’t like that Chief basically only loves Cortana. Good news, now he has like, 3 potential love interests, with Kai, and Perez and Makee!
I want to address possibly the biggest actual spoiler of this little write-up briefly. I’m mentioning this and adding a little buffer for anyone who really wants to avoid all potential spoilers. Basically, I’ll throw some filler lines in here after the warning, then just start talking about it. Skip ahead if you care about spoiler spoilers, probably for the next few paragraphs because I’m going to make some Season 3 predictions, but it’s also nothing new to anyone familiar with Halo lore. The Flood has been introduced a bit earlier. And they are pretty Floody. I wondered if and how they might handle the Flood. Mostly because, in general, the Flood is not real popular, even in the game lore. The Covenant are an interesting opponent, they have a whole society based very very heavily around their alien religion, they have hierarchies, and interesting designs etc. The Flood are just, annoying blobby hoard-mode zombies. They are kind of a necessary evil though, because the entire purpose of the Halo Ring as a weapon is to destroy the Flood’s food source (All life in the galaxy).
So where does the show go from here?
My Season 3 Predictions
Just based on things that have happened and things that are, elements of the games, that would work better with the pacing and needs of a television series. We finally made it to the Halo Ring, and we know that 343 Guilty Spark will exist (The robot eye at the end that controls the Halo Ring for the Forerunners that was interrogating Master Chief). We have the Flood now on Onyx. I doubt Kai is actually dead, I feel like she will wake up floating in space and end up on the Ring with John. Master Chief’s armor was pretty banged up during his fight with the Arbiter, Guilty Spark will take it and do some repairs/upgrades, as a way of getting John out of his armor for most of the season.
The UNSC will fight the Covenant on the ring, mostly off-screen while John and Makee have some chats inside the ring about its purpose and their own purpose as “Blessed ones”. Eventually Chief will emerge again and he will need to stop the Ring from activating. Or they will maybe use it to purge the Flood from Onyx. Eventually though he will need to stop the Ring from wiping out humanity as Guilty Spark chooses to side with Makee instead of John. Kai still has the spike device and will destroy the ring by using the Spike on a covenant ship, similar to how in the game’s Chief destroys the Pillar of Autumn.
I suspect the Flood will be limited to Onyx. Zombies are kind of popular in media, but they are kind of on the way out a bit. Plus nobody likes The Flood. Halsey was infected but put into cryostasis by Miranda. Soren will get his chance to be a Spartan again to rescue her, and they will end up having to flee to the inside of the planet where the Forerunner city is located. This will mean more lore dumps. Because they are inside the shell of the planet, they will be protected from the Halo Ring destroying the Flood on the planet. This will also set up a Forerunner arc in Season 4.
Also, we will be introduced to Thel ‘Lobdamee, who will become the new Arbiter, and take up his part as the “good guy Covenant” from the games. To replace the Arbiter killed by Chief at the end of Season 2. I had some thought that maybe the existing Arbiter may play this role, and he may have survived being stabbed, but Chief would never forgive him for killing Vannak so that really wouldn’t work out in the long term. I’m also not sure they will ever actually introduce this character, since Makee kind of serves this role in the lore. Makee isn’t really a fighter at all though.
The budget seems to get better each Season so far, so hopefully if there is a Season 3, we will see a lot more Covenant fighting across the Halo Ring. Also Grunts. WHERE ARE THE GRUNTS. Maybe they just, don’t fit thematically with the seriousness of the show.
One last thing I want to add for the potential success of this series is that my wife, who is not a gamer, and doesn’t know anything about Halo, seems to mostly enjoy the show. Which is goes to show that it’s a pretty good adaptation if it’s able to keep someone who isn’t in it because they like the game, at least somewhat interested in it.
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.
