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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2554 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread.

I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.

There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.

Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.

Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.

The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.

Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.

Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.

Been playing Valheim (colonialism simulator)

Super fun base builder, decently challenging combat, tons of biomes ahead of us.

Very much recommend.

People are salty about what seems to be very slow development, but I just started playing (I've learned you always want to be a patient gamer with flavor of the month early access games) and it isn't an issue for me

(I've learned you always want to be a patient gamer with flavor of the month early access games)

This is probably good advice. I hate ruining EA games for myself by coming to the end of the content, and not feeling motivated enough to ever return to the game in it's final form.

I've done it many times myself!

I always wanted to do a kerbal space program story run but got bored long before they added research and funding and missions

Maybe I'll fire it up this winter

My Steam library is like an Elephant's Graveyard where EA games go to die.

With my girlfriend

Alone would be a grind

I played that one! Very pretty, but the grind put me to sleep.

Yeah realizing there was a setting to be able to bring metal through portals was huge

Also realizing I could turn loot up to 1.5x (I'll probably go up to 2x, I'm so sick of mining) has been a huge win too

I found that multiplying the resource drop to x1.5-2 from all sources struck the right balance between grind and gameplay. It didn't trivialize everything, I absolutely needed to go dungeon delving on the regular for iron, but not an absurd number of times.

I think iron actually isn't effected by that setting lol, due to how is generated

I played that a little while back, definitely enjoyable game. Can't remember if I even got to all the biomes they had released at the time.

I might have eventually gotten a mod that allowed portaling metals. I remember travel just sucking up a bunch of my time in the game.

Portal-ing metals is a world setting now thankfully, I get the idea behind the tension of having to get the mine home (or build more established bases to smelt on site) but it's just all so tedious

I'm already doing so many chores to keep us alive, let alone all that travel with such a terrible carry weight

Copper+tin is the worst too because you lose metal at a 3:1 ratio on the way to bronze

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