What Did We Play Yesterday?

Big things are happening. I unlocked the ability to make jam. This time around, you dump a bunch of pears and apples into a pot and jam comes out. What's neat is you can dump in enough for multiple batches. This is a way to convert crops to ribbons. Speaking of ribbons, I've unlocked a terraforming store but at 20 ribbons its a bit rich for my blood right now. I'll build it soon, now that I have an easier way to get ribbons besides doing random quests.

I'm increasingly fascinated by the secret lives of the villagers. Patrick is current my favorite. I also got around to decorating my house. Decorations will be pretty limited until DLC comes out but you can still make it nice and cozy. I was a late adopter of the previous game and ended up getting most of the DLC in a big bundle, and had a very good time with it.

Finally, I realized I could make waterfalls and lost my mind. Amazing. Beautiful. I have my fish in a non-ideal place, but I've been working on making it cute so now, that's just how it's gonna be. Aesthetic over efficiency, at least for now.

Progress is swift and satisfying at the farm. Just chillin out with my wheat. Built a house.

Not so sure about these NPCs, though. Their dialogue sounds like it was written by a robot. The good news is they offer little quests, and these reward you with green thumbs up things that you can trade for other resources.

Also, it turns out there IS a warehouse! The warehouse offers additional resource space on top of whatever you get from upgrading various stores.

I've held off picking up Farm Together 2 while it's in Early Access, but the devs recently announced there would be a price increase soon so I went ahead and snagged my copy. In EA the game is $20 though it has dipped down to $18 a few times.

Farm Together 2 is definitely a More Of That Sequel, which is exactly what everyone wanted, but one significant change is that instead of building stalls to convert your crops you visit the in-game town. Once you've built a storefront, you can trade goods in a limited capacity (shops can run out of diamonds, for instance) and you can upgrade the shops to increase your good capacity, the diamonds they have, and so on.

I do like how this takes the first game's end-game Factory and combines it with the trade mechanism, and aesthetically it is nice to not have to build a bunch of stalls all over the farm. They have used the opportunity to create an artificial bottleneck so you can't just powergame your way into diamonds early game. The limited shop budgets force natural breaks.

The town also contains citizens who sometimes have quests. This part is a bit half-baked, and maybe a little buggy. There were a few quests the villagers would not let me fill, even though I had the items they wanted. I think there's an opportunity to really do something here in terms of an emergency story or even giving these characters some life, if the devs truly want to, but part of what makes this series great is the laser-focus on having the core farming mechanics be as satisfying as possible. So doing something with these NPCs beyond having them offer random quests might honestly be a bit outside the scope of what this game does.

The starting farm plot has a lot more STUFF on it, and the additional plots seem to have more diversity in terms of existing crops and animals.

Right off the bat, I planted a bunch of corn and then realized I had no way to offload grain (this happens in the first game, too). Down the road, I unlocked the bakery, but just a shout-out don't fuck around with corn until you have something to do with it (unless you just like the way it looks, large cornfields are definitely satisfying).

Another change is they've added some tractor automation. If you press shift (which I accidentally keep pressing, because on-foot it's the run button) the tractor will automatically process whatever it's doing forward in a straight line. This may be the dev's response to people utilizing tools like Cheat Engine late-game. I got into the habit of using a CE script whenever there was a holiday crop because the unlock numbers were extremely high and way beyond what I could or frankly wanted to invest. The auto tractor is technically faster than the player because it does not run the planting animations. I haven't tested it it much, but I will be thrilled if this ends up being a replacement for rigging up some nonsense with CE and auto-mouse.

Anyway, I played a few minutes and was like, oh, cool. More Farm Together. I already put like 100 hours into the first game, so I'm sure I won't get too weird about it this time.

A few hours later... as you can see from the screens, I definitely started getting weird about it. I'm here for it, though.

Suddenly, everything is green!

I think the reason this happened is I put off terraforming for so long, and now my percentage is going up very fast. It is a little disorienting to arrive in an area that used to be a desert-type expanse, and find it is now a green canyon leading... somewhere.

I've unlocked T4 heaters, so my next task is to upgrade those and explore that big pit thing that just opened up.

My base may not be out of the woods yet. As snow melts, the water level rises, so what was a natural bridge is now the beginnings of a waterfall. I found a osmium grotto I missed when I explored the snowy area previously. This is probably a mineable area. I also found my first machine optimizer fuse and put it to work on a pair of newly unlocked T4 drills.

I'm to the point where I need to trek out quite a bit to explore further. My vehicle is nowhere close to where it needs to be, and we're a long ways off from Zeolite development still, so IDK. I should probably build another base farther out.

A neat Sokobon dungeon crawler.

Grabbed this on sale for like $1.50 with zero expectations. Husband extols you to build the deck, so you must. When you build the deck, you get money. At first, the floppy physics are frustrating, but I stuck with it to build one deck and after a few upgrades I was pleasantly surprised by how the game flow improved. You hammer nails (don't hit hand, ouch!) and build the deck for money, which you use to upgrade hammers, nails, planks, bugs, and so on to make more money.

Some of the nails yell at you, others whisper ominous portents. I still haven't figured out how to reliably squash bugs with my hammer for the big cash prizes (and I'm honestly not sure if you can really "aim" beyond just getting lucky when they crawl under your nail). This is becoming a weirdly cathartic game experience for me.

Also, I want to be very strong for Husband.

Good news: My base did not flood, and I've got a very convenient river circling it.

Bad news: The game is starting to get a little grindy, as I'm in a weird place between T3/T4 heaters and miners.

Continuing to play around with survivor mode in Voids Vigil. I can see myself continuing to play this one off and on for a bit, same as Boneraiser Minions.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa what did i sayyyyy

Lakes are now pooling around my "maybe it will be underwater haha" base. Having water close is convenient, so I'm going to wait it out, but I've been meaning to upgrade my nuclear reactors anyway so I'll probably go ahead and move those. I don't like having a bunch of lower-tier machines around, since each advance in machinery makes the last obsolete, so this is a good time to rebuild some stuff on the high plateau nearby and never have to move it again.

The race to terraform continues, and I've finally unlocked algae-generating stuff. I also took the liberty of shooting several rocks into the air, and those have 1000x multipliers. In response, they've showered the surface with iridium and uranium, it's just a matter of going around picking it all up.

Finally, my uranite mining did not in fact mine uranite, boo. I moved it to another area, and in doing so, uncovered a lot more uranite at a higher elevation. So I might not need to mine for it after all. We'll see.

Unexpectedly scavenging 2 rocket boosters allowed me to build a vehicle. Right now, it's utility is somewhat limited outside carrying cargo. It's slower than the jet pack. But when I find Zeolite I can craft an oxygenated cabin, and then it's on.

I went looking (and kicked myself when I realized I didn't pack any explosives...), but I now realize Zeolite doesn't spawn until you're at 150 MTi and I am NOWHERE near that. So I'll head back to the base and get to work on my numbers, which I haven't paid much attention to since unlocking T2 nuclear.

Ice is starting to melt, which has allowed me access to better bounties. I set up an ore extractor to hopefully mine uranite, so that should solve some of my resource problems.

DIG GAME sort of. Finally started finding digginger games on Steam. Bore Blasters is a twin stick shmuppy diggy thing where you burrow into the planet looking for gems and the exit. You upgrade your ship as you go, for even more diggingness.

Continuing to play Planet Humble while forgetting to take screenshots, so I took a wild and woolly adventure in hidden areas well below the crashed landing pod and died due to lack of oxygen and have nothing to show for it! There were absolutely NO common resources down there, so I learned my lesson and from now on will make sure I have enough resources to build an emergency shelter if I decide to go way off the beaten path.

The bad news is I'd just raided the osmium lake near the starting area, which was the only osmium place I knew of, and lost most of it. But the good news is I found an osmium field just past a massive, enticing derelict that begged to be explored.

It's a bit of a trip, even with the jet pack, so I set up a satellite base with food and water. I've just researched T2 nuclear reactors (finally), the T2 deconstruction chip (FINALLY), and vehicles, so I have plenty to do. I'll need to raid the sulfur fields, and also return to that frozen lake (which is hopefully not frozen anymore) when I'm ready to harvest algae. The next research item to shoot for is the gas extractor, so I can get methane.

I haven't really paid attention to my terraforming numbers since I unlocked the T5 inventory. I don't even have a main terraforming progress screen set up yet, I've been "cheating" using the blueprint screen to gauge where I am and what I need to do next.

I also finally found something to blow up! Weird spherical rocks have resources inside. So far, I haven't found any worth blowing up (I blew up one with aluminum not knowing what was in it, so now I'm reserving my explosive charges since God knows when I'll figure out how to make them).

Once I've replaced my T1 nuclears with T2 and have a solid vehicle I'll probably start setting up ore extractors. The ore crusher has done a really excellent job of providing iridium, uranium, aluminum, and super alloy so far, and that has improved the grind considerably. Since I've harvested all the Uranite in the ice caves, setting up an extractor there is priority, but eventually I'll need to start harvesting sulfur as well.

If you break it down, the Planet Crafter is really just a never-ending list of "space chores to do so I don't die" or whatever but it's so fun.

I didn't have time to muck around on Humble, but I did beat the campaign in Voids Vigil the first time. I had a particularly good run, and was able to breeze through the boss.

A monumental event: the first rain. It occurred right after I was able to build my first moisture collector.

Now that I can grow my own food, and harvest water, it's just a matter of building bigger and better terraforming machines. For whatever reason, updated deconstruction chips elude me. I keep finding blueprints for cosmetic stuff like fences. But I haven't unlocked any equipment that requires resources from level 2 deconstruction, so I'm fine.

I discovered a sulfur valley reasonably close to an iridium source, and started a base with food and water processing. I've completely exhausted the nearby uranium field, but the ore crusher makes it so much easier to get resources I'm not to worried about it. I have 4 nuclear reactors now, and it's just a matter of "build more" as I scale my machines up.

I'm right on the brink of bodies of water forming. My main base miiiiiight be located in an area that gets flooded, but I don't think so.

I'm pushing outward, to explore more and more, but I'm feeling the limits of my T4 oxygen tank. Humble allows you to build up to T5. I think the real issue is cobalt isn't lying around on the ground, you have to use an ore crusher, so it feels more 'precious' and I'm less inclined to build and use oxygen tanks. Speed will make the difference; once I'm able to craft rocket boosters, I'll travel much faster and the distances will be more manageable.

At this stage, we're just kinda at "chores and also exploring," because I have to do certain housekeeping things to stay alive, but I'm still pretty far away from unlocking the next tiers of items. Fortunately, nuclear power is a lot easier to gain on Humble, so it's less of a grind to maintain a power grid to support all the terraforming machines I need to make Numbers Go Up.

I've been playing Planet Humble, but have not been posting about it because I have the game on GOG and GOG Galaxy has a completely different location/naming scheme for screenshots, so I have to either bulk rename and move the screenshots (which is exactly what I want to avoid, and it is the whole reason I made a custom front-end for screenshot handling) or write howevermuch code to integrate it, and I haven't decided how to do that without it being a major PITA.

ANYWAY, this is getting good. Once you overcome the more immediate oxygen and water problem, there's the food problem. I was able to develop food growers just in time, I think, to start storing food instead of relying wholly on scavenging. The next problem will be water again, when the planet starts to warm up and the ice melts, but that's down the road since I've been completely focused on surviving and haven't done much to actually terraform.

Imagine my muted squeal of delight when I found a nuclear reactor to salvage. There's a nice little area down here to explore, but I lack the tools to deconstruct some of it so I will have to come back later.

I have little bases everywhere, and my next goal is to set up a home base area to start working more seriously towards warming the planet up. Once I develop moisture collectors I'll be truly food-independent and will be able to set up water/food pretty much anywhere, but until then I've discovered an iced-over lake I can use for water down the road.