What Did We Play Yesterday?

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.

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.

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.