I Came, I Saw, I Discovered...and I Didn't Even get an Achievement!

I mentioned last week that I was spending a chunk of time trying to knock out the entire Discovery Mode tour in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.  The good news is that I finished it!  That's right, all 30+ tours and every single discovery location--aaannnd, I didn't simply just click through stuff, I actually read the additional info!  Now, I'm someone who generally doesn't care about achievements, if you get them, great, but they aren't something I feel overly compelled to complete.  For some dumb reason I really wanted to get an achievement for completing all of Discovery Mode.  Spoilers...there is no achievement!  Once you've completed all the guided tours you get a "thank you" cutscene, and that's it.  On the plus side, I did learn many new details about life in ancient Greece and the design of the game--that's a good enough achievement, right?  It also made me want to go visit Greece and see some of these sights and artifacts (of course, not right now with pandemic and whatnot).  Mission-somewhat unsatisfactorily--accomplished.

Once I finished Discovery Mode, I spent a bit of time tooling around in normal Odyssey, but I haven't been feeling particularly compelled to stab another 10,000 people.  I've sort of been bouncing around with different games--spending some time playing PC Building Simulator, because I've made another goofy, internal goal of getting my shop to max level (I'm currently at level 26--only 5 more levels to go!).  When I get tired of building PC's I shift gears to the story generator/survival sim RimWorld.  RimWorld has seen massive improvements since I first started playing it in early access several years ago.  The improvements include making the process of escaping the planet much, much more difficult.  I'm hoping this time my poor colonists will make it...fingers-crossed.

My colony.  Note the ominous grizzly hanging around....

My newest colony started off with the basic colony setup--I opted for three colonists with decent technological skills.  In picking who my three colonists would be I tried for a normal balance of useful survival skills--early on I try to pick colonists with decent growing skills, at least one person with decent combat skills, and someone with medical skills.  The trickier part is keeping track of the individual personality quirks and picking people who aren't going to have truly devastating traits.  I only did a so-so job on this front and made one fairly stupid choice.  Two of my colonists have a trait called "gourmand" which means that when they're stressed, they will react by going on food binges.  These binges can put a serious dent in your food stores and fortunately I've managed to stay ahead of any serious shortages (it was really tricky in the beginning and my colonists were basically cooking enough to eat daily).  Calling the trait "gourmand" kind of makes me laugh because I've made it a core part of my desperate food recovery strategy to pillage the corpses of any animals killed by other animals.  So, I hope my stressed out colonists enjoy bingeing on the partially-eaten corpse of a yak or the leftover turtle that they scraped up.  Sounds delicious!

Naoko can't do dumb labor, but she's a good medic.

The worst choice I made in the early game was picking a colonist who is incapable of dumb labor.  The early part of the game requires a boat load of dumb labor--tons of gathering supplies, hauling, building, and scrapping to survive.  So, one of my colonists was basically a useless consumer of food...but, she is also the person with the highest medical skill.  I decided the best option for her would be to have her be the researcher--a job she was willing to do.

The colony has lurched along and managed to avoid any catastrophic events so far.  I really wanted to gain another colonist to help with labor, but failed to recruit any captives and, for some reason, any capsule crashes coincided with other events that kept me from rescuing people (once, a capsule crashed in the midst of a pack of manhunting ibexes and another time it crashed right before a raid).  Finally a random person decided to join my colony and it has helped a ton with getting more resources gathered.

There have definitely been some hiccups for my colony--a meteor crashed on my refrigerated food storage area and destroyed some of my food stockpile; two of the colonists got into a social fight which resulted in the loss of a leg for one of them (the good news is that I managed to level up crafting and crafted him a prosthetic leg which my medic could use to replace his destroyed leg)--the colonist with the lost leg also narrowly avoided being devoured by a pack of manhunting labrador retrievers due to his slow speed...that would have been a tragic death.

My colony will survive!  (MAYBE.)

In some other gaming news, if you're looking to pick up some free games, the Epic Store is currently offering Hitman (2016) and the three Shadowrun games for free!  I haven't played this iteration of Hitman, but was a fan of the classic games--I grabbed it.  The Shdaowrun games are turn-based, RPG, cyberpunk games that are fun games--I would recommend picking them up.  The second game in the series is particularly good.  (Here are links to my reviews for two of the Shadowrun games--apparently I never wrote up a review for Dragonfall which is definitely the best in the series--Shadowrun Returns Review,Shadowrun: Hong Kong Review)