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 Tale of Immortal OST Introduction To quote the steam page, Tale of Immortal is: quote:Tale of Immortal is an open-world sandbox based on Chinese mythology and cultivation. You will grow to become immortal, conquer the beasts from the Classic of Mountains and Season, make your choices carefully and grasp your own destiny. Lofty words, lofty goals. On the one hand, it is a fairly deep xianxia/cultivator simulator game. But on the other hand, if you've every played one of those games you are going to be aware of how terribly janky this thing is. Despite having just released in full on Steam, most players can't even open the game without some form of repairing the files. I got obsessed with it over the weekend, and after spending an embarrassing amount of time failing at it, now at least feel confident to inflict my feeble attempts at trying to get a complete run of this thing on the forums. How This Will Work Do not expect a perfect completionist playthrough. Do not expect even a very good playthrough, I may very well fail at this multiple times. But I am going to make a good faith effort at trying to explain how the game works and smack my head against it for several dozen hours minimum at least. I'm going to ask for advice on character creation, but the rest of this is just being run by LPer fiat. This game is dense enough as is. Oh right, details. Screenshot LP, will alternate between trying to tell this like an actual story and then drawing back the curtain for actual mechanics. Aren't You Already Running Another LP? Yeah, as you might be able to tell from the OP, this is more of something I'm doing on a terrible whim than something that's had careful and thoughtful planning. My Age of Empires II LP takes priority, and combined with the fact that the game requires hours and hours of grinding even on a minimalist run, updates are going to be on a "when they happen" basis. Spoilers If for some reason you happen to know everything about this game already, please don't spoil things in advance of the current tier we're on mechanically, and the story not at all. A good general rule of thumb is if it's something that you can extrapolate from having read a xianxia novel/chinese mythology generally, it's fair game to talk about, but if you would have to know the game specifically to know what's going on, then don't talk about it.
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May 30, 2023 03:39
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Table of Contents 0. Character Creation 1. Setting the Board (I) 2. Setting the Board (II) 3. Shoot the Sun and Miss 4. Live and Die by the Blade 5. Build a Strong Foundation By Grasping the Earth (With One's Face) 6. Building Bonds in the Midst of Brigands 7. Getting Stronger (But Not Strong Enough) 8. The Battle of Yulan Field 8-A. Wait, What? 9. Karma Severing Blade 10. A Pleasant Land 11. A Crowded Room 12. A Golden Event 13. A Legend Lived 14. A Legend Relived 15. A Legend Defeated 16. A Realm Transcended 17. Desolate Snowland 18. Playground of the Nine Tailed Fox 19. Leads to True Nascence 20. Recalling the Past 21. A Demon Without Equal 22. Defying Dragons 23. Meeting the Kuafu Jossar fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 03:40
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Reserved.
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May 30, 2023 03:40
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0. Character Creation Alright, let's get started on this nonsense, there's a lot to cover.  Personal Stats The character portrait is customizable, and there's a lot of options. Annoyingly enough, this also has a mechanical effect on the game - based on your features the game will automatically assign you a Charisma rating. Low and High Charisma are two diametrically opposed ends of a scale - if you have high Charisma, more people will randomly show up out of the middle of nowhere during the end of the month events to try and make friends with you. But you also are very conspicuous and will stand out in case you're trying to do shady shenanigans like steal from people. Low charisma means that less people notice you for good and ill. Internal and External Traits are... mostly useless. A couple like Carefree and Romantic have an impact on the likelihood of those social interaction events happening (Carefree decreases the number overall, Romantic increases specifically romantically inclined events occurring), but most are so minor as to just be roleplaying assists. What you do in game matters a lot more. Name is obvious. Race is unchangeable, there might be one or two things in game that can change it, but it's very rare if so. Sex matters because romantic activities can only occur between members of the opposite sex, but is otherwise entirely aesthetic. Realm is the level system - Qi Refining is the first of ten level tiers, divided into three different subtiers (Early, Middle, Late). Generally speaking differences between realms are much more notable than between subrealms, but the one with the higher value still usually wins. Lifespan technically matters in that you can die if you reach your maximum lifespan, but unless you are a turbo-grinder, you will end the game before it becomes a problem even by mortal standards, let alone added Cultivator lifespan years.  Oh boy, most of these ones are actually important. General Lifespan and Charisma you already know. Mood relates to how bored you get while learning cultivator techniques. You can only immerse yourself in the dao for so many for months straight before you need to go play the flute or what have you. Health and Stamina are overworld stats, mostly used to force you to take a rest if you are turbo-grinding too hard. Vitality is your actual health bar. Get to 0 and you die. Well, maybe not based on a number of miscellaneous nonsense factors. Energy is used for casting all of your techniques except your basic attack. Focus is used to track people of interest on the minimap and is also used as a threshold for opening certain dungeons later on. Luck is a general all purpose "good things happen to you" stat. The higher it is, the better. Insight determines the speed at which you learn techniques from cultivation manuals. This is important because if you are too slow, you take additional months and money to learn techniques. Reputation locks certain things in game behind a gate so you can't do them unless you're prestigious enough. It also has a limited effect on people liking you. Combat ATK is how much damage you generally do. DEF is how much you generally resist attacks. Martial RES is resistance to martial arts attacks specificially. Spiritual RES is resistance to spiritual arts attacks specificially. CRIT is the likelihood an attack becomes a critical attack and deals more damage. CRIT RES is the likelihood of preventing that from happening to you. CRIT DMG is how much extra damage your crits do. CRIT DR is how much extra damage enemy crits do not do. Travel Speed is how fast you move on the overworld map. Agility is how fast you move in the combat map. Martial Arts/Spiritual Root These are all the same thing but for the twelve different types of attack styles: the martials are Blade, Spear, Sword, Fist, Palm, and Finger. The spirituals are Fire, Water, Lightning, Wind, Earth, and Wood. These mostly determine what kind of techniques your character uses, but has at least some role in defense against those techniques and maybe damage pertaining to those techniques. Each set of elements has a bunch of different techniques within the same element, so it's not as basic as "I'm a fire guy, here's my fire attack/special/movement/ultimate". Artisanship Lifeskills. They're not really necessary and are super grindy, but they're also nice to have, especially if you're playing on higher difficulty settings. Alchemy is about making elixirs for buffing/healing. Forging is about making artifacts that can assist you in battle. Feng Shui helps you find resource rich spots on the map. Herbology and Mining are the gathering skills for their respective crafting skills. Talismans lets you make talismans which do things like let you teleport places on the map or see hidden objects. Morality Righteous and Demonic points are independently acquired for being a nice person or a jerk respectively, whichever you have more of is what you are considered to be. People like you less if you have opposed values, and you get penalties for being present in a sect of the opposite alignment. Usually you tend to just stay consistent with your alignment once you've picked it. Destiny (Nature) So most of these things are set in stone with character creation, either because they're standard or the game has decided you can't reroll them. The only real way to modify these more important stats at character creation is picking background three background traits. Standard loot rarities apply, so grey is less rare than green, less rare than blue, less rare than purple, less rare than orange, is less rare than red (this will apply throughout the whole game). Rarity does not necessarily correspond with usefulness, there are some useful greys and downright awful reds, although this is mostly important for the beginning of the game, as eventually you overtake your natural destiny with how you build the character.  Item We're technically skipping ahead a little, but there's three items here which are important for your playstyle. You only get to choose one, getting it right after character creation proper. The Eye of Providence lets you see further on the map, see people's inventories, see and take monsters skills for your own, and revive if you die, but you have to keep paying increasingly more to fix it if you do so. The Bagua Jade gives you a whole bunch of revives without caveat and can be given to another person to bind you to them. The Mythical Gourd lets you absorb monsters and turn them into monster teams that can gather resources for you. ______________________________________________________ Thread Participation That was a lot of words and I've barely described anything. Please submit some advice for characters, general advice on what they should look like, backstories, do I pick up lifeskills and if so which ones, etc. I will try to create as close a character to that as possible given what's available in the game. If you want to do a full character sheet that's fine, but I will also take vibes into consideration, especially if the thread generally coalesces around a specific thing. Herein, under a spoiler, is the boring mechanical advice post for character building: High Charisma is generally better, unless you want to specifically want to make a Cultivator who robs people blind. Likewise, unless you are intentionally trying to go for a dirty, rotten bastard playstyle, you generally want to go Righteous. Luck, Insight, and ATK are generally considered to be the best stats to roll Destinies for, especially the first two as they are difficult to improve later. On lower level difficulties, most of the lifeskills are superfluous, though still can be useful if you're having trouble with the game, especially Alchemy. The Eye is far and away the best of the items, since there's no limit to the number of times it can save your life as long as you can pay the spirit stones for it AND gives you a useful damage skill. The various elements/weapons are all good, but it's genuinely recommended that you either monotype or mix a single martial and spiritual to avoid creating a lack of synergy in your build. I give you this advice freely, use it to help or harm as you may. Jossar fucked around with this message at 05:30 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 04:56
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We need Chad Manly, a punch focused male martial artist using the power of cosmetics to improve his charisma (and sunglasses if we can get them). Give him the Eye of Providence and have him go for high attack.
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May 30, 2023 05:21
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We should be Peng Jun so that for once the redshirts of the Murim world get their day in limelight. Go with charisma, Blade (we're the Peng family after all) and Eye of Providence (this thing seems stupidly strong lmao it only does everything). TBH that item seems like the least evil of the bunch. The gourd especially is a thing that seems to be usually used by villains in these stories.
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May 30, 2023 23:23
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I pick Lao Hung as a name. Go with Luck, Agility, and The Mythical Gourd. Anything to cut down on the grind.
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May 31, 2023 01:38
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Ah, was a bit late to post, but I didn't think I was going to get a lot more people and just wanted to start playing, so I decided to go with Peng Jun. Wanted to make it official before there was a deluge of a bunch more ideas. Already played through the tutorial, and I think if I'm going to do an actual story alongside this, I'm not committing to a literal word for word transcription, although I will try to include a lot. So think of what you're seeing as a playthrough specific iteration of the dialogue.
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May 31, 2023 02:31
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As a true xianxia protagonist we must go all-in on luck. Raise luck as high as you possibly can, regardless of the effect on other stats.
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May 31, 2023 11:59
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1. Setting the Board (I) Hey! What are you doing skulking around like that? Nobody gets past the watchful gaze of this Young Master of the Peng Family.   (Destinies are a little hard to see the outline on, so here’s a clearer description: Eagle Eye, Refugee Protector, Naive) That's right, the one that stands before you is none other than your grandfather, Peng Jun! Valiant man among cultivators, quick to exterminate evil with my blade... Wait, why are you snickering? Okay fine, I don't have a blade right now, it's a long story. The short version is that some villain uprooted the Bai Yuan regional branch of my Peng family, and I was told to take a number of the sub-clans under our protection and flee. Of course that's our number one priority! You must have been hearing some terrible rumors if you believe that the Five Noble Families would use their strength for anything other than righteousness. If my brothers and sisters all fled alongside the main clan, that could only be because my father trusted me to get the job done. That's the last I'll hear of this. Anyway, during the journey we got attacked by an army of bandits. A literal army. The only way we were making it out of there alive was if I challenged the Bandit Lord and slayed him in single combat. So I did! It was a titanic battle that lasted nearly a day, and I shattered my blade in the process, but the Bandit Lord was dead. In the confusion, the rest of the bandits all scattered and the other refugees managed to escape. Unfortunately, I was exhausted to my very bones and couldn't find them again. Even then I tried, but only managed to get myself lost in the middle of a bamboo forest.    Of course, as it turned out, this was no ordinary bamboo forest. In the middle of it was some kind of weird old man named Zhang San sitting in front of a Go table, rambling on about how he'd been sitting there playing the same round of Go for 3000 years and how ultimately it had no beginning and no end. I was in no mood to deal with this nonsense and told him he was full of poo poo, at which point he laughed and asked me to humor him and play a round. I'm not really a big Go player, but remember, I was dead tired and couldn't take another step, so I figured why not? After confirming that this particular game wouldn't take 3000 years, I took a stone and sought to place it on the board, but much to my surprise it turned out that what I was grasping in my hand wasn't a stone at all! It was some kind of amulet with a gemstone in the shape of an eye! Freaking out, I jumped up from the table only to find out that the old man was gone, with his voice lingering in my head saying that he'd be waiting for me at Tian Yun Mountain. I didn't question it at the time, but I guess he must have also restored me back to peak fighting condition?  Which was fortuitous as I got jumped by a bunch of bamboo monsters that had previously blended into the forest. So my first instinct was to reach for my blade and cut them to pieces, but remember, I didn't have a blade any more. So I was forced to rely on a much less efficient technique for shooting energy blades from my fingers in order to slay these Bambuki. Not my favorite, but you have to use the tools at your disposal. My older brother Yongsun has a more poetic way of saying it, if that's your sort of thing: "The blade's in your heart, not in your hands." (Welcome to the combat screen. Controls are fairly simple: move with WASD keys, aim with your mouse, left click to fire off basic attacks, right click to fire off special attacks, space bar to use a dash skill, R to use an ultimate. Notably, you do not start off with anything other than a basic attack skill, and will only get a special before the tutorial ends. So you literally cannot dash for the entirety of the tutorial. I spawned in with a Finger technique, not a Blade one, probably because the game decided I was going to start with a high Finger stat no matter what I rolled for some incomprehensible RNG reason. The empty spots 1-5 are for Elixirs and Artifacts which you can equip to heal/buff yourself. Artifacts are permanent summonable objects which have battlefield effects, though we will likely not be seeing many of them on our side unless I decide to level grind Forging later. Combat mostly involves running around shooting enemies while trying to avoid getting shot at yourself, via what can sometimes be bullet-hell like patterns. There is of course more, but at least some of this I will explain later in the tutorial, some will be explained later in the game, and some of it is far enough away that I haven't even gotten to it myself in my test playthroughs.)   After making it out of the bamboo forest, I managed to come across two sect disciples engaged in a fierce life or death struggle. They seemed evenly matched, but the world will never know who among them was the greater, as at that moment a passing dragon took the opportunity to strike them both down with lightning. No, I promise it was a lightning dragon. Don’t gainsay me on this one, I have witnesses! After saving them, the two disciples were each extremely grateful and as thanks for saving them, each offered me a pass to join their sect in the distant Yong Ning region. I told them that I wasn’t particularly interested as I already belonged to a clan, but much to my surprise neither of them had ever heard of the Peng Family, although they did know a few cultivators with the surname Peng. Apparently the Five Noble Families mostly keep to themselves in other regions and send their most promising members to be trained with the sects instead? How strange! In any event, the disciples were no longer in the mood or truly even able to fight, so they simply thanked me one more time, provided a curt goodbye to one another and left me to my journey. (The passes are mostly there as a way to let you do sect tryouts for a place that you might otherwise be unqualified for due to terrible starting stats. In our case it shouldn’t matter since due to Peng Jun’s starting Destinies he has a fairly good Blade stat. There is a disciple for one Righteous Sect and one Demonic Sect each, just to make sure that both sides of the aisle are covered. You can also just kill the cultivators and take their stuff, but these guys only rarely have anything good like a low level Artifact.)    With that, I was finally free to hit the road. Or so I thought, since there turned out to be another nest of Bambuki nearby. Fortunately, this one had some loot, including an interspatial ring made of the finest chalcedony. Even in the Peng Family they don’t just hand these things away, and here one was, sitting in a cave! (We finally get to see the world map. Traveling to other destinations on the map takes some number of days, affected by your Travel Speed. Certain special nodes will regularly pop up on the map. In this case, this is a monster den. Unless you’re really focused on life skills or need to complete a mission, generic monster dens aren’t usually worth farming. Missions do involve going and clearing out a lot of things that are basically monster dens in all but name, though. Additionally, sometimes people will invite you on adventures to specific monster dens with valuable loot, and those can be worth plundering. In this case, you’re guaranteed to get a free storage ring for completing the dungeon. Those give you additional inventory space, which is good as you will acquire a lot of junk on your travels. There’s a couple of things to note about the rewards screen apart from the goodies. Going into zones consumes Stamina and Health, usually depending on how intensive the zone was and how badly you got beat up. Spend too much of these stats and you have to rest before doing any more activities. Using skills in combat also increases their skill xp, which provides additional bonuses once you hit certain levels. This can be as simple as extra damage, but can also include modifiers to the skill and synergy bonuses between skills, which become really important after a certain point.)    After a few more days of travelling, I finally made it to XinDa Town. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing special, barely larger than a village, but it’s the only real civilization this far north in the Bai Yuan region. I asked around in the tavern if anyone had seen a large group of refugees passing by, or failing that if they had ever heard of a Tian Yun Mountain. Not a single lead! The subclans might as well have melted into the wilderness for all anyone knew and people looked at me like I was touched in the head when I asked about the mountain. Said it was a fairy tale and didn’t exist! The tavern owner told me it was a waste of time anyway, as no one without the resources of a sect or great family behind them had been able to get past the Taihong and Wangwu Mountains for decades, although there was a foolish old man who had been trying to break the mountains for years in the nearby Yukong Village. What I wouldn’t have given to have access to the clan’s teleportation circle again! (I’ll explain each of the buildings here in town as they come up, with the exception of the Tree Vault, which is just an infinitely large storage vault which you can access from any static location where you have permission to be, as opposed to the limited inventory space of your bag. The Tavern lets you spend spirit stones to buy temporary buffs for yourself, ask how the in-game systems work, buy a round for the house to raise everybody’s opinion of you, and is occasionally used for starting some quests.)  But what’s past is past, so I went to this Yukong Village to sort out what the deal was. Turns out that you used to be able to pass through until one day a barrier popped up preventing passage through the mountains. The old man had tried to carve a path through the rest of the mountain, but then every time he went up there, some kind of mountain spirit would move everything back to the way it was. After letting the old man talk my ear off for a bit, a local scholar pulled me aside and said that there was an upside to the whole scenario – Bai Yuan is weak in comparison to other regions, so the barrier being up also meant that cultivators from other regions couldn’t send an army through the mountains to conquer the place. Unfortunately, I still really needed to get through the mountains, either to contact more distant branches of the Peng Family and inform them about what had happened to the Bai Yuan branch or find this mythical Tian Yun Mountain and get some answers about what the hell had happened to me.        So I went up into the mountains and found the barrier array in question. It was well made, but obviously incomplete, or else I could have never even approached it in the first place. I tried to approach the array core to figure out what was going on, when I was attacked by the mystery spirit in question – a Jagu. I won’t describe the battle in much detail – she started off in human form, throwing a bunch of plants infused with Wood aligned qi at me, only to turn into her true Mythical Beast self and summon an army of monsters to attack me. If I had my blade, I would have easily defeated her, but as it was I had to run fleeing from the cave all the way back to XinDa Town. She even let me flee unhindered, just to drive home how pathetic the whole thing was. Curses!     The story of my attempt at getting through the mountains had preceded me back to town, and while I spent the next few days recovering in the inn, I was approached by several well-wishers who offered me some pills to assist in my battle. I didn’t need them, but I didn’t have the heart to tell my admirers no, and besides, I would need the spirit stones. After all, cultivation isn’t cheap when you don’t have your allowance handy! It turns out it costs a lot of spirit stones to buy the materials for a breakthrough. (Several things to cover here. Losing the fight, which is a mandatory scripted event, gives your character a temporary negative destiny of being Heavily Wounded, which lowers your Vitality for 6 months. Fortunately, for a fee of some spirit stones and 5 days off the calendar you can rest at the Inn which heals you back to full and has a chance at clearing off temporary negative destinies. It also brings me to the end of the month, at which point the world state advances. During the monthly switchover a number of events can happen involving your character and their interaction with others. Since Peng Jun has Divine Charisma from being a lovable blockhead, we’re going to be seeing a lot of random people just walking up to us to hand Peng Jun gifts and otherwise try to become his friend. I take the opportunity to sell off the pills at the Market for spirit stones which are both a resource and a currency. You use them to buy stuff from town/city shops and a bunch of other miscellaneous things and events, but you also use them to cultivate techniques. I also buy a Qi Refining Pill I in preparation for Peng Jun’s first minor breakthrough. More on those two with the next update.)    After that, I went out into the wilderness to find a rich vein of Qi and start cultivating. I have to admit that all of my experiences over the last month or two added up, and combined with the Qi, I felt like I was about to reach a real breakthrough for the first time since the start of my cultivation… But I ain’t continuing on with the story until you break out the good stuff. Wine or meat or something! If you’re gonna crash my campfire, you gotta make it worth my while, after all. (Cultivation in this game is actually pretty easy. The primary way of doing so involves wandering out into the wilderness and gathering the energy of nature for 5 days. Technically you can do it on any square, but the ones with this blue glowing effect are the ones that have a lot of Qi and are worth your while. This marks as good a place as any to call the update. The next one should be shorter, but there’s enough left that I wouldn’t want to try and power on through the rest of the tutorial in a single post.)
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Jun 1, 2023 03:22
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Are there any positives to the negative or evil traits in character creation? Like being power-hungry or vengeful? The latter might not even be negative, drat near everyone in murim is vengeful bastard who never let poo poo go.
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Jun 2, 2023 01:27
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From my experience, they mostly just don't matter at all either way. Possibly they change other characters opinions of you, but it's pretty inscrutable.
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Jun 2, 2023 03:34
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Yeah, pretty much what Foxfire_ said: might have an effect on others’ opinions of you, but difficult to tell.
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Jun 2, 2023 04:02
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It matters more for NPC. Internal trait slightly guide their RNG monthly action, like Selfish NPC being more likely to hoard items to advance cultivation and Upstanding NPC more likely to assault other characters on behalf of acquaintances. External traits are the one that affects how they are perceived - the most important one is Romantic is basically a "kill me" sign on any character, unless they are interacting with other Romantic, since it means "I like to cheating in relationship and hate committing". Things like Caring, Family-Oriented, Faithful and Loyal to Friends slightly shift how they are perceived by that category of people (i.e. a slight nudge to be more friendly with siblings, for instance). However most of it is pointless for the player because they don't have a family and getting a non-blood relationship requires building up a good rapport in the first place. Ultimately though people poked into the NPC codes or some such before and I recall the general conclusion is that most of the NPC systems are like a paper tiger trying to imitate Scroll of Taiwu (which is janky enough already but the NPC had room to breathe and do stupid stuff for the player to exploit), but animated big boobs won the day for Tale of Immortal. At least Tale of Immortal did finish up the game, even if the direction was rather peculiar.
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Jun 2, 2023 13:06
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CremePudding posted:Ultimately though people poked into the NPC codes or some such before and I recall the general conclusion is that most of the NPC systems are like a paper tiger trying to imitate Scroll of Taiwu (which is janky enough already but the NPC had room to breathe and do stupid stuff for the player to exploit), but animated big boobs won the day for Tale of Immortal. At least Tale of Immortal did finish up the game, even if the direction was rather peculiar. My general philosophy on these sorts of things is that while I respect the time and effort put into big artistic projects with grand scopes, I will always personally place a higher value on the more mediocre project that actually manages to get the job done. That (apart from Scroll of Taiwu being even more complicated) is why I'm playing this instead.
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Jun 2, 2023 13:30
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That's right! It's pretty respectable they finished the game despite all the drama and a vindictive fanbase - for all the outrage about workshop drama or how the game "feels like a mobile grinder", they never actually added skeevy monetization scheme or dropped the game to milk mobile money or disappeared for years hanging people dry. For Sandbox Chinajank that's a pretty good situation 
CremePudding fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Jun 2, 2023 |
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Jun 2, 2023 14:37
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2. Setting the Board (II) Ah, that’s the good stuff! Glad to see that despite your dour appearance, you know what being a cultivator is all about : living a life free of constraints! Anyway, where was I…? Oh that’s right, I was about to make my breakthrough to the middle stage of Qi Refining.  Well, just before that I was interrupted by some masked vagrant who looked like he’d fallen into a pile of leaves. He praised my exceptional talent and then tried to hawk me a Qi Refining Pill I at a higher price than they were being sold for in the market! I told him to get lost, and he cursed me out for being an idiot who didn’t know the value of his wares. The nerve on that impudent bastard! (Mystery Man Jo is a recurring character that shows up throughout the game, usually trying to sell you stuff and provide advice. I hear his role diversifies a bit later on, which separates him from at least one other character who also tries to sell you stuff and is more explicitly a con artist. Unfortunately, on any difficulty other than the hardest, Chaos, this pill is overpriced relative to the shop, so it’s not worth your while to grab it from him.)   After swallowing the pill I had bought from the market, I focused on circulating all of the Qi that I had gathered throughout my body. Layering the thin wisps of energy over and over again, eventually I reached the point where I didn’t need to think about it any more, and the energy formed a natural stream flowing of its own accord. I had managed to break through to the middle stage of Qi Refining! (Breaking through the intermediary layers of a stage is nearly always as simple as consuming the fancy pill for a particular substage and pressing the breakthrough button. It’s getting past the final bottleneck where most of the problems lie. Accompanying that, as you can see, the stat increases for breaking through substages are noticeable boosts, but more of a gradual increase compared to what we’ll get for reaching Foundation.)   But even though I now had a higher cultivation base, I still didn’t have the weapons I needed to face the Jagu in combat. So I swallowed my pride and looked for the town’s blacksmith, knowing that I could not wait to have a weapon delivered from another province. Only to find that the blacksmith was exactly that: good for making iron wares and nothing more! Instead, I was not only forced to browse through the wares of the local Manual Pavilion, but pick up techniques for refining my basic energy blade technique into more concentrated bullets. I tell you, I can not wait to hold a blade in my hands again! (There’s no such thing as a blacksmith in-game, by the way, techniques are just techniques and can be wielded as soon as you learn them, even for martial skills which imply the use of weapons. Manual Pavilions are where you get skills for your character. They swap out their stock every so often, but I wasn’t going to sit here for a whole year just to ensure that Peng Jun got a blade skill. In future towns, skills won’t just cost spirit stones though. Town based pavilions will also want you to spend tokens you get from missions as part of the cost. Ultimately, this isn’t really the best way to get new techniques, but the first of better ways is going to have to wait for Qi Refining (Late) or even the Foundation stage.)    The boost in my cultivation was already paying off! I used to take weeks or even months to learn a single technique, but now I learned both techniques in a single month. Of course these techniques were infinitely inferior to the more refined ones of the Peng Family, but still, this shows how great this Peng Jun truly is now that he has gotten the chance to stretch his wings! (The book gives a good overview of some of those skill effects I showed off in the last update as well as the kind of status effects that can be applied to enemies. As mentioned before, learning techniques takes time and spirit stones. Once you start learning the technique, you play a minigame where you try to left click blue orbs to absorb them and right click red orbs to destroy them. These provide positive/negative modifiers to your Insight, which determines the speed at which you learn the technique in question. Rarer and higher level techniques take more time and more spirit stones to learn, and can get fairly expensive relatively quickly. You also spend Mood every time you attempt to learn a technique, and getting your Mood too low can result in either temporary negative destinies or your character refusing to do anything until you improve your mood. Usually you can remedy this by using an entertainment item appropriate to your level – but be warned, you only get the maximum Mood restoration value if the item is relevant to your character’s randomly generated interests for that playthrough.)  I was getting somewhat low on my supply of spirit stones, so I asked the tavern owner if there were any feats of bravery I could accomplish in order to acquire some more. He said that as a matter of fact there was such a one – a local bandit chief had kidnapped the young mistress of a local Cai family and were holding her prisoner in the nearby Qingtian Fort. Perfect! I already had experience with taking down such rubbish, so this would be an easy feat to accomplish.   Of course, it was not to be so simple…. What, no I don’t mean the bandits. Just as I said they were a sorry rabble, not fit to shine your grandfather’s shoes with their spit. But even before the fight had begun, the bandit chief said they didn’t have the girl. I figured that they were lying, but even after defeating the bandits, I could find no sign of the young mistress. Just some spirit stones and a hairpin that looked like it might have belonged to her. I interrogated the bandit chief before his life fled him entirely, but all he could focus on was how he needed to get the pin and a letter back to the girl and the spirit stones back to his elderly mother in Yukong Village. He managed to snap back to reality for just long enough to promise a treasure to help me in my cultivation if I did so, producing a jade slip which the bandit chief said had been passed down his family for generations and would only respond to someone who demonstrated the five virtues, before expiring.   Well, after that I wasn’t just going to let the bandits’ bodies rot in the field. Let it not be said that Peng Jun is ungrateful, even if he finds you disdainful enough to take your life. So I buried the bandits and gave them their rites, demonstrating ethicalness. I gave the bandit chief’s elderly mother not only the spirit stones that the he had saved up, but a few from my own stash, demonstrating generosity. By leaving the chief’s private business with the girl uninvestigated, I demonstrated politeness. And finally, by delivering both the letter and the hairpin to the girl, I demonstrated honesty. Or faithfulness? One of the two. All that remained was a demonstration of wisdom, which I was at a complete loss on how to… Quit your snickering!   With nothing else to do, I went back and challenged the Jagu to a rematch. Now unlike last time, this is a fight worth describing. It started out much the same as last time, with the Jagu throwing Wood Qi infused vines at me and summoning monsters, but with my enhanced cultivation I was able to nimbly dodge most of her attacks and focus on shooting her with bullets of pure energy from my finger tips. Eventually, realizing that she was in a desperate situation, the Jagu threw a protective layer of Qi around herself to serve as a form of armor while she unleashed a secret Mythical Beast technique. Pools of Wood Qi began erupting from the floor of the cavern at random, bringing with them small typhoons of razor sharp leaves that cut me if I dared approach.  It was at this point, while I was dodging the Jagu's vines and juking between the pools, that I noticed the eye of my amulet had begun to glow green, in a similar color to that of all this Wood Qi being thrown around. Inspired, I grabbed the amulet and began feeding it energy as I ran up to the Jagu, at which point a second set of pools erupted from the floor, this time hurting the Jagu and her summoned monsters rather than myself. The Jagu’s eyes widened in surprise at this turn of fate, which gave me the opportunity to shoot her in the stomach with several more energy blasts, at which point she fell to the ground in her human form, utterly defeated. (That’s me activating the Eye of Providence’s main combat ability, which literally just copies the abilities of boss monsters into a catalogue that you can pick from and use.) I was tempted to gut the Jagu right then and there for my previous humiliating defeat, but as furious as that had made me, it also ultimately convinced me to let her go. After all, she had let me run, so it was only fair that I do the same. Remember, let it not be said that Peng Jun is ungrateful, even if he finds you disdainful enough to take your life! The Jagu dropped a book and I was tempted to leave it alone like the bandit chief’s letter, but unfortunately this time I didn’t have the luxury of leaving things well enough alone if I wanted to make it through the mountains.  The Jagu’s diary revealed pretty much what the village scholar had told me: the Jagu was committed to protecting the village from the outside mountains, though it was vague as to whether she actually cared about doing so or was honoring the wishes of a third party mentioned in the diary. All that was left to complete the array and protect the village was grabbing a Primeval Vine and the Soul Orb of another Mythical Beast called the Evergreen.   The grove in which Evergreen dwelled was no mere Bambuki forest. Instead, it was a densely overgrown heartwoods where all sorts of monsters dwelled. Not just common ones like beasts and snakes, but even Tyrant Turtles and Glacier Spirits. Even I had some difficulty making it through intact!   Finally, at the center of the heartwoods was the primeval tree spirit Mythical Beast, Evergreen. It shot ring after ring of Wood Qi infused pinecones at me, but with my middle-stage Qi Refining mobility I was once again able to dodge in between the projectiles long enough for me to reach the center and splinter the old oak to pieces with blasts of energy and the technique I had learned from the Jagu. (Some dungeons are multi-room affairs and have minibosses in them before you face the big guy at the end. I got a bit cocky here. It turned out not to matter, but I really should have healed up at the Inn in between facing the Jagu and the Evergreen.)   After carefully making sure not to damage the Mythical Beast’s core while harvesting it, I wandered out of the woods aching from my many bruises, in what was starting to become a theme. After making it back to the Jagu’s cave, I was prepared to hand over the materials for completing the array, when suddenly a voice cried out from my pack saying that I had completed the trials of the five virtues and was worthy to inherit the immortal’s treasure. Apparently, understanding the formation array well enough to help complete it counted as displaying wisdom. I looked inside my bag and discovered that the charm had turned into a wooden box decorated with ornate golden carvings. Opening the box, I discovered that there was indeed a legendary technique unrivaled amongst all others, allowing one to dominate the Qi Refining stage!   Why, oh heavens?! Why must you be so cruel to this Peng Jun and not allow him to display the skill in Blades for which the Peng Family has achieved peerless renown? (I was legitimately laughing here. Your reward for resolving everything in the maximally virtuous manner is a box with at least one orange skill book and between 1-2 others of varying quality. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a technique of a certain type, but the game decided to just hand me another Finger technique.)   In a terrible mood, I threw the materials into the cave for the Jagu to complete the formation array on her own and marched back over to Yukong Village. With the array now properly set up to protect the village, the Jagu had no reason to keep the villagers locked up in the mountains and even personally opened up the portal to Yong Ning herself, much to the adulation of the villagers. I will admit that I was somewhat annoyed that my own efforts to help the village had gone unrecognized, but at least I was free to move on.  And that, mysterious stranger, is where my story ends for now, with myself having just arrived here in Yong Ning. Here, I look forward to finding someone to report to, and then perhaps pursuing more adventures now that I have gotten a bit of a taste for them.
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Jun 3, 2023 04:19
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At this point this is more of a Baek story than a Peng story lmao.
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Jun 3, 2023 23:30
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3. Shoot the Sun and Miss Who are you? You’re saying that we met before as travelers along the road? Hmph. This Peng Jun will allow it, as you do seem vaguely familiar, even if I can’t remember where and when we could have met. Back when I had just made it to Yong Ning? That was years ago! Then again, it speaks well of you that even then you figured I was an important person to keep in mind! It is, of course, a long story. Let me start from my journey beyond the portal…   After leaving the portal, I immediately journeyed to the nearest sect to see if they had any knowledge of the Peng Family, Tian Yun Mountain, or at the very least could provide me with a blade for my travels. Unfortunately, I got answers to none of my questions, and merely even bringing up the last topic resulted in the outer sect disciple that I was talking to calling me a “demonic brigand”, and demanding that I leave the premises immediately. I was outraged, but I wasn’t going to start a fight with a Righteous sect disciple in the middle of their sect’s courtyard without a better justification than that... and without a blade, so I begrudgingly agreed to leave.   On my way out of BaiYun Sect, I collided with a girl wearing some kind of fire cultist outfit, poorly concealed underneath a black cloak. Even then I didn’t know why she bothered to hide it, if you stood near her for more than a few seconds, she radiated heat like a bonfire. The girl, named Sunny, begged me to save her from a madman who had been shooting arrows at her and her siblings. The fellow in question quickly approached with bow in hand, and didn’t even bother to explain himself, only saying that the girl and her family needed to die. He was a good shot with that bow, probably one of the best archers I had ever seen, but it was clear that he didn’t have too much experience with close quarters combat. A couple of energy bullets to the chest and the wind was taken out of his sails.  As the girl ran off, the archer, who having no choice but to cease his pursuit, introduced himself as Hou Yi and said that I’d made a terrible mistake. It turned out that Sunny and her brothers and sisters were a family of Three-Legged Crows who had assumed human form, and that their travels throughout the land had been causing droughts, forest fires, and crop failures.   Realizing that I’d been tricked, I stormed off to find Sunny and give her a piece of my mind, but I was distracted on my journey by a fellow cultivator falling from the sky. I tried to save him, but as my Qi and vital energy reserves drained themselves dry I found out that this was no ordinary cultivator!     Soul Formation! If the man hadn’t woken up and stabilized the both of us, I would have died from the difference in our strength. The cultivator introduced himself as a high-level Talisman specialist who had recently lost the favor of heaven, and was struck by lightning as a result. He handed me a few Talismans to thank me for the attempt at saving his life and then continued on his merry way. (This admittedly poorly-translated fellow is one of a series of scripted events designed to show up in the first non-tutorial area. He’s meant to introduce you to Talismans and practical uses of Feng Shui. The Talismans he gives you as a reward for trying to save him allow you to mark an area and return to it later via teleporting and see all hidden objects in an area. Also he’s absolutely jacked and 100 times better than Peng Jun in every conceivable way, with there still being three stages to go after that!)    I found some of Sunny’s siblings in the middle of a barren wasteland and tried to show them a piece of my mind! Unfortunately, as it turns out, given that they can cause droughts by merely existing, Three-Legged Crows are incredibly strong. Hou Yi, who had been following me this whole time since I ran off, had to drag me out of the midst of a field of fire trails. The two of us agreed that ultimately this was going to go nowhere without the assistance of an Artifact. Hou Yi said he could get most of the pieces that he needed for a truly spectacular bow on his own, but he was ultimately still going to need a Golden Feather from the lord of the Harpies and a branch from the Divine Mulberry tree. He said that I might be able to grab the former by the Foundation stage, or even late Qi Refining, but the latter was protected by a Guardian who was all the way in the Qi Condensation stage and that the matter would just have to be contained by the sects of Yong Ning until he could acquire his materials and I could acquire mine. We’re still waiting on that, as of right now. No, I don’t know why he doesn’t just tell the sect leaders in Yong Ning about it. The history of getting into fights with people clearly can’t help. Maybe he’s worried that anyone else besides me would just kill him for the bow? Peng Jun is a true man of integrity, after all!  With that matter as resolved as it was going to be until I achieved the Foundation Stage, I continued to search Yong Ning for a town. Eventually I found one, but first I would have to travel through the Lightning Lands to reach it.   The Lightning Lands are filled with reptiles, reptile men, and thunder demons, all of whom call those rain-drenched bogs home. I am not quite sure how the reptiles survive the neverending series of lightning bolts that strike down from the heavens, but it makes them all the more fearsome foes.  Eventually I made it through the Lightning Lands, and even had a set of lightning infused Qi shards to show for it. What a stroke of luck, those would greatly help my cultivation going forward! (Alright, the RNG nature of Tale of Immortal’s map generation made me skip ahead here, so let me explain what’s going on before returning back to the proper order of the narrative:  Starting from the first major breakthrough, there are a number of different ways to modify your breakthrough which alter the stats you get. For the first nominal half of the game or so, this is purely just about how much grind you want to put in, in exchange for better stats. Unless you’re really having problems, the answer is almost always “do whatever it takes to get the best possible stats”. To get the best possible breakthrough to Foundation, you require at a minimum, six Qi orbs, made from each of the game’s core elements. You get these in one of three ways: 1) grinding one of the six elemental lands until you get 100 shards of the element in question, then going back to town and paying a couple hundred spirit stones to turn them into a minimal quality Qi orb. 2) If you’ve managed to join a sect, and they have one on hand, buying it from them. This is RNG dependent, but allows you to potentially get higher quality Qi orbs. 3) Wait until an elemental land boss spawns and beat it up. This guarantees a drop of the highest possible quality orb for that zone, but is also RNG dependent on the boss showing up. NPCs can theoretically beat you to any of the RNG methods, but also tend to be slow about it. Higher quality orbs increase the likelihood that your breakthrough is a success. This is just to get the breakthrough to happen at all. To boost your stats even further, you can add additional Heaven and Earth Treasures. The lower rarity ones are drops from those field bosses, while the higher rarity ones require you to go into special dungeons (which you have to pay spirit stones to enter and only unlock once every six months) called Lands of the Spirits. Higher rarity means higher stats. In this case, since the Lightning Lands were right there, I went and farmed the materials needed for the Lightning Qi orb, pausing only to get the breakthrough to the late stage of Qi Refining after picking up enough incidentally spawning high Qi locations.)   My experiences in the Lightning Lands had tempered and fortified me so that I was ready to advance to the next level of my cultivation. After selling off all of the manuals I had collected, including the one from the Immortal’s treasure, I was able to afford the next pill. After consuming it, I rerouted the various streams of Qi flowing throughout my body to its center, filling it up and forming a lake. Once the lake of Qi was full, I knew that I had managed to achieve the Late stage of Qi Refining! Only after the fact did I realize that I had managed to accomplish this feat on my 18th birthday. How proud my parents would have been! But alas, I had, and still have no idea what happened to them! If there were answers to be found as to what happened to the Bai Yuan branch of the Peng Family, they were not in Yong Ning, as I would soon find out myself… Jossar fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 00:53
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Can you make the picture bigger so I can more easily read the text?
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Jun 4, 2023 01:03
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Scalding Coffee posted:Can you make the picture bigger so I can more easily read the text? I have had this problem throughout multiple LPs and the answer is always the same: I can leave it as is, post a larger size which renders it archives non-compliant and potentially breaks the page, or switch to timgs which can be resized more conveniently but are annoying for phone users to look at. Maybe crop some of the pictures/separate them into multiple pictures to attempt to get greater clarify, but that doesn't help for the pictures where the problem is processing everything at once. Every time I make a change it breaks something for somebody, the only question is in whose particular favor I break things for any one LP. But I also don't care that much about the archives, so if it's that annoying, I'm willing to try and stretch the pixel limits for future updates after the next set to see how far they'll go without making the photos too big. Jossar fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 02:00
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This poor fellow. He is going to break through to the next level without even touching a blade. What will the family think?!
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Jun 4, 2023 05:01
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quote:We should be Peng Jun so that for once the redshirts of the Murim world get their day in limelight. I don't follow.
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Jun 4, 2023 06:43
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Bloodly posted:I don't follow. As was explained to me, the Peng family is part of the Korean martial arts society depicted in the wuxia (and less often, though becoming moreso, xianxia) genre, Murim, rather than the Chinese Jianghu. They're part of the Five Noble Families, a group which is ostensibly supposed to be righteous but is really defined by being very rich and kind of snobbish about it. The Peng family in particular is defined as the family most likely to use their supposed righteousness and their strength at arms to lord it over others, which as a result usually ends up with them getting their butts kicked to demonstrate how strong the protagonist or villain of the chapter is. Peng Jun is slightly less vulnerable to this tendency because he's too much of an idiot (even if technically knowledgeable in some aspects) to really understand the subtext behind how his family used its influence to extort people. But I've played a couple of updates ahead and despite my best efforts, we are going to see a return to the usual Peng family fortunes soon enough. Slaan posted:This poor fellow. He is going to break through to the next level without even touching a blade. What will the family think?! He is at least going to get his blade back though!
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Jun 4, 2023 12:21
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Slaan posted:This poor fellow. He is going to break through to the next level without even touching a blade. What will the family think?! Carrying it on your back counts as touching! Anyway, your write-up is really good. Makes the game feels a lot livelier.
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Jun 4, 2023 14:38
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Wow that breakthrough mechanic sounds hellishly grindy.
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Jun 4, 2023 17:38
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Seraphic Neoman posted:Wow that breakthrough mechanic sounds hellishly grindy. To a certain extent it is, but it's somewhat relieved just by nature of the time mechanics - time passes fast enough that most/all of the RNG bosses will spawn on their own while you're doing other quests/training/etc, so it's more a checklist of things to keep an eye out for rather than something that has to specifically be ground for. Some grinding is probably inevitable though, the genre as a whole thrives upon exponential power growth from doing proper foundation setting(/knowing to do so as a result of system mastery). also, re: the bad luck with the morality quest, IIRC the skill is actually hard-set to spawn as the type you have the highest stat in, so it's actually just the same bad RNG from character creation, rather than a new one, if that's any consolation.
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Jun 4, 2023 20:51
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4. Live and Die by the Blade GuanWang Town, while still no hustling metropolis, was much closer to such a thing than XinDa Town had been. But for that reason, the Manual Pavilion also kept a much closer handle on its wares. The owner told me that not only would he refuse to sell me any special techniques until I had proved myself more than a mere runt, but that even then techniques could only be purchased by permission from the Town’s mayor. Nevertheless, I at least took the opportunity to window shop. I found that while a wide variety of techniques were generally available for sale, very few among them were Blade techniques. There wasn’t even a single book available for the fundamentals! When I asked why this was the case, the owner of the manual pavilion told me that unaffiliated Blade practitioners were very rare in the Yong Ning region due to association of the weapon with the JingYue or “Solitary Fate” sect. Forty years ago, the sect leader had grown annoyed that several of his least powerful personal disciples had failed to advance in their cultivation and banished them to the Yong Ning region, saying that they could do whatever they liked, but he would consider them no more valuable than ordinary Disciples of the sect unless they took their fates into their own hands and proved their strength. The least of these personal disciples was still at the peak of the Foundation stage and, furious that they and their children had been cut off from the resources they would have received as personal disciples of the sect leader, ran rampant throughout Yong Ning. Eventually the Righteous and Demonic sects united to contain them, but even in the present day they remained the most powerful single sect in Yong Ning, and certainly the most malevolent. Internally, I groaned: this meant that the Peng Family branch in Yong Ning had likely been suppressed during JingYue Sect’s rampage and was either destroyed, in hiding, or had moved to another region. But without a family teleportation portal, the only way I was going to make it to the branch in Hua Feng was by wandering through the wilds of Lei Ze, which would be incredibly dangerous to anyone under the Foundation stage or even Qi Condensation. For the moment, I had no choice but to continue on the path I had already started.    The primary way that one got the attention of the mayor was not petitioning them directly, but through performing services for the town, assigned via a Bounty Board. I tried to avoid most of the ones dealing with other cultivators in favor of what I had gotten good at over the last few months, clearing out monster dens. The most notable about these ones was that they were regularly populated by Scorpionflower Women, who produced pools of poison that were extremely dangerous to stand in, but could be easily avoided.  Along the way back, I was introduced by a fellow cultivator to another form of Qi cultivation that, uh… would be of no particular interest to discuss in detail. (  Of course Dual Cultivation would be the first thing that comes up for explaining how the Knowledge system works. Apart from the systems already mentioned for Qi cultivation, doing the horizontal tango with a member of the opposite sex increases your Realm experience alongside your Knowledge. Sometimes if you have really good charisma people will initiate this on their own, otherwise you usually need to be decently good friends with them to ask yourself. Other common activities that increase Knowledge include debating with people about the Dao, where usually you want to try and match the other person’s opinions on a matter, and having spars as long as you don’t lose too embarrassingly. There isn’t as high of a friendship threshold to ask for these other activities. The higher level the other person, the more benefit you gain.  Knowledge converts into skill points, which are used to equip Mind Skills – passive buffs to your skills and stats. At the beginning, raw numbers are nice, but eventually you want these skills because their subskill passives will be crucial for build synergy. You can have up to 8 different types at a time, though in practice for most of the early game, you’re only going to be able to equip a few unless you’re very wealthy and constantly debating/shacking up with people.)  Eventually, after a few more monster hunting missions, I had earned enough passes to obtain a technique from the Manual Pavilion. Returning to the GuanWang Manual Pavilion, I found that this month there was, in fact, a fundamental Blade technique available for sale, which I readily purchased. The pavilion owner had even managed to acquire a blade from somewhere, which he handed to me as a gift alongside the Turtle’s Blooming Crescent Blade technique. He said that he hoped that I knew what I was getting myself into, and that this was the last time that he’d stick his neck out for me. The rest would have to be up to fate. But I could not care less. I had a blade again! (Finally! The core theme of Blade techniques in this game is lifesteal. This makes it much easier to sustain yourself in fights, although at this level can’t keep you in a fight indefinitely. Ruthless is an instakill effect that applies to enemies with more health remaining the more stacks you apply, but right now it’s kind of worthless. Any enemy that falls under the threshold would be dead on the next hit anyway.  I unlearn the old left-click technique to get soul stones and sand. Soul stones can be fed to a technique to increase its level without actively using it in combat. Sand can be used to reroll the passives on a technique. These usually come with other costs (time/spirit stones) and aren’t really worth it unless you need to unlock a certain passive ASAP.)   With a blade in hand, I felt like I was more than a match for the denizens of the elemental lands, whom I would need to defeat in order to acquire the materials necessary for my breakthrough to the Foundation stage. Fencers and fox spirits that shot blasts of water lived in the Arctic Lands. However, my battle with them was interrupted by a much mightier foe… (Arctic Lands’ gimmick is that you lose energy as you fight. It’s probably the least threatening of all the elemental land modifiers.)   A Goliath Crab! After trying to shake me off by covering the ground in poison and retreating under the earth, the crustacean eventually realized that I was simply going to dart out of the pool and wait for it to surface. Then the beast hardened its’ shell, erupted from the earth and met me in a clash of weapons: blade against blade-like pincers. Eventually its’ resolve was found wanting and its defenses dropped, allowing me to slice it to pieces.   Not only did the crab have a demonic core that served as equal to a high purity Water Qi orb, but hidden in its shell were the remains of a less-fortunate cultivator whose pack contained several elemental fruits and a manual for converting a technique to the Foundation stage! (Eat fruits to increase your Martial/Spiritual stats. This is going to be important as eventually, even absent the other benefits of dealing and resisting damage, you will be unable to learn techniques if those stats aren’t high enough. Epiphany books are how you convert really good, high quality skills up to higher levels as-is. This early, it’s not really worth using this on anything below a purple, maybe even an orange skill unless you think you’re not going to get anything better at the next tier.)  With the fruits of my labor in hand, I continued traveling to YangTa City, the capital of the region. And finally, here was a pinnacle of civilization. The first real city I had seen in years! As my older brother Yongsun would say: “A man with no city, is like a furnace in the wilderness.” At least, I think that’s that’s what he meant by it… (  Cities are just better in all respects than Towns, they have better stock, are guaranteed to sell items reaching all the way up to the second Realm of a region, and have a bunch of extra features that you don’t see in towns. But there’s only one in a region, so unless you want to spend a lot of money on constantly travelling back and forth, you usually use smaller towns for your low level functions and go back to the city for important things. Anyway, here are the other functions of towns/cities that came up since XinDa Town that I haven’t yet discussed: Bounty Board – Discussed earlier in this update, accept and complete missions for Mayor’s Tokens/Spirit Stones/Reputation. Workshop – Buy recipes for lifeskills, forge and enhance stuff, combine materials into other materials. If you’re not super focused on lifeskills, the last is the only one that matters. Combining each Qi orb from 100 shards costs 400 spirit stones an orb. Auction House – Only available in cities, occasionally cities will have auctions where people will bid through the roof to get things they want like cultivation techniques or treasures. I generally don’t find it to be very useful unless you’re exceedingly desperate for one specific thing or have a really valuable item and are constantly spirit stone broke. Even then, the game really encourages you to mass farm stuff rather than make big items, but this calculus might change when the game slows down later.  Finally there’s the board, city only. The best cultivator of a specific region for a particular element can get a fancy title which makes them nullify a lot of the damage from anybody on their own level or below using that element. Challenging for the title isn’t really worth it at this stage of the game, because if the spot’s already occupied, in addition to meeting the qualifications, you have to go and hunt down the current occupant and challenge them to a duel, and by that point you’re ready to just move on to the next map anyway.  Fun little note though – usually the game takes a really long time for anything to meaningfully change from the current world state, so I was surprised to see this Late Realm 9 Cultivator successfully challenge and defeat this Early Realm 10 Cultivator to take the spot of #1 Fist Cultivator in the World.)  Upon entering a stall in YangTa’s Grand Market, I spotted another weird old man, who looked like a tuber that had been dug up straight from the earth. He muttered something about how it was a shame that due to the selfishness of mortals, good opportunities were hard to find, then handed me several thousand spirit stones and walked away while continuing to mutter to himself about value. (Another scripted event, presumably to introduce you to the Black-rank Earth Immortal and give you some shopping money for the City’s Market.)    Well, if the heavens wanted to hand this Peng Jun good fortune for once, he wouldn’t mind going on a spending spree. I purchased several psychic charms to spot out the remaining elemental lands and spiritual locations, and a high quality flying sword to travel on in style. (Got pretty lucky here, that’s a red quality flying sword mount, adds a lot to my travel speed. The psychic charms reveal every non-random area of importance within 40 tiles, and are useful for minimizing the amount of time that you spend wandering around the map like an idiot looking for that last location. I was also lucky in the placement of the dungeon locations. Sometimes you end up with one of the Foundation level dungeons in the middle of the giant monster zone, but here, every static area of importance until the end of Foundation spawned inside Yong Ning proper.)  With my adventures in the city complete, it was time to get back to the elemental lands. The Blazing Lands are filled with shamans and bandits who have all managed to get used to the intense heat. These despicable fellows certainly wouldn’t mind the wrath of the Three-Legged Crows, but I was more than happy to leave after collecting the hundred shards needed to make the Fire Qi orb. (Blazing Lands special effect: You get set on fire, and take damage over time. This is probably the most annoying land for that reason, since there’s nothing you can do about it, except maybe boost your Fire spiritual root. This is combined with the fact that the miniboss, the Greedy Vulpes, hits pretty hard for this level.)   Stormvales are desolate deserts in which the harsh winds disturb spirits and raise undead. They all seem to know insidious and evil formations for some reason, especially the most powerful of the restless dead, the Souls of Chaos. (Stormvale special effect: Whirlwinds roam across the map, dealing damage to everything in their path. The mobs here love to use AoE attacks which can be difficult to dodge out of unless you have relatively high Agility for this section.)   Perhaps I should have continued on to the other elemental lands, but the first of the Lands of the Spirits was right next to the Stormvale, so I figured that it was worth pressing my luck. And after slashing my way through to the end of caves filled with monsters, what did I find?  Why, another Goliath Crab, of course! I need not tell you how the fight against this monster went, it was much the same as the first.  Save for the fact that trapped under its shell was not a demonic core equal to a Qi orb. Indeed, its core was fairly ordinary. But the real prize was several drops of rare Duskflower dew that the Crab had gathered while regularly passing by the flower. A true treasure of Heaven and Earth. And then… Ugh. Stranger, if you knew what was about to happen next, you would hesitate as well.  Fresh from the looting of the Goliath Crab, I was on my way to visit the next of the Land of the Spirits, when in the middle of the night a thief tried to steal a manual that I had obtained over the course of my journey. It was a mere Qi Refining technique used for improving one’s energy, worth a couple hundred spirit stones at most. But I figured that only a lowly villain would try and steal such a thing, so why should I let them get away with such an act?   A villain perhaps, but lowly she was not. I could barely perceive the faintest hint of a blade being drawn, before I was sent flying backwards by a slash of unrelenting savagery. The kind that I had always been told was the ideal form of the blade, and could not help but admire even as I lay there bleeding out on the ground.  The member of JingYue Sect, for who else could she have been, walked over to my broken body and icily uttered a single sentence: “Weaklings do not get to decide their fate.” Then she slit my throat. Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 21:42
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No, Peng Jun isn't dead. I've still got a life-saving treasure left to use and spirit stones to power it with! But while recording I found it a perfect bit of emergent gameplay that the game decided to only spawn a single Blade sect in Yong Ning, which happened to be Demonic rather than Righteous, and then a member of that sect killed me for a Mind Skill manual. And this is one of those sects where even though the local sect leaders are only Peak Foundation, the Sect Leader is some Enlightened/Reborn/Transcendent hypergod. Really ties the whole thing together. This also means we are not going to learn about sect mechanics until at least the next set of maps since the only sect I would want to join is now basically my sworn enemy. This is going to make things... difficult.
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Jun 4, 2023 22:00
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Never heard of this game until now but an open world sandbox wuxia game (and LP) sounds like fun. The game looks interesting, might give it a try while waiting for Wandering Sword to come out. The controls for combat sound like it'd be a twin stick shooter if it had controller support natively. I wonder how well they'd map to a steam controller...Jossar posted:On the one hand, it is a fairly deep xianxia/cultivator simulator game. But on the other hand, if you've every played one of those games you are going to be aware of how terribly janky this thing is. Despite having just released in full on Steam, most players can't even open the game without some form of repairing the files.  Though this seems like the kind of thing that should prevent a game from being allowed to "launch" on Steam but apparently not! Once you do the repair you're good to go, at least, and don't have to constantly fix it I hope? As crazy as that eye of providence sounds, does the Poke-gourd have a limit to the number of monsters you can control or could you slowly build up an army of resource-harvesting spirit beasts? Also does that thing work on any enemy you beat, meaning at the late game you'd potentially have stuff like dragons and phoenixes as harvesters? You can only use them for resource harvesting and not as minions in battle as well? Jossar posted:I have had this problem throughout multiple LPs and the answer is always the same: I can leave it as is, post a larger size which renders it archives non-compliant and potentially breaks the page, or switch to timgs which can be resized more conveniently but are annoying for phone users to look at. Maybe crop some of the pictures/separate them into multiple pictures to attempt to get greater clarify, but that doesn't help for the pictures where the problem is processing everything at once. I'd suggest going the timg route. It can be annoying on mobile but ultimately it's still readable for them and larger images will help a lot for PC readers, the text in the screenshots is very hard to read at 1440p.
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Jun 5, 2023 01:34
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What's wrong with me that I kinda want to play this
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Jun 5, 2023 07:17
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It's really not a proper cultivation story until some minor incident escalates into a blood feud.
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Jun 5, 2023 17:21
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The Lone Badger posted:What's wrong with me that I kinda want to play this It's probably one of the more (might even be the most) approachable Chinajank "cultivation" game out there - battle represented by bullet hell but it's more about grinding than being some godly dodger, grindy webgame-ish single player RPG, faint veneer of sandbox (NPCs aren't vital here), a translation (if you can't read Chinese), content complete, reasonably cheap. Its competition are either absurdly complex, constantly overhauled, incomplete, and often a combination of all three.
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Jun 5, 2023 22:13
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Evil Fluffy posted:
As far as I can tell, once you've done any of the several possible things to fix the game, it stays fixed, unless some future bug-fixing update breaks it again. I only have very limited experience with the Mythical Gourd because I have a bad habit of dying and thus need revives from the Eye or Jade, but as far as I can tell: *I think it's a limited number but it grows over time, so you do eventually get multiple teams running around. *I don't know if you can capture literally every boss, but I know that you can capture at least some of what the game considers to be boss-level monsters. Jossar fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Jun 5, 2023 |
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Jun 5, 2023 23:07
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5. Build a Strong Foundation by Grasping the Earth (With One’s Face) Well, obviously the story didn’t end there! It turned out that the amulet that Old Man Zhang had given me was also a life saving treasure! Unbeknownst to Bi Wenyao, a stream of energy poured forth from the amulet, silently turning back time and healing my wounds. This also had the effect of burning all of the treasure’s energy and cracking it, making it look useless to my robber and would-be murderer in the process.  I later discovered that feeding spirit stones to the amulet would allow it to slowly recover to full strength, but it was truly monstrous in its consumption! Additionally, I would be unable to use the Flora Spell technique that I had taken from the Jagu while the amulet was restoring itself. But even so, truly a small price to pay when compared to one’s life, especially this Peng Jun’s! (The price to fix the Eye goes up with the number of times that you die and your Cultivation level, though I think the latter greatly outpaces the former. Still, apart from recommending that you don’t die at all, I would at least recommend not dying more than once a Realm or else you basically need to spend the next year or two grinding missions just to get the Eye back in working order.)    Bi Wenyao... Bi Wenyao! I absolutely cannot say enough about how loathsome that woman is! Everything that the pavilion owner said about JingYue sect was absolutely true! It is truly the number one sect in terms of both skill and ruthlessness within Yong Ning, and Bi Wenyao is its princess. Daughter of one of the founders of the local branch from forty years ago, “Fiery Flayer” Wang Huili, she serves under her mother as an Elder in her own right, being at the Peak of the Foundation stage. It hurts to say this, but she is likely the best Blade cultivator in the region, only not having the title as she has not yet deigned to grace the current holder with her presence. And this woman with the resources of an entire sect at her disposal, who could have bought out even the entirety of my family’s estate in Bai Yuan on a whim, had killed me for a cultivation manual that she wouldn’t even bother to waste on her son or personal disciples.  Oh, but that wasn’t the end of my indignities, not by a long shot! In the process of looting my corpse, Bi Wenyao had also stolen several of the Qi Orbs that I had collected and the Duskflower Dew! Luckily, I was able to find another Goliath Crab wandering out in the Arctic Lands to replace the Water Qi Orb, but it was going to take months for the Land of the Spirits’ energy to refill and be traversable again. Again, JingYue Sect already has all of these materials in plentiful supply! (It was kind of amazing just how pointlessly cruel the game was here, and then how nice it was to make up for it. It kind of ping-pongs back and forth for a while.)   With the Land of the Spirits in this part of the region locked for now, I went to the land that I had originally intended to go to next before the whole unfortunate incident. There in the midst of the caves dwelt a pig monster spirit called a Dangkang. It played a primeval, low-sounding horn which summoned several hogs and lesser spirits to distract me while the Dangkang itself shot three gusts of wind in the form of a cone in my direction. After slaying its minions, the Dangkang rapidly charged at me and knocked me over, the sheer force of the impact stunning me for a few seconds. However, what the Dangkang had not noticed was that throughout the fight, while I had been dealing with its lesser minions, I had also taken the opportunity to get in a few key slashes on its preexisting wounds. Eventually, the beast tired itself out and slowed enough that I was able to lop its head off and collect the Sandbury Bone buried in its lair. (Alas, most of the boss fights in this game do not have mechanics as intricate as I make it seem here, but it is still useful to note these two attacks which can hit for a lot and leave you unable to act.)   While wandering through a forest on the way to my next destination, I spied a spirit deer hiding in the foliage that seemed more intelligent than usual. I convinced it that I meant no harm, and it lead me to a cave that contained a fully formed Wood Qi Orb! It seemed that things were finally turning around. (Yep, sometimes the random events can just hand you a full orb.)    On my way to the final Land of the Spirits, I was approached by another Demonic Cultivator who looked like he wanted to pick a fight with me, but fortunately this time it was just to engage in a friendly spar. It was a close match, but my Blade arts were able to defeat his Wood arts, despite the presence of a couple of additional spirits. It turned out that this Ai Deyun was quite an interesting fellow! Wicked by nature, carefree by choice, I was surprised that even at the late stage of Qi Refining that he was a Grand Elder of one of the local sects. I wasn’t sure if that meant that JingYue Sect was really that monstrous or LanXing Sect was really that weak… (It’s the latter. While this guy does show up again, I’m more interested in showing off that sects that aren’t the regional branch of some more powerful sect do exist. And generally speaking, their lack of deeper roots from the support of a larger network means that they tend to be pushovers. Finding one of these Sects and taking it over allows for some interesting options that you wouldn’t see otherwise until much later in the game, if ever. Also you can get a ton of free stuff and become personally super rich. The only downside is that when you move to a new region your sect either tends to get its teeth kicked in a lot or you risk potential overthrow by recruits who are at the peak of the realm above yours. Maybe if it was a Righteous clan or had Blade skills to start with, I would have gone for an early Sect Leader playthrough, but as it was there were too many detriments to really consider.)    The final guardian of the Lands of the Spirits was the Coatl, or feathered serpent. The tolling of its bell is said to seal certain doom, though it was no match for yours truly! I must admit though, it was a harrowing experience. The serpent swooped throughout the entirety of the cave and tried to stab me with its lightning-infused horn. I used the Flora Spell technique to limit its motion, but then it simply slammed the ground, creating a massive, thunderous shockwave which I had to use all of my agility to avoid. Finally, once the beast was near death it called forth six bolts of lightning which constantly homed in on my location. But it only took a few more blade strikes to subdue the Coatl and escape with its loot.   In addition to a thousand year old spiritual stalactite loosened from the cave’s ceiling during the fight, the Coatl also had the first Blade fruit that I had seen for the purpose of improving my skill with my weapon of choice! (The first of many. I was a little too liberal in eating fruit at first, so it is going to take literal years for me to fix the game thinking that Peng Jun is supposed to be a Finger Cultivator.)  I was wandering back to the nearest town to rest up, a complete mess, when all of a sudden I spotted a young boy. His appearance was striking to the extreme – his hair, clothing, and ornaments a contrast of black and white, with a dull pearl embedded in the center of his forehead. With endless compassion in his eyes, he pointed his index finger at me, and I was fully revitalized. I asked the boy who he was, and he said that he was the first piece to be played, and so this region was his concern. Then he vanished in the midst of broad daylight! (If you wander around while horribly beaten up, there’s a chance that this guy shows up and heals you back to full. It’s a failsafe built into the game to ensure that you at least have a fighting chance to try and dig yourself out from a terrible situation, rather than just dying an inevitable death of a thousand cuts.)  I also ran into that tuber-headed Immortal again, this time digging treasures out of a mountainside. He expressed shock at seeing me again and handed over another couple thousand spirit stones so that I would go away.   The last new stop on my journey was Quicksand’s Reach. Here, lost souls from other regions are drowned in the midst of quicksand pools, gradually accumulating large amounts of Earth Qi. Tyrant Turtles make their home here, seemingly immune to the ravages of the place and feeding off the Qi themselves. (There’s one last zone, but we’re skipping it because I got the Wood Qi Orb for free. Quicksand’s Reach’s special elemental effect is that there are a bunch of quicksand pools that damage you and also try to drag you into their center. They’re kind of difficult to avoid, but it’s possible to pull yourself out with minimal harm.)  After going back and retrieving another Duskflower Dew from the Land of the Spirits with the Goliath Crab, the time had finally come for my breakthrough. While there were additional preparations I could make for entering the Foundation realm, I was not certain I would have the time to prepare before Bi Wenyao realized that I wasn’t dead and tried to kill me again. I would simply have to break through as is.  After absorbing the 6 elemental Qi Orbs as stabilizing elements around my central lake of Qi and consuming the Heaven and Earth treasures, it was time to begin condensing the lake into a dantian. At first, everything seemed like it was going well, I had achieved the best and most stable of configurations for entering the Foundation realm. The lake energy was changing in character and becoming increasingly dense…  But at the last possible second, I was interrupted.  Why, oh heavens?! Why must you be so cruel to this Peng Jun and summon tribulation lightning for a simple breakthrough to the Foundation realm? (You see that 60% success chance on the breakthrough? Fail it and you get sent to the penalty zone: The Trial of Lightning. Through whatever means possible, most likely pills, you have to survive a countdown timer as an even more intense version of the Lightning Lands’ field effect tries to kill you. Fail here and you die. I’m not sure if there’s any additional complications beyond that if you use the Eye to cheat death or try to run via the flee/escape option, as it has not yet happened to me. Succeed and your breakthrough continues on as usual.)  After managing to endure the last of the tribulation lightning, I was able to finish stabilizing my dantian and new cultivation base. Then I was opened to the mysteries of the universe and given a chance to rewrite my destiny. (At every breakthrough you get the ability to Rewrite Destiny, giving you a permanent additional Destiny that, unlike the ones you get at character creation, will play an important part in your build going forward. There are ways to try and manipulate the probability on this, but none that Peng Jun has access to at the moment given our particular circumstances. The destinies in this round are as follows: Burning Butt I: 15% additional agility during battle, but you take 10% more damage from behind. Can be upgraded to Burning Butt II. It’s a meme skill. The extra agility is theoretically nice, but it’s not worth having your rear end set on fire. Can be very powerful if you make it all the way to the end of the tree, but it's a huge liability until then. Old But Strong: 1 extra Defense for every year of Lifespan reached. This would nearly double our defense, so it’s a good early game pick, but the higher in stages you go the less this matters. Remember, that 7th stage Cultivator had nearly 2400 Defense and an endgame Cultivator has twice that. I’d pick it if there were no better options, with the hopes of trying to force a reroll via special items later. Fleeing Beauty: After a successful escape, an opponent will like you better. It’s a skill based on you otherwise being hopeless against hostile cultivator enemies (and not other types of enemies) who want to and are capable of killing you, in the hopes that if you don’t die, you can eventually make them your friends. Hard pass. Energy Seed: Max Energy +10%. Generically useful, but doesn’t really define your build in any particular way. I’m of mixed minds as to whether this is better or worse than Old But Strong. On the one hand, it doesn’t fall off as hard. On the other hand, if you manage to get a passive that lets you regenerate energy (which you will probably want eventually) then it’s completely useless. Blood Power I: When you deal damage to enemies within 300 range, convert 7% of Damage into Vitality. Can be upgraded to Blood Power II. There’s a lot of builds that this is useless on, but we’re playing a Blade character which this is pretty much tailored for. The only situation where you wouldn't want this is if you’re already generating so much lifesteal that you’re only worried about getting insta-ganked, but that’s going to be pretty hard to reach. Elixir Recycle: 60% chance to defecate out an elixir that you’ve used in battle within 10 seconds and add it back to the elixirs on your available hotbar. So one of the things about dungeons is that you only can bring in a limited amount of elixirs. This lets you cheat that. In that sense, it’s a very powerful destiny that remains so even later on. But it’s also RNG dependent and based on a playstyle of trying to outsource a lot of your strength to pills. Maybe if we were playing a committed alchemist I would grab this.  In the end, Blood Power I is the only one that really synergizes with the build without having any obvious shortcomings that will make it useless later.)  While in the fugue state, I saw a vision of a man who cut down his enemies and used their blood to heal from the wounds that he had acquired while fighting them. It wasn’t blood cultivation, not in the sense that he was stealing their cultivation bases to increase his own power or lifespan, just an extension of an orthodox technique already present to some extent in my own manuals. When I awoke, I found that while I could not quite do the same thing, my blade’s own ability to fortify me had nearly doubled in strength. And that is where we are now, stranger. To have made the Foundation stage at 20 years of age is practically unheard of, but even that feels insignificant compared to the enemies that I have made. Then again, the saying goes that one judges a man by said enemies, so perhaps that speaks very well of me indeed! Jossar fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 06:39
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It really isn't a cultivation novel unless the mc gets dunked on by some impossibly powerful being early on that either thinks they killed the mc or the mc runs far far away from and needs to turbo-level to get vengence.
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Jun 6, 2023 12:48
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Awfully nice of them to let you breakthrough after beating tribs. I first saw the failure chance and thought the game couldn't be that grindy and had developer expectations of a correct way to play.
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Jun 6, 2023 14:38
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Scalding Coffee posted:Awfully nice of them to let you breakthrough after beating tribs. I first saw the failure chance and thought the game couldn't be that grindy and had developer expectations of a correct way to play. The correct way to play is to eat atrocious amounts of pills to survive, or to have a legendary bloodline and to punch the lightning bolts while screaming.
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Jun 6, 2023 14:45
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Am I understanding correctly that when you break through the quality of the Qi orbs you have is the primary factor in the overall boost you get, and then you can include some (up to 3? More? Varies per cultivation rank?) additional treasures that add their set stat bonuses on top of that? So if you wanted to take your time you could farm until you had red-grade orbs and some ideal treasures to get as big a boost as possible and end up with considerably higher base stats than if you'd used the first set of orbs and treasures (if any) you found? What're some of the instances that someone wouldn't want that Blood Power skill? A play through where you're cultivating through pacifist means and focused on life skills rather than combat? I'm not sure how much range 300 is in those combat screenshots but lifeleech seems like a very "all combat-oriented characters want this" kind of thing. since in most games even a little life leech goes a very long way. Scalding Coffee posted:Awfully nice of them to let you breakthrough after beating tribs. I first saw the failure chance and thought the game couldn't be that grindy and had developer expectations of a correct way to play. When I saw the failure rate my immediate thought was "oh god this sounds like it gets grindy and/or suicidal as poo poo later on." That you can still succeed by surviving a tribulation is a good failsafe, though I guess people could/would savescum otherwise?
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Jun 6, 2023 19:12
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Evil Fluffy posted:Am I understanding correctly that when you break through the quality of the Qi orbs you have is the primary factor in the overall boost you get, and then you can include some (up to 3? More? Varies per cultivation rank?) additional treasures that add their set stat bonuses on top of that? So if you wanted to take your time you could farm until you had red-grade orbs and some ideal treasures to get as big a boost as possible and end up with considerably higher base stats than if you'd used the first set of orbs and treasures (if any) you found? The way it works (at least from ascending from the Refinement realm to the Foundation realm) is that the Qi Orb rarity only determines the chance to succeed breakthrough without a tribulation; off the top of my head purple quality is between 50-60% success chance (exact % chance gets generated on a per-orb basis), orange quality is 70-80%, and red quality (highest) is 90%-100%. At breakthrough time, the total success chance gets averaged based on the orbs used (since the different orbs could have different grades), so a lineup of 6 red-grades gives the highest chance, and a mix of qualities adjusts it accordingly. Orbs don't add bonuses stats or anything else other that affecting breakthrough success (only the treasures do), so if you are willing to savescum you can beeline to the lovely Qi orbs without the grind and just save before attempting breakthrough, then reload as necessary. Evil Fluffy posted:What're some of the instances that someone wouldn't want that Blood Power skill? A play through where you're cultivating through pacifist means and focused on life skills rather than combat? I'm not sure how much range 300 is in those combat screenshots but lifeleech seems like a very "all combat-oriented characters want this" kind of thing. since in most games even a little life leech goes a very long way. Since Rewrite Destinies are a gacha, (and you only get one roll every time you ascend a cultivation tier, barring a very few special quests and events that let you reroll again), there's the chance that a destiny key to the build you're going for is on the same list as Blood Power, so you may not want to take it at that time. 300 range is also not 'that' far, and some playstyles are centered on long-range martial/spiritual arts where Blood Power wouldn't be worth it.
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Jun 6, 2023 21:06
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