Cave Clutter: Building, shooting, and surviving
I’ve been hopping around a variety of games for the past few weeks, different types of gameplay but all of them fun. Let’s get into them.
Minecraft
There’s going to be a few modpacks on this list so I hope you’re not sick of me talking about Minecraft yet.
Invasion
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been joining the Froggy & Phoenix crew every Saturday for the past month or so to play Invasion. There’s still quite a few deaths happening (especially now that laser creepers riding robot dinosaurs have now started spawning), we’ve made a lot of progress and are enjoy the whole experience. You can tell just how many things we’ve had to kill from our Wall of Skulls (which only drop rarely from enemies).
We also do silly things sometimes like steal each other’s Minecraft skins to play Doppelganger.
Homestead
This is one of the packs that I’ve been playing solo and it’s not the easiest pack. But when I’m in the mood for something more realistic and laid-back, it fits the bill. It has made me appreciate vanilla horses and wolves more, which are often overlooked in other packs due to mods providing better alternatives. I have to say that one of my favorite features of it is a fact that you can shear creepers, which prevents them from exploding and make them entirely harmless. And their skin is replaced with one of them crying.
There are also some very cool (and sometimes very strange) ruins that spot on the world. For example, I came across a pagoda-style building and found whatever the hell this is inside.
Sprout
I was getting a little sick of Homestead, so I switched over to Sprout. This pack is quite fun for exploring and has a definite fantasy vibe, what with dragons and dwarves roaming the countryside.
I’ve most recently gotten into Ars Magica 2 which is an amazing mod that lets you craft your own spells. I’ve only just started out in it so I’ve just created a fireball spell and a spell that lets me throw a light source from a distance so far. But I really like to unlock more and see what other kinds of combination I can make.
RimWorld
In addition to my more advanced playthrough, I started a new tribal game featuring folks from the Froggy & Phoenix crew as the pawns. So far we have had two raids, a rabid squirrel attack, Froggy and Lord Crumb having a whirlwind romance that lasted all of three minutes, and Lord Crumb attempting several times to burn down the colony in his fire-starting sprees. The last two may or may not be related. The F&P crew have found the whole thing quite entertaining and keep asking me for updates on how the colony is doing.
The Division
Lord Crumb and I have not forgotten the shooty goodness of Ghost Recon Wildlands but unfortunately Lord Crumb’s laggy internet is still an issue. But we remembered that we both own The Division and hadn’t played it since the open beta so we gave it a shot. The story isn’t award-winning but it’s still an interesting premise and I quite like some of the characters like Faye Lau and Dr. Jessica Kandel. The cover base mechanics are quite good and while it doesn’t have Wildland’s drones, the different abilities you can unlock are fun to play with, with Pulse being my favourite. The graphics are pretty nice and I think they did a good job of adding variety with the weather, where it’ll range from clear to foggy to snowy over time.
I’m pretty sure we found a Shaun of the Dead easter egg as well.
7 Days to Die
Unfortunately The Division is rather hard on my wrists so I asked if we could switch to another co-op game every once in a while to help with that. We decided on 7 Days to Die, which we hadn’t played since a brief foray into Alpha 15. After playing for a few days on a new random map, we were joined by mtnpapa (of the F&P crew) and the three of us have made our base inside a strip club. Something of an unconventional choice but the brick walls are pretty strong and a chemistry station was inside. We did indeed have to take care of several zombie strippers before we could take it over.
We’ve managed to survive the 7th night and are just coming up on the 14th night. We all have sledgehammers and plenty of arrows so I think we’ll be able to survive it.
That’s all for now! I’m going to miss out on Invasion this weekend (got a Thanksgiving family dinner to go to) and Lord Crumb won’t have much time for any co-op games but I’m still looking forward to playing more RimWorld and/or Minecraft.