estirose

This came out yesterday-ish and I may have spent too many hours last night + a little at breaks playing it (and starting over once or twice). I bought it because Pathea authorized a crossover for the My Time At... series (My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock - Gust, Ginger, Nia, and Fang with X) and I am all for that. I don't know if they're in the game yet.

I feel that at early access it shouldn't cost 40 USD or equivalent. I paid about 25 USD, because of 30% launch discount + a bit extra because I owned at least one of/both My Time At games (I essentially got a loyalty discount because I owned multiple games from a different publisher....)

( Some controversies that I've discovered since buying the game )

Anyway, this is definitely a cozy game. It reminds me greatly of Portia/Sandrock, with a little bit of Fantasy Life in terms of the professions. It currently has no storyline other than really going up in profession levels, which I find I'm really appreciating. I also appreciate that other than the game's urging that I pick up the crafting profession, I'm pretty much allowed to be on my own.

There is romance in the game, which does nothing for me, but as they phase in the romance/marriage system the devs have stated that you can romance regardless of your gender, which I appreciate.

The five professions are crafting, exploring (combat), ranching, planting, and fishing. Crafting goes well with the other four professions, while exploring complements crafting, and ranching and planting complement each other (in particular, the first ranching animal - rabbits - can eat the weeds in your garden, saving you the trouble of hand weeding - I haven't poked around with this much though as I'm not fond of ranching in my farming games).

There are resources scattered around your cabin. The ones that are within the fence don't renew, but the ones outside seem to, which is good. You can in fact decorate your cabin, and in fact, you start your time there by making your own bed. (If you get unlucky with the resources and are desperate, the general store also sells them.)

I've barely poked at farming and ranching and not at fishing yet. I've mostly done crafting and exploring.

Each time you go up in rank (your first rank is apprentice, and then you go up to junior, and apparently there intermediate, senior, and expert levels), you first do a craft for the person in charge of that profession for your certification, and then you take on a task for a local resident (a challenge; you need to complete it before you can ask about the next level). This requires more and more materials and more and more running around.

The local "mines" are actually a mystical forest with ores in it. You can fast travel to any camp in this forest that you've unlocked - which means that you need to fix the fast-travel at every camp except the first. You can also sleep and make food at these camps should you need to. You'll need to do certain things to unlock the paths to these camps.

Things are pretty laid back, and if you're not farming, you don't have to really worry about the seasons. If there's one piece of advice I'd impart it would be to not hurry things. Just finish the apprentice crafter certification (and maybe the apprentice explorer certification) and you're good until you want to move on.

Oh, and if you need guidance - your profession quests are tracked by default and the game makes sure you don't get lost by giving you a glowing trail of stars towards where you need to go. You can turn this off, and in fact, you can turn off the directional marker. Which as someone who gets irritated by such things, I really appreciate. The glowing trail of stars sometimes hiccups, once leading me in a loop around somebody's house. But it can be really useful for finding NPCs you need to give stuff to, which is really handy for the crafting master who likes to hide in her basement.

ETA: I posted a guide to the starting quests on my Tumblr.

( Notes and such that are a bit more spoilery )

This was shared in the Stardew Valley official Discord, apparently you should be very cautious in downloading from ModDrop and stick to NexusMods for Stardew Valley mods. Apparently there's nobody moderating ModDrop and therefore stolen and/or malicious mods are getting uploaded there.

I do have a mod on there (Raven's Mystery Box Exchanger), it is not being deleted from there and I'm not uploading it on Nexus, mostly because I uploaded it there for a grand total of one person to be able to grab it easily - having other players grab it was nice but far from critical, and I don't take offense at people being warned from downloading from there. I will also be the first person to tell you that you need to be careful of any executables where they're not expected (bat, exe, sh) and be cautious of .dll files (to a lesser extent - be aware there are plenty of benign community mods with .dll files!).

(I really do need to get into my github and update it with all my freaking mods! But that's for another day.)

I picked Kind Words 2 up as part of Humble Bundle's Wholesome Snack bundle. I was actually expecting to get into Spirittea more (which is very spare in its explanations, to put it politely) and Botany Manor, which is a puzzle game, but I have found myself mostly playing this game. I have it on my computer, not my Steam Deck, because it's very keyboard-heavy.

Kind Words 2 is kinda-sorta a MMO. But instead of battling creatures, you're holding asynchronous conversations and writing advice and encouragement to people who ask for it. You can also post your own worries and someone might reply back! You can also get recommendations for things like games, songs, and music. I asked for a particular subgenre of mysteries and got back two recommendations - one for a book series I was already familiar with, and one for a book I think I've heard of.

If the person likes your recommendation/advice/encouragement, you get a sticker. You can also send stickers if you like someone else's recommendation/advice/encouragement.

There's also a spot where you can literally yell into a void.

I'm liking it a lot. It reminds me in a vague way of Glitch, except just... being there for one another. You're not going to spend hours in it, and there's a limited amount of messages to reply to, but it's very nice.

Or actually, the third party system that Discord uses for customer service did.

I got a notification... not on the email address for my regular Discord account, but the throwaway I used for suggesting a way to improve their business' customer service reputation. (This happened in April and the TL;DR version is I said "maybe if you're going to ban people, give them more details" as I saw that people were being banned with no details as to what they were being banned for. I was told "LOL, you have to use the same discussion board people use to suggest features! Maybe we'll even listen." And when I asked for a supervisor, the correspondence abruptly ended.)

I used the throwaway address because I didn't know if somebody at Discord would be vindictive enough to decide my Discord account needed banning because I was annoying them. And it turned out to be a good thing, as the throwaway doesn't have my personal information, account name, card details, etc and can be easily deactivated (in fact, it has).

This was only their customer service system and not actually Discord's main servers, so the only stuff at risk is anything that was disclosed to them. I know a lot of people use Discord, and if you have never corresponded with Customer Service or Trust & Safety, you should not see any issues.

ETA: Unfortunately that might include payment info, IDs etc. It's a mess; I got away lightly because my only interaction with that system was to tell them it was bad and I used a throwaway with no info about me.

Four characters from four games: My Spirit Scout from Cozy Grove, Grey from Fantasy Life, Esti from Fantasy Life i, and Marco from My Time at Sandrock

There's stuff I wanted to put into my Yuletide letter but I didn't want to put people off by having to listen to all my ramblings (a couple sections got rather long)! So here are a bunch of extra things related to my Yuletide 2025 requests.

With everything going on in the world, I missed an announcement that was in the Nintendo Direct!

Fatal Frame II remake! The costumes look different, but I think it's at least taking some cues from Deep Crimson Butterfly, which along with Fatal Frame IV and V was (re-)released on some form of the Wii (and therefore easier to bring to modern devices). And again, it is not Switch-exclusive.

I'm hoping they ditch the ghost hand mechanic that really was annoying in Deep Crimson Butterfly (and IV, and V). It's the only bit of the game I really didn't enjoy.

Oooh, they seem to have added the ability to run, something that didn't appear until Fatal Frame V... before that, the fastest any of our protagonists moved was maybe a very slow jog.

So, I'm planning on nominating the following media for sure:
* Cozy Grove
* Assemble with Care (this is a small puzzle game that I ran across - it's fun but gads they left lots of missing scene material - also my 'break glass in case of pinch hit' fandom)

Possible:
* My Time at Sandrock (at 885 fics after filters, this is likely the game's last year in Yuletide, and I want in)
* Fatal Frame, possibly the third game but more likely the 1st one.
* Coral Island, mostly for mini-programs worldbuilding, but also for the undersea folks

Definitely in but figuring out how I'm going to nominate:
* Fantasy Life/Fantasy Life i. I mostly want the OG characters in the OG setting, but honestly? I also love Carla and Mira and I'd love to see some expansion of Frajeel and the whole Swolean economy. Also, boats come from the OG lands! I don't know whether to nominate this as a series and risk getting people who have no idea about the OG game's setting trying to write my OG prompts, or nominate both games so that I can get good fics for both.