What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Triaxx]

I've gotten two spoiler things stuck one in an impossible location and the other in a loading ship because I was moving too fast.

[IthilanorStPete]

Finally started playing the Watcher on Slay the Spire. On my first run, got to the act 3 boss, then lost to Deca/Donu. She definitely seems interesting and powerful; I'm looking forward to exploring her builds.

[Silverraptor]

I haven't run into that bug before, but there is a console command to spawn yourself back at the life pod. If you press f3, enable console and type "Biome Safe" it will take you home. Press f3 again to turn it off.

I would avoid using console except for bug fixes though. It ruins the immersion and there are spoilers on the console command list.

I've got about 300 hours and I've gotten stuck from bugs probably 4 or 5 times so the command to go home is useful. Especially since I play on hardcore.

My favorite bug was where I got stuck inside my cyclops but at the same time didn't register me as "inside" the cyclops, so I was stuck in my prawn suit inside the cyclops unable to get out or in. I decided to do a separate save since it had been several hours since the last one and I made significant progress since then that I didn't want to have to redo. I reloaded it hoping it would fix the problem.

Well yes and no. The good news that after a few seconds the cyclops ejected me and the prawn suit out of it's belly and then the prawn suit violently ejected me out like they both ate some awful food poisoning. I know it was near the late game and here I am a smelly diseased human that hasn't taken a shower in who knows how many days, but I couldn't have caused that much of gastrointestinal distress! Anyways it took me a few seconds to find out where I was and where I was going. Apparently I was miles high in the air, yes you heard me! Apparently since I saved the cyclops near a shallow part of the ocean that it was partially sticking out of the water, when the game loaded it decided that collision was a thing even though when I saved there should have been a few meters of clearance and that caused the cyclops to literally jet out of the water straight up into the air, tumbling and turning violently as it did so. I didn't need the rocket to get home, the cyclops practically had me half way there at that point. And the prawn suit was ejected from it and caused to fly away at some random direction way out yonder to who knows where. So here I was, falling through the air as my cyclops drift falls away from me in one direction and my prawn suit is drift falling away from me in another direction and a few clouds woosh past me and I look down to where I was falling and watch as I careen foot first into the Aurora and became one of those bugs that hits the windshield of a car because it was insta-death...

And I was just laughing for several minutes at the ridiculousness of it. I decided to reload the save and the same thing happens. Tumble around for a few seconds as the cyclops is flying around wildly through the air before being violently ejected from both the cyclops and the prawn suit. Only this time I didn't hit the Aurora. The game decided to give me the good gracious of plopping me deep into the dropoff deadzone. It doesn't matter that I was using my seaglide the moment the water slowed my momentum to get out of said zone and tried to do massive evasive maneuvers, I still finally got eaten from the 3 ghost leviathans that showed up and I have no idea how far I was to the safe point except that the cyclops was about 4 km away to which I had no idea where it ended up. However, I knew now that when it did eject me suddenly, it wasn't following the same course. The cyclops was violently spinning and turning in midair at random and it was a lottery to where I, the cyclops, and the prawn suit ended up.

So I decided I would try loading the save a few more times before giving up and resigning to the last few hours of gameplay was about to be come moot point. But the 3rd playthrough I actually got lucky. It decided to drop me off in the map this time in deep enough water to not hit any ground and take damage and I looked around and the cyclops was only 800 meters away. Hey, maybe this won't take too long to get it don-
...oh wait, the cyclops is half resting on the pushed up ground around the Aurora. The hardest part was trying to squeeze between the sand and the hatch at the bottom of the cyclops to get in, but get in I did before wondering how as I suppose to get the cyclops from not being a beached whale. I tried and tried but no matter what I couldn't get the cyclops to go back into the ocean. So another reload we go.

This time I landed over a km away from the cyclops but I landed in the deadzone, but fortunately not too far because I managed to seaglide back enough that one of the ghost leviathan showed up and swam off beside me like a VIP in a limo waving at his constituents on the side of the road without so much as a menacing glare from the likes of the secret service. Anyways I make it the the cyclops and it landed in much the same place, except only this time only a little of the head was beached up with the rest of it in the water, albeit not very deep. I work at it a bit and I finally managed to get the entirety of the cyclops into the water, after which I had to tiptoe gingerly around the shallow parts until I can get back out to the open sea and then promptly flank speed away from the Reaper Leviathan, get out and repair the bits of damage it inflicted here and there and then go off on a nearly 2 km magical journey to receive my prawn suit which was also massively down deep in the depth and that caused me to worry. After nearly the whole trek my worry was justified as the prawn suit had, yes indeed, fallen into the deadzone on the other side of the map based upon where I landed this save and down about a couple hundred meters from the depth limit of the cyclops. Great...

It took a lot of meandering to see how I was going to do this as repeated attempts in my cyclops kept having it to turn head over heels from the headbutts of the rampaging cranky ghost leviathans that kept pushing me out back into the map and promptly disappear meaning I had to get out, repair, and plan a different angle and plan of attack. I finally decided to go for it and swam with the seaglide like my life depended on it. I wasn't saving any breath for the round trip to the cyclops, I knew I would have to make it or die right there, and I knew if I did die it was not going to be from drowning as the roars soon echoed throughout the waves. Then as the cryptic sound loudly played announcing the leviathan was on top of me, I managed to reach and get into the prawn suit causing the ghost leviathan to swim right past me in its missed attempt for dinner. But as it swam past, it provided it's little under belly and I knew it was going to be very hard to scale nearly vertical cliffside in the prawn suit so I managed to hook onto it and had it pull me along a ways and back up. Until it looped around and started to go back down at the time a second roar announced itself on the horizon to which I decided to say "See ya" and used the momentum to launch me up a bit before using the thrusters and the harpoon to pull me up the cliff side enough that they decided to leave me be. After what must have been another 10-15 minutes trying to figure out how to get my prawn suit the rest of the way into the cyclops, I managed a good position to try an attempt on this. But before doing, remembering what caused this whole fiasco in the first place, I decided to save "just in case" the bug getting stuck in the prawn suit happened again. Thankfully it didn't and it was about an hour and a half of pointlessness, but the bright side was I didn't have to replay the last 3 hours before hand.

Moral of the story kids, don't get so absorbed into the environment that you forget you need to mash the save button every once and a while! The bright side is I have one hell of a memory and a story to tell to anyone who wants to hear it.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I've gotten two spoiler things stuck one in an impossible location and the other in a loading ship because I was moving too fast.

I've had issues where I ended up underground because I went deeper than the 'floor' before it could spawn in. Found a few things I probably wasn't supposed to find that way...

My favorite bug was where I got stuck inside my cyclops but at the same time didn't register me as "inside" the cyclops, so I was stuck in my prawn suit inside the cyclops unable to get out or in. I decided to do a separate save since it had been several hours since the last one and I made significant progress since then that I didn't want to have to redo. I reloaded it hoping it would fix the problem.

Well yes and no. The good news that after a few seconds the cyclops ejected me and the prawn suit out of it's belly and then the prawn suit violently ejected me out like they both ate some awful food poisoning.

I had something similar happen with the Prawn Suit; it's got to be the buggiest of all the vehicles. I was luckier though; it was just the Prawn Suit and I figured out if I ejected ASAP it would stop bouncing around once I was out, and it only took about three loads before I managed to get the Prawn in a place where I could get back to it and not go plummeting through the bottom of the world myself. Then it behaved itself until I was almost done with

Spoiler: Subnautica endgame spoilers

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building the rocket to get off the planet

...whereupon it clipped through the sand around the Aurora and buried itself underground, out of reach.

I've also had issues with it getting stuck while walking. Seems to happen more in air than in water.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Haven't had anything quite as awesome as turning into a projectile, but the first time I used my Prawn suit I decided it was time to fully explore the crab snake caves (with the pink mushrooms). So I dropped into the nearest entrance... and kept right on dropping, because the floor hadn't spawned by the time I reached it. Managed to get quite a few kilometers deep before the Prawn suit finally imploded from the crush damage it was racking up.

[Anteros]

Haven't had anything quite as awesome as turning into a projectile, but the first time I used my Prawn suit I decided it was time to fully explore the crab snake caves (with the pink mushrooms). So I dropped into the nearest entrance... and kept right on dropping, because the floor hadn't spawned by the time I reached it. Managed to get quite a few kilometers deep before the Prawn suit finally imploded from the crush damage it was racking up.

Fun fact. If you hop out and repair the prawn you can keep going. Once you hit 8000 or so you spawn back in the shallows.

[danzibr]

I play too many phone games. Thinking of quitting some.

Beyond that, played some Smash Ultimate lately.

[factotum]

I got into trouble when I tried to figure out what to do with the bioreactor. it's an interior part, but too big for the tubes I have access to.

You need a Multipurpose Room for those, which is one of the blueprints you don't start the game with and have to find somewhere. Which I personally think is ludicrous--would it really have killed the pacing that much to have it available from game start?

Regarding the "stuck in room" issue, couldn't you have dismantled the room you were in, or won't the game let you do that?

[Anteros]

You need a Multipurpose Room for those, which is one of the blueprints you don't start the game with and have to find somewhere. Which I personally think is ludicrous--would it really have killed the pacing that much to have it available from game start?

Regarding the "stuck in room" issue, couldn't you have dismantled the room you were in, or won't the game let you do that?

You can't dismantle things if you or anything else is inside of them.

I don't mind having to find things like the room. You're crash landed on an alien world with a corrupt PDA, so from a story standpoint it's just another obstacle you have to overcome.

One of the problems I have with Below Zero's story is that it features someone who intentionally goes to the planet, yet still doesn't have basic schematics for things like air tanks, submersibles, or housing. It makes no sense unless you assume that you're playing as a complete idiot. And this is after they supposedly re-wrote the plot to fix it. Bit of an off-tangent rant here, but I've been following Below Zero's early access and it's not shaping up to be even half the game the original Subnautica was. The plot is brain dead, and while the first game is incredibly immersive, in Below Zero they literally will not shut up and leave you alone at any point, so you can't even ignore it. On top of this, most of the voice acting is bad. Sound design in general is a million times worse than the original. Whoever the composer for the original Subnautica was, did an outstanding job. The music keeps you tense, and there's so many musical cues that sound ever so slightly like the creatures, so you're always wondering in the back of your mind if you heard the cues correctly or if something is sneaking up on you. The sound design in Below Zero has the exact opposite effect. No one ever shuts up, the sea truck is 100X louder than it needs to be and drowns out the ambiance of the game, and the voice acting is completely ridiculous (especially the screams when you get attacked. I actually burst out laughing the first time I got attacked by something in Below Zero). The visuals are stunning, and the core gameplay is still good, but the sound design and the story really drag it down.

[Eldan]

I quit playing Subnautica when I reloaded a save in the Lava Castle after finally managing to get in there and... all the water had gone. My prawn suit just sat at the bottom and wouldn't move. Tried the console, none of the commonly recommended commands would do anything. Spawning myself back at the starting location: no water at the starting location.

Checked my last save, it was probably hours away and I really didn't want to fight my way down there again. So I quit.

[Anteros]

I quit playing Subnautica when I reloaded a save in the Lava Castle after finally managing to get in there and... all the water had gone. My prawn suit just sat at the bottom and wouldn't move. Tried the console, none of the commonly recommended commands would do anything. Spawning myself back at the starting location: no water at the starting location.

Checked my last save, it was probably hours away and I really didn't want to fight my way down there again. So I quit.

I've had this bug. Constructing a building with a hatch and going through the hatch fixes it.

As an aside. We should really stop posting spoilers for the game when someone is going through it for the first time.

[Rakaydos]

I've had this bug. Constructing a building with a hatch and going through the hatch fixes it.

As an aside. We should really stop posting spoilers for the game when someone is going through it for the first time.

I mean, I've seen a speedrun of the game, so if it's important enough to not be a blink-and-miss it moment, like the endgame plot, I at least know it exists. Just not how it's done or where it's at.

[Triaxx]

Good, then telling you that the grassy plains are where to find Battery charger fragments is no spoiler.

[Razade]

Hades, by Super Giant Games, got a Fall release announcement for Switch. Probably the best news gaming wise I've heard this year. Only a new Fire Emblem would make me happier.


Best part for those who have it on Steam and get it on Switch, you'll be able to transfer your save from Steam to the Switch somehow. No full release date announced but certainly by the end of the year.

[Man_Over_Game]

Hades, by Super Giant Games, got a Fall release announcement for Switch. Probably the best news gaming wise I've heard this year. Only a new Fire Emblem would make me happier.


Best part for those who have it on Steam and get it on Switch, you'll be able to transfer your save from Steam to the Switch somehow. No full release date announced but certainly by the end of the year.

Lol, I was literally just talking with my wife last night, saying that we should get Hades for the Switch as the only reason we don't play it all that much is just because it takes time to boot up a laptop with our busy schedule. Her response was "If it ever does, sure".

Damn good timing.

[Rakaydos]

8 hours, 50 minutes in.

Setting off south of the aurora again, I apparently went a bit further south than last time. Set up a base where you can see glowing blue balls in the deeps, but also next to a kelp forest. After stocking up and determining that the deeps are just too deep for me right now, I set off closer to tha aurora with another base-kit.

The next base was 100m down near a hole, but not too far from a kelp forest, with a gradual slope down to the deeps. The hole wasnt that interesting, but by the time I figured that out, my storage locker was too full to relocate. in the area, though, I found a scanner room. Building it was somewhat interesting, as it costs a lot of materials, and I used it to hunt down a Lithium in the deeps. I also found a Stasis rifle blueprint, beacons (which should make my base chaining easier, if I can find them without relying on landmarks) and a few more odds and ends.

I also made another trip north, closer to the aurora, that found a decaying base very deep. That's where I found the stasis rifle, but I suffocated on my way back up. I still need to go rediscover it.

Also, apparetly wrecks have doors you can open? I constructed a new repair tool (I left my old one back at the life pod) to get in and get the beacon blueprint. That spurred a swim back to mark my southerly base, which is where I saved and quit.

[factotum]

Out of curiosity, Rakaydos, have you actually been inside the Aurora yet? You talk a lot about being near it...

[Razade]

Lol, I was literally just talking with my wife last night, saying that we should get Hades for the Switch as the only reason we don't play it all that much is just because it takes time to boot up a laptop with our busy schedule. Her response was "If it ever does, sure".

Damn good timing.

And you won't even lose progress!

Look forward to getting to play it, been holding off on getting it for Steam all this time. I can wait a few more months.

[Rakaydos]

Out of curiosity, Rakaydos, have you actually been inside the Aurora yet? You talk a lot about being near it...

Nope. The closest I got was on the unsaved portion, where I scanned some things on the lifepod side of the aurora's beach.

I'm slowly approaching it from the engine side.

Edit: I'm also starting to see diseased wildlife, which I know from the speedrun I watched is related to the endgame story, but not the details.

[Zevox]

Hades, by Super Giant Games, got a Fall release announcement for Switch. Probably the best news gaming wise I've heard this year. Only a new Fire Emblem would make me happier.

That one didn't catch my attention personally, but one of the other games from that Switch Indie Direct yesterday did. Raji: An Ancient Epic. I'm thinking about giving that one a shot after I finish Okami, it looked pretty good.

[Triaxx]

It's definitely worth heading to the Aurora... Bring your repair tool.

[Rakaydos]

10 hours, 18 minutes-
I've found the battery charger schematic, along with enough diamonds to build a cutting tool. Tried to find that deep hole with the decayed base in it again, but instead built a scanner under a reaper's hunting grounds. I'm 2 for 3 for the Cyclops, with the bridge and engine segments finished, and I think I'm 2/3 of the way with the sensor segment, too?

I circled the aurora after losing a seamoth to the reaper, found some decks that I could access, but with only one fire extinguisher I didnt get far. died to cave spiders.

[Triaxx]

Stasis rifle or survival knife on the spiders. From the Aurora head past your life pod to the grass plains where the cave and wreck are located.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Once you get the grav rifle (I believe it's in the Aurora), it is endlessly entertaining to use it on those damn cave spiders. Sweet revenge.

[Rakaydos]

I've got the schematics for the grav rifle, it's the rare materials that are difficult.

[warty goblin]

I continue to prod Anthem, trying to figure it out. Almost no part of it actually work completely, but some parts come closer to functioning as a part of something coherent, and the game self-sabotages at every opportunity.

The combat basically functions. The movement works very well, the shooting is fine and with some iteration could probably reach good. It messes this up with tremendously dull encounter design, boring enemy design, and bad enemy AI. Hardly any of the enemies seem to even have an ability, even something as basic as a grenade. They just stand there and you shoot them.

Fort Tarsis is so obviously duct taped onto the game it's almost funny. Except for the umpteen loading screens it inflicts on you. There's nothing wrong with a player hub for upgrades and shopping and talking to people. There's nearly everything wrong with this hub, since it takes forever to deal with, it pops up way too much, and nothing interesting happens there.

The voice acting and animation are good. The story is abysmal, its like it deliberately takes every single opportunity to make my character uninvested in the proceedings. You start out failing to stop an apocalypse, then several hours of playtime and in-universe years later get the backstory of what started the Heart of Rage. Which is a big cool thing involving a city under attack. Of course your character wasn't there and didn't know anything about it. Why aren't I from the destroyed city, so I could have fought in the siege and actually have a reason to care? Oh right, the engine almost certainly couldn't handle it.

The while thing just reeks of utterly incompetent project management.

[Rakaydos]

12 hours, 22 minutes. Found the entrance to tha aurora again- it wasn't where I thought it was. Made one aborted (couldnt get inside without propulsion gun) and 1 serious excursion. Acquired the Cyclopse efficency, prawn suit storage items, and the prawn suit schematics. I also made it into Cabin 1, but didnt find any clues to enter the captian's cabin. Also repaired the engine breaches.

There was a voice alert that there was another black box nearby when I entered the prawn bay, but the only hull breach I found was the one I entered by, so that... might be a bug?

[PoeticallyPsyco]

12 hours, 22 minutes. Found the entrance to tha aurora again- it wasn't where I thought it was. Made one aborted (couldnt get inside without propulsion gun) and 1 serious excursion. Acquired the Cyclopse efficency, prawn suit storage items, and the prawn suit schematics. I also made it into Cabin 1, but didnt find any clues to enter the captian's cabin. Also repaired the engine breaches.

There was a voice alert that there was another black box nearby when I entered the prawn bay, but the only hull breach I found was the one I entered by, so that... might be a bug?

Hmm, I don't think this is a spoiler, but I'll spoiler it just in case:

Spoiler: Another way into the Aurora

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There are two ways into the Aurora, both along the same path. The most obvious is at the top of the path, a full on door right next to the place where you need the propulsion gun to move some boxes to proceed.

About halfway down the path that got you to the door, next to a floodlight there's a big pile of boxes that you can move aside with the propulsion gun to reveal a second way into the ship.

[Silverraptor]

You need a Multipurpose Room for those, which is one of the blueprints you don't start the game with and have to find somewhere. Which I personally think is ludicrous--would it really have killed the pacing that much to have it available from game start?

Regarding the "stuck in room" issue, couldn't you have dismantled the room you were in, or won't the game let you do that?

If I recall, when the game was in early access, it did have you start with the multipurpose room at the start. But some time later they made it that you had to scan it.

Also Rakaydos, here is a map of Subnautica that may help you navigate. Just thought I'd post it in a spoiler box below. If you don't want to use it, that's alright. Just thought I'd make it available for you regardless.

Spoiler: Subnautica Map

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[Triaxx]

Early on the best place to get rare resources is actually on the vertical wall of the shelf that the Aurora sits on the Seamoth is particularly vital to such an endeavour, having both oxygen and more importantly spotlights toggled with right-click that will let you see contrast of the smooth sandstone rocks and the more sharp edged limestone agains the world textures.