What Are You Playing? Neoteric November 2024

Stardew Valley's 1.6 update finally hit Nintendo Switch so I've started a new farm with a friend and we've been playing that late at night this week so far. There's so much stuff over the past couple of updates, it's been pretty fun to uncover new things while we were still in Spring. We started on the Meadowlands Farm map which has been a nice change of pace from my usual desire to go with the basic farm. We haven't really touched animals yet, and neither of us has been remembering to love our Chickens everyday, but that should come now that Summer has just started and we ended up planting a few hundred crops on the first day. 

Hilariously, we were unable to get low enough in the Mines (okay, it was me, I kept getting some horrible luck) during Spring so we started off Summer with no sprinklers. Luckily though, I only had to delve another 10 levels to start getting gold which a week into Summer, so we've now got half our fields covered in them which is so good for the energy bar and time.

I expect there to be a lot more Stardew fun in the coming weeks.

Going to also be jumping back into Medieval Dynasty which is getting a big update at the end of the month. It's been a nice, relaxing grind game and our town is about halfway done I'd say. I do wish the game had just a bit more depth to it, I feel as if we're going to get to a point where there's just no more point in continuing to play - lack of end game? TBD!

I started a Factorio run through last week due to the new expansion coming out and I need to jump back into it soon because I've just hit the expansion content. It was a bit jarring I will admit though because I finally encountered something in Factorio that I had no clue what to do with which made it confusing. I hadn't experienced that feeling in quite a long time!

Pokemon TCG Pocket will hopefully get some attention because I see our site staff having fun with it with all their Slack messages. The Warcraft 30th Anniversary stuff is going on in World of Warcraft which is something I want to jump back into; I was abandoned at the start of the expansion so I didn't get to do as much as I had hoped. On the flip side I had just met a cool new person and we've been knee-deep into the gaming train so I'm not really complaining hehe.

Ugh. I need more time in the day, my lack of sleep due to the late night gaming is definitely not good for me.

And yes, Civ Science victories FTW! 

hey hey hey, due to a sort of involuntary exile from my home (aka training on the other end of the country for 3 weeks) I've had a good amount of internet to finally grind a bit of Marvel Snap. Bit rough being several very strong season pass cards behind (especially missing kate bishop and agent venom) but been able to get back from like, rank 13 to rank 87 without much struggle, probably gonna try pushing the last bit in the next couple of days.

Besides that, finally going to take the time to clear out the last couple of achievements in a couple games cuz I can't be damned to do it without a guide. Stuff like "collect every relic" in Ara Fell is such a painful achievement on what was otherwise a pretty cute jrpg. Also need to replay a bunch of Can of Wormholes since for whatever reason achievements don't unlock on that game if you get them when you are offline. Three days ago I'd also be checking off Sea of Stars but the new update brought a bunch of local coop achievements, which I uhh.... can't really do here that easily.

The last thing that has been eating up my time has been with Crystal Project. Turns out that the game has a ludicrously in-depth (but also weirdly limiting) modding client so I've been slowly making my own mod. Haven't gotten around to playtesting it yet but its been really fun coming up with just class concepts for what's probably my favorite rpg (maybe even one of my fav game of all time too tbh, pretty tough competition by I digress). Its been a bit funny looking back because some classes are just "glorified druid focusing only on plant magic" to eventually "Shapeshifting monstrosity that transforms itself into different enemies and stealing their skillsets" and "Mecha with a heat meter in a game that does not have anything remotely close to a heat meter". Been slowly learning how to sprite things so I can create the 96 different sprite sheets needed, then some amount of animations and status icons which has been pretty fun. All this to say that I will probably be working on this mod until the day I die, but c'est la vie its been fun so I don't mind it. I know some people cough Link cough have tried it and not been a fan, but the game has a very generous demo so I'd definitely recommend atleast taking a peek.

Oh I also got Void Stranger recently and that games been very cool as well, not far enough in to really go in detail but I know theres some meta puzzles that I'm looking forward to getting irritated-then-ecstatic about like I did with Baba is You.

Well, November is almost over now so let's recap.

Stardew Valley confirmed to still be the main game right now. We hit year two and a couple of nights ago entered Summer. We kicked Fall 1 off with getting the Barn upgraded so that we could get a little bit of everything to get the community center finished up. Our cows produce the finest milk for the finest of cheeses because they love us so much, and the Witch gave us a Void Egg so now we have a great gift for Seb and, thankfully, we were able to make Void Mayo for the Witch Hut this year (which we found out about via the Library).

Fall was a ton of Pumpkins, the entire farm covered in crops, and occasionally having some Skull Cavern fun. Winter hit and with not much to do on the farm, we spent our time fishing, running together in the Skull Cavern to help farm Iridium for sprinklers for the upcoming year, and being very bad at upgrading our tools for the upcoming spring. Spring Year 2 hit and we weren't able to get all our crops planted in time on Day 1 which threw off the harvests a little which kinda sucked, but we did better Summer 1 with only missing a handful of crops due to spending too much time at the store buying the wrong seeds - I went with the intention to stock up on Red Cabbage, and spent too much time buying Melons instead. Which, speaking of Melons, we ended up with a Gigantic Melon last night, which was both of our first time getting our own Gigantic Crop. Hell yes!

We're just about halfway through Summer 2 now and we're refilling our bank account after getting a second barn. Our first year we almost made a million gold, and this summer we should be making around 1.5 if all goes to plan, it'll just take some time to chug through the crops that are being turned into Artisan Goods.

Oh god, thats a lot of Stardew talk.

We did play some more Medieval Dynasty but Stardew took over the gaming time. I also have played another 14 hours or so of Factorio this month, which has been not great because instead of spending it in expansion content I've been fixing problems with my primary base... stupid biter attacks from every side and poor defense. In my rush to get the 8 hour rocket launch, which I missed by an hour, I didn't really set myself up for defending against the biter attacks very well and so now I'm suffering due to the massive amount of pollution. I have started walling off the base though and lining it in laser turrets which are, finally, automated, so that's been helping quite a bit. I still have some big lines to do with that but soon it shall be done. Between attacks I've been expanding my raw materials production through the use of trains. I've also got a few thousand logistics bots now which has been amazing and they're all circuit network wired up to keep being produced until I hit 50k of them so I can't wait. I've got Kovarex Enrichment going too so I have unlimited amounts of Nuclear fuel, ready to power my base forever. I need to get my Nuclear setup tripled in size though because I've hit the limits of the current reactor setup with regards to my energy usage.

I've started playing Balatro again too. I was pretty pissed off when my save got nuked on iOS, so much so I bought it on Steam instead of using Apple Arcade (the save didn't correctly go forward to my iPad and the iPad overwrote the save file to be nothing on iCloud.. yay) and now I've started the painful process of unlocking everything again. It's so weird playing without having access to soooo many of the jokers. I've had to change my playstyle up but god do I love Balatro. It's good they're gonna win a handful of rewards this year without a doubt.

I haven't had a chance to play Pokemon TCG Pocket yet. The Venusaur Event though... I should play this weekend.

I've managed to do a little bit of WoW 20 birthday stuff, so I'll need to find time to finish that up next month.

Overall it's been a very, VERY busy November and I'm happy I've been able to get in some solid hours gaming late at night.

Quote From anchorm4n

Speaking of which... has any of you taken advantage of Black Friday deals? I know PlayStation has some nice sales going on like AC Valhalla, Horizon: Forbidden West and Diablo IV. I'll probably dip my toes in Diablo for the first time this weekend... The one downside is that all those sales are only for the digital versions and I have a disc console with limited space for downloads but eh.

No real plans for any Black Friday deal shopping here. I don't need more games added to my backlog hahahaha. I also don't really feel like I need anything in general right now. I'm quite happy with the state of things and really the only major thing I'm looking to buying within the next year is the M4 Mac Studio for work. It's not that my M2 is bad, it's just I bought it with the intention I would upgrade to the M4 when it came out and go with the higher-end version of the Studio to last for multiple years. It's been great that more and more games are working on Mac now too, I very rarely have to boot into my Windows desktop to play games anymore. The only reason would be for simracing really. I reinstalled Windows this month and still need to get all my racing stuff setup again though before I can hop back in on that fun.

Black Friday has been kinda... lame? for the past few years though. It never feels like there are any really good deals anymore and it's just largely the same deals we'd see during other times of the year. On the plus side to that though, I do notice fewer people trying to sell Black Friday-specific SKU products which are bottom of the barrel with regards to how they are produced and with what components, so maybe that's a positive.

Quote From Lemushki

Even still if I had some money to throw on the Nintendo Switch sale, I get physical everytime if there is the chance.

Physical all day every day for me too. The eShop won't be around forever, and it gives me the opportunity to sell the games in the future if I want to (I won't, lol) which is nice. It's also nice to be able to loan games out to friends or family. Companies were so hyped about the major switch to Digital, I'm gonna be pissed the day we can't buy Nintendo stuff physical anymore... if that ever actually happens. I feel like Nintendo is in a very unique position where they have huge physical sales still due to the major collector market for the systems, and they're afraid to touch that.