What Did We Play Yesterday?

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.

I finally got around to nabbing the Planet Crafter's Planet Humble DLC. This is a more streamlined planet, but it has a steeper learning curve. Cobalt is not readily available at the start of the game, and you have to leave your starting location to find ice for water. Cobalt is essential for improving your oxygen situation, and evidently the only way to get it is to create an ore crusher which mines cobalt from other things.

I tried playing this on Steamdeck and it's verified, but it's not a super comfortable experience. The game takes a while to initially load, and navigating the menus isn't great. I'm very much a button mis-masher (I cannot tell you how many times I accidentally ended a round of combat in Slay the Spire when I intended to use a potion by pressing Y instead of X) and it's only matter of time before I hit the wrong button and flub an emergency shelter build and end up dying due to lack of oxygen. So I'll be playing this one on my PC. But I'm looking forward to a more condensed terraforming experience, for sure.

Continuing to enjoy Voids Vigil. There are options to add colored outlines to the player, enemies, etc. and this helps with visibility. Loading up on weapons and blasting things is very satisfying.

When I picked up Voids Vigil the other day, I'd forgotten it was by the same developer as Boneraiser Minions. It's more than "Boneraisers but space" and I'm still working out my thoughts, but overall it's enjoyable. It's a lot to process on the smaller Steamdeck screen, so I'll probably have to switch to desktop until I have a bit more familiarity.

I've been playing Slay the Spire near daily, trying to beat the game with Silent, to no avail. My strategy is generally to get as many relics as possible by gong after ?s, and to focus on debuffs and shivs. I think I probably relied too much on debuffs like weak and I should have been adding more blocking cards to my decks. I like the unpredictability of relics, but I'm starting to wonder if I wouldn't be better served angling for more elites so I can get relics and cards.

I got close a winning with Silent a few times, but decided to take a break and switch to Defect. I'm still familiarizing myself with the different orbs, but I like how they change things up. This round, I had a card that channels 2 lightning orbs every time I received unblocked damage, and it was extremely satisfying to watch that thing go crazy when I was fielding 5 x 1 type attacks. So I will probably work on this character for a while.

It's always interesting when I bounce off a game, but come back later and really get into it. I've put 35 hours into Slay the Spire this go, last time I wandered off after around 10 I think. I'm not sure what made it click this time, but I'll continue to work on it (my kid keeps saying, "You're playing that AGAIN?" lol).

Continuing to be haunted by Beltmatic. Every now and then I'll pick it up and attempt a new number. I'm not sure where this road leads me but I know it's nowhere good.

I can't tell if these chains I'm making are good or terrible. Everything blurs together. I unlocked the subtractor and immediately figured out I could create negative numbers, so orientation will matter more on those machines than the multipliers and addition(ers) or whatever we're calling them. I'm starting to get into the 3 digit number goals, which is requiring bigger and weirder machines.

This game is brilliant.

IT'S TIME FOR NUMBERWAAAANG

I decided to torture myself with this Shapez-But-Numbers factory game. You do math. It is awful. I'm still getting the hang of the thing, but it burns nice.

I beat Slay the Spire the first time! This time, it's getting its hooks into me. I've been focusing on snapping up as many relics as possible, which means hitting all the ? and elites I can. I've had one or two runs where I picked up a relic early that I thought would sink me (for instance, extra energy but can't rest at rest areas) but was able to navigate the handicap by changing up my play style. I just unlocked ascension the first time, as well as a new character, so we'll see how long it keeps my interest.

The game is slightly janky on Steam Deck, and I've had a few times where controls became unresponsive. One time, I couldn't play attack cards for some reason. Fortunately, the touch screen has let me work around the occasional control issue. I think there's something going on with the game's modal screens if you navigate the menus in a way the devs weren't expecting.