Tag Archives: Planet Crafter

Planet Crafter – Wrecks and Portals and Over Abundance

We have blown through the age of abundance in Planet Crafter and have reached a point of over abundance. We have too much stuff.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

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

But Planet Crafter takes all of that a step further.

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

Then came the auto crafter stations and the drones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not just a cake, a birthday cake

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

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

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

Portal generator active, jump through the pink portal for exploration

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

A wreck in a wreck site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arcade machines in one of the wrecks

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

An arcade in our base rec room

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

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

A door opened, revealing a loot vault

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

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

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

Genetic trait storage

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

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

If you pet them you get genetic material on you…

But mammals are the last waypoint before completion of terraforming.

Almost there now

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

Planet Crafter – Teleportation, Explosions, and Exploration

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As I wrote in my previous Planet Crafter post, it is difficult to find a break point at which to sit down and write an update because new things come at you all the time changing the game and advancing your goal of terraforming the world you’ve landed on.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

It feels like you get a few technology unlocks every hour or so, and a big one often enough to change the dynamics a few times over the course of a week.

Last time I mentioned that we had just unlocked teleporter technology and was wondering how that might change things up. We do, in fact, have a network of four teleport booths setup on the planet now.

The teleporter in Clavius base

Ignoring the lessons of Larry Niven, the teleport booth was placed inside the base. But the likelihood of strangers arriving seemed pretty small. So far we had only seen notes from people who were quite clearly dead or off planet.

But a single teleporter, like a single video phone, is not very useful. It was time to go explore.

Exploration is very much a part of the game. Some times, when you’re building up new terraforming equipment, like our huge new T5 drills, and are trying to move the needle on some of your metrics, you can end up spending a bunch of time just working on your base or marshaling supplies.

If this were a carnival ride you could stick a few people in each of those cylinders

This is especially true where there is some useful new tech unlock getting close that will make your life better.

More inventory space? Yes please!

Eventually you need to get out and explore. So Potshot gathered up the materials to build another teleporter and we got on our jet packs and went out to find some place to connect to our transportation network.

By this point the atmosphere was sufficiently breathable that we were no longer constrained by oxygen. Our suits could now keep us supplied indefinitely. Likewise, we had picked up the water filter option, so we could refill our suits from any open water, and we had a lot of open water by this point.

The main constraint to just flying around was food, and water if we strayed too far from a place where we could resupply. But food lasts a long time relative to water, so we were able to fly pretty freely without needing to seek shelter. We also flew by many little one room life support pods that we had scattered about the map back when oxygen was the primary constraint.

So Saturday we went on a big loop of the map, which is feeling much smaller now that we are less constrained. We traveled for a while and settled on a big, open area, previously hidden by ice walls that have since melted.

An open valley to explore

This open canyon area the leads out to an ocean, ended up having a lot of locations to explore. It was near a spaceship crash site… and seriously, it seemed to be raining spaceships at some point because their wreckage is everywhere… that we set up our first teleport network connection.

And a good thing too, because there was a lot to haul home from this site which combined wreckage and what looked to be a past civilization that might have lived here. That bridge and those arches didn’t fall from space. Was this planet habitable at some previous time?

As we spread out the pick up what included a seemingly endless number of rocket engines… useful for many things, but there is a limit to our need… we found a water filled grotto area that had a whole under water complex of things to discover.

The grotto back in the canyon depths

Accessing the deep water area meant going down what we ended up referring to as the “deep hole” where Potshot nearly drowned due to being in third person view.

Looking up from a bit down the deep hole

As in EverQuest… didn’t I mention drowning there just yesterday… swimming in Planet Crafter is pretty awkward in third person view because the camera angles are severely limited. Basically, you cannot look straight up, which you need to do to swim straight up.

This is where we discovered that he had been playing the game in third person, over the shoulder view the whole time while I had been playing in first person view. Normally I prefer the over the shoulder view because it allows for situational awareness and some semblance of peripheral vision, which is important in game with combat. So in a game like EverQuest where I need to make sure there isn’t a cyclops wandering around, I stay in third person view. (Again, borrowing from yesterday for illustration.)

Fippy Darkpaw! We meet again! And in third person perspective!

I had not worried about this in Planet Crafter because there hasn’t been anything like combat so far. (We’ll see what happens when the frogs start running the place.) In fact I had only just discovered the night before that there was an option besides first person view. You change views by clicking on the middle mouse button, which is the mouse wheel button, something I always forget is even a thing, which toggles you between the two perspectives.

So we exchanged that bit of information and swimming overall because less of a traumatic experience.

Still, I almost drowned because it is a bit of a labyrinth down there and I got lost and couldn’t find my way out… and while oxygen isn’t a problem above water, it still is when you go diving. Fortunately I was cautious and had a couple of oxygen bottles on me for emergency use.

Our explorations also got us to the first of the Warden Keys, which are scattered around the planet, but which need a special chip to be able to see. You get the first one free then have to get the upgrade to find more.

The first Warden Key location

This also led us to a cave with yet another spaceship… though this one appeared to be intact rather than splattered over the landscape.

A ship that might still fly

We couldn’t get to the ship. It is floating out in a big open area beyond our ability to reach. But it being there at least implies we’ll get getting to it some day.

In addition we picked up the ability to make explosives along the way. There were a number of blocked passages throughout the game that said you needed to blow them up. Now, with bombs in hand, I set out to do so.

I messed up a a bit on the first try. You have to position yourself so when you drop the explosive charge… which seems like a bad thing to do, but whatever… it lands in the right place, because you can’t pick it up again, you can only activate it which turns on the five second timer.

Still, I managed to clear some stuff out.

Blocked passage with the bomb set

And then boom.

Passage soon to be clear

The explosives do not harm anything but the stuff flagged as susceptible to damage. (Which I assume includes me, so I got clear.) So the ship that was in sustained no damage even if the stuff blocking the passage was obliterated.

Some of these opened up to doors that required key cards. Others opened up to new areas and wrecks to salvage.

How did this ship even get in here

That in turn led to more salvage operations and more stuff to haul and more rocket motors to store.

Meanwhile, on the terraforming front we reached the fish stage of planetary life, which meant building aquariums and fish spreaders. Then the amphibians showed up and our front yard was taken over by what I refer to as the “blue frog group.”

But we just keep adding things to make the numbers go up.

The numbers… they go up

That has led to further reconfiguration of our main base, which now has more storage and drones… we unlocked drones… which can auto-harvest and keep things supplied, like the auto-crafters, so we are just a hive of production.

The base as of this week

Finally, we reached the point where I could bake some cookies and a birthday cake.

Not just a cake, a birthday cake

It isn’t anybody’s birthday, but there it is, decorating our lab.

Nothing to report on Save Sync, which we continue to use to share a save file between us. It suits our needs and we haven’t messed up yet.

Planet Crafter – Rovers, Rockets, and Jet Packs, Plus More on Save Sync

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I will say this; Planet Crafter moves along at a brisk pace. It is also good about laying out the next objective for you and giving you a way to see how fast you are progressing.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

Unlike Valheim, which I will use for comparison as it represents such a staple of the survival crafter genre, with rather broad objective of slaying the current biome boss, Planet Crafter objectives are much more incremental.

Also, you’re not actually fighting mobs or bosses. Not yet at least, but who knows what awaits us? Instead you are really focused on simple survival and overcoming the constraints laid upon you by things like your oxygen supply and your need for food and water and the limits of your inventory space.

As noted though, the game very quickly points you in the direction of improving your situation. There are the first few resources to find then craft in order to replenish your water supply and give you a little more space in your inventory.

They you need to start building a base, because some of the new things you get need to be built in a shelter… and also because being inside a building supplies you with oxygen.

Your initial forays are short, because you cannot get to far from shelter, even with a couple spare oxygen bottles. Then you get some upgrades and you can go a little further and you start seeing more of the planet.

You end up getting a message terminal setup and you learn that you are there to terraform the planet as an alternative to a prison sentence. You’re there for the duration. It is also suggested that maybe you don’t want to build your base in a deep valley.

We started venturing further afield to explore wreckage, because rare materials are initially found there. Also food. For a while you’re living off of packaged food you find here and there. That starts to feel like a problem, but you can see on the unlock chart that a food producer is on the horizon.

To get there you have to engage in the upgrade cycle. You need power to get the terraforming machinery running. Your terraforming progress unlocks upgrades, some of which will speed up the process. But the new machines need more power, and while your power options are some of the new unlocks, those need new resources as well.

Meanwhile we have left a series of little baselets around, pit stops for oxygen, and have learned to carry the 3-2-1 combo of materials; 3 iron, 2 titanium, 1 silicon. That will make a pod and a door and give you a place to replenish your oxygen.

In exploring we decided on a place at the top of some bluffs overlooking an expanse of rolling dunes on one side and some canyons on the other. We didn’t undo our starter base or the couple that sprang up along the way, but here is where we decided to settle.

One of the big discoveries was the vehicle bay that let us build a rover.

The initial rover

I was disappointed to find that it isn’t a shelter with oxygen. A pressurized rover is an upgrade. We had some more work to do to get to that. And the rover isn’t that great of a transport option when you have jet packs.

We unlocked those before the rover, and I even made a jet pack pretty early. I just couldn’t figure out how to use it.

Double tap and hold the space bar. That lights the pack and then you are hovering.

Potshot throwing up dust in a hover

After that, you just keep the spacebar down and move around like normal… which sounds a bit awkward, but you get used to it pretty quickly. That felt as fast, if not faster than the rover… we still need to do a speed test… and the jet pack gets upgrades and its speed is affected by other item upgrades, so pretty soon we were just flying around.

Much faster than walking, so our area of exploration expanded.

We also were making consistent progress on terraforming. We had enough heat and atmosphere to get water, which quickly pooled up in the low portions of the map, including where our original spawn point and base were.

Our base, now under a lake

You can go under water in your suit… you can drive the rover under water it seems… but equipment doesn’t run under water for the most part. So it was good that we moved to high ground.

The big melt also opened up new areas on the map that had been blocked by ice. That brought us ready access to what were rare resources. Potshot setup mines at new locations to get us a ready supply of things like uranium. We also found some new resources.

Zeolite – Rare and gating… and then it wasn’t

For hauling the rover turned out to have its uses. We got upgrades to expand its inventory and Potshot found that you can put an empty rover in your pocket essentially.

The rover, just another item in my inventory

You fly it on out to the mine using your jetpack, deploy it there, fill it up, then fly back to base and use the vehicle bay to summon it home.

More supplies enabled more structures which increased terraforming which unlocked more things. It felt like we were putting up satellites pretty quickly once we had supplies going… and satellites include things that boost terraforming.

Rocket on the gantry ready to launch

It is a little strange that you have to stand at the top of the gantry to press the launch button… where is OSHA when you need them… but it is a game.

Big red launch button next to the rocket body

Overall, progress is so regular that it is a bit difficult to pick a spot at which to stop and write a post about the game. I have hit that point half a dozen times, and then something else interesting unlocks. Do I write about moss or plants or trees or the beehives or the butterflies in the biodome or when our base gets redone? Our base has seen a few generations of upgrades.

The base as I write this… could be different tomorrow

That picture was taken from the top of the rocket gantry. You can, if you look at the picture before it, see the base has changed.

I think transport might be my milestone. We were walking in my first post, using the jetpack in the next, and just before I started writing this we unlocked the teleporter.

Teleportation will soon be a thing

We’re going to need some more fusion generators I bet. Back to hauling resources… until we can teleport them.

While the pace of advancement has made chronicling our adventure a bit of a challenge, overall it has been pretty good. If you like this sort of game… and what sort of game is it now… then you could certainly do worse.

Looking towards the future… or a cave… one of the two

Save Sync

Meanwhile, since the two are currently linked in our process, an update on Save Sync.

So far it has worked very well for Potshot and I, though I suspect that it favors our particular play styles and time budgets.

During the week we tend to play at different times. I will sometimes log in for a bit before work or just after work, which is early in the evening. Potshot, when he is home, seems to log in at lunch and later in the evening.

For that it works very well as we are essentially handing off the save.

When we play together one of needs to be logged in and then send the other an invite code for the game so you can join on their version of the save with updating your own local copy. The person who is holding the save needs to stay on so long as you are both online.

We have yet to screw up the save, though not for lack of trying.

At one point the game was balking and we logged out. I had been holding the save, but Potshot started it back up. However, I also started up on the save, forgetting to join via code, something we only discovered when we were supposed to be in the same room in the base and couldn’t see each other.

Oh great, a fork in the save! We decided to preserve Potshot’s branch since he had been building and I had only been hauling some supplies.

I quit out, at which point the shared save was update to my branch. Then Potshot saved in game and logged out, and the shared save was updated to his branch.

Everything was fine. Disaster was averted. But you could see how this could get really screwed up if people are not careful.

Save Sync also has the annoying quality of showing up as the game you’re playing in Discord. I spent some time trying to get it to stop showing up and failed. But having flipped a few switch on Steam and Discord to suppress the game’s visibility, I did manage to get Discord to show when I was playing Planet Crafter rather than Save Sync when I was actually in game.

And that is the important bit. It doesn’t matter if we both have Save Sync open. But if one of us has loaded up the save, it is kind of a big deal for the other person to be able to tell you’re in game. (I tend to use Discord as my visual cue, but checking in Steam works as well. I just have to get on the right page to see it.)

So it works well enough for the two of us, so long as we communicate. But for a larger group… I’d really rather rent a server.

July 2026 in Review

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The Site

This month I am going to bring up Warp Point, a site that is attempting to bring back web site inter-connectivity of yore. The About section sums the project up as:

Warp Point is both a directory and old school webring collecting independent and personal gaming blogs and newsletters.

Its goal is to rebuild the homegrown personal networks that fansites fostered in the early days of the internet through affiliates and webrings.

That’s cool. I’m in favor of that. I signed up and they let me in. There is an entry for TAGN.

My entry on Warp Point

Cool beans. It hasn’t generated much traffic as yet… I suspect that at least one of the two referrals over the last month was me checking the entry on my phone and clicking on it… and the other was probably the site owner validating my entry… but the project is young and it is still developing. (Also, I will confess I haven’t clicked on any of the sites in the listings either. Maybe I should do that.)

There are the usual discoverability issues that have plagued the web since its inception. There are about 200 sites listed as I write this and you can sort the list alphabetically, reverse alphabetically, or by oldest or newest, but users lack the patience to parse anything that requires you to scroll down the page in my experience, so my blog, which is not on the first page of results no matter how you sort… or even when you click on the tags… and don’t ask my why I picked those four… so the likelihood of a random stranger stumbling over my site is pretty close to zero.

They do also have a web ring widget, which is very cool. However, it uses elements not allowed by WordPress.com hosted blogs, so I couldn’t get it to work here. I’ve sung that same song more than a few times over the last two decades.

There are also some barriers to entry. No Substack sites are allowed due to it lacking a strict “No Nazis” policy. (I hesitate to check how WordPress.com fares on that front, but I’m good for now I guess.)

And then there is a “No AI, No LLMs” barrier to entry as well, stated as such:

Finally, please don’t make us be the AI police. If you create text, imagery, or vibe code using generative AI, we ask you not to submit to the directory. Warp Point is meant to uplift human writers and artists, not the regurgitatations of LLMs.

This was what kept Tipa off the site. The struggle is real.

LLMs remain a divisive issue, and that has also spilled over into Blaugust, where the desire not to have to become the AI Police led to a middle of the road policy statement in the event announcement allowing that AI might assist one’s creative work but not substitute for one’s actual efforts manged to get some grumbling defensiveness from some sites who have gone in on LLM enhanced content as well as angry reactions from zero tolerance purists for whom any use is spitting in the face of human artists.

It turns out there is no answer that pleases everybody, and even the ambiguity of the middle is annoying. I tend towards the purist side of things, though more from larger scale problems than everyday plagiarism problem of LLMs. I fear much more so the influence it has on things like search. Google’s injection of an AI result at the top of their search returns page means most people won’t go further than that. And Google (or Microsoft) can 100% shift and weight what those results say.

Of course my example of personal butt hurt on this is the acronym “TAGN” for which this blog has been the top result for maybe fifteen years. Not bad for a scrub like me, somehow beating out Triaminoguanidine nitrate for so long. But last week it looked like somebody moved a level and when I put in TAGN on my work laptop and found the TAGN Group at the top, my explosive rival of all these years as a secondary mention, and zero mention of my blog at all in the AI response.

The result changes when I try it elsewhere or at different times. A lack of consistency is one of the many LLM flaws. Anybody defending LLMs when they get a different result from yours should be reminded that is a huge problem as well.

Overall the AI response from Google (or CoPilot if you’ve somehow stumbled onto Bing) is as often as not bad or wrong or otherwise incomplete and only getting worse as Google itself, and other companies spending money on search, figure out how to manipulate it for their own personal ends.

Which brings me back to Warp Point, because while it is in its infancy as a registry… some day I’d like it to allow me to search on the content of sites listed, so I can see which other sites might be writing about XBox layoffs or the Steam Machine… it also hearkens back to a time of curated lists and the way Yahoo was in its early forms. Granted, exploits and bots broke Yahoo while Google initially had a much better plan. But in a world where Google is abandoning the idea of search in favor of manipulated results, what else have we got?

This probably should have been a blog post on its own.

Anyway, welcome to July 2026 in review!

One Year Ago

There was a bit of a reminder of where we started out here on Independence Day.

The Steam Summer Sale for 2025 wrapped up. I did not buy anything, but I did sum up my gaming so far for the year.

Looking forward, we were warming up for another Blaugust. We had a pretty big lineup of blogs as the start grew near.

In WoW Classic we finally got the pre-patch for Mists of Pandaria Classic. I started some warm ups, including doing some pet battles. The we got the launch and were let loose on Pandaria. I was wandering about in the Jade Forest soon enough.

I was away when it happened, but I summed up the Viking funeral for the Innominate Palace Keepstar in 1DQ1-A, the long time home of the Imperium.

Elsewhere I had bought a jump freighter as the Imperium moved from Tenerifis to Insmother. I tried to sum up the new destinations for the alliances of the Imperium after we left Delve and Querious behind.

Asher was once again pushing us to get into capitals, supers, and titans, at which point I asked myself how badly I wanted a titan. Not really that badly as it turns out.

CCP introduced the Global PLEX Market to try and control/normalize the price of PLEX in EVE Online. They also started adding PLEX to some subscription packages. The company also laid out the road to Alliance Tournament XXI. I was keeping track of destruction by digging through the MER.

My journey to Mordor to witness the fall of Sauron in LOTRO had reached its goal and I was knocking about post-fall. I then summed up the whole journey in a post with links to the whole series. I also took a side trip to review the state of legendary items, which were less annoying than they once were… but they were still annoying.

Meanwhile, SSG was updating their LOTRO roadmap for the year and we reached the 30 day notice mark for the life of the soon to be closed 32-bit servers.

We were messing about in Enshrouded, exploring the Thralls of Twilight update. That included exploring a couple of the new night sanctums.

In the face of the popularity of The Heroes Journey I wondered why EverQuest needed to be the way it was.

RimWorld released its Odyssey expansion, which I jumped into.

Finally, Tom Lehrer passed away, a huge influence on my humor and outlook on life.

Five Years Ago

There was the usual Steam Summer Sale. When it ended it turned out that I actually bought a few titles. That led me to sum up what I had played so far in 2021.

At home we were still binge watching TV despite there being a lull in the pandemic. We watched Community, Hacks, Manifest, and The Kominsky Method.

My wife and I completed Pokemon Go Fest 2021, in part because the cut the price to $4.99.

Lord of the Rings Online launched the Shadowfax and Treebeard special servers for a fast or a slow run through the game’s content. I was also on about how much stuff ends up in my bags when I start a new character in LOTRO due to my having been around the game since launch and owning all the expansions.

The instance group was into Burning Crusade Classic and finally creating a guild tabard. We finally had some gold, in part because I was scarfing up thorium in Frostwhisper Gorge. Meanwhile, I was MIA from Outland leveling up alts back in the vanilla content due to the eased level curve and better traits.

Somebody once again claiming they could dictate what immersion meant to other people got me on a kick to explore what immersion meant to me. It is a complex and somewhat less than tangible topic, but I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. Middle-earth was one of my first stops on that exploration.

World War Bee was hitting its nadir, with a declaration that PAPI was going to take the summer off. But lots of people were taking the summer off it seemed as the PCU, which had kept around 30K most weeks, dropped down to 25K. Fraternity, however, was getting tired of the war and demanded and end to it, so PAPI came up with a plan to win in four weeks. CCP also said that scarcity would be over in Q4, which turned out to be a flagrant lie.

Anyway, this is what I wrote about EVE Online in July of 2021:

Then, past me, whom I really hate, wrote four freaking Friday Bullet Point blog posts that were each all over the map.

The first was about Crowfall shipping, RimWorld Ideology, some stats from the Burning Crusade Classic beta, and Minmatar Liberation Day.

The second mentioned the Steam Deck announcement, Pokemon Go anniversary items, the Diablo II Resurrected alpha, and the reserve bank keys coming to EVE Online.

The third was on about the New World beta, the Path of Exile expansion, EverQuest offering old items, and Blizzard’s big harassment scandal starting to come to light.

And the fourth carried on with MORE about Blizzard’s scandal, the Guild Wars 2 expansion, bards coming to Neverwinter, Crimson Desert failing to ship, and a panic about California having some power consumption recommendations for gaming PCs.

It was quite a July.

Finally, there was the traditional announcement that Blaugust was coming.

Ten Years Ago

Pokemon Go was everywhere after it launched. Everywhere.

I listed out the NBI Class of 2016. I haven’t gone to check how many survived the year.

Daybreak turned off the last PlanetSide server and the game was gone… though it lingered on the server status page for a while.

Daybreak did launch a pair of special event servers for EverQuest and EverQuest II. I was keen enough to go earn the special mount on the EQII server.

There was strange news for Turbine as their parent company, Warner Brothers, announced that they were transitioning into a mobile app development studio. We wondered what that meant for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

In Minecraft I was tinkering with maps and night renders while Aaron created a huge map room in game.

In World of Warcraft I managed to unlock flying in Draenor. Just in time too, as the 7.0 patch was already pre-loading. Soon the garrison gold mine would be turned off. And then it hit, bringing new features.

In EVE Online the Casino War was winding down. There was a Keepstar to chase, the alleged hellcamp, and some sovereignty exchanges in Pure Blind. That wasn’t really going anywhere though. We killed four titans in Okagaiken and blew up a CSAA just to show we were still fighting. But in the end we admitted defeat and began packing for our trek to greener pastures.

Our destination was Delve, ever the region that calls to Goons. But first we had to get through Rakapas. I was there for a bit before I ended up soloing my carrier down to our staging in Sakht, accruing the maximum about of jump fatigue possible.

I also hit 160 million skill points while the Blog Banter spoke of malaise.

Fifteen Years Ago

Google+ was already starting to become annoying. (At the end of that post I also link out to an article that predicts that social media in general, and Facebook specifically, will start to fade by 2014. If only. It just kept getting worse.)

I tried Civ World, the Facebook interpretation of the classic Civilization series of games. I didn’t like it.

In EVE Online, the results of the emergency CSM Incarna summit were released with CCP barely deigning to acknowledge any error in their ways. Hilmar will be Hilmar.

I hit level 50 in LOTRO, got into Eregion, and actually saw the door into Moria. Only a couple of years had passed since I bought the expansion. Gaff was ahead of me, as usual. Meanwhile, Isengard was in beta, but nobody was supposed to talk about it.

Getting lost… rules.

EA, BioWare, and their new Origin service got together and combined my accounts without bothering to mention they were doing it in advance. Just another day at EA as I understand it. Customers come behind their own convenience. Still, I was interested in their authenticator and how it stacked up against others.

Speaking of authenticators, SOE made one available as well that looked just like the Blizzard model. But they could not be swapped, one for the other. I got the official line from VASCO on that.

And on the EverQuest II front, they announced that they were going to revamp Freeport, which I took as a waste of time. (Plus, of course, Qeynos, ever the step-child in Norrath, got shoved off until later.) I am still not convinced that either revamp was worth the effort or the time spent downloading the assets. But I am not sure Beastlords were either. They seemed pretty broken when they launched.

The instance group wrapped up our last adventure in EverQuest II Extended. There were a number of ways the game wasn’t right for us. It wasn’t just the ugly mounts.

The pending closure of Star Wars Galaxies led to interest (and concerns) about SWG emulation.

But PlanetSide 2 news was coming.

I started playing Need for Speed: World, a driving MMORPG. It wasn’t a bad game with the right music playing.

Zynga helped reveal the two faces of Tobold.

And World of Warplanes was announced, which got me wondering if this might not be a spiritual successor to Air Warrior of old. [The answer to that was “no.”]

Twenty Years Ago

Twitter launched. This blog lasted longer than Twitter, because whatever that site is now, it sure as hell ain’t the Twitter we once knew.

Microsoft was talking about a device to challenge the iPod and denying they would ship an XBox 360 with an HD DVD drive. Being on the mark half the time is pretty good for them.

EA was trying to retain people by giving out more stock options and revising under water options while Take-Two Interactive was being investigated over stock grant shenanigans. Remember back when employee retention was a strategy in the video games industry?

The ESA announced they were downsizing their yearly E3 conference.

The Civ IV – Warlords, the first expansion for the title, came out on Windows,

Thirty Years Ago

The perhaps unfortunately named (and all the more so given the later harassment scandals) CUC International purchased Blizzard Entertainment parent Davidson & Associates and Sierra Online, which became the heart of the new CUC Software. The company later became Cedant Software, Havas Interactive, and eventually Vivendi Games.

Most Viewed Posts in July

This list of the most popular posts for the month is a reminder that I don’t write ranty posts about EVE Online for views. I would have to extend this list to fifty to include my two ansiblex nerf posts. Also, Windrose, Pokemon Go, No Man’s Sky, and Stardew Valley… that is where you go for popularity I guess.

Game Time by ManicTime and Nintendo

Something of a spread of games for me this month. As noted along the way, I started the month with some games and ended with other.

Stardew Valley – 57.92%
- Switch 2 – 40.5%
- PC – 17.42%
Windrose – 10.14%
Planet Crafter – 10.27%
No Man’s Sky – 6.41%
EVE Online – 5.80%
Civilization II – 4.30%
R.E.P.O. – 2.23%
Stars Reach – 1.61%
Forza Horizon 6 – 1.21%
LOTRO – 0.07%
World of Warcraft – 0.04%

Stardew Valley tops the list and this may be the first month since I started tracking that a console title came out on top. I guess I am getting some use out of that Switch 2.

EVE Online

Not much going on for me. I even let my PI lapse. Just not feeling it at the moment and CCP being all about their shooter and plans to nerf null sec once again hasn’t helped.

I did start off exploring the new player experience, but that got dull very fast. The company has gone back to the “we’re going to present the game as having story and narrative for an hour” sort of thing, which has failed in the past… but why not waste some more time proving it again?

No Man’s Sky

I finished the swarm event. That was a thing. And then I finished it again on a second save and found that doing so really doesn’t get you anything when rewards for expeditions are shared across saves.

Planet Crafter

A new thing this month. Late this month even, so not much to say about it. We will have to see how far that goes, but it has been fun so far. As I mentioned in the post about it, we’re also testing out Save Sync in the process.

Pokemon Go

We had the 10 year anniversary event which worked out pretty well. But I am still mostly focused on earning the required 50 platinum medals needed to see me through to level 80. There are a lot of other tasks along the way, but that one is a blocker to leveling up at all at this point.

Level: 75
XP Progress: 89.8% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
Tasks for Level 76
- XP: Done
- Platinum Medals: 36 of 38
- Defeat 100 Team GO Rocket Grunts – DONE
- Explore 300 km – 252 of 300km
- Catch 200 Pokemon in a single day – DONE
Pokedex status: 936 (+1) caught
Pokemon I want: Basculegion
Current buddy: multiple as I work on parallel buddies

Stardew Valley

I have three saves of this running. There is the one with my daughter and I that has made it into spring of year 2, there is my other Switch 2 save that is in winter of year 1, and then I have been playing a bit off and on with my Steam PC save, which is in fall of year 1. And combined this is where I spent most of my gaming time in July.

Windrose

We made it to the swamp. The swamp, however, is the end of the road for Windrose currently. They have a new biome in the works, but once we defeat the swamp boss we’re done. However, we got distracted before we made it to the boss. He’ll wait, I’m sure.

Coming Up

No Man’s Sky will be hitting the ten year mark, so I expect some celebrations and events.

EverQuest Legends launched earlier this week. I am tempted by that, but perhaps not as a mid-week purchase. Let the real enthusiasts find the day one bugs. There has already been a stability patch I hear. We shall see what the weekend brings.

Stars Reach will hit early access mid-month. I am interested to see how that pans out given how little game there really is there.

It seems that Potshot and I are suddenly into Planet Crafter. Expect more on that front.

My daughter and I will no doubt carry on with Stardew Valley.

I’ll hit a major milestone in EVE Online at the end of August.

And, of course, it is Blaugust tomorrow.

Planet Crafter and Save Sync

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When did I even buy Planet Crafter? Why did I buy it? Steam says I bought it back in November of 2025, purchasing it when I grabbed Forza Horizon 5, which had been marked way down to tempt the last few of us in its target demographic before Forza Horizon 6 came out I suppose.

And is it Planet Crafter or THE Planet Crafter? It seems to be called both at various locations.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

Anyway, I got online on Sunday afternoon after helping move a couple couches and a host of other furniture pieces, to find Potshot online and playing Planet Crafter.

It was on sale and I think he saw that I already owned it.

Anyway, rather than getting back to Windrose, where we were rapidly reaching the end of the current content, we opted to give Planet Crafter a shot.

It offers online co-op play in the traditional “one person creates the game and holds the save and you can join them when they’re online” approach. That is fine and Steam provides the infrastructure to handle that, so I can see why a lot of titles go that route.

Our group tends to prefer titles where you can rent a server, first made really popular by Minecraft, but embraced by other titles like Valheim, where you can have the persistent shared world of an MMORPG where the group can log in when they have a mind to, without having all of those annoying strangers messing things up.

The problem with the shared save file is that you hold the save file you don’t want to run ahead of the rest of your group… see my posts about playing Stardew Valley co-op with my daughter… so you might not play as much, while if you don’t hold the save file then getting to play means waiting for the person who holds it.

But a lot of the time when we play things together it is somewhat opportunistic. One of us gets online, sees somebody else is in the game we share, and jumps in to play as well. If you don’t start playing then others won’t be enticed. This is kind of how some of our co-op adventures, like Raft or Baldur’s Gate 3 ended, with the save sitting stagnant because one of us didn’t want to play ahead so we never played at all.

Anyway, for the moment we were on together. Potshot, who had done the tutorial, started a game and sent me an invite code and I… who installed the game just then and had never played… joined on it. We were soon on an orange tinted alien world.

Potshot out in the world

We had one little lander pod to work from, which had a small storage crate and a simple crafting station. Outside was the alien planet, littered with resources as these things tend to be in such games, and we had to go outside and start collecting things to first enhance our gear and then to terraform the world.

You have to manage three resources to stay alive food, water, and air.

For food you have a few packages meals and can find more, though eventually you’ll need to grow food. And your need for food is on a pretty slow cycle. You can go a long stretch between meals.

Water you can make at the crafting station from the ice you can find on the planet. Your hydration level goes down faster than your need for food, but it still isn’t a constant nag or anything.

Air, however, that is always a ticking clock for you. Standing in the lander pod your fine, but as soon as you exit your air supply starts ticking down. You start with a suit capacity of 100 units of air, and that goes by pretty quickly. So there is a lot of running out of the pod, collecting some stuff, then running back.

You can create air bottles from the resources outside which will refresh your air supply on the go, but those take up an inventory slot and, as with so many such titles, inventory management is on the list of your initial challenges. You have just a few inventory slots and you need to collect resources when you go out, but resources don’t stack. If you need two iron for something, that is two inventory slots.

The game knows what it is about and sets you some initial goals to begin the long process of mitigating storage as a critical limitation.

Your initial task list

You spend a time initially on just survival. Par for the course for survival crafting titles. Then it is time to start on a bit of infrastructure. Potshot put up the first habitation pod for us.

Our starter home

The habs are nice because they are automatically another air zone you can duck into if you’re running low. They are also hilarious because both of us have ended up far afield and our of air, at which point building one is the logical step. But they don’t come with a door. You have to build the hab and then build the door to get in. I have had a couple of panic moments with air dwindling while I find that last item to craft the damn door.

Eventually we started hitting things to build that required resources that were not just laying about on the plains around us, either loose or in the occasional storage container.

These are a thing

Those often have some other goodies, like additional food packets or seeds or such, but we were missing raw materials for some of the other things we could otherwise craft. So our eyes fell upon the wrecked spaceship thing on a hill overlooking our little base.

The wreck on the hill from our first base

The wreck, as we had hoped, has stuff for us. But it was also dark in the wreck and we hadn’t built the flashlight module and I damn near got lost in the wreck because I couldn’t see where I was going.

Having a light improved that experience and we found new materials and even an email terminal.

They had a dedicated terminal for email?

Once we had explored that we started to figure out that we would only get new tech to build if we started terraforming the planet. That meant building things and managing power and finding more resources, and more resources meant going further afield to find additional wrecks and occasional harvestable goodies.

Finding where aluminum spawned was a big deal

We carried on for over three hours and managed to get ourselves to the point where we had turned the sky blue.

Welcome mister blue sky

That is basically the first stage of terraforming achievement, turning the sky blue. There is still lots to do and we’ll likely carry on. But it was a fun afternoon of us bumbling around and figuring things out. Not too difficult of a puzzle, but enough to keep us entertained and feeling like we had accomplished something.

As for carrying on, I wrote at a bit of excess above about the save file problem for this sort of co-op title. As part of this we are also experimenting with a utility on Steam called Save Sync.

What this does is let you share the local save file with one of your Steam friends so that at the end of session you will both get a local save for the current game. If somebody then plays a bit on their own, the updates get saved to both of you. If you’re playing on the save and the other person shows up, you send them an invite code like you were the one holding the save and then you play co-op.

Anyway, this is in testing for us and so far it seems to work. Like so many other things, Save Sync is in early access. I found it pretty aggressive initially in setting Steam to launch on system start and auto launching itself. It is all a bit fussy about you quitting.

I get that it wants to be there to make sure your saves are all in sync, but I also find apps that assert the whole “I must always be running for the good of the universe” attitude a bit irksome. I know, you want to protect me from myself… but have you met me? There is no hope on that front.

So that was our new venture for the week. We’ll see how it holds up.