Binge Watching Time

It has been a while since I did one of these posts and… well, it isn’t like we stopped watching TV, I just stopped posting about it so now I have to remember what we even watched.

I suppose if I forgot something then that says more about the show than anything I might write.

Also, there will be at least one spoiler from a past season revealed below.  It will be noted in the heading.  Proceed with caution.

Anyway, off we go.

The Testaments – Hulu

In 2019, even as The Handmaid’s Tale was doing well on Hulu, Margret Atwood published The Testaments, a sequel to the 1985 original, no doubt drive by her being exasperated by religious zealots in the US deciding that Gilead seemed like a pretty good model for their dystopian future plans.  The mistake here is thinking they can read.  Anyway, another warning… but also hope as the book follows Aunt Lydia who has decided to undo Gilead.

The show, features her as well, but the ten episodes of the first season almost feel like an origin story as well as an elaborate “previously on” catch-up as to where everybody left off, including how Aunt Lydia came out the other end of the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale alive.

Want to learn more about the social structure of Gilead?  Here is your chance.  Aching to see some mighty blows against the Christofascist patriarchy?  That is probably coming next season.  Until then it is all female subjugation and catching a smoke when nobody is looking.

Paradise Season 2 – Hulu

After the first season of life in a billionaire’s bunker where the president of the United States was murdered… that is not a spoiler… I think that happened in the first episode of season 1… we’re headed to Graceland.  Yes, that Graceland.  Where Elvis lived.  Seriously, it is a whole thing.

Xavier Collins, former secret service agent and son of an airline pilot, so of course he can fly a plane… flies a plane from the underground bunker that is Paradise to go find his wife.  And then his plane crashes, right around Memphis.  Everybody has to walk or drive after that, and all roads lead back to the bunker.

More of a The Walking Dead survival vibe… no zombies, but people were always the real problem in TWD… as the outside world turns out to have carried on while Sinatra was hunkered down in her bunker.

Rick and Morty Season 9 – Hulu

I am still watching Rick and Morty?  I guess so.  Trust me to be the last one to leave the party.

After seasons 7 and 8 focused in on Rick’s quest to come to terms with… well… himself and his choices and existence among an infinite series of parallel universes where all choices have played out and where the pointlessness of anything has been made manifest… we’re back to Interdimensional Cable… or something like that.

Basically, the season sees a return to episodic content focused on adventures that continue to test and expose what it means to be a family with some guy who… well, dealt with all the stuff in seasons 7 and 8.

Windows Bay – Apple TV

This got a lot of buzz for a bit, playing for a mix of comedy and horror in that very New England sort of way like they’re living in Barnabas Collins’ old place but haven’t quite figured out why all this strange stuff is happening.

The comedy was a bit flat… I was down with the Daddy’s Home and other board games in the hotel, but that couldn’t carry everything… while the horror was not all that scary.  And the actors were… fine.  Everybody was fine.  There was nothing wrong here.  It just didn’t do much for me.  Also, the fact that my wife called out every plot twist well in advance took a bit of the edge off.  This is the problem with getting old.  Until the memory loss really starts to kick in, we’re hard to fool.  Still, there are worse shows to spend your time with.

The Boroughs – Netflix

What do you do when all your favorite actors are too old to be cast as middle-age anymore?  Set a series in a retirement home!

This is also a bit of comedy horror combined, but most of it takes place in a made for the show cul de sac outside of Albuquerque that looks very much like the cul de sac used in Pluribus… which I guess was also sort of comedy horror, if we’re just going to pick up that theme… but is not in fact the same cul de sac.

Seriously, they look very similar, but when I checked, they were not the same.

Each show built their of little circle of houses outside of Albuquerque, which seems like a huge waste of resources, unless you’re the contractor who builds fake stage cul de sacs for television productions.

Yeah, so, nursing home in the middle of the desert, everything is a bit creepy and totally suspicious and there are monsters coming out of the ovens who have a weakness to… checks notes… the RF emissions from cathode ray tubes… old televisions.

Enter Sam, whose wife had bought them a house on the fabricated cul de sac for them to retire to, then she passed away and now he has to live there alone… and, also, his hobby is fixing old televisions.  Silly at times, but moves quickly and only lasts eight episodes.  I enjoyed it, though I might be influenced by a decades long crush on Geena Davis.

Little House on the Prairie – Netflix

We had to watch this one because my wife watched the Melissa Gilbert/Michael Landon series back in the 70s and early 80s.  They cranked out 9 seasons with 20+ one hour episodes in each, reaching 200 episodes total along with a few post-series specials.  It was kind of a big deal and threaded a careful line between total schmaltz and a rose-tinted view of reality.  It made people feel good and girls could project themselves onto the life of Laura Ingalls.

So of course somebody had to remake it.

Enter Netflix with an eight episode first season and… I don’t know.  I feel like network TV shows cranking out 20+ episodes a year didn’t always lead to the highest quality output, but it did allow for a few mediocre episodes to sneak in without spoiling the whole show I suppose, with each episode being part of a much larger canvas.

Anyway, it is probably more realistic than the original series, in no small part due to the portrayal of the father, who uproots his whole family and hauls them in a covered wagon to the wilds of Missouri where the railroad has promised settlers free land from the government.

There he alternately screws things up and then fixes the problems he caused.  Eventually the government buys the land from the Osage, the local tribe who lives there and isn’t all that happy at all these people just showing up, then tells the settlers that the land isn’t free.  Everybody is mad at the government, who hadn’t promised anybody anything, and at the end of eight episodes the Ingalls are back in the covered wagon looking for a new home muttering about the stab in the back and ready to vote Republican.  It is the genesis of modern conservative thought, the myth of self-reliance while depending on government subsidies.

The Agency Season 2 – Amazon Prime

Um… I put this one in the draft back when I started this post in early July and I have sort of lost the thread as to what happened at this point.  I mean, it was cool spy stuff and Michael Fassbender looks so cool and gets the job done and Saura Lightfoot-Leon kicks ass and somebody loses a leg in the process and it all ends with a big explosion and a cliff hangar that portends another season.  Oh, and the Earl of Grantham gets totally shot in the face.  That’ll show him.  So I seem to recall I enjoyed it without being able to bring back sufficient details to explain why.

Also, I don’t think I even wrote about season 1… so that was also a thing.  The problem is that the tag “The Agency” now covers several things including a “never actually happened” SOE action spy title that was cancelled 15 years ago.  Time flies.

Finally, this was on Paramount+, which shows you how much I’ve forgotten.

Hacks Season 5 – HBO Max

The victory lap season.  Or maybe the fan service season.  All cast conflicts that were in play get resolved, any final goals get wrapped up, and Deborah gets to play Madison Square Garden.  Everybody finds a new place and Jimmy drives around LA in a new BMW SUV.

Or was that just a commercial?  We had HBO with ads and they sometimes run those ads mid-show with cast members and if you’re looking at your phone and only half paying attention because there is no real payoff expected it might seem normal for Jimmy to be grabbing flowers and delivering a stuffed animal or something.  He’s a Hollywood agent.  They have to get stuff done.

On the one hand, it feels good for a series to get a farewell season.  On the other hand, if you’re final season is going to be very low stakes, maybe don’t milk it out for ten episodes?  Overall I enjoyed the series but this final season didn’t really move the needle.

The Boys Season 5 – Amazon Prime

Proving once again that satire of extremists is impossible, the final two seasons of the show saw the producers exasperation peak as they pulled out the stops point out that Homelander is the bad guy and not the patriotic icon that the nut cases seem to think he is.  He was always an insecure, weak willed, petty, bullying narcissist, but they really got out the fat, licorice scented, felt tipped marker to underline that point, with half a dozen exclamation points for emphasis when he decides he is God and his sycophants go right along with it.  Seriously, that happened.

Anyway, the Homelander situation gets resolved.  This was not the spoiler I warned you about, because you could probably figure that out in any case, it is the “how” that carries the ending.

Sugar Season 2 – Apple TV (Spoiler)

The first season of Sugar was trite until we got to mid season and then there was a big surprise reveal.  He’s an alien.  He’s learned about humanity mostly from movies.  He loves movies.  He’s here with a group and then they are discovered and they leave while he stays behind because… reasons.

So then we’re back to being a very trite, too cute by half detective noir set in LA where he drives around in the most obnoxiously attention getting 65 Corvette and I am just sick of this shit where random ass shows have characters driving around in classic cars the writer or director coveted when they were a kid.  Just stop.

It is like putting Philip Marlow in a Pierce Arrow or Same Spade in a hot rod.  I blame Magnum PI and that Ferrari 308 that Tom Selleck flitted about in.  Everybody doesn’t need to Jim Rockford rolling around in some innocuous mid-price Detroit iron, but you’re a lot less conspicuous in a beige Camry than a metallic blue Corvette.

Anyway, despite standing out like a sore thumb in the obvious car and being overdressed in his tailored suits, he does solve a pretty big crime.  And then his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic answering machine gets a message and maybe the alien thing isn’t completely off the table.

Dutton Ranch – Paramount+

Fresh from Yellowstone, Beth and Rip arrive in Texas, buy a new ranch, and proceed to get into trouble with the law, the neighbors, and a drug cartel.  I mean, problems follow the Dutton’s like stink on shit.  And, of course, there is the Taylor Sheridan philosophy throughout, which is that it is perfectly fine to murder people so long as they are from the city… or sold you a bad cow… or looked at your wife the wrong way… or if you just don’t like them.  The Dutton’s murdering people is always sanctioned by the script.

Like the final season of Yellowstone, Dutton Ranch largely suffers from the lack of gravitas that somebody like Kevin Costner brought to the early series… and I wouldn’t credit it, not being a huge Costner fan, but everybody in the show feels like they are in the B story and something more interesting is happening elsewhere.  Rip and Beth are too cartoonish without somebody there to anchor them.

Maybe they can do a cross-over with Landman and get Billy Bob Thorton in, because he’s the only one holding that show together in the second season.  Oh, crap, did I forget that Landman had a second season as well?  On it in a sec.

Landman Season 2 – Paramount+

As noted above, Billy Bob Thorton carries the show on his back for the whole second season as a bunch of people he is depending on just disappoint him over and over and you feel for him.  Worth it if you liked the first season… and I did like the first season… but if you didn’t there is nothing here to bring it back for you.

[Edit: Also, I apparently covered this already in a past binge watching post.  So when you hear me talk about blogging to help maintain a mental timeline, this is an example of why.  But see if what I said here matches what I said back then!]

EverQuest Legends

My pace has been lackadaisical and my dedication to the effort has been pretty limited, but when I find the time and inclination, I have been logging on and fighting stuff.

Starting off in Qeynos meant that at least I knew where to go for mobs of the correct level… with “correct level” being defined as mobs who were a level or three above my own level, which would get me 2-5% of a level per kill.

Basically, I was rolling yellow con mobs fairly well, so made them my goal.  However, I quickly ran out of those out in front of Qeynos and headed down into the aqueduct, where I was able to find some appropriate mobs.

Nothing like an old school gelatinous cube

That had its limits.  I was mostly fighting blue con mobs.

From there it was to Qeynos Hills, where I still had some willowwisps to hunt.

Outside of Surefall Glade

As evening fell into night I went over to the ruins to see what I could stir up with the skeletons, but managed to pull more than I could handle and ended up running away.

Dread corpses on my tail

Flustered by that I ran the wrong way.  I should have just run to the guards at the entrance to Surefall Glade, where Bixby and his buddy would have saved me without much drama.  Instead I ran to Blackburrow… not that far off, but still further than the guards who could freaking see me from where I started… and probably got a couple of players slain training this group to the zone line.

Or maybe not.  Most people seem to be better at this than me.  I chose my stance at random and, aside from my staff, was pretty much running around with the limited gear I got from Doug.

But Blackburrow seemed like a plan, a place of old where we used to hunt.  However it seemed to be pretty crowded and I had yet to figure out how to spawn my own instance.  I kept seeing references to a RED button I was supposed to press, which I could not find.  Maybe I should have watched the video.

Later, when I read a more detailed description and found it, my first thought was, “That isn’t red.”  The literalist mind will be what it is.

Button

Seriously though, that arrow is red while the button is mahogany or maybe a dark rust.  And yes, I will die on that hill.  But we’ll get to that button later.  Probably not even in this post.  I have a lot more meandering to do.

I ducked out of Blackburrow, where I found my dread corpse buddies still hanging out… just getting back to how things behave in EQ requires some adjustment… so I zipped on past and headed out to West Karana in search of more yellow con mobs.

Out to the wide open spaces

West Karana… well, I have written about it before and its wide open spaces and the almost comically varied level range of mobs out there.

West Karana all on One Map

But I am an old hand in that zone and almost never get lost or surprised by a cyclops or wandering hill giant.  And there were mobs to be found.

Giant spider time

I got a couple of levels out there, though not without mishap.  Bandit spawns were always a common place to camp for xp.  Going in solo though I managed to get in a bit over my head because they come in groups and you have to be careful approaching from the wrong angle as there might be additional bandits behind the one you’ve decided to pull.  More running ensued.

Bandits giving chase… the ladies won’t leave me alone

That did not end well, though death in EQL has a light touch.  No corpse runs, no missing gear, do xp loss, you just have to rest a bit to recover health and mana, apply any buff, and off you go again.

I made a couple levels in West Karana, then yellow con mobs not in groups started to be thin on the ground and I wasn’t quite up for scarecrows yet, so I moved on to North Karana.

This is basically me speed running what feels like my first few months in EverQuest, but which was probably the first couple of weeks in reality.  My brain distorts the passage of time and I am reminded of Rumpole reminiscing with his son about how they used to play at Sherlock Holmes and Watson in the park and his son responds that they did that once and it wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Anyway, North Karana was almost a fun bit of risk.  Much smaller than West Karana, it was the nexus point of the Plains of Karana, linking East, West, and South together while also being home to both a druid ring and wizard teleportation tower.  I wrote all about that back in 2024.

Northern Plains of Karana

The zone doesn’t have the wildly broad range of mobs that West Karana does, and at my level I was hunting at the bottom of the food chain with beetles and lions as my targets.

A pincer beetle in North Karana, with point 7 on the map visible behind

I spent an evening there and it was happy hunting.  There were plenty of mobs in the right range, a bit of danger as one needs to keep an eye out for aggro mobs… or other beetles… beetles assist other beetles in combat, and it won’t do to have a high level boarer beetle show up and ruin the party.  So levels came… not quickly, but neither did they take too long.  New skills would unlock and the first couple of fights thereafter would see a mess of skill ups.

Suddenly all the skills

I managed to get myself up into the range of the baby griffons, the griffawns.

The griffawn is fleeing from me!

And then I hit level 10 and got a notification.

Level 10 announcement

I was now going to have to commit, though honestly I hadn’t really given much thought to any of that.  I was mostly being a tourist up until then.  I was still walking around with mostly the same gear as I had at level 4.  I picked up an earring somewhere along the way.  I hadn’t even turned in my voucher for a tunic at the druid’s guild in Surefall Glade.

Part of that was I remember druids being something of a hobo existence when it came to gear.  Even when you found some, you still look so poor and under equipped that people would feel pity and give you handouts.  But, also, I was still killing things.  So I just kept rolling.

Now, however, I would need to get my act together and make decisions before level 10, and maybe even figure out stances.

Fortunately, since my last post, I did learn that there is an official EQL wiki for those of us who won’t sit still long enough to watch a video about playing a game.  I am not sure why they didn’t mention that up front, but there it is.

The wiki was also where I learned why I was was all alone out there in the wild.  I swear I rarely saw another soul save for some high level on a mount passing through now and again.  As it turns out there is a guide to zones and where to level up, and the Plains of Karana are not on the recommended list.  Oh well, I enjoyed the stillness of it all the same.

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

Melons were planted because we needed one more item for the community center bundle that would unlock the greenhouse, and the choices were melons or pumpkins.  That wasn’t much of a choice, since pumpkins are a fall crop.  So melons it was to be.

However, melons take some time.  Twelve days would have to go by before we would see if our melon dreams would be fulfilled.

While we waited the annual trout derby came up as an event.  Fishing is something I am still working on, but off we went because there was the promise of prizes.

The Annual Trout Derby

In addition to fish, you can also fish up prize tickets that can be turned in at the tent.

One of the rewards for us was a tent kit, which spawned a plan to go out to the desert to take another shot at the skull cave.  The goal was to get down to level 25, which unlocks the desert casino.  The idea was to put the tents outside in a chest, stored with our uneeded equipment, so that we could push on then quickly get to bed as 2am approached.

This was, of course, fraught with the usual issues, like simply dying in the cave again.

Another 1,000 gold visit to the trauma center

My daughter also lost a key item in the mix… the spirits were not favoring the RNG… and while you can recover such items from the adventurer’s guild, it is a next day service and it became a whole thing for a couple of days.  Then, when we finally seemed to get our act together and almost made it to level 25, our time was running out and we didn’t get back to the chests in time to deploy a tent, so we passed out in the desert.

So close to the chest

We tried another run at it, this time deploying our tents before we went in. (Later I read that two people can use one tent, so we need not have spent both.)  However, we succumbed again and ended up back in town and by the time we could get back the next day the tents were gone.

But I guess we kept Pam busy driving the bus rather than hanging out in the saloon.

So we changed up and went back to the cave in the quarry and this time I managed to get the golden scythe at the end of the cave.  I wish I had taken a screen shot at the end, as the final statue holding the golden scythe looked kind of cool, but two of the skull monsters were busy killing me as I was stuck collecting the scythe and I had to get out.  But still, scythe.

A golden scythe

The golden scythe is better than the normal, copper, or steel scythes, because video game tool quality is measured by the value of the metal being used and not its suitability for the job in question.

Meanwhile, the melons finally ripened and were harvested.  My daughter turned in the bundle and during the night the junimos came out and repaired the broken greenhouse that had been sitting on the farm since we arrived.

Midnight greenhouse supply

And the next morning the greenhouse was there and ready to go.

The greenhouse rebuilt

My daughter set to work on that, starting off with some strawberry plants in one corner of it while she worked out a larger plan.  The wiki page about the greenhouse has a whole thing about how to optimize your sprinkler layout for maximum crop planting and how to get fruit trees growing.  So that will be an ongoing project.

Meanwhile, as summer began to fade we had Robin expand the barn once more and bought a sheep and a pig.

The barn expands

There was also a bit of a re-arrangement of the farm buildings and the addition of another silo for hay over the winter.

We hit the summer luau where, once again, the soup was declared merely “average” by the governor.

The governor pronounces judgement on our soup

There was also another green rain in there somewhere.  We collected more fiddleheads.

Then summer came to a close.  Fall landed and new crops were planted outside, save for the corn we had planted during the summer.  Corn persists through the fall.

I took a bit of our saved up gold and splurged on the iridium fishing rod, then went out and did some fishing.

Fall fishing in the lake

I had picked up a task on the board to catch 20 lake fish, which turns out to be 20 specific fish and not just 20 fish caught in the lake.  Chub count, salmon do not.  I figured out after a bit that you get more chub without bait, and wrapped that up on the second day.

That also boosted up my fishing level.

Level 8 fishing achieved

Now that I have that and the iridium rod I need to spend some time figuring out which bobber I ought to be using to make catching smoother.  The cork bobber, which just makes your catch bar a bit bigger seems like the most obvious one, but others that stop the bar from bouncing around or slow down your decrease rate when the fish is outside of the bar do have some appeal.

Stars Reach – Early Access Launch

Stars Reach… is arriving with a little less heft than one might hope.  And that might be fine.  It has a solid building and crafting core and a light quest and exploration game play loop.  No spaceships yet, but at least spaceships have been moved from the bottom of the “maybe some day” section of the roadmap.  For now if you want Stars’ Reach spaceships you might have to look elsewhere.

The difficult bit is that, unlike so many of the recent crafting survival titles like Palword and Enshrouded, Stars Reach is an MMORPG and the baggage that entails.  A shared world for all players means somebody has to pay to keep the server going.  You can’t just yadda yadda past that and let your end users rent their own or figure out a way to manage shared saves.

There won’t be a subscription at the start to cover the server thing, but buying into early access will be steeper than it was for the survival titles I do go on about, with the ask being between $30 and $80, depending on how many cosmetic blow ins you want.

The early access price tiers are:

• First Light Edition ($29.99) – Includes the game, the in-game title “Founding Explorer,” and the founders flag building item.
• Voyager Edition ($49.99) – Includes everything in the First Light edition plus another in-game title, “Voyager,” cosmetics item (a Ballhog hat, a groundsuit, and a founders t-shirt), the “Heroic” emote, and a Servitor Head Trophy building item.
• Cosmonaut Edition ($79.99) –  Includes everything in the previous two bundles plus two more in-game titles, “Galactic Explorer” and “Cosmonaut,” additional character cosmetics (a jumpsuit and a spacesuit), the “To the Stars!” emote, and advanced versions of the grapple and grav mesh craftable tools.

We got those price points back when the early access plan was announced back in June, but now we have the details, summed up in a chart provided by the team.

Stars Reach early access item chart

Less clear is how early access will be run.  Back during the Kickstarter campaign the team promised/threatened repeated server wipes, including a final wipe at the conclusion of early access.  The plan for wipes appears to have been reaffirmed in the license agreement you have to sign off on to play the game.  Section 2.3 says:

Stars Reach may be made available during pre-release phases, including alpha, beta, or Early Access. During these phases, the Game is actively under development and is not a finished product. Features, content, systems, gameplay, performance, balance, and other elements may be added, removed, changed, reset, or otherwise modified as development continues. The Game may contain bugs, errors, incomplete features, service interruptions, or other issues typical of software under active development. Playable Worlds may perform server resets, progress rollbacks, database wipes, or other changes as reasonably necessary for development, testing, operation, or maintenance of the Game.

That makes this less “early access” and more “paid testing” to my mind.  It is also a reminder that the concept of “early access” remains as ill defined as “alpha” and beta” have been since back in the day.

The tension between continuing game wipes and working in a genre that depends heavily on sunk cost fallacy to survive with a game whose current core is focused on building and community is not difficult to see.  So we’ll have to see how those two things coexist.

The game itself, which is only available on Steam, appeared to be available when I got up yesterday morning Pacific time, seemed to get off to a good start.  Steam Charts clocked Stars Reach at just shy of 700 users online in the morning.  That is about 6x the number that showed up for the final server load test.  While that dropped off a bit, it still hovered around 500 users for most of the day.

Bigger numbers meant higher loading and new problems to deal with.  By 11:00 Pacific the team had acknowledged the following known issues:

• Some of you have spawned as a bundle of sticks. As you might have guessed, we wood not do this on purpose. A fix for this is coming soon!
• The chat filter requires some additional augmenting. We’re working on this now.
• We know that some of you are losing your heads. Literally. We’re investigating this and will fix as soon as possible.
• Stars Reach does have a single shard in the wider universe. However, because Haven is the tutorial zone and we anticipate high player density, we are instancing this part of the game. If you can’t find your friends on Haven, you’ll be able to regroup once you advance past the tutorial.
• We are aware that quests are breaking if you leave Haven for Crucible. They will not be completable upon return to Haven. For now, please abandon those quests (in the menu) and re-accept them, which will allow you to progress them once more.
• Skin tone selections will be updated and augmented in a future update. We have added this to the living roadmap.

Par for the course for an online game launch, and probably all the more so that is launching into a state of being publicly tested.

I did log in a bit yesterday, just to see how things were going.

Explore the galaxy, one planetary surface at a time

I’ll save comments on the state of the game until I have some time to play more this weekend.  The team will have some time to file down the worst bumps by then.

I did rather foolishly redeem my in-game code only to be find that the actual cool things I got from the Kickstarter, like the Playable Worlds T-shirt, appear to be listed in the game as being redeemable one time only.  Now I have that shirt on a character I might not like, on a version of the game that will be wiped, so I had best take some screen shots of it because it looks like it will be gone before I know it.

Learn from my mistakes.

The team also has an early access launch trailer.

It leans heavily on what the game might become.  The promised “life among the stars” is mostly being on planets, so technically I already live a life among the stars.  I mean, I can see one out the window right now, and I’ll see more then if goes around the back side of the planet.

Anyway, for a brief moment if you search on Stars Reach you’ll get some actual news results about the game and not quite as many items about how a local team’s sports “stars” managed to “reach” some championship or tournament.

Related:

• Stars Reach – Official Site
• Steam – Stars Reach Store Page
• Massively OP – Raph Koster’s Kickstarted sandbox MMORPG Stars Reach officially enters early access
• RPG Gamer – MMORPG Stars Reach Released on Early Access
• MMORPG.com – Stars Reach Launches Into Early Access Today
• GamesBeat – Stars Reach launches into early access after 8 years of work

Certainly A Planet Crafter

I know, I know, inventory management in games like this often makes you feel like you have too much stuff.  And we have spent most of our time with the game dealing with the ongoing and almost eternal question of “how do we store all of this stuff?”

But Planet Crafter takes all of that a step further.

For a bit it felt like we were ahead of the game.  When the T2 storage lockers opened up for us Potshot got in there and upgraded all of our storage on the base and, for a brief moment, it felt like we had breathing room.  We had a whole hallway of these lockers, one dedicated to each major resource material, but there was room to drop items when we took the rover out to the various ore extractors.

Then came the auto crafter stations and the drones.

Up until the auto crafter you had to go to a crafting station with all the materials on you and press the button to make things.  The auto crafter will let you select an item to build from all of your current options, will draw from nearby storage for resources, and will build on auto-repeat until its output hopper is full.  The hopper has six slots, so that is your natural limit.

This was extremely handy, especially for me who cannot remember anything complicated for two seconds and inevitably shows back up at the crafting station missing an ingredient.

Unlocking the drone station took that up a notch.  All of your storage can be configured to demand or supply things and the drones will fly about attempting to fulfill the needs of these configurations, including running out to ore extraction sites to haul the resources straight to the appropriate T2 locker.

Instant abundance, and all the more so when you get the T2 drones zipping about.

So you get the auto crafters going and the drones supplying resources, then collecting and storing output and pretty soon everything is full.

Soon enough Potshot started routing some output to the recently built trade rocket, which lets you send specific items off planet for credit that can be used to buy some things you cannot find locally, like wheat and cocoa seeds so you can bake a birthday cake.

Not just a cake, a birthday cake

Soon we had two, then three trade rocket platforms running, because the rockets have a 10 minute cycle time and stuff just starts to back up.

Things were still pretty full, but we were making some space.  And then we built the portal generator.

The portal generator is the Planet Crafter answer to players having explored all the local wrecks yet still being short on a few of the items you have to find rather than make.  Access cards, for example, have to be found and we have a locked door in one wreck than needs five to get through.

Portal generator active, jump through the pink portal for exploration 

The portal generator uses some crystals to generate an opening to a procedurally generated wreck site (usually with two wrecks if our experience so far is representative) where you can scrounge for more stuff.

A wreck in a wreck site

A lot more stuff.  Especially stuff you have been trained to see as valuable, like rocket motors, which you need to build a lot of things including drones, where demand has fallen off but you still can’t help but grab them all.

So you come back to back with all 45 slots of your T6 backpack crammed with rocket engines and circuit boards and crystals you cannot manufacture and flares… why do I keep picking up flares… and genetic material and whatever else, and then you have to find a place to put it all.

Potshot put up a couple more drop off T2 storage lockers and I got over my hoarding and just started stuffing rocket engines into the trade rockets.

The sites you get sent to are kind of neat if you liked the whole exploring spaceship wrecks aspect of the game already.  There is a bit of a dark maze exploration aspect to the whole thing and I do get turned around and lost.  But they also hand you so many flares that I stopped trying to mark locations with them… the flares are all one color, so you can’t really tell what they mean after a while… and started just lighting a path back to the exit.

Who needs bread crumbs when you have glow sticks… erm… flares

As noted, you seem to get an isolated zone with a couple of wrecks to rummage through along with some secondary bits of loot scattered in lockers around the area.

So far all the wrecks have a familiar vibe.  There are the usual things to find, plus some bonus things you can deconstruct which will give you a blueprint so you can put those items in your base.  Find some arcade machines in the wreck you can deconstruct?

Arcade machines in one of the wrecks

Once you get back to base you can use the blueprint to add one to your own layout.

An arcade in our base rec room

There seems to always be an access card which you can save for something else, or which you can use to unlock a room in the wreck.  For us they have opened up vaults which have held some good items, like trade token vouchers.

Likewise, there is usually a fusion reactor which you can bring online with a fusion core, something you can build back at your base, which powers up the wreck, turns on some lights, and opens up some closed doors which have more loot behind them.

A door opened, revealing a loot vault

Now, the catch is that while there is some good loot in these wrecks… stuff we even need like one of the quartz crystals we cannot manufacture… a lot of it is the same old stuff.  Most of it.

So we drag back the still useful stuff and leave behind the mostly not useful stuff.  This involves putting up some storage outside the wrecks so we can offload quickly then go back in for more.  Then we can sort through the take and see what is worthwhile… and how many more flares I can use to continue making my trail through the wreck.

Meanwhile, the whole terraforming thing… we’re almost done.  We’ve unlocked mammals, which you can genetic engineer in a pseudo-Spore like mini-game of sorts.  We have a pile of genetic traits to play with and the wrecks give you more.

Genetic trait storage

I will say that the gene lab storage is huge… that isn’t even half full, I just cropped off the empty rows… so there is apparently a lot out there to work with.

In the end, however, they all just stare at you with their dead eyes,

If you pet them you get genetic material on you…

But mammals are the last waypoint before completion of terraforming.

Almost there now

Once we get done there are some additional unlocks to achieve which will get us the ability to… terraform other planets.  Or so I have been told.  So we’ll see how that goes.