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Return To Zom-Zom’s I want to pack everything up at Gyges and move further east. Maybe one of the city hexes near the ATN for now, an enterprising player can usually pick up some good stuff by bartering with them over time, selling them salvage and whatever you’re capable of hunting and their food and medical help makes surviving a drat sight easier. There’s only one campsite in the game that’s as good to live in as Gyges, but that one comes with it’s own set of problems. The only issue with Gyges is being too far away from anywhere I might want to go.  I actually finally managed to stumble across an extremely rare sight: another human being, just another looter like myself. Who isn’t interested in a fight. I tried to talk, but he just took off. Just as well.  I feel like the game is purposefully being easier on me than usual, almost like it knows I’m showing off for the crowd or something. I don’t normally get this much good stuff this early, or in these kinds of quantities. This is like the sixth crowbar I’ve found now, and at least the second water tester (a handy little tool that tells you if a unit of water is safe to drink, infested with parasites or bacteria, or poisonous, but needs batteries to work).  It’s just a coincidence that I never fought a melonhead before going to Allegan, they’re scattered around this whole area. They don’t use equipment, and are just big-headed humans, so they’re pretty trivial to fight one on one.  They also still count as humans for the purposes of cannibalism, so don’t go eating the melon.  Woo, I got a rifle, in great condition, with a strap on it! Woo, I have nothing to shoot out of this gun! Guns are tricky. They’re far and away the best ranged weapons when you need to deal a lot of damage quickly (especially rifles and shotguns). BUT you need to have the proper ammunition. Without Ranged, Phillip can’t tell a .45 from a .308 from a 12ga slug, they’re all just bullets to him. Plus, bullets are just plain difficult to find in usable quantities. If you want to use a ranged weapon without Ranged, a sling is generally a solid option (I picked one up cheap from the ATN, you can use them to throw pebbles for a little damage or larger stones for considerable damage). With Ranged, you’re capable of making your own arrows, and should stick to the best bow you can get your hands on. On the other hand, this thing is worth nearly $600. I immediately shoved it in an abandoned house, I’ll pick it up the next time I come up this way so I can hock it. I need to save up a large sum of money for something I want to do later anyway, this will help contribute to that.  After the first visit to Zom Zom’s you can reenter any time by using their logo, which is always found in the hex Zom Zom’s resides in, similar to the window to explore Gyges way back at the beginning..  Upon reentering, you have to decide what drew Phillip back here. Did he come for the barbecue (it’s still PEOPLE!), can he take care of himself and have unfinished business, or is there no good reason and he should just leave? I’ve already established that Phillip can take care of himself and doesn’t need to eat this trash. I’m after the big prize.  Unfortunately, that means going in as stock again.  The first time you go to Zom Zom’s, Phillip’s number will always come up second, giving you a chance to find out about the fights before getting stuck in one yourself, The Stoat only rescues you if you have the medical bracelet on, which I guess confirms that’s how he knew Phillip had come from Gyges. On return visits, it’s entirely random. You could be sitting here munching barbecue (again, not a good idea) and watching people fight robots for hours.    There’s only a handful of fights written up, there’s no random drawing here, the same human always fights the same robot, and repeats can and do happen often.  Phillip’s up, and there’s no Stoat to save him this time. This would be absolutely terrible except it’s exactly why I’m here.  Because I have a cunning plan. Step 1 was fulfilled when I woke up the melonheads at Allegan and got out alive. Now we have step two.  A lot like the dogman at Gyges that started this shindig, you can use just about any skill to fight Zom Zom’s robots. Some work better than others, and there’s enough random chance involved that coming down here is always dangerous. I’m going to beat it with Phillip’s knowledge of trapping. A brief description: Trapping or Hacking – try to trap the robot by taking advantage of it’s programming Athletic – try to outrun it until it runs out of power Mechanic – try to take advantage of weak points on its legs  Well it was obviously never going to be that easy.  That was actually incredibly lucky. I can’t remember the last time I pulled that off completely unscathed.  Yep. My work here is done. I fought a robot, receiving absolutely no reward. Right?  Except wait, I seem to have a new combat ability now. Vanish From Sight does exactly what it sounds like. What I just pulled off was achieving one of the game’s two legendary reputations. If you do a series of awesome things and get known for it, you get a special skill. Because I used my wits, ingenuity, and reflexes to escape Allegan and beat the robot, I got the Elusive skill, increasing my defense, making me harder to spot in poor lighting conditions, and reducing other creatures’ ability to follow my tracks. It also unlocks two combat skills, one of which you just saw. The other is the more impressive of the two. It’s coming up later. Also, I ended up killing that guy anyway. One less murderous cannibal in the world. (I am not actually sure if there are finite numbers of Bad Muthas or any other creature, based on my own experience I believe there’s a finite number per day but they can respawn later)  VFS is less useful, but still handy, in fights against multiple enemies. Using it against three dogs here dropped two of them out of combat entirely, leaving only one for me to fight.  My wandering took me to this strange, dark little patch of forest almost directly west of Gyges. In most playthroughs I come here first after getting clothes and before anything else. I’m not sure why I put it off so long this time.  Yeah, this all seems perfectly normal. Nothing untoward about this place. CARRY ON!  You can use a handful of skills to try and suss this strange grove out as you move through it. The only relevant one I have this time is botany.  Botanist says this place is dangerous as gently caress.     I ended up using Athletic against it this go-around.  Oddly, the game never describes the creature in this version of the fight. In the version where I used Trapping, it was clearly another Enfield Horror. This is the Beast of Hades Grove (which of course makes this forest Hade’s Grove, it’s never identified as such anywhere else) that killed me in one attempt as I noted earlier.  This is clearly bullshit on several levels. First, of course, I fought an Enfield Horror early on when I was barely equipped and came out okay, there’s no reason for all this rigmarole. More importantly, however, is that the fight happened at all. This doesn’t always happen, and I’m not sure what the exact factors that play into it are (having and using Hiding helps, but doesn’t seem to be required). Unfortunately, whatever plays into the events here, they’re set in stone. After multiple reloads, I wasn’t able to do anything but escape this Enfield Horror (taking varying amounts of damage along the way). In playthroughs where you avoid the Enfield Horror, Phillip gets led on a merry chase through the woods by a mysterious presence, possibly a woman in white, that calls his name, but he never gets a good look at. This results in Phillip reaching a clearing with strange, non-human footprints and sometimes treasure. Most notably you can obtain a device that claims to repel Dogmen, but actually summons them to you while you hold it. There’s also sometimes a tracking bracelet that claims to be useful for a location that will appear later, sometimes a nanomachine medical kit, and sometimes a bottle of water. Sometimes there’s nothing at all. And sometimes you get jumped by the Enfield Horror. I feel ripped off.  On the plus side, coming out of that with just a couple wounds (one is older, the other came from rubbing up against one of the plants) is pretty good. I popped back to gyges to wash and bandage my horrible battlewound, then took a swing to the south.  When you’ve heard of places like Grayling or Detroit but don’t know exactly where to find them, you can use a roadmap to mark them on the in-game map (I never show this map because it’s garbage). I already knew where Grayling was from talking to The Stoat, so this just let me identify the Glow in the east as Detroit Mega City.   Well now, that looks interesting. Radioactive stuff is probably perfectly safe. It’s slimy and full of garbage too. This just keeps getting better and better. I missed a shot of the next screen. There’s a door, with a sign warning “Beware of the Tiger”. Tigers in Michigan. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. It still seems pretty dangerous though. Taking this at a run seems like the logical course of action.  OH gently caress ME THERE’S A loving SABER-TOOTHED TIGER! RUN NOW, MAKE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF THE MILLENIUM LATER! Safety. Safety is good.  … Well, safety is relative. I’m thinking maybe this isn’t a place I want to be in very long.  Oh yes. It’s a robot. Of course it is. There goes that Nobel Prize for discovering a live specimen of an extinct species. I have no idea if you can even get a Nobel for that. What’s that about hot bricks though?  I’m with Phillip on being concerned about this man having access to plutonium. Especially in close proximity to Phillip himself. The fact that ol’ Bob seems a bit crazy isn’t helping.  If he starts in about contrails or 9/11 or some poo poo I’m braining him with the hot brick and taking my chances with the tiger.Bob’s crazy is almost, but not quite, enough to distract from the fact that he just said there’s a thorium reactor under here. I’m pretty sure those are categorized as “things that need to be maintained by professionals and maybe I don’t want to be this close to one this long after society ended and nobody’s been caring for it”. I wonder what post-apocalypse Florida is like. Or possibly South America. Hell, maybe they already buried the thing in concrete. Would explain why Bob here isn’t dead if he’s been living here.  Thankfully, it takes very little to convince Bob that I’m not here to rob him, tax him, or really do anything else. The radiation seems to be frying his brain a little, and there’s nothing I can do for that. But I can help him fix his robot. But first… Bob, I’m stupid enough interested in your little radioactive brick there. What do you want for it, couple hundred bucks?  Well, Bob doesn’t deal in currency, he wants useful items. There’s a few he might take for the brick, nothing I have on me. Except the bronze talisman that protects me from almost certain death at the hands? of an angry spirit that’s been stalking Phillip for over fifty years. Meh. Free power’s a pretty good deal. So I traded the talisman for a brick. This thing is technically perfectly safe as long as you don’t keep it on your person, and spits out a bit of electricity ever hour. It also stores a fair amount of electricity, which is useful if you want to recharge batteries on the go.  I can also use my Hacking skill to optimize the programming on the tiger. If you don’t have Hacking, you can use a multitool to try and make physical repairs… which gets Phillip a big dose of radiation. That’s to be avoided.  This seems really elaborate and silly. Wouldn’t motion sensitive cameras with guns on them achieve the same result?  Really, I’m just shocked that a guy like Bob was able to build such an elaborate animatronic and have it work as well as it did. I suppose in a world that didn’t go to hell he’d have a good job working for Freddy’s.  My reward for helping Bob is a doll. Yay?  Yay indeed. The doll serves a couple different purposes. Right now, it’s primary use to me is being a big ol’ battery, holding as much stored electricity as the hot brick can (every one of those grid squares is the maximum capacity of a AA or smartphone battery, a laptop or tablet battery holds four of them). Other uses for it will turn up. All is well with the world, got some cool stuff and ready to start packing everything up and move on to another area. Why do I feel like I’m forgetting something…  Oh. Right. That. NEXT TIME: Phillip confronts his past in the most literal way possible. VS. the MERGA WRAITH What happened to the world? Werewolf attacks in New Mexico Cutbacks led to streetlights being removed in most of Detroit Police overstretched in Michigan, supplemented by private security Detroit built walls to cut itself off from the outside world Smallpox outbreak, started with Coast Guardsmen in South Carolina and spread from there Crop seeds made by a thinly veiled stand-in for Monsanto (Agrisanto) have become so integral to feeding the world that the company got the seed vault at Svalbard shut down so their seeds’ genomes couldn’t be contaminated (SEEDS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!) Truthkeeper fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 04:31
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 You can also trade a slab of cured medium meat for the hot brick, and it's probably the earliest way to get a reliable source of electricity!
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Oct 26, 2018 06:34
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Anticheese posted:
There's a bunch of potential items. Medium meat, some guns, some of the rarer tools. I think this might be the first time I've showed up there with nothing he wants except the talisman. It's a shame, because after fixing the tiger he usually makes an offer to trade his rifle for the talisman.
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Oct 26, 2018 07:19
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Thank you for doing this LP, I'm really enjoying reading how the story plays out and your concise narrative. This game was on my wishlist for a very long time until I tried the demo. The idea and concept of this game always attracted me, but for whatever reasons at the time I didn't have the patience for it.
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Oct 26, 2018 12:31
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Monsanto wouldn't care if their science don't make sense as long g as they can get rid of the competition. Talk enough gobbledygook at the politicians, throw some money at them and they'll believe anything you tell them.
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Oct 26, 2018 13:55
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Really enjoying this LP. I didn't realize how many story areas I missed. I usually treated this game as a find-a-matching-pair-of-shoes simulator.
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Oct 27, 2018 04:05
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Helical Nightmares posted:I usually treated this game as a find-a-matching-pair-of-shoes simulator. Truly the most difficult quest in the game. And then you finally have two matching boots only to have one fall apart and you have to replace it with a sandal or something.
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Oct 27, 2018 04:13
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Vs. Merga Wraith So there I was, finally face to face with the terrible spirit that sent me running to the Anishianaabe to get a magic talisman to keep it at bay. The same talisman I just traded to an irradiated redneck for a chunk of plutonium in a soup can. 10/10 for style, but minus several million for poor planning. But this was it. No more running and hiding for me. It was time for Phillip Kindred to face his past head on. Still kinda wish I knew what I did to piss it off though.  Kind anticlimactically, the Merga Wraith starts most fights stealthed, being too far away for Phillip to see easily despite having just popped in like a bolt of lightning. This is, without doubt, absolutely, the toughest enemy in the game. If it touches you, you will die. There are generally four ways to handle this fight: 1- The method I’m using today, making use of the Elusive skill’s Lethal Trap combat ability. It’s a rare ability that doesn’t always pop up when you need it and has to be used within a range of four (and again, the Wraith can murder the gently caress out of you at 1). The name of the game here is kiting, get into that 2-4 range where you can hit it and it can’t hit you and stay there, never letting it reach you. If you trip and fall, your rear end is grass. 2 – Using the other Legendary Reputation skill, Unstoppable, the reputation for being an unbeatable death machine (attained from various shows of strength and martial prowess, entirely trivial to get if you start with the Strong and Melee skills). That skill gives a combat ability called Exploit Weakness, which lets you penetrate an enemy’s armor. The Merga Wraith has a lot of armor it, but underneath it’s as vulnerable as any living creature to being shot a fuckload of times. 3 - Maybe you don’t have any legendary rep. Maybe you just have giant brass balls, or are an idiot, or just didn’t know any better, and you went into this fight without them. No instant kill, no armor skip. If you only have melee weapons, might as well kiss your rear end goodbye and start planning your next playthrough. BUT, if you’re very well equipped, particularly with guns and ammo to spare, beating the wraith legit is possible. You have to get very lucky with your shots and manage to get the brain or heart despite the wraith’s armor. It’s tough, but doable. 4 – Friends! Associates? Slaves. I - I brought slaves. Whatever you call them, if there are friendly (or at least non-hostile) units in the same hex when the wraith is summoned, it might go for them first, and they’ll usually fight back. If that poor son of a bitch taking the hit for you happens to be a Detroit Megacity guard, it is very possible he will manage to gun the thing down for you. All methods are equally valid, in that they’re all exploits anyway. The Merga Wraith was intended to be unbeatable. When people found ways to do it anyway, the dev was so impressed he just wrote it into the story. Anyway, my attempt. Step 1, as always, is to ditch the sled so I can move at full speed. The Wraith and I started a long distance apart, great if I was shooting it, less than ideal for the close range Lethal Trap strategy.  It only took one turn of searching to lay eyes on it. Like I said before, kinda hard to miss. His only attack is a melee range instant killing touch. My plan is a slightly longer range trap. And so we close the distance.  And then I lucked out. As soon as I reached range 4, Lethal Trap was immediately on the table. It died much the same way as it appeared (even with the same graphic, kinda lazy). Originally, this would have been the end of it, but to celebrate players beating the Wraith, the dev threw us a little bone. In the place where the wraith dies, a portal appears. You can jump in, or not, choosing not to makes the portal vanish.  Sure, I’ll jump into the mysterious hole in the air leading to a strange world I know nothing about that’s home to a horrible monster that’s been hunting me for decades!  Welcome to the Merga Realm, it’s a fun and happy place. Your options here are to bail back through the portal, take a look at the items scattered around, try to get a good look at the figures milling about down below (can’t see well enough unaided), or do the same with a scope or binoculars.  Dozens. Oh. Goody.  On the other, much safer hand, the room Phillip appeared in is full of stuff. Mostly completely irrelevant.  Some letters.  A childrens’ book.  A cuneiform tablet.  And some old home movies (Louis Le Prince invented one of the earliest, though likely not the first, motion picture camera).  Welp, I guess I have to admit that I remembered something incorrectly. Remember a few updates ago when I said: ”Truthkeeper” posted:Unfortunately, this is another storyline that feels incomplete. While more of Phillip’s past can be found, there’s no way to learn more about the NEO. Welp!  I somehow completely forgot about this bit.   So the Wraiths have super-advanced computers. That’s an interesting touch. Maybe advanced alien species? Hell, maybe they’re dark fairies or something. We’ll never know. The Merga Wraiths, unlike every other creature to turn up in this game, are entirely fictional, made up completely by the developer. I’m given to understand that ‘Merga’ means ‘death’ in Kurdish, maybe that was what he was going for.  What we do know is that the talisman worked to keep them from getting to Phillip, but they apparently had some exhaustive tracking going on. No magical sense of “talisman’s off, that boy’s rear end is mine!”, they were watching and waiting.  Welp, time to go! This is triggered by having looked at the computer/viewing device/magic screen. Phillip immediately gets the gently caress out, he’s not gonna find out what the darkness does and he’s sure as gently caress not going to fight more than one wraith.  And that’s probably the end of that. Certainly the end of it for Phillip. There was some talk from the developer for a bit concerning a potential sequel (presumably sometime after his current game is finished), I assume whatever the hell the Wraiths are doing would be a factor there. But for now, the rewards! The wraith is basically the final boss, combat wise. Beating it gets you whichever legendary reputation you didn’t have (or both if you pulled off the difficult no legendary kill option). I also was able to take the letters, books, film, and whatnot with me. Collectively, they’re worth about fifty bucks. Not really worth it for the amount of space they’ll take up when I move on.  The main feature of having Unstoppable, as I briefly mentioned before, is the Exploit Weakness combat skill, which can be used at any range and allows you to bypass enemy armor.  The other combat skill is Intimidate, which is a better version of Threaten that actually works sometimes. Still less effective than Vanish From Sight. If forced to pick between the two legendary skills, I’ll take Elusive over Unstoppable every time.  Back at Gyges, I was able to use the power stored in the doll and produced by the hot brick to charge up all my various batteries. That’s AA batteries for one of my two flashlights, a laptop battery for my laptop, and one smartphone battery to split between my two phones. And also this nifty little device, a sparker is any kind of battery modified to, as the name suggests, make sparks on use. It’s an electric lighter. A little bulky, but very useful.  Now that I finally have some juice for it, I can take a look at the Copperbook brand laptop I picked up scavenging somewhere.  Huh, so at some point they managed to make incredibly difficult to penetrate user authentication for end-user operating systems. That’s a hell of a thing.  Which is completely invalidated by the US government! Thank you Uncle Sam! This is the main meat of the Hacking skill, besides minor story uses like using it to fix the robotiger. Laptops, cell phones, tablets, and flash drives can all turn up with potentially valuable data on them. The First three all need to be hacked to find out what’s on them. It’s just a matter of using the Hacker skill on laptops, thanks to the aforementioned government, but phones and tablets require specific cracking software, which you have to hope either turns up on a hackable laptop or on a flash drive. Outside of random scavenging loot, the only real place to obtain software is near Detroit, which has a much better store than the one at the ATN.  I have no idea who’s going to pay me any money at all for these old company employee records, nor why they would only pay $4 if it’s actually worth something to them. NEXT TIME: Go East Young Phillip! What happened to the world? Werewolf attacks in New Mexico Cutbacks led to streetlights being removed in most of Detroit Police overstretched in Michigan, supplemented by private security Detroit built walls to cut itself off from the outside world Smallpox outbreak, started with Coast Guardsmen in South Carolina and spread from there Crop seeds made by a thinly veiled stand-in for Monsanto (Agrisanto) have become so integral to feeding the world that the company got the seed vault at Svalbard shut down so their seeds’ genomes couldn’t be contaminated
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Oct 27, 2018 05:49
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Huh, was the portal thing patched in later? I could swear I managed to beat the Wraith at one point but don't remember it as a result.
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Oct 27, 2018 06:14
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Yeah, it was a fairly late addition, I think one of the last major content additions. Like I briefly mentioned, the wraith wasn't supposed to be beatable, so everything related to actually beating it (being rewarded with both legendary skills and the portal) were added once Fedor found out people were doing it, rather than trying to change the wraith to be more unkillable.
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Oct 27, 2018 07:01
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 Another horrible death. Totally had this one coming, I was showing off trying to get off a lethal trap on it.
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Oct 27, 2018 09:05
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The four bucks for company records could be a pity thing. "This is completely useless but man, some effort went into getting it, I oughta at least kick 'em a little pocket change for the trouble."
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Oct 27, 2018 10:07
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Someone, somewhere, wants to know what Grandma did for work.
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Oct 27, 2018 10:39
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If the Merga Wraith kills you, does that get you a novel death screen/description or is it just the usual combat log with "MERGA WRAITH PUNCHES [PLAYER'S] HEAD OFF."?
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Oct 27, 2018 16:37
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Jeepers, it feels like you've beaten the game and you haven't even gotten to Detroit yet.
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Oct 27, 2018 20:40
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Aren't you just selling the drive rather than the info on it?
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Oct 27, 2018 22:26
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Nope. That bit I highlighted is specifically a blob of data on the laptop that's worth $4 by itself. Some data is worth much more than that, it's what makes Hacking a viable skill, being able to make a quick buck with it. Although you're still technically correct that in order to sell data, you need to sell the device (a computer or drive with the data stored on it) it, which would add the value of the data to the sell price of the computer or flash drive.
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Oct 27, 2018 22:54
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Maybe there's people out there who want to read old nonsense because they think it's soothing Like a post-post-apocalyptic accountant
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Oct 28, 2018 15:26
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It's actually really cool that rather than make the super monster immortal the designer added a bonus for people who figure out how to kill it against their intention.
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Oct 28, 2018 15:40
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Have you never played [insert survival horror fps], where old world memos are the key to getting access to the uber-loot because idiot office workers wrote down the password in their email?
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Oct 28, 2018 16:45
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That is a good point, people will buy data because you never know how useful it'll be. Merchants likely funnel the data to information brokers who sift through it to find useful things, maybe how to rebuild some broken down parts of society, or finding lot caches.
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Oct 28, 2018 16:50
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Night10194 posted:It's actually really cool that rather than make the super monster immortal the designer added a bonus for people who figure out how to kill it against their intention. some game devs throw a hissy fit whenever their supposedly unbeatable challenges are inevitably beaten. it is indeed cool that this guy rolled with it instead.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:18
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"If you give it HP, someone somewhere will find a way to make that HP count 0." A central axiom of gaming. If you want to make something unkillable, make it flatly unkillable. If you settle for 'Strong enough that no one could possibly down it', someone will. Full stop.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:27
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Siegkrow posted:That is a good point, people will buy data because you never know how useful it'll be. Merchants likely funnel the data to information brokers who sift through it to find useful things, maybe how to rebuild some broken down parts of society, or finding lot caches. Post-apoc information broker? I'd play it.
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Oct 28, 2018 21:53
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queserasera posted:Post-apoc information broker? I'd play it. Unfortunately, you'd run into some stiff competition in that field. The post-apocalyptic info broker of note should be coming up in this next update.
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Oct 28, 2018 22:28
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Truthkeeper posted:Unfortunately, you'd run into some stiff competition in that field. The post-apocalyptic info broker of note should be coming up in this next update. Huh. Guess I didn't get that far into the game. Though you've covered just about all of my usual deaths. Deadliest killer in Neo Scavenger is hubris.
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Oct 28, 2018 22:56
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You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy Captain China just doesn’t have the same ring to it as Captain America.  Told you I was gonna stop and grab that rifle again. I leave little supply caches in easy to reach places sometimes (a set of clothes, a good melee weapon, a multitool, a lighter and some sticks), but something as valuable as this rifle (and comparatively worthless to me in its use as a weapon) is definitely getting dumped off at the ATN for that sweet sweet cash. The dead dogman is a new addition to this space though.  It’s been dead a while and the corpse is fairly deteriorated. Using low-durability items in crafting usually results in the final product having the same durability. So hacking up this nearly-rotten dogman will give me a pile of nearly rotten meat and a ratty dogman fur coat. Not worth it at all.  Especially when there are perfectly good live dogmen around. Doesn’t get much fresher than still trying to rip your throat out!  A dogman fur coat can save your life in the early game when you desperately need every edge you can get to say warm. At this point, as well equipped as I am, it’s just extra cash in the bank. It was a few minutes after this that I can into another dogman, tried to get fancy and wait to kill it with a lethal trap and, well… I posted this one last night, but it bears repeating. As Queserasera put it: queserasera posted:Deadliest killer in Neo Scavenger is hubris. drat right. Thankfully, I only lost a couple minutes of progress there.  Huh. Now that’s just odd. The guys in black are guards who patrol the area around Detroit. They almost never make it this far west. I avoided them for now, only to run into THIS rear end in a top hat!  Please note the warning signs. Dressed in a hospital gown, accented with a bright blue sash. Take this as as important a warning as a rattlesnake’s rattle . This a devotee of the Cult of the Blue Frog. Froggers are all inherently dangerous. First, they’re generally hostile toward everybody outside of their cult, that’s bad enough, but no worse than the other murderous scum roaming Michigan. Oh no, these guys are worse because they’re all carriers of a deadly disease, the Blue Rot. If you spend too much time at close range with one, particularly if he’s also coughing up blood from getting his internal organs ruptured because you’re beating him to death, you can very quickly find yourself infected, it’s eventually lethal, and difficult to cure.  I smashed him to death with my crowbar, which is longer than my club and allows attacks from a little further away. It’s unwise to take his clothes (and why would you want to?), either the gown or the sash (or possibly both) carries the Blue Rot germs and can infect you if you wear it. If you’re willing to take that risk, wearing the blue sash will pacify other cultists in the field, since they’ll think you’re one of them.  Future trips to the ATN Enclave involve 100% less blindfolding, which is nice. This was just a brief visit, sold off my loot and grabbed some of their free food. Where I’m going, there’s food in abundance, but it’s not going to be free. Nothing’s free in the city. From here, I made my way back to Gyges, to finally sort what I need to take with me and leave a token supply cache behind.  Sometimes when you run into Anishinaabe warriors on patrol outside the forest, they’re willing to chat a bit, never anything interesting or useful though.  Realistically, I’m probably never coming back, so I took everything important (particularly the orange transponder I got from the Stoat and my piles of aluminum foil) You can see my destination on the right edge. The time has come to hike over to Detroit Megacity. It’s a bit of a trip, much further away than anywhere else I’ve been so far. I should pack a lunch.  If you’ve previously wondered what exactly limits the game to Michigan, behold, the Ohio border! By which I mean behold, the Great Black Swamp.  Normally, you would find out what the hell this is from the DMC guards… except for some reason none of them ever give me the option to ask about it. Basically, Monsanto happened, and then the government happened. Genetically engineered superwheat got out of control and grew wildly everywhere. The government responded by bombing the entire area with Super-Agent Mega-Orange. The end result is hundreds of miles of toxic ground covered in miasma that will rot your lungs out if you go in there without a gas mask.  Well that’s needlessly eerie. Now, the swamp is actually an incredible place to scavenge. Any scavengable square has great options for stuff you can find, on par with locked sheds. And you don’t have to worry about anybody or anything attacking you. It’s just, you know, lung rotting. So I did a dumb thing. I popped in briefly to scavenge one square. I keep a rag tied around my face to protect me from mold (it’s actually a concern while scavenging), which has a chance of protecting from the miasma. Didn’t work. In the two turns I spent here, I acquired Defoliant Exposure. I am very probably going to die. But not today, and there’s a small chance of survival. I’ll take it!  Ran into a looter fighting a Bad Mutha. The looter won and didn’t want to fight, then I got to loot the dead cannibal. Got me a gun. Colt .45 semi-automatic. Play-doh. Okay, I’m not actually strong enough to crush guns. Besides, this thing’s worth money.  A coup in China when the people found out about the Captains China. Yeah, I’m sure nothing ever came of that.  I actually made it three-quarters of the way, close enough for Phillip to see the city, with zero hassles.  From here, you are basically playing a completely different game. Scavenging is completely ineffective near Detroit, because everything’s picked over. Instead, the name of the game becomes playing the market for profit, mixed in with the occasional quest. Or body scavenging, which is to say murdering guards and stealing their gear. The good news is that, in roughly the same radius as reduced scavenging, the guards are so effective that you never have to worry about being attacked.  As the text briefly mentioned before, DMC is a massive walled fortress full of skyscrapers with a shantytown outside the walls, the Sprawl. One textbox compares it to have shanty town, half refugee camp, half RV park, which is as good a description as any.  There’s an honest to God restaurant here, a place where I pay money and get food that isn’t made of people!  I mean, it doesn’t tell you what the food is made of (except the third one, that’s sweet and sour seagull wings), but it’s at least not people.  I got a bowl of veggies with TVP. $7 is fairly reasonable. There’s better, more filling, but also more expensive, food inside the city, but the Last Chance is more than enough for the adventurer on the go.  The Junk Market works just like the store at the ATN, but with a wider variety of items that can appear for sale. They’ll still buy stuff from me for full price, modified by it’s durability.  Without Medic, I can’t identify pills, so I can’t really make money selling them. But I can hack computers to see the software on them, along with using cracking software on phones and tablets. Unwritten rule: Nobody will buy meat from humans. Don’t try to sell it. You will not like it.  A tracking bracelet is always available for sale here. You need one to enter the city proper. But buying one is for suckers.  There’s also a parking garage hotel.  You can rent a vehicle to sleep in and keep your crap in. It can get pricy, but I dropped some cash on a pickup truck.  This is roughly on par with Gyges (the cab light provides light and there’s a trash can fire providing warmth and can be used for cooking. Once you’ve reached DMC, getting money is more of an issue of time and effort than anything else, so affording a spot here isn’t difficult.  I can’t enter the city without a bracelet and I know it. But Phillip doesn’t know that.  You’re supposed to be able to apply for entry, going through a year-long approval process, but I guess the dev didn’t want to go through all that trouble. Besides, who immigrates legally, that’s what shady brokers are for, right?  Conveniently, there’s one right here who immediately decided Phillip looks like someone he should meet.  Hatter is shady as gently caress, but shockingly, is legit.  Even better, you can totally skip this quest. With my skillset, I have the options to skip it completely (using Trapping to make some Holmes-style deductions about Hatter’s client) or to do something technically proficient instead (using Electrician to replace Hatter’s old CRTs with tablets). But I took the quest anyway.  This would be really difficult if he didn’t label it on my map.  Thankfully, he did.  I took the opportunity to put down four weeks payments on my truck.  Defoliant Exposure is pretty nasty poo poo. Here you can see most of the symptoms hitting me at once, only missing blurry vision and vomiting.  Then I found a kid’s backpack. I’ll stuff it full of ill-gotten gains.  The house at Seven Gables Road on Hidden Lake is a dark and spooky place. I should probably bring a light. Despite having a flashlight and torches, I’m going to light a Gizhik Smudge Stick (I bought it from the ATN the first time I was there for just this reason).  Spooky.  In normal horror stories, the basement’s the last place you should willingly go. I’ll go there first.  Oh well. This place is spooky, but there’s nothing actually here, it’s harmless.  Going upstairs led me immediately to the urn I came here for. Again, nothing here. This place is all spook and no substance. Still, there is one more hallway to check out…  I’m sure the last room doesn’t have anything in it either. Missing image, but it’s just a corpse wearing a burlap sack over it’s head.  Seems harmless enough.  Meh, it’s not worth anything. I’ll toss it. Actually, this whole adventure is super-dangerous if you don’t bring a Gizhik stick. The stick repels evil spirits, you see. If you use any other kind of light source in this house, they kill you. If you go in with no light at all, you spend the whole time through the house being chased, menaced, and attacked by them. If you enter the last hallway without the smudge stick, the spirits will chase you, and kill you if you go in the empty room with no escape route. If you go in the corpse room, you still take the hood, but put it on instead of just picking it up. The Strangler’s Hood possesses its wearer, giving you a powerful attack to “Silence the Rasping Thing”, but will kill you if you go five hours without killing something. Throughout the house, you’ll get battered and stabbed. Doing it the safe way is better.  I dunno, this sounds like a scam to me. Still, I don’t want to offend this guy and risk him attacking me. One of the options available to trade for his phone is a lovely low quality scope only worth $10. I’ll make that trade.  The phone does turn out to have some data on it, without being able to hack it, I have no idea what it is or if it’s worth anything.  Returning to the Sprawl, I stopped at the Last Chance for a bowl of “non-veg stew”. Probably best not to wonder what’s actually in it.  Was still hungry, so I also grabbed a plate of fried tenders.  I dropped the urn off with Hatter and got the bracelet. For now, that’s all, but he’ll have another quest for me later, and there are other things I might be able to do with him.  I stopped at the junk market to see if there was anything useful. They have Zolpidem, a sedative that will allow even my insomniac rear end to get a good night’s sleep, but with the minor side effect of sleeping so deeply you don’t wake up if someone walks into your hex and starts rooting through your stuff.  Finally, entry to the great walled city!  Meh, even fifty years in the future, still kind of a dump. There’s a shitload of stuff to do in Detroit, some super-important gameplay stuff, some story stuff (more of Phillip’s history).  I’m still in a bad way after my trip to the swamp, might as well check into the local clinic.   I signed up for a full diagnostic workup. Just to make sure my problem is Defoliant exposure, not anything else. Although the timing and symptoms are right.  Yep. It’s dormant, which just means that it’s not getting actively worse right not.  A nanomachine treatment will cure almost every disease (except Defoliant Exposure and Blue Rot), and boosts your immune system. After all that medical work? Well, I ate at the Last Chance, but I’m still kinda hungry. And if you’re going to go to Detroit anyway, you should at least enjoy the food.   Soul food, made from honest to God meat? I’m sold.  There are three combo meals available at the Red Gnome. Fried Chicken, Fried Shrimp, or Cadillac Burger, all with sides piled high. The shrimp is the most cost-efficient, but if you care about the most efficient way to spend your money, you won’t be eating here in the first place. I’m here because Phillip’s had a rough couple weeks since he woke up and deserves a treat.  Phillip is so used to lovely food that actual flavor hurts his tongue. That’s horrible. The shrimp combo is the most cost-effective, and is the only one that comes with dessert. I don’t do seafood myself, but Phillip seems to like it, so good on him.  The option: pay, or dine-and-dash? You can totally pull a runner, as long as you don’t intend to ever come back. If you dash and then come back later, you get beaten up, then wander out into traffic and die.  Not tipping won’t get you killed, but every time you do it you risk being thrown out and not allowed back.  I can’t quite do all of the story stuff in Detroit yet, but I might as well knock out the first section while I’m here. You might recall, way back at the beginning at Gyges, Phillip was able to look up his records, and the only thing connected to him was a bank account number at Detroit Savings Bank. If you don’t recall, go read the first part again, or just take my word for it. If only there was a way to…  Oh, good. This is another event where your options vary wildly based on your skills. This is one of very few where the actual series of events changes based on what skills you use. I could just brazenly walk in, for instance. Or I could use try and wait for the banker to leave (but this only works if you have Hiding). I could use Mechanic to block the air vents and make her leave, but again, you need Hiding to pull that off. Or I could use Electrician to trigger a power cycle. The general goal of this part is to try and get the banker’s computer login. At which point you could lure her out again, use Lockpicking to get in (or not have it and have to break the door, drawing a ton of attention) and use Hacking to find the information Phillip wants. If you don’t have Hacking, it takes longer, and spending too long gets Phillip caught by the Skycorps cops. That’s all an awful lot of work. The direct approach is easier.  You have two real options on this route. You can just ask outright about the account… which fails because it’s not Phillip’s account, and anyway he has no ID. Or you can, and I quote, “pretend to be a mentally retarded patient”. Phillip will use his generally good skills at pretending to be dumb and harmless. You can hand any random piece of junk to the banker, and she’ll play along and ask if he’d like to deposit it. When Phillip manages to scrawl out the account number we picked up from Gyges. The banker assumes the account is for somebody who’s responsible for Phillip it looks it up. Phillip looks over her shoulder to get the info and then takes off.  Turns out Phillip’s stay at Gyges was being paid for by one Cale McAllen, who lives in the Concrete Forest Apartmments. It turns out the reason Phillip’s cryo freezing ended is because the account ran dry. With an address in hand, we’re ready to go check this guy out. Well, no, we’re totally not. It takes some doing to see Mr. McAllen without anything going wrong, and I want to prepare more.  I did stop by the Concrete Forest to check things out though. Besides Cale’s apartment, there’s some guys dancing, a food truck, and a convenience store.  All the potable water you can drink, soda, candy, Twinkies, soup, whiskey, Tylenol, batteries lighters, all kinds of useful items. The kind of stuff that would be impulse buys for normal people are precious commodities for Phillip. I’m not done in the city, but I need more money to achieve my ultimate goal. Let us close the book on Phillip the Scavenger. NEXT TIME: Phillip the Tea Merchant What happened to the world? Werewolf attacks in New Mexico Cutbacks led to streetlights being removed in most of Detroit Police overstretched in Michigan, supplemented by private security Detroit built walls to cut itself off from the outside world Smallpox outbreak, started with Coast Guardsmen in South Carolina and spread from there Crop seeds made by a thinly veiled stand-in for Monsanto (Agrisanto) have become so integral to feeding the world that the company got the seed vault at Svalbard shut down so their seeds’ genomes couldn’t be contaminated China started a super soldier program, news of this getting out caused the people to rebel Agrisanto’s superwheat got out of control, needed to be controlled by the army bombing the entire Michigan-Indiana-Ohio border with Super-Agent Orange, creating a deadly toxic no-mans land
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Oct 29, 2018 01:47
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We need a new pages. Image loading is starting to get wonky for me.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:17
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Detroit is as far as I got in the game before I ran into a cycle of 'go outside, try and wander off to loot stuff, get too hungry/thirsty etc. and go back to the slums to get food' before putting the game down. Also I hate leaving stashes lying all over the place, I prefer to be properly nomadic because I have no idea when I'll need some of the random stuff I pick up 
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Oct 29, 2018 02:26
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Chiming in to say thanks for this lp, it's the best way to experience this game.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:37
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Can you reliably make at least $363 on a scavenging expedition into the Swamp, allowing you to pay for treatment when you get out?
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Oct 29, 2018 03:07
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I used to follow some really good Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead LPs that seemed a lot like this. Of course, this one does seem to have an actual story-line that you can follow.
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Oct 29, 2018 03:07
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The Lone Badger posted:Can you reliably make at least $363 on a scavenging expedition into the Swamp, allowing you to pay for treatment when you get out? Sometimes, yes, but not reliably. It doesn't matter though, because the clinic can't cure defoliant exposure. I got the nanomachine treatment for the immune system boost, which will give me a chance to fight off any further progression.
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Oct 29, 2018 03:25
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How do you deal with the Defoliant?
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Oct 29, 2018 04:01
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Night10194 posted:How do you deal with the Defoliant? Time. Defoliant Exposure wears off after a year, if the symptoms don't kill you or it doesn't lead to a secondary infection. Defoliant has a tendency to lead to Blue Rot, which can kill you directly after a while. Blue Rot is likewise uncurable at the clinic (although there is one way to cure it directly instead of waiting it out. And before anybody asks, no, it's incredibly unlikely that this game is likely to last that long. I mean, I could just crash in my truck and eat restaurant food work thousands of turns, but it would take a while and get really boring.
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Oct 29, 2018 04:32
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Man, this game is way more spooky than I'd have expected, between the ghost hunting you, turning into a wendigo and now a real life legit haunted house. Are there warnings for the house if you don't have a spirit fighting stick or is it a gotcha?
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Oct 29, 2018 04:49
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Are there warnings for the house if you don't have a spirit fighting stick or is it a gotcha? Not a drat one, outside of the generally spooky atmosphere. It's generally survivable (unless you try and bring lights in there), but you get absolutely zero warning about the evil hood or the numerous ghost attacks you'll suffer.
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Oct 29, 2018 06:46
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Impulse buys for others are a commodity for us. Are... Are we homeless?
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Oct 29, 2018 06:51
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Siegkrow posted:Impulse buys for others are a commodity for us. We're sleeping in a sleeping bag in the back of a pickup truck. So umm.... yes?
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Oct 29, 2018 06:52
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Yeah, I remember Detroit as being a great place to gently caress yourself over if you're impatient or used to games without permanent consequences. Because a lot of stuff that'd just be a "lol u fail, try again?" or "you lose 2 HP's, try again?" in another game, here is basically: "Okay, now roll whether you survive at all, and if you survive, good loving luck even getting close to Detroit again, suckerrrrr." Also without the spirit-repelling sticks, is the only way to survive the Spooky Urn House by basically soaking up a lot of hits and going the right way in the dark?
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Oct 29, 2018 10:46
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