Who says money cannot fix things?

And the money was worth being able to spend some quality time with our daughter.

But when you have a shiny new console, you also kind of want something new and/or cool to play on it.  I mean, I already had games on the Switch Lite and being able to play Pokemon on the TV has its appear.  But one tends to want something that will show off the new hardware a bit more than, say, the port of the 2004 title Pokemon LeafGreen.

The latest version of Mario Kart sprang to mind, but I wasn’t keen enough to spend $80 on that.  (People are bitching because GTA VI might be $80, but Nintendo has already crossed that barrier and then charges me $40 a year to play online.)

In digging through the store I found No Man’s Sky.  There is a version specially for the Switch 2 and it was on sale because the game is always on sale when they do a big update or expedition.  So I grabbed it, downloaded it, and went to go play on the TV.

The No Man’s Sky opening

This is the third copy of the game I have purchased… but I have purchased all three (Steam, GoG.com, and Switch 2) when they were on sale, so I have now paid maybe $12 over the $60 list price.  The game is worth it.

And the game was fine.  All that it is on the PC, it is on the Switch 2.  Only both physically bigger when it is on our TV and a bit smaller because my PC monitor is higher resolution that either our TV or the Switch 2 screen.

The controller took a bit to get used to.

I do not play NMS on the PC with a controller because I find the dual analog stick layout, where the left one is your aim and the right is where you are looking, to be awkward.  Also, aiming it annoying with an analog stick once you’re used to the precision afforded by a mouse.  But I am sure you get used to it, that it all becomes ingrained once you play enough.

I started the main campaign and went through all the usual thing.  I had wanted to try the expedition on it, but on the evening when I purchased with Switch 2 it has not yet been made available to that platform, which explains a comment I made about the expedition in a post last week.

I did not have any high expectations beyond the game being the game on another platform and fully expected that whatever I did on the Switch 2 would stay there, cross platform play being a challenge for most studios.

But Hello Games is not most studios and on Friday night when I was digging around on various cross platform threads (I started with Stardew Valley and then just started going down the list because it was my mania of the moment) and found out that No Man’s Sky does support cross platform play (we all play in the same universe, which I guess I knew already), it even has a way to exchange saves between platforms.

I was intrigued!  So I went to the admin page they have for this and setup both my Steam and Nintendo accounts so that they would be able to exchange saves.

There are detailed instructions at that link, but I will say that you need to pick which save to make available on other platforms, which is easy enough.

Having had problems with my long running main save before, I decided to experiment with the new save I rolled up just for the expedition.  I marked it to be shared and was told it was successful.

Cross platform save initiated successfully

I then went over to the Switch 2 and did, in fact, see that save available.  However, I couldn’t use it because it had been marked as incompatible.

Well, that didn’t work

This is the problem with cross platform is that the PC versions tend to be updated ahead of the consoles as Sony, XBox, and Nintendo need to vet and approve the updates, which they do at their own pace.

So I decided to try it the other way around.  I marked that first save on the Switch 2, making it available for cross-platform save access… and it worked.

I went back to the PC and brought up NMS and there is was on the list of saves to which I had access.  You have to click the icon to download it and once you’re done it has to upload again, but it was there.

It was there and it worked.  I was able to log in and do the next couple of starting quest tasks before deciding that I had done the whole “build a base” thing before and that it wasn’t all that interesting the first time I did it, so I wasn’t keen to do it again.

So I jumped in and out of my Radiant Pillar to create a save point and then exited that save and uploaded it.  I then went back to the Switch 2 and downloaded it and verified that I was where I had left off on the PC.

There is some room to exploit in that mechanism… but there are also tools out there to edit your save, which is kept locally, so why bother?  You are only cheating yourself.

All cool, experiment done.  I went back to just playing NMS on my PC.

Coincidentally, this is about when I noticed that my missions for the Countermeasures milestone in Phase 3 of Expedition 22: The Swarm seemed a bit off.  While I had clearly started off as a member of The Sages, as noted in my getting started post, and I and my ship were still clearly a bright green in color, something was off.

My green outfit and green ship… which means I am on Team Sage, right?

However, my missions seemed to favor the Weavers.  As noted in the follow up post, why would a Sage run a mission that was bad for the Sages… or one that was only good for the Weavers.

Purge mission rewards I was being offered

When I put up that post several people said I had to be in the Weavers because those were the missions they were getting as Weavers.  So my operating theory became that I had somehow changed faction, I just wasn’t sure how.

And then I thought about the whole cross save thing.  Did the Switch 2 save change me to Weavers?  Well, there was one way to at least test the idea.  I went back to the Switch 2 and started up a new save for the expedition, which was now available on the platform.

Selecting the expedition fresh start

I went through the little questionnaire, at the end of which I was assigned to the Weavers.

There it is, Weaver

I have seen some debate as to how you get assigned a faction, but it appears predetermined once you get the update that opens up the expedition.  (How to change your faction and where that is stored is a different story.)

I was a blue Weaver on my new Switch 2 save.

Feeling Blue Now!

Touching a save from the Switch 2 on my PC changed my faction without any notification, so now I am a green Weaver on my main save.

Green on the outside, blue on the inside I guess

I hope that doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass at some later date.  But for now I have accidentally ended up on the winning team… though we were not even halfway done when I checked in last night.

My expedition so far:

• TAGN – The Swarm Update Arrives in No Man’s Sky
• TAGN – No Man’s Sky and Getting Started with Expedition 22: The Swarm
• TAGN – No Man’s Sky Expedition 22: The Swarm – Why Would I Run These Missions?

Related:

• Hello Games – The Swarm: Introducing Update 6.4
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.41 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.42 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.43 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.44 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.45 patch
• Hello Games – The Galactic Atlas
• Hello Games – Cross-Save Admin
• Reddit – NMS Swarm Expedition 22 In 2 HOURS – (Almost) Full Guide

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

This is largely because it struck me as a nice little farming and social simulator, but that wasn’t enough to really pique my interest.  Nobody told me it had blackjack and hookers.  Or, blackjack at least.

Get me to the tables!

I haven’t made it that far yet, but I watched the Honest Game Trailers for it that I had somehow missed and it spilled the beans on that.

My daughter and I started on our third play session in the game this past Sunday, that being out designated day, and I was able to join in with the Switch 2 and the game running on the TV, which among other things meant I did not need to wear my glasses.

I mentioned the mines being a problem as well, not being very bright on the Switch Lite screen, but that sort of glossed over the fact that I was completely unaware that the mines and exploring them and harvesting ore was a thing.

And fighting things.  Granted, mostly small things… though still deadly… but I had no idea that combat was a requirement.  Then again, according to Steam, the last time I played the game was in early 2017, so it might not have been a thing back then.

But my daughter has played a lot of the game in the last year, so was guiding me along.

You don’t get a sword until you get to the mines.  There Marlon of the adventurer’s guild meets you and you have your own little “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this” moment as he hands you a rusty sword.

Not quite the right line, but close

Once we were in I ended up with a journal entry to get to level 40 we spend some time getting into the mines.  Each level is relatively small, but the ladder down to the next level is often hidden.  You have to break rocks to find it.

Fortunately I had gone to Pierre’s and had spent the money for the backpack upgrade.

Pierre’s in town

Pierre is charging 2,000 gold for that upgrade, which feels pretty steep… and chicken coop is $4,000 and makes you money… but the irritation of dealing with constant inventory management choices… was not interesting game play to say the least.

I’ll have to save up for the next backpack upgrade.  Pierre needs to make a living, I get it.  But some of his prices make me want to get that Joja Mart membership.

See what no local competition does to prices

We went in and fought our way down.  You get an elevator stop every five levels down, so it is worth the effort to make it to that fifth level further on with each venture so you can pick up where you left off.  (I try not to think to hard about the elevator thing.  It is just a save point sort of convenience.)

At 20 we were rewarded with a chest that coughed up a sword upgrade.

A steel smallsword! I can discard my rusty sword!

Things got a little dicey as we went further down, but we got in a rhythm of just scrambling to find the next ladder down and avoiding the mobs as best we could.  That got us down to level 40 after a couple of day cycles, and I was able to go find Marlon and join the adventurers guild.

The other thing I worked a bit on while we were together was fishing.  I went off and did that while she reconfigured out farming plot.  There is a right way and a wrong way apparently.

The fishing mini-game was immediately frustrating to me, largely because it has something of an inverse progression when it gets easier as you advance.  So when Willy hands you a bamboo pole and says “Good luck” you’re at the steepest part of the slope to fishing mastery.

Which I guess is true to real life… but this is a video game and being immediately bad at something and finding zero success does tend to put you off.

Also, I started this on the Switch Lite and the cues for reeling in a fish were so small on that screen as to be effectively invisible to me.  So I had previously fished for a bit and then just gave up.

This is apparently such a known issue that the game will circle back on fishing, in the form of Willy landing on your doorstep one morning pointing out that you appear to have not done much fishing.

I couldn’t help but notice…

First, has he been spying on me?  Second, it is 6am.  While the fact that I wake up at that time is the most close to real life aspect of the game, and that fishermen tend to be early risers, it is still a bit weird that he is at your door waiting for you.  Also, he is blocking you in so you have to speak with him.  The game is pretty forceful when it feels you need to hear something.

Willy on the spot at 6am

After a few more boxes of text he ends up giving you the training rod, a fishing pole for beginners that makes it easier to catch fish, but which limits you to common fish.  This helped… though perhaps not as much as having the game on a screen bigger that the Switch Lite… or having a controller with the rumble feature so that, in addition to the tiny exclamation point and faint sound you get when a fish is hooked, you also get a small jolt from the controller.

Sunfish caught, op success!

However, I do want to gripe a bit about the fishing mechanic, if only because it makes me want to go put together a post ranking the various fishing mechanics in games.

Stardew Valley favors the mini-game approach, where once a fish is hooked you need to press the Y button to keep a bar over the fish in the mini-game.

A fish on the line, time to play the game

The fish icon moves up and down the vertical indicator and pressing the Y button moves the green segment, which you must keep the fish within, upwards, while letting go of the Y button causes it to move down.

This is not the worst fishing mechanic in the world… I have some opinions about Valheim’s stamina based mechanic… but it does require the player to work on a fine touch, because it is very easy to over correct and get into a player induced oscillation scenario where the bar is going up and down like a piston in a combustion engine.

This is similar to the fishing mechanic in Palworld, which I described some time back, only Palworld is on a horizontal axis.

Catch dat fish!

Holding the fish in the zone advances with tan bar to the right and once it fills up the full way you have caught the fish.  Of course, failing to hold the fish in the zone causes the bar to drop and if it hits the bottom then the fish gets away.

When you start out with the initial bamboo pole the green zone that you move is at its smallest, growing as you level up fishing or with better fishing poles which can also have bait and bobber enhancements, so all things equal catching the same specific fish grows much easier as you advance.

I assume that there are more difficult fish out in the world to catch, ones that move more actively up and down the UI, but the higher the skills the easier it gets.

Otherwise our co-op game has made it through spring to the first summer and things are much better on the Switch 2.

EVE Online nerds harder

But every once in a while there is something about them that makes them worth something more than a passing mention in a Friday bullet points post.  This is one of those months, so I’ll get the usual formalities out of the way, which includes where to get the report.

• CCP/Fenris – May 2026 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP/Fenris – May 2026 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – May 2026 MER Thread

Here is what CCP chose to highlight

• Following April’s large-scale battles, Mining Value has stabilized, while Destruction Value has declined and Production Value has increased slightly.
• ISK Faucets increased by 26%, with Bounty Prizes and Commodities being the primary drivers of the increase.
• The largest battle of the month took place in Pochven, where players fought over an irreplaceable Fortizar.
• Mineral Price Index increased again month-to-month.

Seems reasonable.

Over on Reddit somebody posted the money supply chart from the MER which they had marked up to point out that the amount of ISK in circulation in the game had nearly doubled in the last 4.5 years.

I am going to steal their chart, because it is a good chart.  There is nothing wrong with the chart.

The May 2026 Money Supply Chart Annotated

Where I have a problem is that the title of the post pointed out this growth and suggested that CCP/Fenris needed to do something about this.

And then there were all the comments (you can read the whole thread here) which went immediately to what I think of as “jealousy mode,” where people get in and complain that some play style other than their own… wormhole space, Pochven, null sec ratting, whatever… is too damn lucrative and that is why the ISK supply has grown.

Not one comment, when I read this on Saturday morning, asked what I thought should have be part of the initial premise, which is why this growth in ISK is bad, and who it is bad for.  What is the actual problem here, besides the line going up?

Instead it was just generally accepted that this situation was bad and needed to be dealt with somehow… preferably by nerfing the income of those other people.  When I added a comment to the thread pointing out that the argument was incomplete, that the author had failed to establish WHY this was bad, why the company should spend time addressing it, it got zero traction.  Nobody was interested in that.  They were only interested in jumping to their pet theory of who should be nerfed.

I know, welcome to Reddit.  I would have been better off joining in and… I don’t know, maybe blaming events.  Do you see how much the commodity market spikes when the company has events?

Here’s the thing; When I look at that chart, my gut reaction is that this seems to be a symptom of a problem.  I am inclined to accept the need for a fix at a gut level at least.  The thing is, I am not sure if it really is.

My immediate reaction is that of somebody who has played online games… MUDs in the 90s and MMORPGs since EverQuest… and has seen economies wrecked and currencies devalued while new players still get drops worth a copper.

The freshman Econ answer is that if there is a lot more money in circulation then the competition for goods should be driving prices up.  Have prices been going up in New Eden since 2022?

Absolutely.

And has that been because of more ISK in circulation?  That is a more difficult question.

Certainly we saw mineral prices spike to all time highs since 2022.  I mean look at that peak in January of 2025.

January 2025 – Mineral Price Index over all time

However, that wasn’t because of ISK.  That was due to CCP and its hare brained ideas about how to run the economy, which led to the starvation era when they crippled mineral output and then spent several years trying to put the whole thing back together again.  That peak is because they thought putting isogen only in low sec made them very smart.

So that is, in fact, a case of too much ISK chasing too little supply… but only because CCP put a strangle hold on supply.

So the supply and demand thing seems valid.  But the excess of ISK wasn’t the major contributing factor.

How about ships?  Certainly ships have gotten more expensive.  You could get a titan hull for 60 billion ISK back in 2018.  Now if I go shopping in S-Mart on the GSF forums it looks like I need at least 140 billion ISK to get a titan hull.  A pretty big increase.

This too though, this is because of CCP.  Back in 2018, when we were still in the cheap mineral era that Rorquals with excavator drones made possible (again, something CCP thought would be a great idea), a titan was pretty cheap largely because it was a T1 hull that just needed normal materials to assemble.

Then CCP changed that up, adding new materials to battleships, capitals, and super capitals, making them all considerably more expensive.  There was a point when the new materials were a bottleneck and demand was up… like right after the fight at M2-XFE where a whole bunch of titans went boom and you had to be in Pandemic Legion to get CCP to replace it for free due to server problems… when hulls were reported to be upwards of 200 billion ISK.

My own personal wallet balance has grown quite a bit since 2022.  I think I came out of World War Bee with about 10 billion ISK in cash and 5 billion ISK in Imperium war bonds.  I have 30 billion ISK in my wallet about five years later.  In part I made out when we moved from Delve to Insmother, which caused me to repackage and ship a bunch of hulls and modules to Jita to sell, many of which were purchased before the mineral changes, so I made a bunch of money just clearing my hangar.

So prices have changed… but that seems to have been more supply and resource driven than due to any

Finally, my third data point; PLEX.  PLEX has reliably gone up over time.  It was effectively 600,000 ISK way back in the day.

Current prices are around 2.25 billion ISK, relative

This is a bit confusing because along the way CCP did a 1 to 500 split to make PLEX the cash shop currency, removing Aurum, so that old screen shot of 300 million ISK for a PLEX is actually 500 PLEX in today’s market, which is valued at around 2.25 billion ISK last I checked.

And the increasing price of PLEX has been due to demand, with more ISK chasing a limited amount of PLEX absolutely making the price go up.

But even PLEX has gone down in price recently.  It was hitting 6 million ISK per back in July of last year, but has settled back down to around 4.5 million ISK more recently, sales induced spikes not withstanding.

PLEX Price Chart – 16 APR 2026

Now, this is because CCP has take some action on the PLEX price front.  They unified the market so you could not longer use geographical market barriers to exploit the laziness of capsuleers, and they have injected more free PLEX into the game, which has… somewhat to my surprise… actually worked.  I am tempted to broken clock metaphors given CCP’s track record, but maybe they asked the economist they hired for EVE Frontier to help out.

Anyway, if the argument was CCP needs to do something about so much ISK because look at the price of PLEX… well, they have done something.  They just didn’t hit the ISK side of the equation.

But this is EVE Online and, if nothing else, it is different than the average MMORPG.

So where does that leave us?  Things have been more expensive… and things have been cheaper.  Some of that is no doubt due to inflation from the ISK supply, but the New Eden economy is a lot more sophisticated than Azeroth or most other virtual world economies.

The market in Jita should be studied more.  It acts like an economic text book where an increase in demand increases prices, but then increased prices bring in more supply and the market stabilizes.  Common in demand items often have a fairly narrow gap between the listing price and the buy order price, an indication of the market deciding on the value.

Things are both cheaper and more expensive in Jita depending on what is happening, and the ongoing rise in the money supply doesn’t seem to dictate an overall direction.

And then there is what that chart is really measuring, which is the ISK in the game on active accounts.  If you go away for 90 days and don’t log in, your personal stack of ISKies falls off the chart. When you come back again, it is included once more.

That explains the somewhat cyclical waves you see even as the line climbs slowly upward.  Expansions, events, major wars, those all bring players back or get them to activate alts which boosts the supply.  And then the people who came back for some free Omega time go away and things slip.

Finally, there is some evidence as to what happens when players do feel poorer.  When CCP was screwing up the economy a few years back in what I call The Year of Disappointment, when the starvation economy was in full string and capital ships were too expensive to undock… well, look how logins went in 2022.

Average players online May through September across four years

That is a serious dip, a dip worthy of other bad ideas from the company, like the null sec blackout.  That hit ISK sinks pretty hard… almost as hard as player logins.

There is a pretty clear problem if you make players feel poor, or like they cannot earn enough ISK to feel like they can afford to undock and put ships in danger.  Wars and destruction require players to feel like they can afford to commit.  Making the game more onerous just to get by… well, as often as people say EVE is like a second job, we don’t live in New Eden.  If things are fun people just stop logging in.

I don’t know.  The New Eden economy is complicated.  You could convince me that the rise in ISK over the last four and a half years represents a dire problem that needs to be addressed.  But you would have to show me some evidence to support it.  The fact that the ISK line is going up is not sufficient unto itself.

And even faced with evidence to support such an action I would advise caution, because making players feel like their poor… even if they are not… never seems to lead to good outcomes.

No Man’s Sky – The Swarm

First I used my main save, then when that was… complicated… I turned off multiplayer and started a new save for just the expedition.

Game mode selection, with expedition in the lower right

That ended up not being the huge difference I thought it would be, so actually went back to my main save and caught it up so that both saves were sitting at the current phase and milestone of the event, Countermeasures.

My phase three progress

Countermeasures is the first community-wide milestone, and this has slowed everything down.  There is no “finish the expedition in 3 hours” guide, because we all have to cooperate for a while as a mass, slowly advancing the progress bar.

For this milestone, you can run three types of missions, purge, restore, and sabotage.  However, there is a timer running that keeps you from running more than one of each of those missions more than once per six hour window.  That is my guess as I have seen the timer for the next mission as high as five hours.

Also, the three sides, Weavers, Royals, and Sages are all in a competition to be the ones to contribute the most to the milestone, which brings me to the missions.

When you summon the anomaly and enter, in the middle of the main area where one used to grab group missions is now an additional structure the Prismatic Core, which dispenses missions.

Get missions here

You click on it and it shows you which three missions, one of each type, are available plus some stats on how things are progressing… which is marred a bit on my screen as the background isn’t wide enough for my 3,440×1440 monitor.  But you can still see the stats.

The milestone status on June 15 at 15:00 UTC

The Weavers are out in front, but not by a huge margin.  The assigning of people to the factions seems to have been somewhat balanced and, while there are some Reddit rumors of being able to edit your save to make sure you’re on the winning side, nobody is running away with the competition yet.

So this means that I want to run missions to help my side.  But the mission choices currently… are not helping with this.

Restore missions are fine.  They advance all three factions equally for completion, so at least serve the purpose of getting us through the milestone.  I am for that.

Restore mission rewards

They also happen to be pretty easy most of the time.  The one pictured above involves mining some resources and delivering them to Specialist Polo in the anomaly.  When I get one of those I will always mine a bunch extra so when that mission comes up again I don’t even have to leave the anomaly.  I just walk over and hand him the stuff.

Harvesting some more Paraffinium for Polo

They are not always that easy.  Sometimes you have to go clean up some swarm debris on a specific planet.   But the anomaly reconfigures its exit so that you are in the correct system when you undock and can just jet on over, do the mission, then come right back.

So I am good with those.

Then there are sabotage missions, the rewards for which are currently… not good for me.

Sabotage mission rewards

So if I do that mission my faction gets dinged… and so do the Royals.  Well, that isn’t any good.  So I have been declining to do those missions when they are configured like that.  They might change up with each mission cycle, but I don’t log in often enough to check because… they are not all that exciting to do.

They tend to be finding a corrupted terminal and flooding it with resource… nanites if you have nothing else, and the game GAVE you 10,000 nanites for a previous task, so you have the nanites… and then you’re done.

Then we get to the purge missions, which also are not incentivizing me very well.

Purge mission rewards

So if I do that the Weavers get the benefit.  These are usually pretty quick, undock and do some space combat.  But why would I do this?  I suppose there is the argument that it at least gets the milestone over.  However, Hello Games made this a competition so forget that I guess.

So the milestone keeps moving forward, slowly, without much help from me.

Countermeasures Progress

So I plug away… on two saves no less… doing something for the Sages when  I can.

My green outfit and green ship… go Sages I guess

That is, when I can remember to log in and do them.  After doing the initial two phases of this expedition my play time has tapered off significantly.

Addendum: My working theory even as I was finishing up this post is that I have somehow become a Weave while remaining green in color, having started as a Sage.

Addendum 2: Wrote about what happened here.

Related:

• Hello Games – The Swarm: Introducing Update 6.4
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.41 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.42 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.43 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.44 patch
• Hello Games – The Swarm 6.45 patch
• Hello Games – The Galactic Atlas
• Reddit – NMS Swarm Expedition 22 In 2 HOURS – (Almost) Full Guide

Windrose – in Early Access

First, while it is my top title for time played so far this June, I am kind of playing at least five titles in rotation and my bandwidth for playing and blogging is generally about three titles deep… and one of those has to be EVE Online which, after more than 19 years, I have developed a pattern as to how I approach writing about it.  And EVE Online isn’t in the top three currently, so I end up with a bunch drafts queued up to work on, but then something else pops up and I realize a week later that I never quite got to a post or three.  It happens.  My routine is to try and get in one update post about any title I am playing regularly… and that hasn’t been working out.

Second, I have been a bit busy in real life.  June is always a chaotic month working for the state as the fiscal year starts on July 1 so we’re in the last minute budget/project planning cycle where I get a “what if we did this?” sort of question a few times a week… and always at the very end of the work day with a need for an answer by the morning.  Meanwhile, we have stuff in the air at home as well, so lots of distractions.

Finally though, I am also having a bit of trouble finding an angle to write about that interests me.  This is, in part, because if you pull back far enough Windrose falls into the co-op base building survival genre… the survival crafters as Tipa referred them the other day… and I’ve written about and played a lot of those over the last decade.  Valheim is the current prototypical title in the genre, but Minecraft counts as well, in addition to Enshrouded and Space Engineers and Astro Colony and Conan Exiles and probably a few others I am missing.  And that is keeping it to the private server crowd.  I could very easily argue that No Man’s Sky belongs in that list, or even Stars Reach in it current state, despite them being single universe titles, as they scratch the same itch.  So we I have only one post so far.

Yes, Windrose does have its own theme… pirates… in the Caribbean… but not “of,” because copyright, you know… and it is more quest/story driven than some of the titles in the genre, but there is also an underlying sameness that is making it feel somewhat less exciting than I might have expected.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some good stuff in the game.  I do like the bigger boat I ended up with after not too long into things.  You start with that bathtub sized craft, but quicky get sent to find a boat that has washed ashore, then need to round up some supplies to fix it and a crew to man it and then some cannons to mount on it, but once you’re there you are free to sail about.

The Cape Kvetch ready to… do things

The sailing is simplified.  Potshot setup the server so I am not sure of what the difficulty options are, but for us the wind doesn’t matter.  Unlike in Valheim, the wind is always strong and blowing at the optimum angle no matter which direction you are heading and you can set full sale and get your ship humming along to 19 knots, which is pretty fast in a world where you need to be really optimized for speed and racing to get much past 20 knots on wind alone.

And there are NPCs to fight, so you maneuver around to try and get a broadside hit on them.  If you batter them down sufficiently you can board… or you can just sink them and take whatever loot floats to the surface.  Boarding is more lucrative, but takes time.  Also, you have to keep an eye on how much damage your ship is taking and if you don’t have some repair supplies to hand, things can go badly for you.

Have you been gripped by a sinking feeling?

But then you go back to your base and put everything back together and carry on as before, because what good are you without a ship?

And for all the speed of you ship, 19 knots is still not very fast when measured against the size of even the abbreviated sea the game offers you, so you move by fast travel points, which exist at certain ports, or you can manufacture your own.

Meanwhile, content is gated through multiple progression paths.

There are levels… because why not?  Everybody loves levels?  Yes?  At least as a way to allocate attribute and skill points for your character, which impact how well you do in fighting on land or in boarding actions, and most of the progression combat is around that.

And then there is crafting, which follows the usual unlock patters when you find resources or recipes or just a thing in the world like a weapon, which once you have held it you can now craft it.

I struggled a bit with combat until Potshot pick up a halberd, a strength based pole arm with an AOE attack as you swing it, which helped me take on the multiple foes you run into.  Those dodos on the beach… they’ll totally gang up on you, so you need to be ready.

Weapons can be upgraded… need to be upgraded… to keep up with foes of increasing difficulty.  This past weekend we took a detour to an island and found it populated by level 12 creatures, which put them into the next tier of difficulty.  Even our weapons, upgraded as far as the first tier would get them, were not much good and we spend about 40 minutes getting our asses handed to us by three crabs and four undead.

Watch out, them crabs is murder

There are also guns, but guns of the period that are somewhat accurately modeled in that you get one shot and then have to fumble around to reload.  You also have to have gunpowder and shot to hand, though fortunately one size fits all so your pistol and your newly found musket have interchangeable ammo needs.

I avoided that complication for a while, preferring to close with my halberd and just smack things, until I picked up a musket with a bayonet.

If you’re close enough to stick ’em…

I started using that because it has a special thrust attack with the bayonet, in addition to being able to butt stroke mobs and shoot them at a distance.  Potshot has favored a blunderbuss up to now, which is a shotgun… but uses the same ammo at the same rate… so can sweep up a few mobs on an opposing deck if being a bit of a shorter ranged weapon.

Then there are boss fights.  The quest chain brought us up to face Thomas Richards, a no goodnik of some sort that had an MMORPG feel to the fight.

Specifically, when we first encountered him he was behind a gate.  We opened the gate and stepped in, which started him off, but I was standing in the doorway and an explosive attack knocked me out of the room just as the gate closed again to contain the fight, leaving Potshot solo for the first round.  He did not survive.  But we learned a few things about the fight, the first being to be in the freaking room so when the gate closes you’re not locked out.

Together, with the aid of health potions and bandaging (instant heals and heals over time) we were able to bring him down.

Richard Thomas has fallen, but he can get up if you use the shrine just outside the gate

That victory unlocked the foothills, which is the next biome, the ability to craft/upgrade past level 6, and opened up a couple of quests that led into this new area of the Caribbean.

That got us to some new locations with new resources that unlocked new upgrades and new things to build.

We have discover hardwood

Also, wolves… and goats.  Which kind of brings me up to date on where we are with Windrose.  Now to see if I can not fall behind again.