Enshrouded:  Well, I'll be dipped in .... I was making new chrs/saves/testing and realized that each save, even offline/SP, is still like creating a separate world "instance" of the game - which you can then enter/visit with any other character you create.  Meaning you could take chr. #2 and enter chr #1's save/world and grab anything out of chests. leave and go back into chr #2's world/save.  High level tools, gear, big storage boxes, working workstations, whatever.

Keeping that join-server-like feature as part of offline/SP is nuts. Talk about sandbox-replay shortcuts.  So that gives Enshrouded a few extra bonus points until a possible full creative mode.

I think I'm lacking the snow biome.  I'm not sure I care. I'm almost current max-clvl already, and the progression of shroud and dungeons are becoming more aggravating (platforming jumps, maze-likes, getting constantly lost/turned around, ugh). Plus I don't need snow-themed furniture, haha.   My fave biome so far is the 2nd one (kind of a redwood/forest rainy biome) and it's probably the only one I'd want to base in, anyway.

17 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Enshrouded:  Well, I'll be dipped in .... I was making new chrs/saves/testing and realized that each save, even offline/SP, is still like creating a separate world "instance" of the game - which you can then enter/visit with any other character you create.  Meaning you could take chr. #2 and enter chr #1's save/world and grab anything out of chests. leave and go back into chr #2's world/save.  High level tools, gear, big storage boxes, working workstations, whatever.

Keeping that join-server-like feature as part of offline/SP is nuts. Talk about sandbox-replay shortcuts.  So that gives Enshrouded a few extra bonus points until a possible full creative mode.

I think I'm lacking the snow biome.  I'm not sure I care. I'm almost current max-clvl already, and the progression of shroud and dungeons are becoming more aggravating (platforming jumps, maze-likes, getting constantly lost/turned around, ugh). Plus I don't need snow-themed furniture, haha.   My fave biome so far is the 2nd one (kind of a redwood/forest rainy biome) and it's probably the only one I'd want to base in, anyway.

I assume snow is on the development plan, since the game isn't even officially version 1 yet. I haven't even reached the water biome yet.

51 minutes ago, Hurlshort said:

I assume snow is on the development plan, since the game isn't even officially version 1 yet. I haven't even reached the water biome yet.

It's already in the game. I've seen ppl on forums talk about it. It's mountains I guess.
I've been focusing on exploring and seeing what one can do with building blocks (no gravity/structural integrity considerations, can "float" bases, like in NMS).  I still haven't even tamed a cat/animal.  Just like in real life these days, I don't really want to take care of one. 😛

Edit: I went without the larger backpacks for ages because that swamp FT spire annoyed me - I kept falling with those bouncy pads. Later I finally tried chopping a stairway into a tree and got to the top that way. I hated that swamp area.

Edited January 5Jan 5 by LadyCrimson

1 hour ago, LadyCrimson said:

It's already in the game. I've seen ppl on forums talk about it. It's mountains I guess.
I've been focusing on exploring and seeing what one can do with building blocks (no gravity/structural integrity considerations, can "float" bases, like in NMS).  I still haven't even tamed a cat/animal.  Just like in real life these days, I don't really want to take care of one. 😛

Edit: I went without the larger backpacks for ages because that swamp FT spire annoyed me - I kept falling with those bouncy pads. Later I finally tried chopping a stairway into a tree and got to the top that way. I hated that swamp area.

My biggest issue is altitis and worlditis. Like, I keep starting new characters on new worlds with new server rules. I'm an expert on the first 10 hours of the game.

1 hour ago, Hurlshort said:

My biggest issue is altitis and worlditis. Like, I keep starting new characters on new worlds with new server rules. I'm an expert on the first 10 hours of the game.

With the way melee animations work, I haven't had alt-itis like I do in some games. I've tried melee a few times and once I melee-thrust myself off a cliff. Technically I think using the staff to cast spells does the same forward/stuck in an elongated animation movement but since you cast it from afar it doesn't bother me.  I might try the bows later. Of course, I'm still using mostly the easy settings, because after the first 20 or so hours,  I'm just trying to rush to unlock stuff. Having to find/loot block varieties in "random" places is so annoying.  Loot a chest, bang, "true sandstone fancy block discovered."  Pffft.

Edited January 5Jan 5 by LadyCrimson

Enshrouded: 
I found the snow biome. Or rather, I found some edges of it. I guess I didn't notice before because I've been using double-jump, gliding, and a lot of pickaxing to reach places before the game wants you to, I think. So I'm often in tunnels, or it's night, or ---
Anyway - I glided and then made a tunnel upwards in this one spot. I hit patches of snow and new granite/blocks (I can now build snowmen).  At one flat cliff ledge some way up, I plopped a base-altar. Good thing, since about 60 more seconds of tunneling upwards through rock, I wtf dropped dead, apparently from cold. Tried again, paid more attention, saw the tiny "frost death imminent" timer bar this time. So I went sideways. Found another snowy ledge, but this one had a nice, empty, pre-built fancy stone house. So I put a base altar in there as a foothold.  there was a path upwards. So I tried again, just walking. Worked for a while, then that bar showed up again and I had to rush back down.  I think it's "altitude" based, not the actual snow.

Guess I need frost protection. I have zero idea how to get it. My altar stage is still only lvl 5, that's probably some of it.  Each altar level (for me so far) has at least one (shroud) material required that is so annoying to get, even with 25+minute shroud-time. Either because of grind or getting lost finding a POI area or a spawn area etc. Dangit, guess I gotta grind. 

Edited January 8Jan 8 by LadyCrimson

29 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Enshrouded: 
I found the snow biome. Or rather, I found some edges of it. I guess I didn't notice before because I've been using double-jump, gliding, and a lot of pickaxing to reach places before the game wants you to, I think. So I'm often in tunnels, or it's night, or ---
Anyway - I glided and then made a tunnel upwards in this one spot. I hit patches of snow and new granite/blocks (I can now build snowmen).  At one flat cliff ledge some way up, I plopped a base-altar. Good thing, since about 60 more seconds of tunneling upwards through rock, I wtf dropped dead, apparently from cold. Tried again, paid more attention, saw the tiny "frost death imminent" timer bar this time. So I went sideways. Found another snowy ledge, but this one had a nice, empty, pre-built fancy stone house. So I put a base altar in there as a foothold.  there was a path upwards. So I tried again, just walking. Worked for a while, then that bar showed up again and I had to rush back down.  I think it's "altitude" based, not the actual snow.

Guess I need frost protection. I have zero idea how to get it. My altar stage is still only lvl 5, that's probably some of it.  Each altar level (for me so far) has at least one (shroud) material required that is so annoying to get, even with 25+minute shroud-time. Either because of grind or getting lost finding a POI area or a spawn area etc. Dangit, guess I gotta grind. 

Hah, I like how you were skeptical about the game a couple weeks ago, and now you are way further along than I am.

My flame level in 3, I think. Maybe 4.

13 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Hah, I like how you were skeptical about the game a couple weeks ago, and now you are way further along than I am.

My flame level in 3, I think. Maybe 4.

It's winter and I have nothing better to do. Plus I'm pretty sure I have both more free time and more "ocd" factors. 😛

At the moment I'd give the game in its current form maybe a B or B+.  I like aspects but there are still those super annoying things that get your goat, a little too often. So I try to focus on the things I like, until the game "forces" me to do otherwise. I've somehow finished 70ish "quests" (I use that term loosely) but there's oodles of them all over the map I've ignored and every new thing procs more.  I'm sure I'm missing a lot of NPC-crafts by not doing some of them.  I do like that there's no money/buying/selling. Just resource grind.

Speaking of which, I spent a few hours trying to get the 40 of the one item I need to upgrade the altar again. After that time I have --- 37.   And that's with the setting that I think increases amounts you loot a bit.  >.>   The "grind" is that you have to wait for enemies to respawn and ofc it's not a thing that spawns in numbers. It gets MMO old.

EDIT: if game didn't have all those easy settings I can turn on/off at whim, I'd probably have irritation-quit. 😄

Edited January 8Jan 8 by LadyCrimson

I have two worlds really going, one is on easy and the other on regular. The easy one is less annoying with combat and death consequences, but I have noticed there are less enemies and it can be tough to get resources that require them. The standard world seems to have a lot more mobs.

I checked and I am at flame level 5 on the easy world and 3 on the standard. 

37 minutes ago, Hurlshort said:

I have two worlds really going, one is on easy and the other on regular. The easy one is less annoying with combat and death consequences, but I have noticed there are less enemies and it can be tough to get resources that require them. The standard world seems to have a lot more mobs.

On your Easy, did you slide every slider full to left? Because one setting controls the numbers.  Less/Normal/More, something like that. I left it on Normal because I don't care how many there are in most cases, as long as they die easy/don't kill me in one hit or whatever (bosses mostly, mobs are nothing).  The enemy I had to farm is a flying one and it simply doesn't spawn many in the few shroud areas it can spawn. I only found one larger area where maybe 3 spawned, other spots just had one.

I have now found coal, which means I can craft a hand-warmer, but I also need a certain kind of leather, which I do not have. Hehehe

Edited January 8Jan 8 by LadyCrimson

Unavowed.  


Becuz (pixel) size matters!  ❤️ 

Big props to Dave Gilbert for making a living by telling the stories he wants to tell for twenty years now? This one is also the game where he got a little inspired by Bioware-style companions. Gilbert's never been much of a puzzle guy, but this gives him something toy with. You even get to name your character and can chose an "origin", with the game starting out a little different depending on your choice.

Edited January 9Jan 9 by Sven_

Enshrouded:  After a bunch of unrelated exploration/resource collecting/dungeon crawling etc I finally got around to making some "cold biome" wear. So between base-comfort rating, clothes, and new hand-warmer I can now stay in super-cold for about an hour.   But - I could live with the top, but the hat and pants, no, just no.  

Thank goodness for transmog.  I went back to my original "look". But at least I can live in the high snow for more than 40 seconds. 
Also learned that if one is relying on base-comfort frost bonuses, teleporting to a TP-only flame altar removes it because it takes on the TP-altar's zero frost bonus, when you get there. >.>  so one has to make any base near winter/snow the same frost-comfort level.

Edited January 10Jan 10 by LadyCrimson

Almost done Aven Colony's campaign. Enjoyable game, although is repetitive in the missions as I pretty much follow the same build order.  Fun enough to try to optimize food refining, which I still haven't done, still end up with too much Entari. 

Maybe should have played on a harder difficulty.

Started Octopath Traveler. Seems very good. Lots of JRPG tropes, but gameplay is interesting enough, I'm enjoying it.

Looks like it has some hard achievements to get, but I'm a sucker for those, so I'll probably end up completing it.

Enshrouded:  I'm (current) max level, all biomes visited (but not fully explored), most "crafting" things acquired etc. But based on empty workbench squares, I'm missing some building blocks. So this is when I start wiki-ing more. So yesterday I start one of the areas/things for a couple of them. Took me near 2 hrs to get to the end (1st time, exploring, puzzle/traversal-deaths etc). Near the bottom, got one new block. Then I encountered my first major game bug. The boss at the end - which I need its head - I saw its health bar appear on the UI, there was music, but no boss. I killed a few mobs, looked around, saw a treasure box - grabbed it - then saw a teleporter pad. I thought, ok, maybe I have to take this to the real boss-room. So I used it.

Which took me to .... the start/entrance of the dungeon. And teleport is one way, ofc. And everything's respawned by now, so even if it took me half the time doing it, I'd have to redo all the puzzles/open doors. Granted, I guess there was a glitch, but I temp-rage-quit again.

EDIT: my god I talk too much when I'm frustrated.  shortened: I've had about enough of the MMO-like resource/other grind. also, the bug seemed to be I was able to pass thru/unlock a gated door I shouldn't have been able to, before beating the boss.

I'm still stupidly stubborn enough to try to get at least all the "building blocks" unlocked (I'm close-ish) but after that I'm out, until a creative mode, or they rebalance things extensively.  😛

Edited January 13Jan 13 by LadyCrimson

I have finished today late in the night the hardest MKvsDCU Kombo Challenge, Shang Tsung. As before, I have used the feature of my controller to program actions. The paradox of this challenge is, that 8 out of 10 challenges, are not that hard, but challenge nr.7 and 9 are crazy hard as ****, even when not counting the occasional game latency. It took me 3 hours to program the 8 easier challenges, and another 3 hours to program these two crazy one.

For now 4 out of 22 challenges are completed. 😮‍💨

Playing tainted grail.  Got to the final act.  Was enjoying myself.  Read that the DLC can't be played after you beat the main quest.  Decided to go back and play the DLC.  Now I am really struggling to play the game.

 

I should have known when it involved squid people.  On the plus side, I think I know what bothers me the most about squid people.  It's the human body.  Animal races at least kind of make sense.  They have legs.  But squid people their tentacles become a mouth I guess?  A beard?  At the very least they should use their tentacle beard to hold stuff.

VirtuaVerse is next, nice OST at least.  Like I'm listening to keygen music

I guess no one plays games anymore? Nobody has commented since Sunday!

I've been playing Stoneshard. It's pretty close to done, and there is a ton of content to explore. I love the art style in this game.

I've also been thinking about another run of JA3 but I'm having trouble deciding on a starting crew.

Haha, seems like it 😄 I have actually not played anything since last week or two. But now I have prepared some basic recap of first Celestian Tales game, so I can finally play after 7 years or so the second part of the series 🙂 

I'm doing a little bit of BG3 again, because I also started watching some old Critical Role DND streams after the new Mighty Nine show released. :p 

The game feels a lot easier now that I know what I'm actually doing. 

On 1/21/2026 at 2:26 PM, Hurlshort said:

I guess no one plays games anymore? Nobody has commented since Sunday!

I play pretty regularly, but I'm a very slow and deliberate player who loves to take my time and goof off within my games. I'm almost 300 hours of playtime in my current first playthrough of BG3 and yet only about 2/3 of the way through Act 2. I'm the kind of roleplayer who can easily spend half an hour trying to figure out which of my party members should get that new ring I just found. 😀

Near the last act of Virtuaverse. Fun game, puzzles are a bit strange sometimes - asking me the number of stars in Ursa Major is strange.  But the game's written by a veteran of the scene, why else would this be a key cutscene 

 

 

@Hurlshort  -- have fun with the Enshrouded Altar upgrade 8 boss. 

After taking a mental break from that game for a bit I went back and filled out some more areas, got more stuff/npc's - I have 17 NPC's, and even if some aren't crafting stations, holy that feels excessive.   Anyway, there's a long long task (as usual, I get lost a lot) before Altar8-boss. You need lvl8 to be able to have frost-death protection (no death-timer) even while in your base in the actual snow.  Could you live without that, sure, but hey, it's progression.

So that boss. Yeah, nope. Even on easiest everything, I died in like 15 seconds during 6 tries. I might've done a sliver of damage to its health bar. The spike is unreal vs. everything else in the game. Its main two attacks seem to do percentage damage so doesn't matter your health, clvl or settings, your health dies in seconds. The area you have to fight = must be master with glider, double-jump/glide, slide/constant avoidance timing, speed/reaction etc or die in meteor puddles or slip/misstep/fall and/or be lasered or pushed to fall death.  Sure, it's a skill issue and I suppose a few will like the challenge, but imo very unfair - again, vs. all the rest of the game.  Out of place, all of a sudden.  I could've maybe dealt with the dodging of near-insta-death attacks themselves (been there done that in other games) but the fight area for me was impossible with no room for "hey I suck, ok", navigation (imagine a very very skinny donut shaped piece of land). 

After reading online comments about this perhaps over-tuned boss, I gave up (I'll never have that type of "skill" and don't care to bother), and used a (kinda buggy) cheat-engine table to insta-kill it 5 times (so I can have spare heads for other chrs), removed cheat-engine-table,  then continued on my sandbox-y way.  Altar upgrade 9 is easy peasy in comparison, have head already, almost there. 

Just to say, you can easily not bother with this boss/last few upgrades, and still build tons of sim-y castles and towns/do most everything else.  I have a feeling a lot of people haven't even reached this point in the game, because they're too busy building obsessive deco-towns.  Or this is where they quit.  Or they went to a "resource" server and just grabbed a head from a chest that someone else farmed (that's a thing in this game, if you don't mind Online).

Edited January 23Jan 23 by LadyCrimson

Enshrouded is apparently going to release version 1 this year, so I'd guess they will balance that boss first.

I've moved onto Stoneshard and Jagged Alliance 3.

I'm also trying to play Star Wars Outlaws, but the control scheme is a big turn off. I don't like that I need to look up all the controls if I don't play for a week. It is not intuitive at all.