Xbox One Gaming: Elite Dangerous Community Goals

This game has a lot of stuff to do and one of them is the community goals (CG) that appear kinda regularly that’s pretty cool. The recent one is a call to all Commanders to take part in a two-part goal to build five new starports in currently uninhabited space but close to existing shipping lanes and, I guess, to expand those lanes. One part of this CG is to obtain and deliver certain materials to a central location and the other is to provide protection at the central location.

Since I’m not a player who gets into PvP battles of any kind – and because I managed to get in on the tail end of the last CG mission, I decided to jump in right at the start and use my Python – named Magellan II – to deliver my share of the materials required. I started out at my home starport, Galileo, in the Sol system by using the Inara website to, first, mark my position and then to locate the materials. I’ll add at this point that if you’re playing the game but you don’t have a profile on Inara, get one – it’s a huge help and in a lot of ways.

I located the materials I wanted to start delivering and jumped to get them and, actually, made a lot of trips from the source location to the collection point and, oops, totally wiped the source out of the required material and requiring me to not only locate a good source for something else but plotting a course to go get it. As luck would have it, the item I chose – water purifiers – was in the next system and I was happy about that because it lessened the number of jumps and, as I’ve been learning, the more jumps you make, the greater the chance of getting jumped, your cargo hijacked, and/or your ship destroyed.

And now begins The Grind which some players either complain about or try to avoid but The Grind is what it is in that if there’s something you want or need, you’re gonna have to do some work to get it. I don’t mind grinding because in some of the other games I play, well, you gotta grind to get stuff but in Elite Dangerous, yeah, I found that grinding for a CG can be even more boring that what I normally do when I play the game. Leave the collection point; jump to the source location; load up 200 water purifiers; jump back to the collection point; dock at the indicated starport, sell the water purifiers, refuel, do any repairs, and do it again.

And again. And again. I found myself wishing that an NPC bad guy would show up and try to jack me just to break up the monotony of the grinding but that never happened so I was pretty much on autopilot and, at times, nodding off. The first day of the CG, I did pretty good and my contributions qualified me to get a decent payday for my efforts. In this CG, there were five tiers involved and differing levels of rewards from getting nothing to getting paid big time if you were in the top 10% of contributors. After making my last delivery I thought, “Okay, cool – I’m gonna get something!” and also with the thought that I’d go back to doing what I normally do… but the next day, I was of a different mind about it and kept on grinding for the CG.

I wasn’t satisfied with doing the minimum work to get the minimum reward; I wanted to see how far I could go and I was grinding like crazy. At one point and while I was taking a real-life bathroom break, I got to thinking about how my Python, which is currently configured to carry 200 items, kinda/sorta wasn’t enough cargo space and debated on whether or not I wanted to get, say, a Type-9 cargo hauler which can carry a hell of a lot more cargo. I could afford it but I also got to thinking that, for one, the Type-9 hauler – and like the Type-7, isn’t so easily outfitted to fend off pirates and they handle like a brick in mud and, for the other, it would be my luck to get one, load it to the rafters… and get jumped and destroyed. So I didn’t buy a new ship and resolved to do my part in the CG 200 items at a time.

I was making around 700,000 CR (credits) every time I sold my water purifiers and I was happy about that and kept on grinding and grinding until it was time for me to shut it down and get some sleep. I awoke yesterday ready and eager to get back to the CG and The Grind to boost my contribution but when I got into the game and checked the CG status, well, damn – that part of the CG had been fulfilled and was now over with. All I could do was click on the “Complete” button and watched my credits jump to over 100 million credits – and I got an achievement for completing my first CG.

One of the the “highlights” of my participation wasn’t how easy it was for me to find a place that had what I needed; it was me paying attention to what I was doing and, sometimes, I just wasn’t. I was so into The Grind that a couple of times I left the source location… and forgot to set my destination. Indeed, in one moment, I’d undocked from the source, cleared the safe zone, went to get line up with the destination and kick in supercruise… but couldn’t figure out why all I could actually see was the starport I’d just left and not the indicator marking my destination. Oh, it was a bad moment! I’m rotating along all three axis trying to find the destination marker and, oh, somewhere around the third time spent making myself dizzy, it finally hit me that I hadn’t plotted the course back to the collection point.

Yeah… I felt pretty stupid about that. The Grind calls for a certain level of focus but because this one was so repetitive and monotonous, I was so focused that I lost focus. But wait – it gets worse! At another point, I’d forgotten where I was for a moment and that wasn’t pretty since, um, when you’re sitting in the dock somewhere, your location is right there in front of you on the cockpit panel. Then I had dropped off a load at the collection point and headed out to pick up more water purifiers… and kinda forget where I was going and then realized that, nope – didn’t plot the course to get there and making it even worse was that fact that I had bookmarked both the collection and source locations so that I wouldn’t have to keep looking them up.

I wasn’t having so much of a senior moment but, sometimes, The Grind just fucks with you like that and more so when the game isn’t doing anything to provide some kind of distraction like getting interdicted which will most certainly get your attention. A few days ago now, I was having the “interdiction day from hell” and having to fight and/or evade more than what I’d call normal when playing in Solo mode. So as I shuttled back and forth between locations, I was keeping a very close eye on my scanner’s scope and checking out every and any ship that appeared to identify them and, because this grind was so monotonous, kinda hoping they’d want to pick a fight with me just to give me something different to do.

But, yeah, I completed my part in the CG without any real problems other than the loss of focus I mentioned… but now it gets funny. With the job done, I made my way back to my home starport so I could get back to hauling cargo here and there and the first job I took once I got back home was a nice paying job of delivering an internal report to a nearby starport. One of the things I’ve learned about this game is that if a “simple” job is paying a whole lot of credits, it’s not that simple. Sometimes it’s paying so much because the destination will literally and in real time take an hour or more to get there but for this job, nah, not only did I just have to make two jumps, the destination was “only” about 300,000 light seconds from the system’s star which, in my Python and its powerful engines, meant a trip in real time of about three minutes. As I’m preparing to start the trip, I’m wondering why this routine kind of job to a system not that far away and that close to its parent star, is paying over a million credits.

And it didn’t take me long to find out why. I left home, made the first jump and while going through the process of lining up for the next jump, I see a message pop up that said, “Don’t try to run! I have you now!” Oh, shit! I’m not really worried but, as I’ve learned, if I’m going to be interdicted, I do not want to be anywhere near the star when it happens. Now I’m doing several things at once with my controller: Hitting the right buttons so that my sensors are locked on the ship that might be the one who sent the message; reconfiguring my power distribution settings to give more power to my engines; switching from Analysis Mode to Combat Mode; lining up with the next jump point while accelerating toward it and while keeping an eye on where I am in relation to the star and just as I clear the star, I hear the sound I don’t like hearing; I see things turning blue and the message all up in my face that I’m being interdicted and now my whole focus is on locating the Escape Vector indicator and sparing a glance to see the type of ship trying to shut me down and still chasing the Escape Vector all over the damned place.

I take a look and, oh, fuck me: The ship trying to interdict me is an Anaconda and I know that there aren’t too many ships that are more badass than an Anaconda. I know that if I get interdicted, that ship is going to chew me up and spit me out with ease so it’s in my best interest to not get interdicted. I’m ducking and dodging and chasing the EV and the NPC in the Anaconda is sending me all kinds of threatening messages and demanding that I just give up and maybe because it’s an Anaconda and likely equipped with a very powerful interdictor, it’s taking me a long time to escape the attempt… but it’s either stick with it or give up and get caught… and probably destroyed before I can being to fight back, not that my weapons would be able to do the Anaconda any damage.

As I’m trying to get away, I’m also thinking about how much fun this is. I know the specifications for an Anaconda since it’s the next ship I’ve been grinding to be able to buy – about 150 million credits. What I don’t know and because (1) I’m playing in Solo mode and (2) this is an NPC, is whether or not its really outfitted to do maximum damage and in a hurry. I’m thinking that it is possible that I have better weapons than the Anaconda chasing me does but, as I continue to chase the EV, yeah, I’m not really of a mind to find out. The interdiction is now into its second minute and it feels like I’ve been doing this for much longer than that. I have one eye on the EV and the other on my scope; I’m looking to see where the Anaconda is and also looking for the pretty green icon that represents the Federation Security Service or the local security service that, if present, will attack the Anaconda and give me a chance to escape…

But it’s just me and the Anaconda. I’m aware of how my thumbs are working the controller’s joysticks and that I’m not really paying attention to what my thumbs are doing – that is just so cool! I finally get the EV lined up and in an area that will either end the interdiction… or get me interdicted – and hear the sound – and see the message – that the interdicted has been evaded. Yes! I quickly realign myself with the next jump point, activate my FSD drive and, four seconds later, I’m in the wind… but I know I’m not safe because of something that can happen in the game:

The Anaconda can follow my FSD wake and that means that the moment I arrive where I jumped to, that fucking asshole will be right behind me. I arrive and quickly do a few things: Scan the local area; open the navigation panel to locate my destination and lock it in (or make sure it’s locked in – sometimes, it isn’t); get the fuck away from the star and in the direction I need to go in; searching the scope for any signs that the Anaconda did follow my FSD wake. Power up to get out of the star’s area and gravity; for this run, hit the nav panel to activate supercruise and to orbit the planet I’m headed to and activate my FSD. So far so good – I’m on my way but I still have my eyes glued to the scope and switching between whatever contacts are in the area. No Anaconda but just when I think I can relax just a bit, I see the Anaconda appear on my scope – marked in red – and, yep, it’s interdiction time.

Son of a bitch! The NPC sends me a message: “You thought you had gotten away, didn’t you – I have you now!” Like hell you do, bitch! I’m still in Combat mode and still have all available power routed to my engines and the chase for the EV is on again… but this time, I see the green icons for the FSS and there’s three of them headed my way and as I have one eye on the EV, I see the green icons converge on the red icon of the Anaconda – and the interdiction ends. I breathe a sigh of relieft, reestablish my lock on the destination and, a minute later, I’m orbiting the planet and waiting for the moment to deorbit and reach my destination… but keeping in mind that I’m still not safe because I’ve been in orbit around a planet and have gotten jumped. But I make a perfect approach to the planetary base and land. I refuel, do some minor repairs, complete the job and get paid a million-plus credits. Ka-ching! I’m looking through the available missions and find one paying a half-million credits but when checking the destination, I know it’s paying that much because once I get there, it’s going to take almost a half hour in real time to get there.

Course plotted and laid in. I launch and begin the rather slow process of getting out of the planet’s gravity well and clearing the base’s no-fire zone. Make it out of there, hit supercruise to gain altitude and once away from the planet, line up with the destination icon, activate my FSD and I’m off and running and happy that where I’m going is only one jump from where I was. I pop out of hyperspace at the star – that just never gets old and you’d have to see it to understand why it doesn’t – and I’m getting lined up but I get a system message about an incoming enemy alert. I clear the message while checking the scope and there’s no other ship in that space other than mine; sometimes, the game just fucks with you and gets you keyed up for an attack and it never appears… and I’ve learned not to trust the game at all.

I get lined up, do a bit of fuel scooping, but before I can clear the star and activate supercruise to the destination… interdiction! I’m still in Combat mode and with all power to the engines; I do the thing to lock onto the red icon I can now see… and it’s not only an Anaconda… it’s the same fucking Anaconda that had been trying to get me! Where the fuck did he come from and how did he get away from the FSS? I’m not all that worried about the Anaconda as I am being so close to the star itself; I know that if I get too close, my proximity to the star will either shut my ship down or destroy me and I’m a bit worried about that because the EV is running all over the surface of the star and I very much need it to point to open space if I’m going to survive this. As I’m evading like crazy, I have a moment to think about grinding in the CG and how boring and monotonous it was… and now I’m missing that boredom and monotony something fierce.

And it is very exciting. I note that help is on the way but I can’t count on that seeing as how that asshole in the Anaconda got away from them before but I’m really very cool and calm as I defeat the interdiction and supercruise to my destination and arrive in one piece. Once there and I complete the job and collect my half million credits, I’m really kinda mentally worn out from battling interdiction and by the same damned ship so I get out of the game and opt to watch TV until it’s time to go to bed.

And I can’t wait to see what the game will have in store for me today!

 

Xbox One Gaming: Elite Dangerous Update

This has become one of the rare games I own that drives me crazy but not so much to make me stop playing it. There are a lot of players who are very much into the mode of playing known as PVP, or, Player Versus Player. They go around attacking each other, pirating cargoes, and other such combative things while others, like myself, are well into the PVE – Player Versus Environment – aspects of the game and aren’t all that interested in fighting and “killing” other players.

There is still so much to learn about the game and so very much to see since we’re playing in a pretty good representation of the known Milky Way Galaxy and the parts that are unknown to us are very nicely “stuck in there” and creating one hell of a playground for anyone who can take to the game to just do their thing.

Mine is being a courier; taking important data from one place to another; I’m also a “space trucker,” taking goods from place to place; I’m also a kind of space-borne cruise ship, ferrying passengers from one location to another or taking them on sightseeing tours and while doing all of these things, I’m also an explorer; as I travel, I scan every system I arrive in and, more often than not, discover new systems that, at the very least, I haven’t seen before. While the PVP players are all about collecting bounties on each other, stealing whatever they happen to be carrying in their cargo hold, fighting an alien presence that I’ve not seen for myself yet – and I’m sure I don’t want to if what other players are saying is accurate – and even taking jobs to assassinate NPC – non-playable character – criminals and are getting paid huge sums of credits to do so, I prefer to take a more non-violent approach to getting paid…

And one that isn’t without its own set of risks even though I play in Solo mode; it allows me to run around the galaxy without running into those playing in the more popular Open mode. Grinding is, well, doing whatever you’re doing in order to make credits, like mining… which I suck at something fierce. While a lot of players are keen to get the biggest and best ships the game has to offer and as quickly as possible, grinding is all about slowly but surely doing your thing to amass credits and not really deviating from it all that much. It’s pretty much the same thing being done every time you play the game and, hopefully, with some goals in mind. And while a lot of players have collected a lot of ships, I only have two; one of the things about this game is to acquire the best ships you can buy and outfit them to do the jobs you need them to do whether it’s fighting or moving cargo from place to place or just roaming around the galaxy to see the sights.

The day before yesterday, I was playing and grinding and with a bit of “urgency” to rebuild my credits after dishing out 55 million credits to buy a ship known as the Python, which is designed to carry a lot of freight while also being very capable of fighting. I was making good progress building up my credits and roaming around my local neighborhood – that would be our real-life solar system and where my home base is – and, well, it gets pretty boring because while every job is different, I don’t get to go to many different places and I feel that when I take a job and both the system and delivery location are things I know about, it tends to make me not pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around me a whole lot… and now, enter the NPCs.

The game designers had to have figured that it would be way too easy to play in Solo mode and totally escape the dangers one can face playing in Open mode and, early on in my play, I found out the hard way that the game will throw an NPC at me that’ll try to shut me down and rob me – and even if I’m not carrying anything – or just do their best to destroy me and just because. I’ve gotten to the point where I can look at a job and tell that, yep, I’m going to get attacked along the line and I’ve gotten to be very good at escaping being interdicted – that’s when someone forces you out of “warp” and tries to do you harm. But the day before yesterday?

I’d been doing job after job and, at that point, hadn’t been attacked and interdicted until I had taken a really high paying job – around two million credits – to deliver ten items to a planetary base and one I could get to in just one jump. I knew before I even took the job that, yep, I’m going to get attacked and, holy shit, did I ever get attacked! Usually, an NPC will try to interdict me once and if I escape, well, that’s it. Sometimes – and depending on whether I’m in friendly space, Federation Security forces will show up to take out the bad guy NPC which allows me to escape unharmed but when in hostile space, eh, maybe they show up, maybe they don’t.

I got attacked three times. The first time, I used my Python’s firepower to fight back but since I seem to suck at fighting other ships, my Python took a lot of damage while dealing out some damage. This part really fucks with me because I can’t seem to get the attacker in front of me where I can see them and have a better chance of fending off an attack… which is why my ship is outfitted with weapons that will track an attacker without me having to really be face to face with them… theoretically. The NPC pain in my ass gave me a beating but I put some serious hurt on it as well, got my engines back on line, and hauled ass to my destination. Whew! At least I didn’t get blown up, which would have been very expensive and would have badly affected my reputation. But the NPC wasn’t done; I was, oh, about halfway to my destination when the motherfucker tried to interdict me again and making this even worst is the attacking NPC always talking shit about how they’re gonna destroy me if I don’t give up whatever I’m carrying, something I find funny.

It was of great import for me to not get interdicted again; my ship had suffered 50% damage so taking more wouldn’t have been a good thing. I’m dipping and diving trying to catch the Escape Point that’ll set me free – and trying to catch it isn’t all that easy; I got interdicted the first time because the asshole attacked while I was sitting in front of the local star and so close to it that when I started to evade, I got too close and the proximity caused my ship to shut down and I got caught. Federation Security arrived and engaged my attacker and I’d caught the Escape Point and back to hauling ass to my destination. Now, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been attacked twice but I was breathing a sigh of relief to have escaped again; I looked at my panel to see – confirm – that I wasn’t too far from my destination so I could get into its safe zone and couldn’t be attacked. But just as I almost go to the distance where my ship would “drop out of warp,” I got attacked again!

Getting jumped once? Expect that. Getting jumped twice? Didn’t expect that but it happens. A third time? I’m actually laughing about this – and as I’m back to dipping and diving to catch the Escape Point – and more so when a quick peek at my scanner showed a slew of security ships surrounding my attacker and the cool part was that because I had “locked on” to my attacker (necessary for my weapons to be effective), my ship’s computer was telling me that the target’s shields had failed and, seconds later, that it had been destroyed. Yeah, take that, bitch! I caught the Escape Point… but overshot my destination so I had to turn around and reacquire it and gratefully activated the Auto-Dock feature and docked, safe but pretty beaten up and in need of repair.

But the destination port was one of those that didn’t have the repair facilities I needed and, after completing my delivery, getting paid, and even upping my reputation, I was “forced” to return to Galileo, my home station in our real-life Sol system to get the repairs I needed. I could have checked out any of the places in the system I had made my delivery to… but the triple attack kinda left me rattled and after I got home safely – and it wasn’t a given that I would – I repaired my ship and shut down the game.

Grinding can be boring and monotonous but if you want to succeed at whatever you’re doing, there’s no escaping it. Other players complain about having to grind and as if they feel they don’t have to put in the work that the game requires in order to make credits, gain reputation and achieve naval ranking in the three navies that one can be ranked in. Most of the time, the distances involved are daunting, like one sightseeing gig I took that took over 150 total jumps and a couple of real-time hours to complete just to get the passenger to the places they wanted to see… and with a very cranky passenger onboard who kept giving me shit about the trip taking too long and then making over 150 jumps to take them back to where I picked them up. Grinding in this game can wear you out and while you can “take a break” to get up, move around, use the bathroom, whatever, you’re never really safe to take your eyes off of what’s going on because even in Solo mode, an NPC can appear out of nowhere and attack the shit out of you. I’ve learned to take my controller with me if I’m going to the kitchen because I can still see what’s going on from there or just standing up and stretching with it in my hand because you just never really know.

I tell myself that, today, I’m not going to play the game and grind; I remind myself that I have almost 100 other games I can play instead, like No Man’s Sky, for instance. There’s grinding in that game as well and it comes with its own risks and dangers since most of the planets you can be on are trying to kill you. Or Minecraft which is all about grinding in order to keep your stock of materials and food as full as needed. But Elite Dangerous has proven to be rather addictive. On the game’s Facebook group, a player asked what everyone does when they’re not playing Elite Dangerous and I responded by saying, “I think about what I have to do when I do play…” because grinding requires a purpose, a goal, a plan. I only have two ships; my Python and a recent purchase, a passenger ship called an Orca, a big step up from the Dolphin I used to own. My goal is to eventually either replace my Python with an Anaconda – a seriously badass ship and the only thing better than an Anaconda is a Fleet Carrier – or just buy one and keep the Python and to do the same thing to acquire a Beluga, the best passenger carrier the game has.

It’s going to take a lot of credits to buy these ships and to get those credits, I have to grind and be committed to grinding to achieve my goals. I want to up my reputation with those I do business with and while I’m not a fighter so much, I want to keep advancing my Federal Navy rank – which is currently Lieutenant Commander – because doing so gets me better and higher paying jobs as well as access to other kinds of ships that are, admittedly, more for fighting than anything else. Grinding allows me to explore the many other things the game has to offer and that can be seen and it’s often a nice break to go check out something marked as “Unexplored” even if to break up the monotony of going from point A to point B over and over. Grinding also includes keeping my two ships up to date with the things I can get to improve them and some of those things aren’t cheap and, yep, still have to keep whatever ship I’m using to grind fueled and repaired.

Grinding in this game is a pain in the ass… but since I’ve embraced the grind, it’s really a lot of fun. It’s still not an easy game to learn and there are many things that you wind up having to learn as you grind to do whatever it is you’re doing. The grind just never stops until you turn the game off.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft: Digging a Mineshaft

One of the things my daughter and son-in-law get in my case about is how I dig mine shafts. I learned to just step down one block at a time… after having to figure it out but it left a narrow kind of shaft that even I the game, can feel claustrophobic and I realized that digging a one block wide shaft meant I could be missing out on coal and iron and other good stuff.

I experimented with both three and five block wide one shafts after understanding the odd number symmetry of the game; a 6x6x6x6 cube for a building doesn’t “look right” when doing a door and Windows but a 9x9x9x9 base offers a pleasing symmetry… but for my mine shafts, a 4 block wide thing just works – it gives room to move around, maybe lay down tracks for a mine car, and exposes more areas and some of which can lead to caverns and ravines or a spot to mine coal and iron.

I like my mine shafts nice and neat and “sloppy” shaft digging just drives me insane although I’ve often dug into large open areas and now it’s about “ignoring” them for later exploration so I can keep digging down to the bedrock level. My son-in-law, well, I make him a little,cray-cray because I developed a way to carve out an area to mine; “slice by slice” and over time, I can carve out a very large space that keeps the symmetry I find comforting and easy to work with… and makes my son-in-law want to disrupt the symmetry by digging long shafts where I don’t want them or, worse, digging up the floor and leaving gaping holes all over the place…

Which I wind up filling in or now I’m trying to regain my preferred symmetry around those long shafts he like to dig. Sometimes he’s nice and fills in whatever holes he’s made and puts stuff back the way I had it – or not – but he never fails to remind me that he, as well as my daughter, doesn’t like the way I mine while acknowledging that it works for me. I like being able to peel it away, working from left to right, top to bottom and in a manner that can be mind-numbingly repetitive and boring but I find it to be rather relaxing and, sometimes, it’s safer because you never know when removing a block will reveal water or, yikes, lava!

Once in the rhythm and unless I run into something, I can spend an hour or more carving out my “mine room” and often without realizing that I’ve been at it for that long. Digging a mine is high on my list of things to do in a new world because one of the things I know I’m gonna need is cobblestone to build a place to stay, create more durable tools, and craft a furnace and I’m going to need coal and iron – lots of it – in the initial going…

And digging a mineshaft the way I do it will eventually supply me with enough material to do what I need to do and I just might be able to find some diamonds along the way. I even have a preferred “starting level;” I always start digging a mine at level 64 which, in most places, is ground level. While there are no rules for starting a mineshaft, I just learned that staring at level 64 or lower makes digging a shaft faster than, say, starting at level 75.

There’s method to my mine digging madness and I might even be a bit OCD about it which makes me laugh at myself at times. As I’m digging the shaft down to bedrock – usually at level 6 – if I dig coal or iron out of the sidewalls, I use cobblestone to fill in the area I’ve dug out so it’ll look neat but it keeps me on track with how I’m progressing. Sometimes I’ll dig into a side wall and find huge areas that can be explored and exploited for iron, coal, and the most important thing when digging, gravel which is almost always needed for the great oceans of lava such a “side hole” can reveal or lead to and as much daughter instructed and taught me, where there’s lava, there also can be diamonds.

Diamonds are always good. In some places, water and lava have gotten together to form obsidian – and that reaction is a damned good reason to always have a bucket of water on you at all times since you never know when you might have to keep from burning up and dying. You need obsidian to build a nether gate and to make an enchantment table that, along with bookcases, can creat a room that you can use to give your armor, tools, and weapons some extra powers and abilities.

I’ve learned to leave a “doorway” for those areas so that it’s easy to leave the shaft proper – and after I’ve installed proper steps in the shaft – and get in there to explore… and I know my son-in-law happens to like areas like that because he can dig like a demented gopher without wrecking the symmetry of my mine shaft and mining room.

Madness and method. And the biggest perk is, when I finish digging my way down, there will be more than enough cobblestone and other materials for use to build pretty much anything I might feel like building and, oh, yeah, if run short, I can always spend some time in the mining room to get more. It is never if I’m gonna dig a mine – it’s always where I’m going to dig it because it’s just a big deal thing to do in a brand new world and, later, just to have something to do.

I even learned how to dig two separate mines and, using the game’s coordinate system, connect them and no matter how far apart they are… and you never know what you’re gonna come across or run into. The other day, my daughter called me a pussy because when I’m in building mode, I play in the game’s Peaceful mode until I’ve set things up the way I want to before switching to Normal mode and lets the various mobs loose.

I just don’t like trying to establish an area while having creepers creeping up on me and blowing me up or having to fight off hoards of zombies and skeleton archers when the sun goes down and my house isn’t quite ready yet and/or food is scarce in the area and “starving to death” is a real thing in this game. I ain’t got the patience to deal with that crap and prefer to work undisturbed. Yeah, I might be a pussy… but I don’t set myself up to get killed and running the risk of losing my inventory should I die and can’t get back to it in the time allotted – about five minutes.

I learned a costly lesson about this when digging my mineshaft, I fell through a gap and down quite a way into a ravine and died on impact. I lost everything and I wouldn’t have had I been in Peaceful mode and I couldn’t get back to where I died to collect my stuff without dying again. So, okay – I just might be a pussy but I’m an alive one with an intact inventory and XP points.

And besides, it’s my game and my world and I run this bitch so it’s my rules, too! Baby girl called me a pussy and her hubby agreed with that assessment so I put the game into Normal difficulty and a few seconds later near my son-in-law shout, “Oh, shit! Fuck me! I ran right into a bumch of skeletons!” And I just asked him if he was okay. I got your “pussy” right here…

It’s not that I don’t know how to play with all the things that will kill you running around all over the place – I do. But why do it when I don’t have to? And if you’re wondering, had my son-in-law died after the switch to Normal, yes – I would have laughed at him and with no real compassion or sympathy – call me a pussy, will you?

 

Xbox One Gaming: Elite Dangerous Update

The first part of this gaming update is that Elite Dangerous is now free of charge on Xbox’s GamePass, which is a good thing but there are a lot of players who, like myself, shelled out the price of the game to be able to own it… and I guess we should have known that Xbox would eventually make it free for all GamePass members.

Next, my progress in the game so far. While there are a slew of players running around the galaxy fighting each other, blowing up shit and getting jacked up by an alien presence that one doesn’t see that often, there are folks like me who are enjoying the non-violent aspects of the game also one of the things I learned early on is that even when playing in Solo mode and a mode where you’re never going to run into any of the others playing the game, the game isn’t beyond having an NPC – non-playable character – come along and try to hijack you or blow you out of the sky: I guess the game wants to occasionally remind Solo players that the galaxy is still a very dangerous place and keeps you on your toes and well-versed in escaping interdiction attempts.

I’m still in the Lesser Orion Arm of the galaxy but I’ve slowly but surely managed to work my way, well, back home: The Sol system which is home to Earth. You need a special permit to go to Sol and when I got my permit, I wasn’t – and still aren’t – all that sure exactly what I did to finally get it other than to have my Federation rank go up (this is the galactic government/faction I’ve aligned myself with). I’ve been buzzing around delivering stuff and/or taking passengers either to other systems or outrageous tours of the stellar neighborhood to see the sights; there are a lot of sightseeing places that travelers are willing to pay millions of credits to go see.

The game is a grind if you’re not running around shooting up the place; you need credits for a lot of things, from buying new ships to taking care of ship refueling and repairs and updates to paying fines and, yeah, if you get blown up, you gotta pay a chunk of change in order to get your ship back and go on about your business. I’ve learned to pick and choose the jobs I want to take on and I have a “goal” right now to get the next size passenger carrier – the Orca – so that I can ferry those who want to travel in business or first class comfort… and for a lot of credits… but that heifer is expensive at somewhere around 45 million credits, give or take a hundred thousand.

I have four ships. The one the game gave me when I started it (a Sidewinder); I have a passenger ship (a Dolphin), a heavy hauler (a Type 7) and the ship that I use to explore and carry stuff (an Asp Explorer). I’ve bought – and gotten rid of – some of the fighter/military craft because, um, I very much suck at dogfighting in space, that and I can’t properly configure the ship in the most efficient way it can be done. I’ve bought such a ship, outfitted it the best I can, and when I’ve taken it out for a spin, it’s all good… until I deploy its weapons systems… and the whole damned ship shuts down and I’ve got about five minutes to get it up and running before I run out of air and die. Which kinda leads into the other thing I suck at: Mining.

I did the tutorial for mining and shooting an asteroid, well, that’s easy but catching up with the material blasted free? Yeah, um, shit… I totally failed that part of the tutorial. The good part is that in the game mode, there are things called limpets I can get that will go get the material I’ve blasted from an asteroid and I have a mental note to get some… but that’s not all there is to it. I had a ship configured with a mining laser, took a short trip to an asteroid field to see what I could mine; deployed the weapons to bring the mining laser to bear… and the ship shut down and right in the middle of NPCs buzzing around and, I guess, waiting for me to collect something so they could take it from me. I went to reboot the ship and it rebooted its systems… kinda. My shields were still offline, I’m not sure what my engine was doing and, oh, yeah, I was still running out of air and the clock was quickly counting down so I did the only thing I could do: Exited the game.

Shit. I don’t really need to mine anything but I kinda have to since in order to get certain upgrades for my ships’ systems, I have to mine stuff instead of going to a station and buying them from the “store” many of them have available. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong and as I continued to grind doing passenger trips and delivering goods, I was still thinking about how I managed to fuck it up. At one point during my play last night, I was about to dock at a station and had engaged auto-landing and as I marveled at how my ship was moving in order to get lined up, I had noticed that the auto-landing feature had re-tasked my weapon systems power to the engines… and in that instance, I knew how I fucked up my attempt to do some simple mining: I needed to shunt power from somewhere else to the weapon systems… and the mining laser is part of the weapons system.

Well, fuck me. I’ll test this later when I play (after I finish writing this).

Buzzing around the place, for a “space junkie” like me, is fun and especially when I see stars and systems that are not only real but I’ve read about in the many science fiction books I love reading. I’ve collected more permits to other systems, like Sirius; I’ve advanced in Federation military rank to be a Chief Petty Officer, which not only gives me access to the better fighting craft – which I have no plans on buying – but more lucrative Federal jobs. I’ve learned that taking passengers on sightseeing tours, while profitable, can be a pain in the ass. The one “complaint” I keep running into is my passengers bitching about how long it’s taking to get somewhere and them saying that they’d love to get there before they die. It’s not my fault that they’ve picked locations that are, sometimes, hundreds of multiple jumps away from where I picked them up and my Dolphin can only jump so far and cruise so fast… which is why I need to upgrade to the Orca and, eventually, the Beluga – it’s literally one whale of a ship.

I had one passenger get totally pissed off and cancelled the contract mid-trip and, as such, I didn’t get paid and had my reputation get reduced, too. I don’t mind when, in mid-trip, a passenger decides they want to take a side trip to some other place or that they need something like consumer electronics… and now I have to look for a station that may or may not have whatever they’re looking for. Or, lately, some have wanted to go into areas of conflict and I’ve learned to not get too close to whatever fighting is going on since, um, getting blown up with your passengers on board isn’t a good thing and I don’t wanna find out how bad that’s gonna be.

I don’t do that many sightseeing trips because it takes a lot of time… in real time. The last one I did took me three hours to complete and, jeez, even thought the trip went without anything going wrong, it was boring as fuck and to the point where I was watching TV shows on my tablet and iPad while grinding from one star system to the next. I’d occasionally check to see how many more jumps I had left, shake my head, mutter an obscenity to myself, and keep it moving. I tend to take on trips to deliver passengers from Point A to Point B which aren’t that time consuming and, often, doesn’t pay a whole lot… but that’s part of the grinding one can find themselves doing.

At one point last night, I’d earned about 25 million credits and while checking out the job postings, I saw a lucrative job to ferry a lot of items to a system that was one jump away… and I was in the wrong ship. I looked to see what ships the station had to offer and saw that they had a Type 7 bulk carrier, a step up from the Type 6 I had sitting at my home station… which was five jumps away and I knew it wasn’t available at my home station. I had a decision to make being halfway to being able to buy an Orca; do I pass on the Type 7 and the two million credit job… or do I spend the credits, get the Type 7 and take the job?

I decided to get the Type 7 and the job. After completing it, I immediately went home – and I kinda don’t like being empty but I couldn’t find anything I could haul back to my base in the Sol system – so I could sell the Type 6 I had and to have my Asp Explorer shipped back home to me, which is a pretty cool feature in the game if not a bit pricey. My problem is still that I’m not good at configuring ships. The Type 7 is like flying a brick; it’s slow and ponderous and while I can upgrade its engines, eh, there’s some tradeoffs to be considered. I upgraded its engines and power distribution systems but when I went to upgrade its stock laser weapons, well, that’s a problem because where I happen to be, they don’t have the type of laser weapon I need. The stock lasers are fixed in place… and pointing forward which makes sense… except when NPCs start shooting at me, they’re never in front of me and no matter how hard I try to point my weapons at them and shoot back, well, it just ain’t happening so I need the type of laser that isn’t fixed and can move as necessary to target the asshole behind me and eliminate them.

And this is part of the grind as well. I’m slowly but surely learning about configuring ships so that, say, when I take off from somewhere, the damned thing doesn’t shut down or I go to scan an area and, oops, I haven’t properly assigned things to the right areas. I’m not a fan of landing at locations that are based on a planet… but I kinda like it, too, because every landing presents a challenge that’s just too enticing to ignore and, of course, the goal is to “stick the landing” which means deorbiting at the right time and doing things in just the right way so that, if I do it right, I’ll be landing in a couple of real time minutes but if I get it wrong – and I do screw it up – it’s gonna take a long time for me to get to where I’m going.

The fun part is that while I’m in the middle of making planetfall, I catch myself flying the ship; I’m aware of the minute corrections I’m making with the joysticks and corrections I’m no longer and really paying that much attention to while keeping an eye on my speed, how much distance I have left and even how high I am relative to the surface… and all without really thinking about doing those things. Last night I made four planetary landings; I stuck three of them and totally screwed up one of them; instead of having a couple of minutes of flying to land, I was twiddling my thumbs and waiting out the 30 minutes or so it was going to take. Now, there is a way around such a screwup; all I have to do is engage my frame shift engines, aim at the escape point, and time the moment when I can lock back onto the landing spot… except, um, sometimes, I screw that up, too, and in this one, I actually wound up kinda crashing into the planet, not enough to seriously damage my ship but enough to have me cussing at myself.

This game is just so much fun to play.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Elite Dangerous: Horizons Part 3

First, I’ve changed my theme… for now – lemme know what you think of the Ryu theme!

I’ve pretty much “forgotten” about my other favorite games, including Watch Dogs: Legion, which I had gotten before I got Elite Dangerous; it was so bad that when I went to play my other favorites, I had to remember how to play them but this isn’t unusual for me because once I have a game that I can really get into, well, all I have is time to play it.

I’ve made great progress considering I haven’t been playing that long and compared to other players, I have a very long way to go. I haven’t bothered with playing alongside others because I haven’t worked toward any missions that I’d have to shoot stuff – yet. I have six ships now and one of them is a fighter and I guess once I build up my credits again, it might be time to go kill some shit. Until then, I’m continuing to do decent paying jobs using the different craft I have… but I gotta tell you what happened yesterday and during my third mission using my brand new Dolphin-class passenger ship.

The second trip was a bitch; I took a passenger to a planet in a system that I thought had a station but instead, there was a… device there that I had to scan for them. What made it a bitch was there was nowhere for me to land close to it and I’m surprised my ship didn’t take any damage because I was bouncing around all over the surface, slamming into the ground at times while trying to get the ship under control. I finally got into a bit of a hover and it occurred to me that I was supposed to scan it – so I did. My passenger was happy and I took them back where I picked them up and got paid 150,000+ credits.

It was worth the hassle and my ineptitude doing stuff like that. I was debating on changing ships to do other jobs and decided, what the hell – let’s take another passenger somewhere. I saw a job that was gonna pay a million credits and I was qualified to do it; I loaded them up, and selected Auto Launch to get underway. Auto Launch is a blessing; I’ve learned to fly my ships fairly well and I could manually fly out of the space-based stations even though they all rotate: Think about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the PanAm clipper and as I might have mentioned, the game uses the same music as the movie. I could do it… but if I don’t have to, that works.

The ship lifts off and stops because other ships are in a queue to leave or enter the station when I look to my right and see, in bright red letters, “Illegal Passenger Onboard” and I thought, “Oh, shit!” That’s when I discovered that once you engage Auto Launch, you can’t cancel it or if there’s a way to do it, I didn’t know anything about it. I’m “panicking” because I see a green icon cross my screen and the identifier is for a Federal warship and I knew my ass was in trouble and more so when, in the many times I’ve left a station, this particular event never happened. I’m still furiously going through my options and trying to find a way to abort the launch but it’s too late: My ship leaves the station and I know that it’s going to be about a minute before the Auto Launch procedure releases me… but I’m already thinking about turning around and ditching my illegal passenger. I abort the job and I get a message from the pissed off passenger that says if I’m not gonna take them where they want to go, just drop them off at another station.

My plan was to take them back inside but just as I was free and clear to navigate, my onboard computer calmly says, “We’re under attack.” And before I could see even where the attack was coming from – and even though I knew it was the Federal warship – I got my ass blown out of the sky. As you can imagine, I was pissy about that because the game didn’t see fit to warn me about the illegal passenger until after I had launched and, again, I couldn’t stop it.

Because I had gotten myself blown up one time before – way back when I was still trying to figure out some stuff, I knew I was going to wind up at a detention facility and I had to laugh because I’m in jail even though y’all just blew my ass up and killed me and to make it worse, I had to pay in order to get my ship back, too. I could afford it and I do like that the game doesn’t make you lose anything in this situation but, yeah, I wasn’t happy about how that all went down. Now I have to fly back to my home base and hoping that the authorities hadn’t put a bounty on me or hit me with some fines. Neither thing happened but, yeah, I was still pissy about it and kinda mad with myself although, again, there was nothing I could do or knew about to stop the Auto Launch process.

I kept playing, safely ferrying passengers and as I went on about playing, I was thinking that despite my very rough start, I’m glad that I bought this game and accepted its challenges. As I was on my way back from one place and super cruising to the station, I was looking at my iPad and Facebook and saw a post from one of my other game’s group… and that’s when it hit me that I’d been playing the game before I got this one and, well, yeah – this one is so good that I just didn’t have any thoughts about playing that game… or any other game.

Because I have three Microsoft accounts, I can have three profiles on my Xbox and, per my habit and when I have a game I can really get into, I started a new game on my second profile because now it was time for me to use what I’d learned from my main profile – along with the gazillion mistakes – and apply them. I decided for this profile that I was going to delay having to leave the starting area for as long as I can since, once you leave there, if there’s a way to go back, I don’t know about it. I found that I could plot a course back to the starting point but since my leaving made them revoke my license and permit to be there, well, shit. So, for my second profile, I’m just gonna hang out there and do jobs and make lots of credits and for as long as I can.

One “mistake” I corrected was to buy a Hauler as my second ship; at the point where I get invited to an Engineer’s location so I can get fancy updates for my ships, a YouTube guide for this mission specifically says to get a Hauler to make the trip because it carries more fuel – and even though I can refuel at a star – but they also are able to travel greater distances. When I did this job, I ignored the advice and thought that the ship I was in – an Adder-class kind of freighter – would do just fine. Um, yeah, shit, I should have listened to that advice! At one point during the very long trip, I almost ran out of fuel a few times and I was thinking about what could be done if I did run out of fuel. I learned, after the fact, that there’s a way to have someone bring you some fuel but since I didn’t know that, all I could do was, upon arriving at a Fuel Star, was to keep diving in until I had enough fuel to continue.

I’m like two jumps away from my destination; my fuel status is beyond questionable… and the game let’s me know that where I am is the last main sequence star that I can refuel at and I’m having yet another, “Oh, shit!” moment. I know that if I get too close to the star, the least thing that can happen is my drive shuts down and the worst is I get burnt the fuck up. As I’m carefully skimming the corona of the star, I’m wondering which one of the game’s developers thought it was a great idea to emerge from light speed and the first thing you see is a fucking star but for now, I’m very happy that they put this into the game. I successfully completed the mission… but for my second profile – and knowing that, again, at some point, I’m gonna have to do this job – I went ahead and bought a Hauler as my second ship; I am not going to make the same mistake twice.

Finally, my son-in-law. I convince him to buy the game. He’s always recommending games to me, some of them to my liking, some of them not so much. I’ve been telling him about the game and how challenging it is because when it comes to playing games, he’s like me in that if it’s challenging, we just gotta go for it. I was telling him what I had experienced early on and after he watched a YouTube video about the game, he decided to get it but I had offered to get it for him because I really want him to play this game because it’s gonna test his skills. He made it through the tutorial which, uh, by the way, I technically didn’t and he was able to kill the one ship that had to be killed that I just couldn’t manage to do so he’s got one up on me in that regard. When we play together – and as we do for a lot of games – it’s never a contest to see who’s better or anything like that and I appreciate and respect his gaming knowledge in some games, like Borderlands, for example.

I can’t wait to see how he makes out with Elite Dangerous and I hope he gets the hang of it enough so that we can play this one together.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Elite Dangerous: Horizons Part Two

This will be a much shorter scribble than yesterday’s offering.

I left y’all to tackle the game yesterday and I actually had a great day playing it. I’ve been taking jobs to many systems and even managed to make enough loot to buy another ship that’s suited for exploring; apparently, there’s money in this area. I haven’t tried tackling any of the jobs that calls for assassinating anyone – yet – I’m using the courier and other delivery jobs to not only make credits but to get better at playing the game and as even I expected, I screwed the pooch on something important.

Planetary landings. The very first one I did was actually done incorrectly, according to the game’s quick start guide and what the Facebook group membership told me when I screwed up another landing. Okay, the actual procedure is kinda technical and has some shit to do with orbital mechanics and glide slopes/angles but let’s just say that when I was attempting planetfall to deliver some goods, my deorbit burn and glide left me well over three hours away from my target and the situation was made worst by said target being on the other side of the planet. I got lined up – the ship is now pretty much on cruise control and maintaining direction and altitude without me doing anything – and I found some other stuff to do while making the 3+ hour trip while occasionally waking my controller and console; I found out that if my console goes into sleep mode while the game is running, it stops my ship dead in its tracks which is a good thing (I guess).

One of the things I did while waiting to arrive was ask the Facebook group what I did wrong – and I knew that I had even if I didn’t exactly what I did. So, to keep it as uncomplicated as I can, what I should have done was super cruise close to the planet but not let it put me into orbit by shutting it down and if my objective is on the other side of the planet, well, now I have to glide in, which was the second thing I was doing wrong. I looked in the quick start guide and I’ll be damned: They had an entire section on how to land on a planet including how to glide correctly and the “bad” part is that I saw the indicators on my HUD (heads up display) that was trying to tell me what to do and I didn’t know what it was telling me.

But now I know. Three or four trips later found me heading toward another station that was planet-side: Time to do it right! Well, that’s what I had in mind, anyway. I shut down super cruise and didn’t wind up just circling the planet while keeping an eye on the compass as well as the location’s marker; I pushed the stick forward to break out of my mini-orbit and started my descent; the ship went into glide mode and as anticipated… except instead of the pretty blue indicator, it was red: I done gone and fucked up again and so bad that I managed to run into the the damned planet because I had also managed to lose control of the ship. The good part was that my ship suffered some damage and my shields got knocked out until they rebooted and didn’t get destroyed and the second good thing was that once I got some altitude and flying right, I was only three minutes away from the ground station!

Much better than being three hours away! Once I docked, I had a rather big repair bill to pay but I had the credits to handle it easily and without putting a dent in my funds. The new bad news was there are no easy to do jobs where I’m at currently so I decided that since the ship I’m currently in is good for exploring, I’m going to try to do some exploring.

Stay tuned…

 

Xbox One Gaming: No Man’s Sky – Continuing

This game is so frustrating yet so addictive. It’s glitchy and tends to crash without warning and despite a couple of updates to the game, weird shit keeps happening.

Like, I was traveling from a space station to my home base via the teleporter, something that seems to take a long time to happen and you just get used to the long delay and I’ll sometimes put my controller down to give my hands a break… but this time, I was glad I hadn’t put it down because when I reappeared, I did so in mid-air! I mean, I was really up in the air and only my quick reaction to use my jetpack to ease my landing saved me from an unexpected death.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t even on or near my home base, which I now had to walk a fairly decent distance to get to and I’m saying, “What the hell just happened… and why did I appear here and not at the base?” Members of the Facebook group were reporting similar incidents and, I guess, we collectively just chalked it up to yet another glitch in the game that Hello Games is either ignoring or they don’t know how to fix it… or the many other glitches one can run into while roaming the galaxy.

Later, I was on a task to repair one of my damaged frigates and wondering if I could fire the crew of this particular frigate – they just keep breaking the ship and not finishing missions. I’m on the last repair, took a step… and fell right through the floor I was standing on… and into open space. I look down and there’s the planet beneath my feet and after a moment, I start to fall and I’m thinking, “Oh, shit – I’m fucked!” even though there are some guys who will deliberately make the big drop and in the hope of landing safely.

But I didn’t fall to my death; my jetpack “ran out of gas” for a moment and I thought I was gonna die… then noticed that I was standing still and not falling. Okay! I tried to get back onto the ship I was fixing, couldn’t do it, wound up activating my last save and wound up back where I started, all safe and sound.

Whew!

 

Xbox One Gaming: No Man’s Sky – The Adventure Continues

I keep thinking about how someone said that this game is Minecraft for adults although it does seem that more adults play Minecraft than youngsters do (as far as I can tell). There are some similarities between the two games, like, the necessity to scrounge and gather… stuff in order to complete missions and, really, keep yourself from getting killed a lot.

To that end, I’ve been killed 12 times and not because I screwed up. Yesterday, my to-do list was all about farming Cobalt and as much as I could so I could turn it into the other form of Cobalt that fetches a very high price when you sell it at a space station or land-based trading post. I have, among the many worlds I have a base established, almost the perfect place to farm and it literally takes hours to remove every piece of available Cobalt from the cave that I specifically established my base near. Then the unthinkable happened:

I ran out of Carbon, which is very much needed to power my Multi-tool. The bad part? The planet this base is on is subject to “major” storms and there’s not a lot of Carbon to easily be had given that there are… predators lurking and waiting to attack the moment your back is turned. And the storms show up regularly, like every ten minutes or so, making it a pain to be outside and trying to harvest Carbon from trees and plants.

Sigh. This put a big crimp in my plan for the day but it was easily remedied because on a base on my home planet, it’s set up next to another cave with Cobalt but what makes this cave different is it has probably more Carbon than I know what to do with – and the cave on the base I was farming has no available Carbon.

So I had to go home to load up on Carbon and as I did so, I realized that I had forgotten one of the primary rules of Minecraft: Gather up as much of the necessities as you can manage to do. In Minecraft, there’s no such thing as too much wood, coal, and iron; indeed, once you appear in a new Minecraft world, getting as much of this stuff as you can, well, it’s something that you will learn provided an experienced player doesn’t tell you to do this very important thing.

And a thing that I should have done once I realized the need to do it. The failure can kinda be blamed on the game and how it has you doing things in the early going. Since you start out with a Multi-tool with its Mining Laser, you find out that it’ll run out of fuel at some point but, oddly, you’ve probably – and accidentally – collected enough Carbon for it to not be a problem… until you tack on more devices and updated items that, shit, run on Carbon.

Minecraft is big on wood, coal, and iron; No Man’s Sky is big on Carbon, Di-Hydrogen, and Ferrite but you eventually find out that the more you advance through the game, crap, there’s a whole lot of stuff that you need to have in your backpack and in great quantities… and your backpack will only hold so much stuff and provided you can buy more space, bringing me to the other point of this game that reminds me of Borderlands:

There’s no such thing as too much money. The day before, I had nine million units (dollars, if you will) which, comparatively speaking, isn’t a lot of units and considering that some players are billionaires – but they have way more hours of game time than I do. I’d been on a ship-collecting spree, going on the hunt for the much-prized S-class ships and, specifically, ones that were crashed and all busted up; that’s “easier” than hanging around space stations and/or trading posts and waiting for one to show up and even then you might not have the units to buy the ship.

But the crashed ones have a major problem: They have to be repaired and that takes both a lot of materials and units and more so since some of the stuff you need can only be purchased at a space station or trading post. I found and added to my fleet of ships three S-class ships and one of the big Haulers… and pretty much wiped out my nine million-plus units fixing them up so that they’re space-worthy and fully operable, leaving me with a measly 720,000 units. Ouch – talk about a hit to one’s wallet!

Hence my need to go farm Cobalt and convert it to its more pricey form… and I ran out of Carbon and, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have and more so because once I realized that this game has some Minecraft aspects to it, I should have done what my son-in-law did: Collect stack upon stack of the very necessary items and more so when most of the necessary stuff can be piled up into stacks of 9999.

So I’m back home, harvesting Carbon, fighting off the hazardous plants that live in caves and that are prone to popping up at any time and trying to gas you to death which means shooting them – but getting Oxygen or Sodium in the process and, yep – you find out that you’re gonna need lots of these elements as well.

I harvested almost seven thousand pieces of Carbon, more than enough to go back to my Cobalt farming cave and wipe it out of every piece I could find and, yes, it took me almost two hours to collect two full stacks of 9999 and 700 more; that didn’t count all the Geodes I got while harvesting the Cobalt; Geodes are cool in that they usually give you more of whatever you were harvesting and for Cobalt, they tend to give you Tetracobalt which is pricey all by itself but even more so when refined into the even pricier form of Ionized Cobalt.

Yep… took me a moment to remember what that form is called. Anyway, I’m not happy because having to restock a lot of Carbon put me behind schedule; even though I have both a Medium and Large Refiner – and I used both of them, it takes a long time to refine that much Cobalt and, yeah, in the process, I used up all 3000+ pieces of Oxygen because, if you add Oxygen to Cobalt when you refine it, instead of the normal 2:1 ratio you get refining Cobalt on its own, you get a better 2:5 ratio that gives you more Ionized Cobalt.

I had a plan to replace the much-needed Oxygen – I have an Oxygen Generator that – get this – when you fuel it with Carbon, 250 pieces of Oxygen gets generated… but it’s a slow process so I found myself running back and forth to either my own Trading Station and the one in my local space station buying up all the Oxygen I could… and costing me even more units that had to be replaced.

The good part? When I finally refined all the Cobalt into Ionized Cobalt and sold it, I walked away with just over seven million units so at least my wallet is… heavier, for the moment. But I still have the need to stockpile as much stuff as I can because, shit, you just don’t know what you’re gonna need a lot of until you find out you need a lot of it. I spent the rest of my time scrounging for hard to find stuff, like Activated Copper which is needed to fix items on busted ships, not that I plan on looking for more of them since you can only have six ships in your personal fleet… but you never know when you’re gonna need it or what you’re gonna need it for.

The bad part? Activated Copper – and the other Activated elements – are only found on planets with extreme conditions: Heat, cold, radiation, and/or toxicity. And most of those planets – at my point in the game – is guarded by some very aggressive Sentinels. Sometimes, if you start to “mine” something, they’ll show up and scan you; maybe they’ll leave you alone and maybe they won’t and sometimes, one will scan you and find you’re carrying something in your backpack it thinks you shouldn’t have, then start firing on you and/or escalating their alert level and really bringing the heat.

Shooting those little motherfuckers ain’t as easy as it looks and if you kill one, two more will eventually show up and if you off them, even more aggressive Sentinels will arrive including a Walker Brain – think of the AT-ATs of Star Wars fame and those things are no joke. I’m out to farm stuff like this, ducking Sentinels, taking cover from the extreme conditions and storms and, well, I’m not having a good day while, at the same time, I’m having fun going through this shit.

While I have a couple of main mission things to do – and a couple of secondary missions and one of which I’m not going to do since it involves dealing with some very nasty Sentinels, I’m finding that I’m spending a lot of time hopping around not one but two universes and looking for systems/planets that have the materials I need and, hopefully, without having to deal with those pesky Sentinels.

Or, kinda/sorta, I’m playing Minecraft in that I’m exploring and collecting stuff in order for me to survive. In Minecraft, you can create all of the large chests as you need to store… stuff; in No Man’s Sky, you are limited to just nine storage containers – and provided that you had the nanites (the other form of currency in the game) to unlock the plans for all nine storage containers. The thing about this is that I could go to a new planet, build a base and add all nine storage containers… and they wouldn’t be empty because they’d be the same nine containers I already have and whatever is already in them.

One of the things I have to do is consolidate my storage containers; when you add stuff to them, it sometimes stacks like-items and sometimes, it just goes in whatever available space in any container. I wish that there was an easier way to do this but there isn’t. For instance, I’d like for all the edible stuff I’ve collected to be in one container but I’d have to spend some time taking them from wherever they happen to be, putting them in my backpack, and then into a container with enough space. It’s tedious and monotonous work and so much that, yeah, you just really don’t want to be bothered with doing it… but you probably need to because your stuff can get all spread out across all nine containers so, say, instead all of your Storm Crystals being in one place, they could be anywhere and if you needed more than one of them, you’re gonna have to look through all of your containers since there’s no telling where they are.

At least in Minecraft you can create a large chest – then create a sign that says what’s in the chest and you know that only the stuff that belong in it will be in it.

Here’s another bad part. I can’t stop playing the game even though I’m at the point where it’s making me a little crazy between collecting stuff and trying to do the main mission stuff.. I need to farm more Cobalt to get more units; I need to get my storage units organized and I seriously need to make some of my bases neater and, to that end, yep – forgot another Minecraft thing in that when you first build a house, you should build it with the expectation that it’s not going to be big enough for what you need to do.

The issue in No Man’s Sky is that unless someone tells you this, you just don’t think about it until you have to do it… which means, for me, dismantling a lot of stuff and building it again so that my big bases don’t look like a Category Five hurricane went through the place. And I don’t know if I really wanna do that.

 

Xbox One Gaming: More on No Man’s Sky

Between my three gaming profiles, I’ve racked up about 120 hours of game time… and counting. I’ve been focusing on my main profile and continue to learn stuff about this game, not only from playing but from the Facebook group – they are very helpful to all of the newbies who are just now getting into the game.

Feels good that now I can answer some of their questions… while asking a ton of questions myself. My son-in-law plays the game and, sometimes, he’ll come into my game and work on stuff; I’ve been to his game once so far and it didn’t surprise me that he picked a world with the worst possible environment to call home; to say it’s as hot as hell doesn’t begin to describe it.

Once I get the game cranked up, when I discover stuff I know he’s gonna need to know, I’ll message him. I’m further ahead on the game’s main missions than he is… but he’s really good at stockpiling stuff and units (money) than I’ve been willing to get into… but I’m getting better at it and out of necessity. Early on in the game, you wind up collecting… stuff that, in those moments, you don’t need; they take up precious inventory space in your backpack and unless you have more than one base, chances are you can only create a 20-space storage unit. While like items will stack up together, there’s a limit to how many things – like Marrow Bulbs – will stack together before needing an empty space.

So you wind up selling or getting rid of stuff you don’t need… or you think you don’t need… then wind up kicking your own ass because, later, all that stuff you sold or disposed of now becomes the same stuff you need and, mysteriously, can’t seem to keep enough of on hand.

I just added two more storage units on my secondary base giving me a total of seven units… and I’m gonna need more. Let’s get to a literal game changing moment I experienced…

Eventually I learned that the galaxy – and existence – is a simulation (think “The Matrix”) and one created by a god-like entity called The Atlas. The Atlas is dying or breaking down and it told me that in sixteen days, the entire simulation will crash and everything – and everyone (including me) will cease to exist. That had me running around doing main missions (instead of hoarding all the goodies I could scrounge up), visiting many solar systems and, finally, faced with the option to reset the simulation and preserve existence… or walk away.

I chose to reset the simulation. As an aside, on one of my other profiles, I’m going to choose to walk away just to see what happens. I do a slew of other main mission tasks and, finally, get to the point where I have to “push the button” to reset the simulation. Certain characters in the game are telling me not to do it along the way but I push the button…

And it gets very trippy as the simulation shuts down and reboots. It restarts and I’m faced with four new objects that appear to be galaxies and I have to pick one and after looking at all four objects, I pick the very pretty red one and, more trippy, psychedelic cut-screen stuff and I find myself in the Calypso galaxy… and on an extreme hell-planet and my critical exposure time is measured in seconds and not the minutes I’ve experienced on other such planets. Then again, I’d collected stuff that makes it easier to survive on the more extreme planets…

And it’s all broken and damage. My entire Exosuit. All of the modules that makes it run. And my ship is nowhere to be seen. My Multi-tool is just as broken; I can’t scan anything, can’t mine anything and the only thing that saved me was there was a deep cave just off to my right – and I haul ass inside the cave to take stock of my very dire situation. In the real world, I’m panicking a little; I didn’t expect this to happen but after calming down a little, okay – this is like the very beginning of the game… only ten times worse. Now I gotta literally use my hands to collect stuff to start fixing everything that’s busted.

The good thing is I had some of it with me already… just not everything and, yeah: A lot of the stuff I needed a lot of was some of the same stuff I hadn’t been collecting a lot of. Karma, it turns out, is a bitch even in a video game.

Little by little – and being bombarded by major firestorms every few minutes that’s preventing me from going out of the cave for very long – I get my Multi-tool’s visor and scanner working; this not only allows me to identify stuff I need but it tells me where my ship is: It’s 690u (and whatever the fuck the “u” means) away and it’s even more broken. I utter a real-time curse because if I gotta walk to it in these frequent firestorms, I’m going to die and quickly. I work on getting the main components of my Multi-tool working: Both the mining laser and terrain modification laser; I need the first to collect items in the cave – and outside – faster than beating on them with my hand (get your head out of the gutter!) and once I got the second working, well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

I need to establish a base… inside the cave. I put down a base computer so I can build a wooden structure and, specifically, facing the direction of where my ship is. I spent long and dangerous minutes collecting everything I needed to do these two “simple” things and almost died once because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was standing: Too close to the entrance of the cave and exposing myself to the extreme heat. I duck inside my wooden “house” to recover… but I can’t stay here – I need to get to my ship so I can get the fuck off of this planet… but how?

Bring in the terrain modification laser. At the time, I was on a FaceTime call with my son-in-law and telling him everything I was experiencing and, being himself, at first, he was laughing at me… but as I described the conditions, he stopped laughing and said, “You’re screwed…” and I agreed because he was right. But it finally dawns on me that I can use the modification laser to tunnel straight through the rock to get to my ship! That puppy chews up rock and mineral deposits and the good thing is that the rock it destroys gets collected and is used as fuel for the laser. So I get to tunneling, trying to keep on as straight a line as possible – the terrain modification laser isn’t the neatest tool and a couple of times I was glad my jetpack was now working so I could lift myself out of a deep hole the laser cut.

I feel a strong surge of hope and when I broke through the last bit of rock, my ship was directly in front of me! I was elated something fierce! I dash to my ship while taking note of what’s around me because I know I’m gonna need this stuff. First, get the shields up and it took four quick trips to get everything I needed to do this. Now I’m protected from the firestorms which are coming with more frequency now. I have a plan: I need to get the engine components fixed so I can get off of this damned planet and even if it means having to land on a less hostile planet but what I’m hoping for is that there’s a space station out there somewhere.

If there is, I have enough units (and stuff I don’t wanna sell but will have to) to purchase the things I need to fix pretty much all of my gear. I almost die like four times running around in the terrible heat to get my engines fixed and with a shout of triumph – and one that had my son-in-law laughing his ass off – I lifted off the planet and into orbit to look for the space station.

It was only at this point where I remembered that, um, some solar systems don’t have a space station. I know that I don’t have enough of the things I need to build a teleporter – I tried that on the hell planet – and I feel some panic starting to set in because on the ship’s HUD, I can’t find the station icon. While kinda floating in place, I manage to fix the ship’s scanners and scan the other planets in the system… and they’re just as bad as the one I escaped from but with different hazards; one was extreme cold, the other extreme radiation.

And only now do I realize why there were four items to pick from and that the colors of the items precisely matched the conditions of the planet I was gonna land on in this new galaxy. Red, blue, yellow, and green. Heat. Cold. Radiation. Toxicity. Shit. I sigh to realize that no matter which color I had picked, I was fucked right out of the gate. Shit. Okay, where is the damned space station?

I’ll tell you now that I totally forgot something and I forgot it because when you play this game, you really get immersed in it; as I’m fighting to survive and escape the hellish heat of the planet I found myself on, I’m really sweating like a fiend and feeling the “panic” and desperation of my situation and kicking my ass for the decision I made… while knowing that I could have put the controller down and even ended the game.

Did I mention how addictive this game is? What I forgot is that I could call for the Space Anomaly because, during my trips to reset the simulation, I wound up in a few systems without a space station; I summoned the Space Anomaly… because it has an intergalactic teleporter that I used to get back to my home base. And I totally forgot about it but it was moot because I did find the space station – and they all have a teleporter.

When I got there, I had over five million units… and I used all of it except for 240,000 units to fix as much of my gear as I could, kicking myself in the ass because the devices you can buy stuff from doesn’t always have what you might need. Off to my right, I can see the blue glow of the teleporter – and now it dawns on me that I might not be able to connect to my home galaxy and planet; in the forum, a player asked about this and I couldn’t remember how they were answered. But, okay – let’s get shit fixed first then worry about getting home. I don’t have enough stuff to make a lot of warp fuel so I hoped the teleporter worked the way it’s supposed to work.

I approach and activate it… and sigh a great sigh of relief because there’s my home base at the top of the list. My son-in-law is still laughing his ass off and I don’t mind because, now that I’m safe, it’s pretty damned funny… and I know that when he reaches this point in the game, he’s gonna have the same experience – he’s just gonna be better equipped because I told him that when he starts to reset the simulation, stock up his backpack and ship with all the stuff he needs to repair both things.

I select my home base in my home galaxy… and a few seconds later, I’m home. If I could have made my character drop to his knees and kiss the ground, I would have done just that. I’ve played a lot of games that have hairy situations in them… and none of them matched or came close to how being in this situation made me feel in the real world. You’d think that after this ordeal, I’d shut the game down and find something else to do, right?

Nope. Didn’t do that although I did get up and go to the bathroom and walked around for a moment to clear my head and realize that, wow, I was really and seriously into the game and more than I had expected to be. The bad part? At some point – and according to the more experienced players on the forum, this is going to happen again because there are an untold number of galaxies to be found and explored by continuing to reset the simulation.

I can now and better see why so many people are hooked on this game; it only “ends” when you get tired of playing it. I’ve been doing some of the secondary missions; I’ve been running around my home galaxy doing an important main mission task and, even more important, collecting and storing all of the stuff I can and in as much quantity as possible. I’ve used my trips to the many solar systems to visit space stations – when there is one – and add more space to my backpack and at a cost that takes a huge bite out of my units.

The thing about this game – and probably the thing that makes it so addictive – is you don’t know what you need and what you’re gonna have to do before you need it and do it; it makes you very aware of how many times you’ve screwed up – and didn’t know you did – early on in the game. The more experienced players on the forum, who have proven to be very helpful, also laugh at us noobs because they’ve already gone through what we’ve been experiencing and they give us tips and hints on how to play the game better.

As reported before, the game is available for PC, Xbox, and Playstation. On Xbox and via GamePass, the game is still free to play – for now – and if you have an Xbox and you wanna play a game that is going to test your survival skills, forget the zombie-type games. If you play Minecraft, that’s gonna help. Get the game. Play it. Find out for yourself what it’s like to be immersed and, yeah, even addicted to a game that, in a way, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense other than you have a mission to get answers about why things are the way they are… and you’re gonna have to survive in some of the worst conditions I’ve ever seen in a video game.

When I first saw it on GamePass, I said two things. One was, “This looks interesting!” and the other was, “How bad can it be?” Famous last words. Because it can be very bad. Frustrating. Can have you sitting and asking yourself, “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?” Pay attention to how long you’ve been playing the game when you go into it and select your last saved game; I thought this was in minutes when I first saw it but, no – it’s in hours:minutes and this time will pile up and depending on how much time you have to play it.

If you’re still sheltering in place and with nowhere to go, I recommend this game to keep you occupied when you need something to do. So now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go play the game. Yesterday was a very productive day playing it – I got a lot of stuff done that I wanted to do which makes me warn future players to have a plan for every time you play the game. Work on main mission stuff one day; work the secondary missions another day; plan to do gathering of stuff and if you think you’re not going to need it – and depending on where you are in the game – collect it and store it anyway. Lots of it.

And have fun… because I’m having a grand time playing No Man’s Sky.

 

Xbox One Gaming: No Man’s Sky (Hello Games)

Holy shit! When I saw this game on GamePass – and while looking for something new to play – I said, “Let’s check it out!” Watched the little video which, actually, doesn’t tell you a lot about the game but it’s free to me and if I don’t like it, I can uninstall it.

I love this game. I’m hooked on it. I hate this fucking game. The first thing the game does is put you on a planet that’s trying to kill you and, yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me. Oh, the game told me what I had to do – find some sodium (more about this stuff later) and use it to beef up my protection or to get inside a cave or other structure but for me, there wasn’t anything around… so I died.

Lesson learned and, I found out, almost everyone who first plays the game gets killed right out of the gate. The game is mission-driven with both primary and secondary missions to be completed and there’s a lot of shit you gotta do… that you don’t know you have to do unless you happen to pick up the game because someone you know is already playing it and can help you. I’ll add that there are a ton of YouTube videos about how to go about playing the game and there’s a Facebook group for it but what I wound up equating the game to is also a sentiment I’ve seen expressed by other players:

This is Minecraft for adults. Once I could wrap my head around this concept, some things became… clearer. Load up on essential stuff, which is a kind of backhanded science lesson: Carbon, Ferrite Dust, Oxygen, Sodium, Di-hydrogen crystals. Claim a place and build a shelter. Sounds kinda easy… except most of the planets the in the game – and there are an untold number of them – are inhospitable and will kill you pretty quick if you’re not on your game and if the planet doesn’t try to kill you there are other things that will try.

You have to fix your gear which, of course, isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Once you get it fixed, then you have to find a crashed ship and follow the instructions on how to fix it and get it flying… all while the planet is trying to kill you. By this point, you know that some crazy assed storm of some kind is gonna pop up and unless you were lucky enough to find a lot of sodium, well, you’re on your own unless, again, you can find a cave or some other shelter to hide in until the storm passes.

Then you leave the planet you started out on (but you can come back to it if ya want to) but one of the things I learned via YouTube is that before you leave the planet, scrounge around for these items: Cobalt, which is found in caves, and Marrow Bulbs – also found in caves. Oddly, that first planet and where the crashed ship is, there’s always a cave so you go in there and ransack it for all the Cobalt and Marrow Bulbs your backpack can hold (but watch your ass because there are things in the cave that will try to kill you, too, like “Hazardous Plants” which, when you off them with your newly repaired Multi-tool – gives Oxygen or Sodium. With the Cobalt, you wind up making a Refiner; you take the Cobalt and refine it into Ionized Cobalt… because it’s worth a lot of money.

You load up on this stuff ASAP because at one point, you’re gonna have to visit a space station and that’s where you can sell the Ionized Cobalt and all those Marrow Bulbs you collected because, trust me – you’re gonna need all the units (money) you can get your hands on. Here’s the thing that might fuck with you.

While the game is mission-driven, it’s probably best to ignore some of the missions and just roam around the place you’ll eventually call home. Scan everything you can scan (your efforts are rewarded), scrounge for the essentials and work on building your base, powering it, and a lot of other things that drove me crazy trying to do… and still does because, as I found out, you can come across something that you’re gonna need later in the game – but you don’t know that you’re gonna need it… until you need it.

Did I mention the pirates? Okay… flying the ship you repaired might take some doing to get the hang of but you could be attacked by pirates and the thing that made me insane was that, bleh, I didn’t want to fight them – I just wanted to get to where I was going – but when you have them to deal with, um, your pulse engine – it makes you go really fast and warping is something else you’ll find out about – gets temporarily disabled and your ability to boost your speed is limited.

Try keeping track of the pirates, who are zipping around you like flies on shit and you pretty much can’t move a whole lot. Early on, wiping out the pirates is pretty easy… so you know that ain’t gonna always be the case.

There is so much… shit you have to do. A lot of shit you gotta get in order to do things. I am actually playing this game on all three of my Xbox profiles – and I just recently reactivated the third one I had just to use some of the YouTube knowledge I gained and, yep, from all the mistakes I made that I didn’t know I shouldn’t have made. You get to certain points where you can’t really do something but the game keeps nagging you to do something and I finally figured out that this is the time to just roam around the planet and collect stuff to turn into units and to be able to buy stuff you will absolutely need. Here’s the real kicker:

Between my three profiles, I have about, oh, maybe close to 100 hours of game time… and I’m not even close to really getting into the heart of the game and nowhere near being able to do some of the stuff that you can do in the game. Like with Minecraft, shit… I’m looking at players on the Facebook group and all of the wonderful things they’ve built, the ships they’ve collected and some have thousands of hours playing the game – and I failed to mention that this game came out about four years ago and is available for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. So it’s been around for a while and a lot of people have been playing it for all this time.

I told my son-in-law – who’s been playing with me – “Every time I think I’ve done something outstanding, I find out that I ain’t did shit compared to what other players are doing!”

The game throws handicaps at you and at every turn. I spend more time refueling my ship and Multi-tool items than I do anything else. I have one mission in particular – to learn how to build a Circuit Board – and I have no fucking idea what I’m supposed to be doing; the game says to help the Scientist so he can show you how to make one… except, when I talk to him, there’s nothing to do for him.

So I’ve been running around looking for stuff that’s gonna get me some units. I’ve been finding broken ships and trying to fix them – and some of them need items to repair them that it’s not time for me to even know how to get them at the point in the game I am. I can get them flying… and that’s about it. I’ve bought some ships. You find out quickly that you are gonna need a bigger and better Multi-tool and those things ain’t cheap. For them, you start out with a Class C Multi-tool but you learn there are Class B and Class A devices… and they can cost a grip or two.

There is so much to this game, like the Space Anomaly, Freighters, black holes and the list goes on. Most games have a wiki that includes a walkthrough that you can reference to, at the least, figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. This game has one… and it’s completely worthless… and I know why it is.

Methinks it’s impossible for someone or a bunch of someones to come together and write a definitive and complete walkthrough for a game that is so wide open and diverse. Even the IGN wiki – and their wikis/walkthroughs are usually very good – sucks. It’s outdated and incomplete.

So like Minecraft, you just gotta figure out what you can do, when you can do, and all while staying alive. This game is easy… and not even. I love it… and I fucking hate it. There hasn’t been a day since I first started playing that I haven’t told myself, “I’m not playing this fucking game today!” – and I wind up playing it anyway. I am learning – and you will, too, if you decide you wanna try it – that every day, I need to have a plan on what I’m gonna do and stick to it. Yeah, a mission will pop up that has to be done but right now, I’m pretty much ignoring the primary missions, trying to take care of the backlog of secondary missions if/when I can… but I’ve just been stockpiling the necessities and trying to make enough units as I can.

It’s almost boring and tedious work. You always have to be mindful of how much space you have in your backpack. You can get more space but that means trying to locate Drop Pods – which ain’t easy – or being able to buy one extra space from every space station you wind up visiting; once you get a space from a space station, you cannot get any more spaces from that station.

I know this is sounding confusing and I apologize for that… but the game has, again, a lot of shit going on and so much that even as I play it, I’m confused because I just do not know how to do some of the shit I have to do or I get to a point where I just don’t want to do anything except sit in my shelter or my ship… and just be there.

It’s an amazing game and graphically beautiful… and there’s no real end to it. I read that it’s impossible for a player to visit every system and world the game can throw at you… and I believe it. I am trying to establish a base on every planet in every system I’ve visited so far… and it’s a daunting task given what you wind up having to do to build the most minimum base: You need a big enough wooden shelter; a base computer; a teleporter and the means to power it, like the Biofuel Reactor you wind up building early on in the game. You wind up running around and scavenging for the materials you need, oh, like using your scanner to find Copper deposits and then figuring out how you’re gonna get to it without something bad happening to you along the way. Most planets, again, try to kill you with hellacious storms. There are “bad critters” who’ll attack you and there are even plants – and one looks just like a Venus Flytrap – that try to kill you.

Fall into a hole that’s too deep and you’re dead unless you can save yourself. You can get lost in a cave – and just like you can get lost in a mine in Minecraft. The game is… frustrating at times but I can’t stop playing it but, yeah, if you have an Xbox and you have GamePass, go get this game while it’s still free and find out for yourself.

And try to survive. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve died in this game. There is so much about this game that I don’t know about – yet. Members of the Facebook group are always talking about stuff they’ve come across and/or have done… and I’m nowhere near being able to have a clue. With some games, if I’ve been playing for over one hundred hours, yeah – I know some shit about playing that game.

Not this one. Like I said in the beginning: This is Minecraft for adults and in spaceships and I am happy that I know how to play Minecraft even if I still can’t do all that’s possible in that worthy game. I’ll find my groove in No Man’s Sky – I just don’t know when that’s gonna happen or if it’s gonna happen at all.

Loving this game… and I’d wish it on my worse enemy in a flat, skinny second because that’s just how much the game pisses me off.