[Weekly Thread] What Have We Been Playing - March 11 2024
Howdy all! Just finished another shift diggin’ for gold, and me beard is itchin’ for a new vein to explore. What mines games have you been spelunkin playin’ this week? Found any diamonds in the rough? Let’s swap some nuggets of wisdom in the comments below!
Got back into Minecraft with the kids and alone, especially with the Minecolonies mod. Having a great time but I’m hitting the point where each building upgrade requires a trivial amount of done random item from a biome nowhere near me. I had to walk 20k blocks to get red sand from a Badlands.
My eldest (6) absolutely loves Minecraft but I’ve never been a fan of it, and truth be told, it bores me to tears. Any suggestions to make it less…that.
I like the mining and collecting chests full of resources, so we may just not see eye-to-eye.
I do feel like Minecraft is TOO open, and it’s very easy to feel like you have no Idea what to do next. There’s always another village or cave or whatever. Playing with the Minecolonies mod (pack) is more like a city builder-lite. I need to attract visitors and entice them to stay. Give them a place to live and a job, eventually get people to make the things your other people make.
E.g. my builder needs some “spruce-plank and deep slate bricks wall” to upgrade the the nethermine for me. (Wall panels from the Dormum Ornamentum mod- lots more options for architecture and decorating). They checked the warehouse, and the warehouse didn’t have it so the warehouse puts an order in the queue for those wall panels. The stonecutter gets the order and not having spruce planks and deep slate broken in their inventory puts a request in for both. The warehouse doesn’t have either, so an order goes to the sawmill for spruce planks and back to the stonecutter for deep slate bricks. The sawmill requests spruce logs if necessary, and if the warehouse doesn’t have them an order goes in the queue for them. The lumberjack takes the order and chops a spruce tree if there is one, and if not requests a spruce sapling from the warehouse. When the lumberjack has spruce logs, a courier picks it up and takes it back to the warehouse. then, since the warehouse can fulfill the order for spruce logs, a courier takes them from the warehouse to the sawmill, then takes the planks to the warehouse. Then, since the warehouse can fulfill the order for spruce planks, a courier takes them from the warehouse to the stonecutter. The stonecutter gets polished deep slate from the warehouse and turns it into deepslate bricks, then combines then with the spruce planks to make the walls as requested originally. Those are picked up by a courier and delivered to the warehouse, from which a courier picks them up and takes them to the builder.
If the lumberjack needed a new axe to chop the spruce tree, they would have put an order in for one, and the smelter would smelt some iron on demand and combine it with sticks from the warehouse.
It gets quite in depth! Lots of opportunities to automate the processes by adding more/different resource gatherers and crafters.
Bought F1 Manager 2023 and have been having a good time with it. Has been more exciting than the actual product F1 has been serving so far, at least.
If you like F1 and can find it on sale I recommend it. It’s not the deepest sim/management game ever, but there is enough to it to be enjoyable - especially since the presentation is stellar. The graphics are great, but more importantly official licensing stuff like soundbytes and radio snippets from the actual drivers and engineers make it very immersive.
If you’re a true F1 nerd you might find some things (like tyre temperature effects) to be a little simplistic and unrealistic, but they seem to have aimed for a slightly more casual target audience, nonetheless without straying all the way into complete arcadeyness. I actually think it’s a pretty decent balance point to strike. There is enough here for an F1 enthusiast to chew on, but you don’t need a PhD to play it.
I haven’t played it, but from what I’ve heard Motorsport Manager is better at more bigger picture stuff, making your own team and building it from the ground up, more freedom with sponsors and youth systems and lower divisions and stuff like that. Maybe more mechanical depth in general.
F1 Manager has stellar presentation, especially the race-day experience is superb. Official licensing, cockpit cam, radio messages and great graphics. I’m enjoying the in-race management too and feel there is enough to it to be entertaining. The development side seems fine, you can choose your focus with both car parts and individual attribute sliders. Finances has been a big challenge, with the budget cap being the main thing to consider. The game definitely seems to reward careful planning.
I’m still at the tail end of the first season and have focused heavily on research for next year, so we’ll see how it pans out soon. The in-season development race has been a challenge year one (playing with both difficulties on Hard), and I’m hoping the AI continues to put up a fight. It hasn’t felt too easy so far.
Been playing a lot of Hades and swapping favourite builds with a work mate. It’s been over 100 runs, my progress has slowed down but I’m still slowly getting better. Maybe.
I ended up enabling ‘God mode’ to push me over the top. That mode (IIRC) gives you a guaranteed stat-boost with each run, and over the course of 20 or 30 hours it really helped me push forward.
Some Singleplayer Escape from Tarkov. It’s a mod for Tarkov that you can play offline, which replaces real players with bots. My god, finally I can enjoy the game without the damn hackers and the shitty netcode. Sure, it is not the same, but it’s fun enough to entertain me for a few hours in the evening.
I also played Ultima Online for about an hour. Never played it before and was curious. It certainly has charm but it didn’t age well, even in the enhanced version. The graphics are tolerable, but the controls are… difficult. I kind of want to play it some more though.
Lastly, I fooled around in the current “skate.” beta for an hour or two. In the last few playtests little had changed, but this time they added a whole new area, which was nice to explore. I am really excited for the full version, but I fear EA will go overboard with the microtransactions.
Started playing Remnant 2 with a friend of mine. Maybe 6h into the game and it seems great. We enjoyed the first game too and the second only seems to be better. Everything that was annoying has been fixed, as far as I remember.
Well the story does not seem that interesting, at least currently, but I’ll live
Veteran difficulty (next from standard) seems good for duoing, but it would probably be too difficult to solo when starting. .
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