Which overhaul mod Peltz? I have Xenonauts and I love XCOM but I never played it yet, so maybe this would be a good way for me to dive on in.

Lol @ Fallout Tactics. That game is wonkey as hell man. But still quite enjoyable. The design and level of detail is actually surprisingly good considering how clunky the mechanics are.

Glad to see Satis playing a game again without it feeling like a job.

I've mostly been playing Command and Conquer Remastered...beat Tiberian Dawn and now close to finishing the Allied campaign in Red Alert. Tons of fun. Will keep the expansion pack missions for both games for casual gaming in between other games I think.

Shiny, some friends and I picked up Ark on the Epic store for free recently and have been playing that. It's good stuff, actually. Lots of RPG stuff like levelling, building a base, as well as taming dinosaurs. We've had some server issues... started trying to play on official servers, but they tend to be full all the time. One of the guys I play with rented a server, but it's got serious performance problems... lag, rubber banging, and regular crashes that end with lost progress... so, not the best experience. However, the game itself (outside of bugs) is pretty good.

Otherwise, Fallout 4 and World of Warships. I'm really digging fallout 4. Totally bedded the Irish companion and am now working on another companion. So much to do and the lore is great. I forgot how much I really enjoy Fallout. Exploring all the locations doesn't feel like a chore, it's really interesting.

Jade alert!

I couldn't get into FO4. The settlements mechanic seemed pointless crafting for the sake of it, and i didn't particularly like how within the first hour or so you find power armour. I mean like, in FO1/2 it took a lot of effort to find one, and in FO4 they lead your straight to one. Ok, it's not like you can use it straight away, but the mystery and struggle is non existant (as well as the reward).

Anyway, played a bit of Civ 6 and i've just put it down. I saw it was on sale for £15 so I grabbed it. The AI is weak and the game turns out to be very grindy, so ... *uninstalls*.

O'Cram convinced me to buy Darkwood (indie top-down survival-crafting). Unfortunately too indie for my liking. Very unintuitive for a decision-based survival game, e.g. a million crafting options but no idea whatsoever WHY i need to craft them.

Sorry to hear none of those games are meeting your high jade standards Derf. Anything else you're playing then?

Satis, you make me want to play FO4 now...but that won't run for shit on my laptop. /sad Do you think Ark would do well on crappy PCs? I think I picked it up for free on the Epic store as well.

I've finished the campaigns of Tiberian Sun and Red Alert in the C&C remaster - great fun. Now i'm just casually playing some of the expansion pack missions when I'm bored.

Also playing the Outlast DLC Whistleblower and started playing Ion Fury, a 'modern' shooter in the Build engine (of Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior fame). It's a really fun ride.

Didn't have a lot of playtime the last couple of weeks, yesterday i got a good dose of Terraria again. I was preparing to fight Wall of Flesh, but then i got sidetracked too often.

Playing Journey mode btw, it's more casual/less grindy in the sense that you can "research" materials you find. If you do this often enough, you can reproduce the items whenever you want. Say you researched 100 gold ore, you can make all the gold ore you want. So it's easier to progress.

And you don't end up with a gazillion of (unlabelled) chests where you have to keep all your stuff.

I've finally started GTA V. Having fun causing chaos. Made the stupidest car I could: https://www.facebook.com/10000452395870 ... 200697864/ sound on for the awesome horn!

In playing Fallout 4, I never wear the power armor. I'll collector parts and upgrades for it in case I ever run into something that's too difficult, but that hasn't happened yet. As for the settlements, they're pretty much pointless. You could probably ignore them... I get a bit of a kick out of building them, but it's obviously not well thought out. I'll build little shacks and throw down 20 sleeping bags right next to each other so I can host as many colonists as possible. Anyway, though I do indulge in it, it's mostly for a change in pace and definitely not important to the game.

Regarding Ark, with all the graphics turned up, you'll need a decent box to play it. I play at 1440p with everything maxed and have no issues (using a 6th gen core i7 and a gtx 1080). If you dial the settings way down you might be able to play it. For Fallout 4 I downloaded the free/optional texture upgrade pack... 50GB! It does look pretty nice, though. Unfortunatelly my m.2 SSD is only 500GB, so between that and Windows and the other games I have installed, I damn near ran out of space. I may need to splurge on a 2TB m.2.

Speaking of PCs, my company is moving offices (Yay! I get to more crap in the middle of Covid!) and they're ditching all kinds of hardware. I snagged two decent computers...4th gen core i7 with 16GB of RAM and a discrete (non-gaming) graphics card. Swap in a real graphics card and an SSD and it'd probably make a pretty good gaming PC. I think they use registered RAM though, so upgrading the RAM to the max 32GB may be a little more expensive as a result. I'm probably going to turn it into a dedicated server for Plex, games, and probably VMs for work.

Like any recovering junkie, I feel both sad for J that he relapsed and jealous that he is playing Terraria again. Journey mode sounds pretty good though...short term grinding for a payoff of no long term grinding!

@ Pev, that link doesn't work for me? Something to do with the viewing rights?

@ Satis, your main machine only has a 500 GB SSD? Shit, even my laptop has one one those. And it's a 500 euro Acer one. Gotta step up your game son! Speaking of, I definitely can't run Ark on this thing...looked at the specs and it would just be frustrating as fuck. Oh well.

Sounds like you got a sweet deal on those old machines. Did you just get to take them home or did you have to pay something for them?

This is what i've dug out so far. As usual i always end up with a crappy house, i should just tear it down and rebuild it from scratch, and proper this time. But getting sidetracked all the time.
I also didn't remember how huge the Dungeon is. And that there are fake walls i tend to miss a lot.

Note to Satis: i get a "Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached" error message. I post a picture once. ONCE! Lol.
So no picture yet.

I'll fix my link at some point. Probably got my privacy settings up high, I'll upload it elsewhere but not tonight, I'm a very sleepy Pev and off to bed now.

Nice, free computer stuff is always good Satis!

Getting back into The Long Dark now, following a minor update with a playing mode “Winters Embrace”. Basically I think the aim is to survive for 25 days. Basically, interloper but colder (especially indoors) and more loot. I like the concept of the countdown because the end game doesn’t really exist. I can pretend someone is coming with the chopper

Clearly Satis has instated some racist forum rules against Belgian people. It's the only possible explanation.



Mmm I'll have to check this out. As long as I got loot I'm sure I can survive the added cold. How far did you get so far?

Just completed it. Was pretty fun. Mission success.

I opted for a random starting location, and it ended up being Bleak Inlet :S Which was kind of appreciated because i'd never visited that region before. I had no clue about the timberworld mechanic, so that caught me out. I got attacked twice before i managed to escape that region before looting it fairly well. Fuckers destroyed by shitty coat and scaft. With no decent equipment, i knew i would have to travel to fresh pastures and keep moving for food and essentials. I exited Bleak Inlet, only to find myself in ... Forlorn Muskeg :S I thought to myself, jesus, ok, so this is a challenge! My aim was simply to get the fuck out of Muskeg ASAP as I knew the weather could easily screw me. I never liked that region. I almost didn't make it out! The escale from Bleak Inlet wasn't well timed, so it was late by the time I was in Muskeg. I had to stop a few times and light a campfire to resolve the hypothermia the cold was eating away at my HP. I got lost at night, but luckily had just enough sticks to keep a fire going all night until morning, where I was able to see where the fuck i was going. A blizzard overnight would have finished me, but my luck turned from this point on. Very low on health, i could see where to go (ran into a bear on the way, but he got bored of chasing me). I just about made it to Mystery Lake.

I must have gotten there on day 15 (you have to complete 25 days to finish the challenge) and it was in this region that I finished. Trappers Lodge was an amazing place to stay. The bad luck I had at the start balanced itself off in the 2nd half of the game, because I had truly excellent luck. I had by now found a revolver and rifle along the way. Whilst collecting supplies around the lodge, i turned and to my surprise saw a moose 50 metres away. So rare, because in previous games I would try to spend days finding one, and there is was! Only one thing to do, whipped out the rifle, shot it, but it ran off. Had to go back in house to warm up overnight. My intention was to go and track it and finish it off, even if it means travelling out in the cold. I stepped outside for the hunt, but the fucker was right outside again! I counted my blessings, got the rifle out again and dropped the bastard.

Easy from then on. A metric fuckton of meat which i cooked and saw me through for 10 days straight. The last 5 days I spent rabbit hunting. Even managed to craft the moose satchel, but it served no purpose. Mission complete. Chopper landed. GTFO. (last bit my imagination).

@J... I don't think I have any special attachment limitations set up for Belgians, though you never know. :p Try resizing the image to something like 1920x1080 or smaller... I know this forum software has a really hard time with high-resolution images, like anything coming off a cell phone is pretty much not uploadable. Sorry, about the only idea I have. I wouldn't mind upgrading this thing, but to be honest, at this point I'd probably have to trash the existing db and start from scratch because it's so outdated.

@Ox... yea, the PCs were free. They're not super-amazing, but they're also not bad. I just ordered 16GB of RAM and two SSDs off Amazon... a 2TB one and a 500GB one. I'll turn one box into a server with 32GB of RAM and the 2TB SSD and the other will just be a spare or something. Regarding my main machine's wimpy 500GB SSD, it's an m.2 SSD with a 2GB/s read/write... and it's also like 3 years old I think? I dunno.. I definitely need to upgrade it, but at the time it was pretty nice (and probably like $500). Besides, I have a secondary SSD (not m.2, just SATA) that's 1TB. Still not amazing by modern standards. *shrug* My laptop only has a 256GB m.2 SSD... still really fast throughput, but the size is stupidly small. I really need to pick up 2x 2TB m.2 SSDs and do an upgrade on both... but damn that's a bit expensive.

Congrats man!! Sounds like an epic run. I have tried two runs in this mode so far and they both ended pretty quickly. I also chose random starting locations (to not make it too easy on myself).

Run 1 I spawned in Bleak Inlet, which like you I had never been in before. I saw the ruins of the massive factory in the distance across a lake and in my haste I almost immediately sank through the ice. Amateur move. So with my clothes wet and the frost on top of it I was immediately down to freezing and tried to make my way to the factory to find a place to camp out or find gear. I quickly realized it's literally a ruin and there's narely an actual interior location or bed...I found a trailer but given that all my clothes had frozen by that point and the temperature was so low even inside I couldn't get warm. Even sleeping would have me at -6 degrees. Didn't find enough gear to realistically recover either with fire/food so I deleted the save.

Run 2 I spawned in Muskeg, with great weather (open skies, afternoon), on the opposite side of the exit to Mystery Lake. Knowing that I just needed to follow the tracks across and the favorable weather conditions I decided to go towards ML. In hindsight I should probably have looted Broken Railroad as I spawned right next to it and it's got some good loot, but eh. Made it to ML easily, then spent the night in the lakeside cabin. Found some decent stuff in terms of food but not much gear. Decided to spend the colder part of the day (morning) repairing clothes and then went out to hunt some rabbits across the road. Took me ages (my stone throwing is rusty) but bagged three and made my way back. Was close to hypothermia but figured I could skin at least one before getting in danger. Miscalculated and died. Really stupid again.

I think I need to get used to constantly running a fire until I get good gear. Still struggling with the fact that being inside doesn't automatically protect me from freezing to death! Speaking of, how the fuck did you survive camping outside (I presume) in both Bleak Inlet and Muskeg for almost 15 days? Were you basically moving from fire to fire? How many sticks did even pick up? But even then a blizzard would have wasted you no? Either way, damn impressive, especially after surviving two Timberwolf packs. And here I thought I was good at surviving after a few great interloper runs. I did notice this mode gives a lot of useful gear from the start...notably matches and a sleeping bag. Real lifesavers early on, both of them!



Oh yeah, it's as expensive as SSDs were 5 years ago haha. I've never actually owned or replaced an m.2, is it hard to do? I'm guessing no, since almost every piece of hardware has become 5 times easier to install and handle over the past 20 years or so that I've been messing with PCs.