Caves of Qud : "Ego"

Go around the world, meet many interesting ...

"things?"

Finally got my starting position made out. In a game where your character gets deleted if you die once you play a bit more careful. So steady as it goes we actually got to lvl 9 ... tension mounts b/c after this losing it on a supermob that spawns out of nowhere or accidentally offending an NPC and having a whole village attack would be pretty bad.

So we just grinded out a few maptiles, its really tiny

Cleared out all nine districts in each of the tiles coloured in bright yellow in the pic. Exluding ofcourse the tile where the Joppa settlement is as attacking anything there, even a fish in a pond seems to make all farmers and npcs , merchants and other hostile ...

Thats true openworld for ya, sandbox : you are free to murder the whole town including the questgivers and antagonise the whole planet by being cursed after killnig someone you swore a blood (in this case water-)oath with .

The map continues to the right for about another 20% more so what we got covered so far is realy really small

We got lucky and zoned into a district with baboons or some type of monkey that was hostile and got about 125 xp each ... at that point a sudden feeling came over that the Praetorian preset might actually not do the game its due rights .. its like "almost too easy" but since we got to this far i guess we'll keep playing for a while from the looks of it there will be plenty to do and we can get a bit more into the mechanic before moving onto a herbalist ESPer-monk or maybe even a daring custom build.

We clear out the tiles completely before moving on bc theres no way of marking it on the map in-game so maybe if we keep this screenshot we can color-code it a little .. the amount of loot stacked inthe legendary smiths upperlevel is getting bulky , the snapjaws drop quite a lot actually but without butchering skills their corpses seem to be worth nothing.
(yea you can butcher bipeds alike here it seems ... i guess meat is meat in the post-apocalypse , maybe the humans will find out too in the not so distant future, barring recycling vats or soilent green, cannibalism keeps you going if all you have is rocks and sand eroded)

The "final stage" of planet : sand ... not sure how far silicon wafers go without silver or platinum but we have touched that subject enough. It seem the great leaders of this world are hell-bent on remaining stuck on it ad aeternum ... so the human race is already extinct somewhere in the future as the planet wont hold forever ... erode even faster into unlivable and before that ... so few resources butchering snapjaws might become a common skill.

The questline gives a good 1000 xp in all which is about half a level i think between 8 and 9

so at 7 and 8 you get no attrib points after getting 1 in each attribute at level 6 and i think a single one to place at lvl 2 or 3 ...
at lvl9 our most awaited : another free to pick attrib point

I guess lesserbeings and casual gamers (we cant say noobs or lamers no more i suppose that gets the enmity of the 5%er media that nearly killed ubisoft b/c they thought thats what the other 95% wanted ... would say AH praetorian : STRENGTH OR VIT (dmg or hitpoints)

however

not-so-casual stranded aliens from the future have been scheming since the first 3 characters to get that ego up first and the fact that the praetorian is like a german wwII Tiger-tank makes this simply possible without having to play three hours to strategize around one map bit

Which ends us with 19 ego, finally b/c to get the SKILL we were trying for

you need minimum 19 ego, so now "for bartering purposes" all trades are done with an ego considered 4 points higher (bartering only)

Which actually leads to the glowfish corpses that were some 20 or 30 cent drams now netting a nice 52 drams each, meaning two corpses equals 1 dram ( = fresh water , the currency of the future in the post post apocalypse) which ofcourse you need to survive as well ...

"drinking money" :)

now if we sell the whole shebang and only keep the best artefact weapons and tonics i think we are good and can stop running around parched and only eat one vinewafer when dehydrated to stay alive ... but instead keep drinking fresh water -

thats why we said "the starting point is set now" more or less

GODS THIS GAME IS SO REFRESHING IN THE POOL OF CRUD-today : caves of qud , killer of crud ... no fast-paced but still deadly if you dont watch out

maybe the plastic generation A.D.D. would consider it madness to play a game with permadeath (and actually you dont have to, you can play roleplay or casual mode (explore i think) but i think its the shit ...

"best thing since Ralos Zek ?"

hard to compare (Rallos Zek was a notorious bad-ass server in one of the proto-mmo's called "Everquest" (by Sony) where you had no holds barred and no complaining to gm's about cheating or unfair behaviour ... the place was packed with criminal elements and everything goes. You can loot money of the corpse of anyone you kill and even gear (at a later point they allowed higher level items to be "bound" but i think you didnt get them bound straight out of the dungeon)

And literally everything went : lagging players out while zoning and killing them when their avatars was hanging ... ganking right outside the dungeion (or also in the second(s) while zoning, a vulnerable point, so if five or so guyss wait outside a dungeon where some soloist or group comes out wounded and low on hp , mana and potions its like highway robbery)

But not just that, corpse camping , EVERYTHING, if a pk-guild was tight they would just sit on your corpse for 5 or so days while you had to do corpse runs , sometimes take a live boat (took about ten minutes just taking the ride and all you could do while floating was fish from the sides)
Then you get to the spot (naked or in low gear) and there's a guy there , you move closer , turns out theres three or four that jump you , you die again , lose the rest on your second corpse and respawn somewhere else again ... real bad-ass pk guilds would sometimes just sit there and take shifts, (while YOU obviously have to sleep)

Not uncommon for bigger guilds, in ARK evolved for instance i think they had later on dinos that take like a WEEK to tame (real life time) so you need a tight guild and people to sit in round the clock for days taking turns to get one

THATS WHY ARK WAS SO AWESOME BTW (amongother things)

so after x days in EQ / rallos zek and you between sleeping trying to get to your corpse it rots away - if you had tier 7 bound items on there

they're gone :)

now THAT WAS BADASS GAME

i think they nerfed it bad when one guy somewhere committed suicide over being scammed out of a BP (breastplate armour)

no shit kimosabe ...

id say the world has gone soft but

it hasnt

only the top layer

...

Found a nice table standing outside down the street to pick up, will make a nice replacement for the wooden thing on wheels here - thanks for that neighbour.

Sadly no one ever leaves retro computers or consoles outside with a "free totake "tag on it ... i wouldnt mind a falcon or A1200 or sharp, even a ZX or original NES standing outside someones door to pick up

As for the rest of the world ?

no clue we succeeded in avoiding it but last time sounded like it was last months news and

well, not to sound like anything or anything but

We been hearing Gaza since Arafat ... thats like news from beyond, nothing ever changes xept entropy pushing outward

so it doesnt go in circles but in a downward spiral

thermodynamics in the metaverse, all transfer or energy comes with a loss

so there we are with the spacemines again - you cant keep running in circles in a closed system

no perpetuum mobile

et al etc ...

---

hmm strange creatures in down below, gotta revisit that one for the strange dagger

wwwww

have no money and no future so its not really interesting to talk about ... it would take a small miracle by now to fix anything to a state of potential future ....
the state of the body became awfully clear again as we cleaned the elder-car , with a karcher even, no frotter , legs heavy 30 minutes later, spent the whole day lying down , luckily could fend off sleeping or the whole rythm would be fucked again and with that i think we move to second cycle

the solutions were clear : stop breeding, get spacemines ... or find out what happened to mars

aand

well not really, for no particular reason, i think we posted more in the last two weeks than in thelast two years

it might "just stop" again

The c64 game, the Jag game and then the ST game if possible before demented, three things we can still do that were on the bucket list but

reality : even if we HAD money to go to paris or venice again (or that mongolia where we never got to) we'd just spend the day there sleeping twice in an expensive hotelroom so even THAT has been nullified

if we WERE suicidal its pretty sure it would have happened by now, a while ago probably so

no luck there, guv

you stuck us here

you bear the responsiblity

we're gonna sit out the end of the sumerian era b/c we promised someone dear and i think that will be it

take a clinical approach, a purely real and physical approach

i dont think there's any way you can bend the numbers without cheating and dont reach the spacemine-conclusion

which means its over

might as well enjoy the demise of the species that killed our life