What Did We Play Yesterday?

The reason Farm Together has such normie house decorations is presumably because there are 1302343 DLC packs. Historically, I'm not much for cosmetics, but I decided to treat myself to the Sugarcane Pack, which is a pirate-themed DLC that includes a few outfits, a pirate house and decorations, and the sugar cane harvestable.

Friends, I had so much fun with this DLC! I customized a pirate-witch farmer and created a pirate base in the middle of my main fish pond and finished my beach. It has a treasure chest with a tentacle coming out of it. WOULD DLC AGAIN.

I also separated my animals, moving the fowl to their own little plateau, and started another clown fish pond. It's relaxing to plant long rows of crops in the flat areas, but I've come to enjoy figuring out the most interesting ways to use the hilly/rocky terrain.

My orchard has become a sprawling hot mess. Thanks to Ardrana's Tree Season Guide I was able to organize the trees seasonally. It makes them much more enjoyable to harvest. Unfortunately, I may have done too good a job organizing them, because the flow from one to the next is so natural I now I feel compelled to harvest everything that's available.

I also decided to improve my mess of a garden. Orchids are a slow-grower I've been working on for a while, because there are several to unlock. I stuffed all those at the back and organized some of the smaller flowers by growth time. The entire eastern side is for tulips and probably tea down the line. I have enough medals now to comfortably branch out (uuuhj sorry) into trees and flowers that have medal costs.

I spent a few hours doing this, and I felt healing warmth flow through me. Comfort gaming is good.

Oh, and I've added paths EVERYWHERE. For some reason, harvesting trees is more fun when they're in neat little paved 3x3 clumps, and I think part of it is because I don't have to pause to make sure I'm properly centered to harvest the correct clump.

More About Farm.Data

Turns out the farm terrain information is human readable, and Daxidol's guide Converting existing maps to Flat Maps explains how to convert terrain to flat (or whatever). Farm.data contains a list of every tile in the map along with player stats and quest info. Some examples:

[{QuestItem:"FlowerDaffodilWhite",QuestAmount:20,QuestProgress:4},{QuestItem:"AnimalDonkeyMiranda",QuestAmount:10,QuestProgress:4},{QuestItem:"CropCauliflowerOrange",QuestAmount:20,QuestProgress:0}]

{Id:"CropPeanut",Experience:{Level:11,Progress:60}}

{id:"AnimalDonkeyProvence",food:6665,extraFood:0}

{ChunkId:"Flat_Chunk",Unlocked:"false",ChunkPosition:"6,4",Tiles:

These are values the Cheat Engine table allows us to modify. Something else I noticed is the cursed pumpkin level data isn't here (CropPumpkinHalloween). I found the event data is stored in farms.data:

"Events":[{"id":"Halloween","progress":[{"index":0,"progress":6242},{"index":1,"progress":6242},{"index":2,"progress":6242},{"index":3,"progress":6242},{"index":4,"progress":6242},{"index":5,"progress":6242},{"index":6,"progress":1128},{"index":7,"progress":1128},{"index":8,"progress":1128}]}], "Rewards":[{"id":"FenceAnniversaryFence"} ...

The first few items are based on cursed pumpkins harvested, the second is the haunted trees. You can unlock the items by adding them to the Rewards list.

More Mods

I also found a few more mods at 3DM GAME, including Tiehan Tenderness (unlocks opposite-sex clothing). This appears to be done using the Unity Mod Manager and it patches the game so backup data for sure.

Time for another seasonal event! Yay! It requires a stupid amount of grinding! BOO!

I wanted a witch hat real bad, but according to the quest I'm gonna have to plant a shitton of cursed pumpkins and baby I ain't doing it. I'll plant 800 pumpkins, but I'm not planting 6000 or whatever silly amount it is. On top of that, farm hands can't harvest seasonal crops. I feel like the devs have gone out of their way to make this a grind. So I fired up ye old Cheat Engine using fantoma's cheat table to see if I could fark around with the quest parameters and make all my spooky dreams come true without the boring grindy stuff.

I accidentally wiped out all my active quests trying to find and modify the values for the seasonal quest, which meant I would no longer be able to trigger automatic quests. Obviously I should have backed up my farm first! Fortunately, you can find the backups under:

...\Steam\userdata(your profile number)\673950\remote

I was lucky I still had a .bak from before my goof, so I deleted the farm.data and renamed farm.bak. Okay, so I can't easily modify the quest itself. Now what?

Even with the cheats for Fast Crop Harvest, Crop Any Season, it's a lot of grinding to get 6000 pumpkins. I set tractor fuel to 99999999 and set up MurGee's Auto Mouse Click to simulate a mouse click every second, which is about the fastest you can plant and harvest due to the in-game time delay. I then wandered off to do other things. Using the tractor to plant/harvest 3x3 grids of pumpkins, I think it took a little over an hour to unlock the first 3 Halloween items. The questline then switches to needing about 1,000 Hollow Tree harvests. The Hollow Trees are limited to 45 per farm, but with Fast Tree Harvest and Crop Any Season, these can be farmed with the tractor in about 5 minutes and harvesting trees is honestly super satisfying so I didn't bother with the autoclicker for that one.

I feel like the Hollow Tree limit provides some insight into the seasonal quests. The developers do not want you to crank all the crops out really fast, like I did. They want you to return to continually work on the event goals over days or weeks (this event lasts 2 weeks), and provide an opportunity for the community to farm each others crops, etc. I appreciate that but needing 6,000 pumpkins is way too much IMO.

Anyway, cursed pumpkins look very cool at night. Seasonal crops remain until harvested, even when the event ends, and I still have a few birthday candles I've enshrined on a hill. I thought it would be fun to keep a few of each seasonal crop to display so I'll set a field of pumpkins somewhere too.

I'm to the "let's automate all the things" phase of brainrot, and I decided to set up a diamond farm with rubber and money trees (which don't actually generate money, I only now realized). I want the diamonds but I also want to level up those trees, and I found having a farmhand on my apple trees leveled them up pretty darn fast. As I accrue diamonds I replace the money trees with rubber trees, which produce twice as many diamonds twice as often. It's satisfying to watch the diamond number tick upwards while I'm working on other things.

For money, a lot of people recommend clown fish pools and night tulips with sprinkers. As it happened, I recently unlocked night tulips, so I set up a stand with sprinkers and added a clownfish pool of about 100 fish. Flowers pay out a lot more if they're regularly watered. The tulips generate about 17k each, so in 4 days they pay for themselves.

I'd really like to permenantly update the player's move speed slightly and find a way to disable "needs water" indicators (since I never water anything), but otherwise I'm happy with how things are.

Folder Dungeon is a cute Brackeys Game Jam roguelike by Ravernt where you traverse a computer's files searching for a Very Important File. Very short, but also very cute and fun. Don't check the gallery unless you want the Very Important File spoiled! D:

I recently discovered an unliscensed Genesis remake of an old console game called Oh, Mummy. It's a maze game where you must traverse a tomb while avoiding enemies to go to the next level. The game does not explain the win conditions, so I had to experiment a bit, but it seems you have to uncover at least one key and treasure before you can go to the next level. Sometimes you'll uncover a scroll that temporarily makes you go backwards.

The remake tries to add some level variety. One level is in the dark, one is in water, another has a large flying cat sphinx that obscures parts of the maze. The graphics and bosses are kinda cute but unfortunately the gameplay is overly simplistic and not really fun, even with the added variations.

It includes a port of the Amstrad CPC version. I actually liked this version better in some ways, because the paths are obscured, but the collision detection is super fussy so it's easy to get hung-up on a corner.

I have not encountered many compelling Neo Geo Pocket Color games, but Crush Roller has remained moderately in rotation due to its super cute graphics. This is the Japanese version of Make Trax, a maze game where the player must paint all the roads within a neighborhood while avoiding fish. Every pixel must be covered. Occasionally a creature will emerge and leave footprints in the paint which must be covered over.

The 1999 Neo Geo Pocket version is by far the cutest version of this series, the NES version (Brush Roller) and arcade versions look drab by comparison. It is a little stressful, but it has unlimited continues.

Brainrot reached tentative modding levels. This is a Unity-built game, and not mod friendly. The devs indicated it wasn't designed to accomodate mods and there wasn't an easy way for them to create tools for this, but there are a few hints scattered around and some people have cobbled together stuff. assembly-csharp.dll can be decompiled and dug into. I wanted to mod my farmer's face decoration for Halloween. I think the most straightforward way would be to rip the face bundle and replace one of them, but I'm not sure this is a project I want to get into as I'm unfamiliar with Unity and have zero interest in learning the tools.

Later in the game the player unlocks buildings that have much faster conversion rates than stalls and no cooldown period. The downside is they don't look very farmy. I ended up creating a little town center for these because otherwise they look weirdly out of place on the farm.

I find it relaxing to plant long rows of time or type-organized crops, so I've been slowly adding to the flat fields at the northern side. At this stage, it's become less of a game and more of a thing to tinker with.

I like planting crops and doing crop-based quests, but I don't like dealing with livestock. I had the same problem with animals in Stardew Valley, but that game had the auto-grabber, which was a way to harvest livestock resouces automatically. Since I actually enjoy harvesting fruit, and find it weirdly therapeutic, I trashed most of my farmhand apple orchard (apple trees are up to level 47 or something silly like that) and moved all my livestock into the 13x13 farmhand work grid instead. That way, they continue to level without me doing anything. Quests that require lots of animal harvesting are still annoying, but they aren't going to be the bottleneck they were when I was harvesting those resources myself.

I unlocked rubber trees, which are the defacto way to farm diamonds, so it will be interesting to see if that gives me a boost since land is getting a bit pricey to unlock.

When I saw the Japanese e-shop exclusive merge game Watermelon Game going viral I decided to get in on that. You can try the comparable Suika Game in the browser, but I wanted to play it as a handheld game and unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) all the clones in the Google Play store are ad-riddled garbage and none replicate the physics just right.

This game was released in 2021 but exploded into popularity this month, sort of like Among Us blew up during the pandemic, but the developers didn't give any indication they intend to port the game or offer an English translated version. So, I made a Japanese eshop account and bumbled my way through adding 1500¥ and here we are.

This is a 2048 merge puzzle variant but you drop fruits Tetris-style into a bucket. If a fruit lands past the brim, it's game over. What makes it really compelling is the physics. The fruit jiggle and slide around, which can create life-saving last-minute combos, and part of the strategy is trying to anticipate when fruit might merge down the line. But the physics that make the game so fun also make it very unpredictable, because sometimes if a fruit gets tossed too high it can trigger the endgame, even though the bucket is nowhere near full. Like this:

The wildcard element is what sets this game apart from similar puzzle games.

I wasn't sure if Donut would go for this one, but they were immediately drawn in by the cute fruit and the physics. It's just good fun.

I had a craving for pipe/road-builder style puzzles and I ended trying out several versions of Pipe Dream, the ubiquitous pipe placement game that has been ported all over. The NES and Gameboy Color versions simultaneously bored and stressed me out, and the NES has a Tetris-style bonus level that was somehow more stressful, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Super Famicom version.

There are a lot of little bells and whistles, like a level selection map and a shop for powerup purchases. The player is given a start and ending pipe along with a minimum piece goal, which encourages more elaborate paths. The ooze travels at what feels like a slower pace, and bonuses are awarded for more complex connections like crossover pipes. It's the combination of refined win conditions and a slower timer that turned this version into something I can see myself revisiting from time to time. A+ would pipe again.

Hatris is a Tetris-style puzzle game that seems kinda boring at first but gets far more interesting at higher levels. Hats drop in pairs and the goal is to stack similar types to clear the area. As the levels increase, so does the styles of hats. Movement is limited to swapping their horizontal position, but as soon as one hat is stacked it disconnects from the other, so creating higher stacks can help break up pairs. At the end of each level, you can buy helpers to remove a certain type of hats from the screen, but this is totally non-intuitive and I didn't realize it was a feature until I actively searched to figure out what the heck the shop was about.

There is not a lot to say about this beyond you either dig hat dropping games or you don't. I whip this one out from time to time, starting at level 0 if I want a chill experience or starting at higher level if I want a bit more intensity. There are several ports of this game but the NES version has a certain charm, with two little dudes on a conveyor belt dropping hats onto the heads of people standing below.

It turns out Farm Together has holiday events! My first was the birthday event. Plant 400 plots of birthday candles and get new stuff! The field looks really cool at night.

So you plant 400 of these, at 1k a pop, and get a bunch of swag. Sounds easy, right? So I harvested 400, only to realize...

Yeah, NO, you evidently gotta plant at least 400 plots for each item. LMAO. I found it increases over time, so I needed a total of 2,000 to unlock the fourth item, and so on. You can't use farmhands to do this, it's just you and your trusty tractor (and friends, if you have friends, which I do not.)

I also decided to build a beach in the little cove near my massive fish ponds. Sand is 10k a plot, so this was an expensive project. I think I burned through 500k doing this much. I also decided to test Farmhands. Farmhands will tend to tiles within a 13x13 range of their base, and I figured out they'll teleport or jump up/down to navigate terrain, meaning they can actually reach my cove fish pond, yay. I ended up setting up a apple orchard with livestock and fish tiles along the border, which is one of the recommended setups for this. I like having a way to passively harvest my fishpond. Livestock are still kind of a hassle, because farm hands can only feed them and they have to be harvested manually. Livestock are my main quest bottleneck atm.

The brainrot is real.

I've reached the stage where I could play the game indefinitely because I have so many crops/rotations there's always something to do with very little downtime. Right now I'm mostly focused on leveling up certain crops to unlock new ones and expanding and organizing the farm. I decided to dump all the fish in a lake. Not sure how I feel about that just yet and may end up changing it again, but my flower garden and expanded orchard is coming along nicely. The farthest out plots are flat land, making them ideal for planting long rows of coordinating crops (I assure you, this is very fun for me).

I'm at the point in the game where medals are the newest bottleneck. They're a tier of currency that allow you to build extremely useful things like teleport pads and gas stations. You get medals from completing quests, but you can also create them with jam. When I initially looked at the jam stall I thought I could turn 50 jam into 1 medal, which didn't seem like a very good deal. Thankfully, I misread it! I can turn 10 jams into 1 medal, which is a much better conversion.

I always diligently plant at least a 3x3 of each new fruit-bearing tree I unlock, and at this stage in the game it is paying off. There are four ways to convert fruit into currencies and I like how they all have their pros and cons. The fruit shop is an efficient way to convert fruit to Diamonds, but at an XP loss. If you go the jam route, you're eventually able to convert about 400 fruit into 1 Medal. The fruit stand never loses it's usefulness! Even though they have timeout periods they're very cheap to build, at 10 diamonds, and they remain the most XP-efficient way to convert fruit.

• Fruit Stand - 10 Fruit = 5 Diamonds, 20 XP (0.5x Diamond, 2x XP)
• Fruit Press - 50 Fruit = 5 Diamonds, 20 XP, 1 Jam (0.1x Diamond, 0.4x XP)
• Fruit Shop - 125 Fruit = 60 Diamonds, 100 XP (0.48x Diamond, 0.8x XP, No Timeout)
• Jam Stall - 10 Jam = 1 Medal, 40 XP (0.1x Medal, 4XP)

I read that jam was the best way to farm medals and wasn't really paying attention to the other stats, so I've been heavily utilizing the press despite having a relatively small orchard. If I had paid attention, I would have utilized the fruit stands a lot more heavily and leveled up my farm much faster. Anyway, I decided to convert most of my grapefields into an orchard since I have unlocked all the "grape" stuff (the game counts some berries as grapes).

Good news bad news edition.

Good news:

I figured Lae'zel's personal arc would go a certain direction based on her GMC and writerly black magic spidey sense and I was right.

It was actually intensely satisfying to charge into the creche like an idiot in love, kill the Inquisitor, and straight up beam my ass to the astral plane, all for my secret girlfriend who has no idea we're getting married but trust me we're totally getting married. The reveal that V'laakith is actually a Lich Queen of death eating the Gith is pretty cool, and being able to walk up to the Guardian and say, yo, answers? was also satisfying, even if I didn't get many answers. Voss showing up wanting to truce was icing on the cake. Many would be shell shocked and crushed to find they lived so devoted to a lie, but Lae'zel is all, "I didn't fail, she did," and I think that's really wonderful.

Bad news:

Between Farm Together and BG3 fandom I was forcibly hurled from the BG3 wagon and haven't touched this game in a bit. The fandom thing was stupid. I dipped a toe in, expecting to see lots of fun fanart and fun memes and just fun stuff, and immediately got smacked in the face with biphobic wank and it seriously messed with my levels. So I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to... IDK navigate my desire to see cute fanart and funny memes of Gale vs. having toxic people aggressively shit in my mouth. I don't feel like I should have to accept toxic bullshit as the cost of doing business here. I think if Tumblr let us block tags AND a certain post type, like text posts, it would help a lot.