What Did We Play Yesterday?

I was enjoying watching Donut build a sweetberry farm in Minecraft, and I had an epiphany... I really love automation farming! It scratches a really specific itch in my brain, yet I've never sought out a game exclusively for that purpose. I still play Farm Together, in fact I created a whole-ass website just so you guys wouldn't have to scroll past my weird, crunchy posts on that game, but 150 hours in much of my fun centers around figuring out mechanisms that let me automate... basically anything, so I can passively rack up resources while I'm running around decorating houses.

Factorio is the go-to automation game, but I wanted something more farmy and after poking around a bit, I landed on Assembly Planter. I played for about 30 minutes, and was like eh I'm over it. But I came back later that afternoon and at some point the hook got sunk deep. Deep my friends.

Assembly Planter is a 20-level optimization sandbox puzzle. The early levels, which walk you through the game mechanics, require you to plant seeds to farm resources, but once you hit later levels the farming gets abstracted to the point it's more of a factory automation game. I really enjoyed the middle section of the progression, where I had a convoluted farm chain that really slapped and I could sit there and watch it do it's thing. As you progress, much of the challenge hinges on fitting increasingly elaborate machines into the limited building area. You unlock a Shrinker feature that allows you to shrunk larger machines into 1 block machines to save space. The boxy machines are less fun to watch, but it is still satisfying to see all the resources popping out.

I feel like the pacing is good. Every level a new production goal is set, and I usually end up completely tearing down whatever I had built because the new goal requires serious optimization and my current Frankenstein setup isn't gonna cut it. I love optimization (as a coder, I spent so much time refactoring code, purely for fun) and within the confines of Assembly Planter it's mostly fun, but around level 15, I started to get just kind of... overwhelmed with it. I kept trying to create self-feeding machines in the shrinker, which it turns out is impossible until you actually unlock self-feeding collectors. I got past this by setting really specific intermediary goals, like creating a crate assembly line so I can expand my stack size, or farming earth orbs to expand my farm area.

Level 16 unlocks transmutation, which are resource shortcuts. So you can go from 30x lead > Gold, rather than Dirt>Sandlion>Sand>Cactus>Compacted Sand>Gold. This changes things up and gives you a lot more options for the long-tail crafting resources.

I'm currently on level 18, and my goal is to figure out a way to craft 1 gold per second passively. But before I do that, I think I'm gonna have to solve my dirt generation problem and build another crate factory. If this sounds terrible to you, you might hate this game! But it's $5, so if you wanna try the genre this might be a good entry point.

Well, the time has come. 140 hours in I'm bored of farming and livestock and pretty much all I do right now is decorate since I've got all these empty houses sitting around. When I need to blow off some steam, I cheat-engine 400 tickets and get bizzy. Most of the DLC theme furniture can't sustain an entire house, so I do a lot of mixing and matching. I enjoy it, but I'm running out of houses. And furniture.

Before, I was like, why the hell would anyone care about these mundane kitchen appliances and bathroom stuff? Now, in each house I meticiulously set up a thematically appropriate kitchen and carefully consider the number of mundane appliances and kitchen gadgets to include. IDK man.

I still have a few large land plots to unlock and fill responsibly with flowers and crops, but I unlocked all the center plots. I've found some fun ways to landscape these. My favorite is the rice patty field that is full of ships and koi.

This update isn't even for me, it's for Donut. For some reason, Donut became obsessed with maxxing this game sometime in January and they have maxed out... IDK basically everything. 70+ hours in, they've maxed health/level. They looked up YouTube videos on how to do... whatever the heck they're doing! Exploits, glitches, you name it. I've honestly never seen them geek this hard for a game before. They've unlocked stuff I didn't even know existed. They have maybe 30 droids?

Obviously, the kid is a gamer, but this was the moment where I realized Donut might end up being even weirder about games than I am. As a parent, you have to set boundaries, and I limit game time to 1 hour on the weekdays and 2 sessions (before and after lunch) on weekends. This seems to be working okay for now. Donut is still struggling with emotional regulation while playing competitive games (I had to put Gangbeasts in game jail, along with Fall Guys, and Fortnite has been pre-emptively banned because I know my child), so I'm happy they can get into a single player game like this and really dig in and find enjoyment.

Felix: Hey boss, can we get some Rizzos?

Captain: We have Rizzos on the ship.

Roseway is the second "company town" you visit in the Outer Worlds. This one is controlled by Auntie Cleo Pharmaceuticals (It's Better Than Nature!) and they have a corporate rivalry with Spacer's Choice.

Roseway is an optional location, which is interesting considering how tightly designed it is. Everything ties up neatly and you have a lot of manuverability in terms of roleplaying. The level opens with a mystery--you are following a distress signal to a place where ?????? happened, and the early environmental storytelling is absolutely lit. Whoever came up with the loader turned on its side, repeatedly issuing warning messages, deserves a hearty pat on the back.

This level is home to Anton Crane, a scientist who has at least one highly ardent fan on Tumblr. Crane is also a good example of why RPing an asshole in the Outer Worlds is the short play. The game offers much more lore if you make empathetic dialogue choices. If you're a dick to Crane, he shuts down pretty early on. If you're even remotely compassionate or inquisitive, his dialogue tree blooms like a beautiful beaurocratic (cannot spell it ever) flower and you learn all kinds of interesting things, including the entire toothpaste subplot.

• There really aren't many loose ends here, but I spent some time trying to confirm the fate of Maria Volkova, who was stationed at the storage facility and whom Porter refers to by the pet name Mashekna in correspondence. Porter tells her to stay put when all hell breaks loose, but obviously never came for her and doesn't even after you convince him to leave the lab. My best guess is she's the "scientist" corpse in the dorm (which would have been her room, since she was the only person sleeping at the storage facility).
• Roseway is filled with the usual illegible paperwork background clutter, but there is one legible message: distillery instructions written on a chalkboard in Maria's room. The distillery is located in a cave behind the main compound. It's the closest thing to a secret area Roseway seems to have.
• The dev team ended up cutting a companion and SAM was a last-minute replacement. SAM is only obtainable if you pick up a part at Roseway, but he has reactions at Groundbreaker. He'll TCP hand-shake with Greasy, and he reacts to Welles' wanted poster.
• I got the Robophobia flaw in a previous playthrough, and had the option to scream every time I saw SAM, which I thought was a nice touch.
• If you pick up decorations before recruiting a companion, the decorations show up in their empty room anyway

I grilled ADA on the system and got some dialogue I'd forgotten about. ADA despises Edgewater and actively roots for you to kill everyone there. She says she sent a distress signal when the Unreliable landed because Hawthorne was injured, but instead of sending medical help they sent people to collect illegal landing fees. Hawthorne apparently had a concussion (?) when he set up the landing beacon, and that's why he remained in the landing zone after he activated it. For the longest time, I could not figure out why Hawthorne died that way.

I also learned you cannot go back to check on Guard Pelham. There's a collision block preventing your return to the starter area. He'll end up in the constabulary at some point, if you helped him.

The Groundbreaker has all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies, as well as lots of side story tidbits, environmental storytelling, and a few deadends. It is neat from a level design perspective. They did a good job of giving the impression of different factions coexisting in an enclosed space. Last playthrough I discovered the secret skeleton (climb up above the entrance and make a few running jumps to get onto some platforms with loot and find a skeleton stahed behind some pillars). If you enter the Groundbreaker this way, you can avoid triggering the ship impound conversation at the front gate, but I assume doing so breaks the game or at least creates some continuity weirdness.

• This level has some pretty funny conversations if you pretend to be Hawthorne (or deny you're him, in some cases).
• You can't recruit Felix until after you talk to Udon about the ship impound (I tried). I usually take Felix and Max at the beginning of this area, because of Max's personal quest, but this time I took Pavarti and opened some interesting asides, including a bit where Pavarti expresses interest in Junlei and gets teased by the security officer. Felix defends her.
• If you pay a bribe, you can enter the security office and mardet quarters without the holographic shroud countdown timer. Not sure if it's really worth the bits, but I appreciated taking my time snooping around.
• I'm not sure why there's a Doc Maybell wanted poster on the Groundbreaker, but if you investigate Welles' poster your companions will weigh in.
• MacRedd is like, the peak TOW NPC. Everything about him--allegedly 26 years old, offers to let you "parlay with the king," wants to go corporate, has a carnal relationship with Sanita--is exquisite. It really doesn't get better than this. He's basically the Toledo Killswitch of Halcyon.
• The Groundbreaker has an "unmarked" quest, Greasy the robot, that you can investigate for the heck of it. There's evidently no kitchen key (I certainly looked) so you have to pick the lock.

There are also a few weird dead ends, including a mysterious series of emails that are deleted and a few named NPCs that seem like they ought to be attached to a quest somewhere but they just.... aren't. One of the devs remarked they cut more content than the probably should have (paraphrasing), but as far as I can tell they haven't really confirmed what they cut beyond the fact they evidently cut an entire planet and later regretted it. I assume these strange little loose ends are related to cut content or a lack of time. But it also makes the game world seem bigger and messier and, IDK, more real.

I have a very sordid purchasing history with this game, which I love more than almost anything. I just picked up the Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition. For those of you keeping track at home, this is the 3rd time I've purchased the base game, the 2nd time on PC. This time I got it from GOG. Playing with 2 second load times has been really sweet.

This 5th playthrough will follow the adventures of Corpo Esquire, a kleptomaniac fake lawyer who lies about literally everything and will be doing a true board run with the lowest body count possible (people can't bribe you if they're dead!). As some of you may recall, I attempted to do a board run back with Sexymann Corporate only to find my failure to keep Reed Thompson in power at Edgewater meant Sexymann would have to nuke the entire town, and he couldn't bear to do it. I fell in love with Akande so this was very sad. I shall remedy it this time. This will be a 100% completionist Board run. The notes probably won't be interesting unless you've played a bajillion times.

Speaking of playing a bajillion times... I wasn't sure if I'd really get into this run, since I abandoned my dumb run a while back, but it's been really enjoyable so far.

You're not supposed to have Vicar Max in your party until you get the book and leave for the Groundbreaker, but I wanted him in my party in the Vale so I did a speedy requisition of those items and got the ship up and running, then doubled back to finish all the sidequests and quest conversation trees. Max isn't supposed to be in the party at this point so he has no speaking lines except his timed banters with Pavarti, but I enjoyed having him along. I noticed a LOT of dead marauders that I didn't personally kill when I returned. Players will return to Emerald Vale for a companion quest, so maybe there's a flag that nukes some of them.

One of my other goals was to investigate every nook and cranny of the maps. The Outer Worlds is a silly game that lets you do lots of silly things, so sometimes there's a real HUH moment when they don't actually let you do something. For example, when I realized there was a balcony with an interior-leading door above the general store, I became VERY committed to trying to get up there because that would provide a way to break into the shop without having to kill anyone. And you can't! There are a few boxes stacked up that makes it look like maybe-maybe, but you can't. No back entrance, no way onto the roof, nothing.

I've gotten so used to weaving between the marauder patrols and camp at the very start of the game I've never actually explored that area thoroughly before. The shoreline is cool, albiet with minimal loot. I found a few wildlife dens and cleared them out. I triggered an amusing banter from Pavarti when we travelled along the river. The entire Emerald Vale countryside is a cautionary tale on the dangers of being outside the walls; the only people with any sort of survival rate are the deserters at the botanical lab and the mauraders living in larger groups (until I show up, of course). All the other residents outside the walls are dead. Many of the marauders in small camps are also dead. All the wild canid packs are actively eating human remains. The primals may not actually eat humans, but they certainly kill them; every primal nest had dismembered corpses. Monarch is The Scary Wildlife Planet (tm), but Terra 2 isn't exactly a picnic.

There are items like Bred Noodles, which are consumables you can pick up, and then there are things like Bred Crumbs which are environmental decorations that cannot be interacted with but have similar packaging ("Don't tell anyone our crunch secret! Seriously, don't tell anyone! Trust us!"). Most of the printed papers and letters you find are illegible environmental decorations, but I was fascinated by an envelope sealed with wax that I found in one of the buildings.

I think we can all agree Zoe sucks, but her ambient chatter with the mauraders is funny. I'm pretty sure the only reason she's alive is because she's hanging with Guillaume Antrim's crew, and Antrim is presumably "with it" enough not to kill her on sight, and isn't ruthless enough to simply kill her to loot the remaining Adrena-Time from her corpse. Zoe doesn't register the quest complete until you talk to her, so even after you kill all the mauraders she will still converse with them as though they're alive.

Beefs:

• I still feel like not being able to engage in conversation with at least 1 of the 3 bounties is a missed opportunity. Doc Maybell doesn't even aggro until you get RIGHT ON TOP OF HER.
• I've complained about this before, but the game has way too many consumables. I intended to pick more of these up and actually use them, but I usually have to read through several descriptions and figure out what does what and IDK man.
• Despite telling no one my real name, I received 2 emails addressing me directly. Get your shit together Obsidian. I take my roleplaying very seriously.
• This game needs a flashlight. I actually had to crank my gamma up to see at night (D:)