Digital Spring Cleaning

In attempt to count the bad weather we’re having in the days leading up to the start of Spring (which has already begun by the time you’re reading this), I decided to stop putting off a significant task I’ve been ignoring for months and clear out my digital inventories in Final Fantasy 14. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve accumulated a lot of junk that I thought would eventually be useful. Some of that wound up being true, and some of it wound up being incredibly false. It has been a real grab-bag, having all of that junk around, and while it was certainly helpful sometimes to just have the stuff I needed for whatever weird little thing I wanted to do or make, I’ve recently reached the point where I need to instute actual inventory management as I start having more and more stuff I need to sort into discrete collections that the game doesn’t recognize. So, rather than have to pick through a bunch of different inventories, I’ve reworked how much is kept where, what stuff is kept for future projects, what is kept from workshops, and what is kept around for my various “money makers.” It’s not a terribly complex system, but it’s one that works without needing a lot of management. Unforunately, that comes at the cost of actually needing to follow through on all of my “I’ll save this for crafting at a future date” promises so I can actually use some of these incredibly rare resources for their intended purposes rather than just throw them out so they stop cluttering up my virtual pockets.

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Figuring Things Out In Outward

True to my previous statements, I decided to start playing Outward to see if what I feel is inefficiency and impracticality on the part of a Let’s Play I’m watching is truly those things or if the game really is just that punishing. I’ve even got a friend playing it with me, so we can really replicate the recorded experience. Albeit with the benefit of having watched the stream and having a wiki open on my second monitor. So it’s not exactly the same, but it’s similar enough that I’m pretty sure that some amount of what I’m seeing in the LP is the players’ reach exceeding their grasp. I’m sure some amount of this is the constant awareness that what they’re doing is being recorded and will be put online for entertainment purposes, so they don’t want to spend forty hours doing incremental small journeys out into the wilds to safely collect resources, earn money, and buy skills before they really strike out into the world. I mean, I haven’t done that yet, either, but I am in the process of doing that, to the tune of buying all the basic skills available to me in the starting city that meshed with my chosen sword-and-shield approach. I will probably buy more, yet, just to keep beefing up my repetoire of abilities so I can bust out the appropriate weapon as needed, but I think we’ve hit the point of being as ready as we can be to really make a go of things in the wider world beyond our small town’s gates.

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