Rescuing slaves in Kenshi, part 2

Sinkum (click the pictures to enlarge)

OK, this is the conclusion of my story (Part 1 is here). We're rescuing slaves in Kenshi, and now need to make our way south, through or past both the United Cities and the Holy Nation.

Note that both societies keep slaves. Both will eagerly capture escaped slaves. And the Holy Nation, at least, will attack non-humans on sight especially hates non-humans. (With the ex-slaves, I have two different species of non-human in my faction right now.)

My plan was to skirt United City territory on the west. I'd never been there before, but we'd seen a Hive Village just south of us. So far, the Hive people have always been peaceful. (I'm not sure why. I doubt if human beings have treated them well.)

When we got there, I left the escaped slaves hiding nearby, and the rest of us went in to trade. We were able to sell all of those skimmer claws, but they didn't have anything we needed. So we moved on,... into Sinkum.

As soon as we crossed into Sinkum, my guys started warning me about the dangers there. Apparently, this wasn't going to be simple. So I tried to stay just inside Sinkum, but not very far. We needed to head south, and I figured that our best chance was to stay near the border between Sinkum and the Great Desert.

That first night, we were ambushed by two heavy bandits. I don't know where they came from, because I didn't see them coming. And there were just two of them against 13 of us - 14, if you include the pack bull. But they were very tough.

Red, our pack bull ("Red Bull," get it?), in Sinkum

It was probably lucky for us that they focused on our pack bull at first. (I forgot to order the bull to stay out of the fight.) But after the battle was over, everyone needed bandaging, and we had to carry not just the pack bull, but also two of the ex-slaves we were rescuing. (Again, there's no magical healing in Kenshi. You can bandage people and splint their broken limbs, but it takes time to heal - more time if you can't sleep it off.)

So we slowed down - and started sneaking, which made everyone move at a crawl - and I tried to keep a better eye out for danger. Sinkum was clearly a dangerous place, but it still seemed like the best option. (For one thing, it wasn't sand dunes, so skimmers couldn't wait in ambush. There was a type of skimmer in Sinkum, but they appeared to be solitary, and they could be avoided.)

As we got further south, we started to run into canyons, which limited our options and made it hard to see what was coming. And there were both United Cities patrols and Holy Nation patrols (looking for each other, but we had to stay clear of both).

At Drin, a heavily damaged United Cities outpost, I finally gave up and decided to try the desert again. Partly, that was because of the scary cannibals we saw (luckily, they'd already captured their lunch - an unlucky slave they'd grabbed at Drin - and didn't see us). But when both factions have patrols out, it doubles the number of people we have to look out for. And it's just so much easier to see what's coming on the open desert, too.

So we stayed right on the edge of the desert and made good time for awhile. Then we reached the Skimsands near the mountains south of Okran's Fist. All we had to do was get across the mountains and we'd be in Holy Nation territory (not safe, but a lot safer than we had been!).

The first trail led directly to Okran's Fist, apparently. (At least, there was a wall with a guarded gate across the trail.) So we tried to get to the next one, further south. What a nightmare!

The dangerous Skimsands, looking towards the mountain pass

First, there was all sorts of traffic here - manhunters, slavers, mercenaries, bandits, and military patrols from both sides. Even worse, this was the mother lode of skimmers, apparently. I've never seen so many in one spot! (I had to reload a saved game once when my entire party was wiped out by a skimmer ambush. That was the only time, luckily.)

Eventually, I had everyone stay put, hiding in the sand dunes, while other travelers tripped the skimmer ambushes. The patrols were always a lot stronger than we were, so they'd defeat the skimmers and move on, at which point I'd loot the skimmers for meat (and ensure that they didn't get back up again).

At one point, Rebecca - one of the human women I'd recruited before rescuing the slaves - ran up to a huge Holy Nation patrol which had easily defeated a skimmer. She was intending to wait until they left, then loot the corpse. And normally, that would have been fine.

But the Holy Nation is a patriarchy which doesn't like women a whole lot more than they like non-humans. Usually, that doesn't affect us too much. Women just have to pretend to be submissive. But in this particular case, they got suspicious because she was in disputed territory - a woman in disputed territory, with no man keeping her in check. Clearly up to no good, huh?

Luckily, she was fast enough to run away and lead them towards a huge United Cities patrol, where the two sides began an epic battle (larger than I've ever seen in this game). She ran off a bit, started sneaking, and made her way back to the rest of us.

But we weren't going to survive there much longer. It was just too dangerous. So when a group of manhunters got distracted by dying bandits (just like the last time, they'd been ambushed by skimmers and now were going to be enslaved), we made a run for it.

The Holy Nation has some of the richest farmland in Kenshi

I sent my fastest character up the path through the mountain, to see if the way was clear. (Luckily, it was.) And I sent my second-fastest character to lure another skimmer out of the way. Everyone else, with fingers crossed, ran up the mountain path and across the border.

It was night by then, and there didn't seem to be anyone around. In general, Holy Nation land is a lot more peaceful than the rest of Kenshi, provided you're human and not an escaped slave or a heretic. We still had to keep our eyes open, but the rest of the journey was a piece of cake, compared to what we'd just gone through.

We stayed to the rough land on the east side of the mountain range, where there was unlikely to be much traffic. And we skirted a Holy Nation village in the middle of the night. Just as it got light again, we crossed the main road between Blister Hill and Okran's Shield, running south on a well-maintained road that seems to get no traffic at all except for bandits. (We avoided them.)

Technically, we were still in Holy Nation land, but not the populated part of it. There were a couple of ruins there - former Holy Nation mines, now completely destroyed - and I was able to leave our ex-slave recruits hiding in relative safety while the rest of us made a run to Blister Hill for backpacks and food.

When we got back, everyone loaded up with construction material looted from the ruins. At that point, my new recruits had only ten hours left, out of that initial 100 hours, to stay out of sight (at which point they'd be under no risk at all of being identified as escaped slaves).

So we headed further south, out of Holy Nation land and into the Border Zone, looking for a place to build a settlement for ex-slaves. (I've decided that my goal will be to rescue slaves - mostly from the Holy Nation, no doubt - and bring them back to build a new life with us.)

Lots of fun!
___
PS. We did start a settlement, too. Now, the Dust Bandit king is trying to extort money from us. It's just one thing after another! :)

Beginning to build the Phoenix Aerie, sanctuary for ex-slaves

Rescuing slaves in Kenshi

Phoenix Rising in the Great Desert of Kenshi (click pictures to enlarge)

Yeah, I don't blog at all, anymore. I certainly don't make game posts. But I had such a blast with my first attempt at rescuing slaves in Kenshi that I thought I would write it up.

Note that I didn't plan to write this, so I haven't saved any especially beautiful screenshots, even though the world can be really beautiful in Kenshi - especially for an indie game. So I'll just take a look at my saved games and try to come up with some illustrations here. (Note that all of the screenshots in this post were taken in the Great Desert. The terrain in Kenshi is more varied than this.)

I've written about Kenshi a few times previously. It's an open-ended squad-based game of exploration, combat, and construction on a arid, alien world devastated by environmental destruction and violence. (It's single-player, so you don't play with other people.)

I've been playing it off and on for three years, and it's been great fun, even though it's still in development. (The final part of the already-huge map is supposed to be finished early next year sometime.) But the game just gets better and better.

You start the game by creating a character. But this character starts off with no impressive attributes, no skills, nothing heroic at all. He's wearing rags and wields a crappy sword, and there is literally nothing in the whole world which can't kick his butt. A puppy would leave him bleeding in the dirt. (Admittedly, the puppies in Kenshi are pretty tough.)

And the only way you get better is by doing. You learn to fight by fighting. You learn to heal by healing. You learn to cook by cooking.

Your strength increases when you carry heavy weights or fight with heavy weapons. Your dexterity increases when you fight with light weapons and no encumbrance. Your toughness increases whenever you get badly damaged or even defeated in combat (assuming that you don't bleed out and die).

I don't want to talk about strategies here, but you start off staying near a town and just running everywhere, so that you get fast enough to escape from danger. (Again, you have to run in order to get better at running. The whole game works like that.) But you need to eat, too, and your starting money won't last long.

North Port at midnight

When you recruit other characters to join your faction (some will join you for free; others require a payment), they become no different from your initial character. Often, they start with some skills, but otherwise, it's exactly the same. Indeed, if your initial character dies, the game will continue as long as someone in your faction is still alive (or so I've heard, at least).

But you can play the game however you want. You can have one character or dozens (there's a mod which increases the maximum from... 30, maybe?... to 256). You can explore, just running away from danger. You can look for fights. You can trade. You can steal. You can even build a small city (and/or several smaller settlements). You play the game the way you want, and the only goal is whatever you decide for yourself.

So, anyway, I wanted to stick with just the one character and explore the world. It's huge, it really is. Even with part of the map unfinished, it's absolutely enormous! It's rather empty - this is a damaged world - and parts of it were much too dangerous for me to explore, but I tried to make a start at it, at least.

Then I decided that I really needed some help, so I recruited a few more people - just a handful. (They are pictured in the first screenshot at the start of this post.) And we continued to explore. But I got pissed off at what I was discovering. The Holy Nation is a bunch of bigots. The United Cities seems better, until you take a closer look. And both make extensive use of slavery.

It's funny, since this is just a game, but I absolutely hated seeing how they treated their slaves. And the Traders Guild nobles - who make their money off slavery - really pissed me off, acting as arrogant as rich, evil bastards can be. So I decided that my goal was going to be to free the slaves - some of them, at least. (I tried to steal from a noble, but... they've got a lot of guards in their homes!)

Eventually, we found ourselves near North Port, a slave compound far to the north, bordering the sea in the Great Desert, in United Cities territory. (This was a bad place to start, as it turned out. But it was lots of fun.) And I didn't really know how this even worked in the game. So I figured I'd just give it a try.

I waited until after midnight, but the gate to the encampment stayed open - and well-guarded. I wasn't expecting that, since I'd seen slave compound gates locked at night in Holy Nation territory. Here, I was able to walk right in, but it would be a lot harder to get any slaves out. (I left the rest of my team hiding outside, just west of the encampment.)

Starving North Port slaves at midnight, before my rescue attempt

The North Port slaves were still working, even in the middle of the night, but their overseers had gone to bed, apparently. In the dark, I was able to sneak around and pick the locks on their shackles. But other than their expressions of gratitude, nothing else seemed to happen.

Eventually, I realized that I had a bunch of slaves following me, sneaking along as I was. I figured that I'd release as many as I could, so if we rushed the gates, maybe the guards wouldn't be able to stop all of them from escaping.

But then I noticed that the guards had been pulled away from the gate by an attack of skimmers - giant, dangerous, insect-like monsters which inhabit the desert. This seemed to be a great opportunity to free at least some slaves.

I'd removed the shackles of ten or twelve slaves by then (it's hard to tell, because some slaves are so beaten down they won't even try to escape), and there were lots more. But I felt that I couldn't pass up this opportunity. So I led the slaves to the gate, all of us sneaking through the darkness until some of them were discovered, at which point we started running for freedom.

Most of the guards were still fighting the skimmers. Only two followed us, and both had been injured. Even so, they were much too tough for my squad to fight, but their injuries probably slowed them down. At any rate, after awhile, they gave up the chase, and we started sneaking again - heading west along the shore, through the sand dunes.

Note that my faction hadn't been identified as criminals. No one saw me unlock the slave shackles - a crime in United Cities territory - and although the guards chased after us, they were just trying to recapture the slaves. Either they didn't recognize the rest of us or they didn't connect us with the crime.

Of course, the world of Kenshi is dangerous enough even without the active enmity of the United Cities or the Traders Guild, but it would be far worse with it.

After awhile, one of the slaves expressed his everlasting gratitude and joined my faction. One by one, the others did that or simply ran off into the desert. Six of the slaves had stayed with me - three of them human and three of them Shek (which would become important when trying to get through Holy Nation land, because their guards will attack non-humans on sight).

[Correction: The Holy Nation people are bigots, and they hate non-humans, but they won't necessarily attack them on sight. Apparently, I was mistaken about that.]

The rescued slaves (disguised now, and well-fed) who joined our faction

They were all starving. Slaves are kept at the ragged edge of starvation specifically to make it difficult for them to escape. They had no skills at all, they were wearing slave rags, and they'd had their hair cut off to make it obvious that they were slaves.

Note that this is exactly the same thing which would happen to any of my characters if we were captured by slavers. We're just... ordinary people in the world of Kenshi, just like the NPCs. And now that the slaves had joined my faction, they were exactly the same as even my initial character. They were just skinny, slow, weak, completely unskilled, and really, really hungry.

I gave them food, but starvation is like injuries in Kenshi - there's no magic solution here. It would take time to recover from near starvation, and in the meantime, they'd eat a lot more food than normal.

And they were obviously slaves. For the next ten hours, anyone who saw them would know instantly that they were escaping slaves. (And even if they weren't recaptured then, that recognition would reset the timer to ten hours again.) So we really need to stay out of sight - not just from the slaver patrols and the manhunters, but from everyone. And that's not easy to do.

As the night went on, we continued sneaking towards the west, since I had a plan (not a good plan, as it turned out, but... well, I suppose we were lucky).

Sneaking is a lot easier in the dark, of course, but it's also harder to see people at a distance (one benefit of being in the desert). When it got light, we stopped sneaking - so we could run - whenever the way looked clear. Note that sneaking is very slow, especially with unskilled people, so we couldn't stay ahead of any slaver patrols coming from behind us is we didn't do anything but sneak. And the ex-slaves were quite slow even when running.

At one point, I saw a trader's caravan in the distance, so I ran off - just my initial character, who has become very fast - to buy some more food. Starving ex-slaves take a lot of food, and we were already getting low. The whole trip was very tense - trying to spot patrols, estimate where they were heading, and then attempt to avoid them - and we'd barely begun.

Crossing the Great Desert

After ten hours, though, my new recruits were no longer "escaping slaves." Now, they were "escaped slaves." The difference is that they wouldn't immediately be identified as slaves, provided I could disguise them a bit. And if they could avoid being recognized for another 100 hours after that, they'd be free and clear.

And that's when we had a real stroke of luck. We'd seen a small group of bandits traveling from the west, and I was hoping that they'd stay far enough from shore that they wouldn't spot us hiding there (while also hoping that they'd move quickly enough to clear the way for us to continue west before slaver patrols came up behind us!).

But then they were ambushed by skimmers. As I noted, skimmers are insect-like monsters which live in the desert. But they're especially dangerous because they can hide under the sand and then spring out to ambush you when you get close. And that's exactly what they did to the bandits.

The bandits fought back, and it was a very tough fight on both sides. At the end of it, all of the skimmers were down, along with all of the bandits but one, who limped off, severely injured.

Note that these were starving bandits, ragged people living on the edge, owning almost nothing. They didn't have any first aid kits, or the surviving bandit would have bandaged himself and his friends (not "healed" them, but at least bandaged to stop them from bleeding to death).

And note that none of them were dead, though most of the bandits were dying. Without help, they'd eventually just bleed out. The skimmers were a lot tougher. They were unconscious - and badly injured - but they would get back up again (and be almost as dangerous as they were before).

Bandits

But I ran over before that happened (just me, again). By taking even one piece of meat or claws from an unconscious skimmer, that would kill it completely. And I wanted them to stay dead! Besides, we needed the food (and the claws could be sold for money).

I was sneaking (my first character is very fast by now, and very accomplished at sneaking), so the surviving bandit didn't see me. Most likely, he would have continued leaving anyway,... except when I started stealing everything from his buddies.

Yes, I stripped all of them naked and left them to bleed to death in the desert. What can I say? It's a rough world. And I needed that stuff.

You see, that bandit clothing would help disguise my escaped slaves. I had them throw away their slave rags and dress in that bloody bandit gear that was probably just as ragged. But it made them look less like slaves. After that, there was only a 10% chance that a person getting a good look at them would recognize that they were escaped slaves.

Those aren't real good odds, given that we had six escaped slaves and that there might be a dozen people in any patrol we encountered. Slavers and manhunters are especially good at identifying escaped slaves - and they don't really care anyway, since they'll enslave anyone they can, regardless - so my new recruits were still at huge risk. But... step by step, huh?

Indeed, shortly after I ran back to my people, a group of manhunters saw the dying bandits and gleefully ran over to bandage them up,... and then enslave them. Well, it was that or death, I suppose. But I was very glad to see the manhunters head back east, carrying their new 'property.'

It was time to try to make our way south, through or past both the United Cities and the Holy Nation. (Just before we left, I saw a nomad caravan and ran up to purchase a pack bull from them. I could afford it, and I thought we could use it to carry stuff. As it turned out, though, I ended up carrying the pack bull myself, much of the way - plus everything it was carrying. Heh, heh.)
___
Note: This is getting very long, so I'll continue with the story in Part 2.

A Really Bad Day in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Yeah, these screenshots don't do the game justice. Sorry, but I didn't take any screenshots while I was playing, because I didn't know I was going to post this.

I haven't been blogging about games or books lately, although I've still been reading and gaming just as much as ever (if not more so). But I'm sick to death of politics, after what bigots and idiots (and bigoted idiots) did to our country last week, and I thought I'd post my first day of a new play of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

I've blogged about this game many times before. It's one of my all-time favorite games - which is really something, given that it's free, developed entirely by volunteers. Note that I'm playing 0.C Cooper, which is still the latest stable  (i.e. non-experimental) version of the game. But it has tons of content.

Cataclysm is a turn-based zombie-survival game. I set the options to my own preferences (no joke monsters, no skill rust, no NPC's - which tend to be annoying as hell - and extra character points), then usually pick the hardest starting scenario in the game.

Ironically, if I survive, that makes my character even more powerful. But I don't play long enough for that to matter much. I like the early game the best, when I'm struggling to survive. When survival seems assured, I stop playing or start a new character. But hey, those are just my own preferences. They don't have to be yours.

When the day began, I was drunk to the point of incapacitation, depressed, dying of an infection, and sick with the flu. I was naked, wearing only a wet towel, inside a city infested with the undead. And the house was on fire.

There was actually a zombie in the room with me, only a couple of steps away. [That's a first for me. I've never started this scenario with a zombie in the same room!] The door was only a couple of steps to my north, but my afflictions and the pain I was suffering had slowed my movements drastically. I would have died in the next few minutes, but for a chair which slowed the zombie just enough that I could get through that door and close it behind me.

[The hardest part of this "Really Bad Day" start is how slow you are. Until you heal up, you can't outrun anything (and you certainly can't out-fight anything, even if you weren't naked and completely unarmed). Luckily, zombies are mindless. They'll walk into lava if it's on a direct path to you. In this case, the lucky placement of that chair made the difference - and only just barely, even then - between death and at least a few more minutes of life.]

Zombies can break down doors, but it takes awhile. With the house on fire, the roof would collapse before that would happen. And speaking of which, I needed to get out of that house ASAP. The fire had started in the wall to my left, that same wall I'd just come through. Unfortunately, that was the same direction I needed to go.

I found myself in a large room - a combination living room, dining room, and kitchen - and there was no possible exit to the east. There were bedrooms to the north, but I could hear zombies behind the doors in that direction. So that left only west, through the smoke, as a possible escape route.

Luckily, the main door to the house was in that direction. However, I could see a second fire burning in the northwest corner of the living room. I had to get out fast, before the roof caved in. There was just no time for anything else.

So I plunged into the smoke, taking further damage (thus, slowing me down even more) and increasing my coughing. Admittedly, at this point, there was enough noise from the burning house that a little coughing wouldn't make much difference. But it would make it just that much harder to hide, assuming that I managed to escape at all.

When I opened the door and stepped outside, I ended up on a little patio at the northwest corner of the house, which was itself at the northwest corner of town. Walls on the south and east sheltered me from sight, and there wasn't anything but an empty field in view.

Of course, it was snowing, and I was naked, but you can't have everything, right?

Map: I started in a house in the northwest of that north town, then entered the two houses just north of that. Once I broke contact, I looped around counter-clockwise, west of that tiny subway station town, then southeast to the town with an office tower (T), ending up in a house at the northeast side of that south town, south of the mansion (M), west of the prison in the forest.

I walked west along that wall until I could see around the corner to my left. There was a pack of wolves to my southwest - and zombies closer yet (apparently drawn to the noise of the burning house). One of the zombies was huge, and another was... well, I don't know what it was. It was humanoid, but snow-white in color and with no eyes or nose, just a perfectly round mouth in a blank face.

[Note that, as many times as I've played Cataclysm, that's a monster I've only ever seen once before - and I avoided it then, too. So all I knew is that it was very, very scary-looking.]

Clearly, I couldn't go west. Maybe the wolves and the zombies and that... weird-looking horror would all fight among themselves, but I couldn't risk it, not as slow as I was moving! So I backed up, then moved north along the wall there, staying as close as the smoke would let me get.

There were zombies nearby to the east, and since I wasn't able to hug the wall and peer around it, they quickly spotted me. A grabber zombie, with long arms, was the closest, but there was a van in the street just a few steps to my north, and it wasn't smart enough to go around the van to get at me.

But when I went along the van to the north, with the grabber zombie mindlessly ripping apart the vehicle in a frenzied rage to get at me, I discovered another zombie, which shrieked loudly when it saw me, coming from the northeast. I don't know if that one had a few brain cells left, or not, but it came around the van to attack me. So I just entered the side door of the van and escaped out the back, still heading north.

The shrieker zombie saw me, but I went through a car the same way I'd gone through the van [and out the trunk, somehow], which put me just a few steps from the southwest corner of another house.

The door was to the east, but it was almost certainly locked. And there were more zombies in that direction, anyway. So I stumbled my way to the nearest window and smashed it with my bare hands. Then I leaped through the broken glass, cutting myself on the sharp edges, just ahead of that shrieker zombie, which had been delayed - but not very long - by my previous tactics.

That window wouldn't delay it very long, either - not even long enough for me to pick up a piece of the broken window to use as a weapon. But there was a bedroom door to my north, and I was able to make it there and shut the door behind me.

Luckily, there weren't any zombies inside, but there wasn't anything useful, either. Another door to the east led to a hallway, and I checked the rooms which led off from that: another bedroom, a kitchen, and a pantry. But I couldn't find any clothes or medicine. (I was hoping for a well-stocked bathroom medicine chest, but the bathroom wasn't in this part of the house.)

Before leaving, I quickly drank a coke and ate a cheeseburger I found in the kitchen. That was the only way I could carry anything, except in my hands (which I needed for smashing windows). But there was another house very, very close to the east of this one - close enough that I could probably cross the gap without anything seeing me. Things were looking up!

Of course, I was still naked (and drunk, depressed, infected, and sick), and it was still snowing. But it's funny how adrenaline and the prospect of being eaten alive can take your mind off the inconsequentials. :)

This time, I smashed a window on the north side of the house. (I was on the edge of town, so nothing but empty fields were in view in that direction.) I entered into a bedroom, and although I could hear zombies in the south part of the house, the bedroom door was closed.

There was another bedroom to the east, and I finally found some clothes there: winter boots and gloves, a hoodie, and a raincoat that actually fit. (That last was very welcome. It was early spring, and I knew that the snow would turn to rain as the day went on. Nothing like being wet to put the capper on a really bad day...)

OK, I was still naked below the waist. And if you want to talk shrinkage, try being freezing cold, sick, and seriously injured, while being chased by zombies. Luckily, there wasn't anyone to see my embarrassment. (I don't think the zombies cared, one way or the other.)

After that, I snuck back out the window and headed north, only to discover a giant, pink crab-like monster fighting a zombie dressed in tattered military gear. I didn't wait to see how that turned out (though the zombie was clearly out-classed), so I turned around and ran - or hobbled, really - west. There was a science lab and a hazardous waste sarcophagus to the north, but neither would have done me any good, even if I could have gotten to them.

So I went west, into the open field, then south when I was far enough outside of town. After awhile, I came back east to loot a house on the outskirts - and finally found a pair of pants! - but there wasn't much else inside, not even enough to fill up the pockets of my hoodie.

There were a bunch of non-animate dead bodies outside the house - they looked like scientists - and some weird blob-like creatures. There were lots of zombies further east and southeast, so I turned around and headed west again. I had to skirt a large hotel and a megastore that were absolutely packed with zombies, and then squeeze between a couple of slime pits filled with more of those weird blob-creatures.

But eventually, I found a gas station, where I could grab some snacks. I ate what I could, since I couldn't carry very much, but it was very close to the forest, and I had to sneak out the back to avoid a bear which had become enraged.

As it turned out, there were lots and lots of bears around - and moose, too. There was only one direction I could go - southeast - and even that was quite difficult. In the distance, directly to my east, there was a subway stop, surrounded by a few buildings, but I couldn't even get close to it. Face it, I couldn't have outrun a bear or a moose even if I'd been healthy. As it was, I was just very, very glad to avoid their attention.

The next day, I moved into this mansion.

Eventually, I came upon another town that was directly south of the first one. I got inside a house on the northwest side of town and found a few more clothes (it was still very cold outside), but then a bunch of zombies spotted me through the window.

I couldn't outrun them, but I had a head start, so I jumped out a south window, then ran around to the back and entered the house again from the west (where I'd initially smashed a window to get inside). I closed an interior door behind me and slipped out a north window, leaving the zombies happily smashing their way through the house.

Luckily, zombies are mindless. If you use your brain - and you're not surprised in the middle of nowhere, without many options - you can usually confuse them and lose them. Of course, in town, there are a lot of zombies, so you might just run from one bunch of mindless predators to another.

Again, I had only one direction I could go - this time, north. So I skirted the north side of town (too many zombies to loot any of the buildings there) and ended up in a house on the northeast corner, with a mansion off to my north and a prison to the east.

This time, nothing spotted me, and I was able to close the drapes on every window. Better yet, I found a well-equipped first aid kit in the bathroom, so I was able to treat my infected wound. [The infection is fatal if left untreated for too long.]  It was mid-afternoon, so I'd sobered up by then, too.

But I was still sick with the flu (although I'd found some cough medicine, at least), and I had nothing to kill the pain, not even aspirin. I hadn't found a knife or a backpack or a flashlight. I'd picked up a rock, which I wielded as my only weapon. Not that I was in any shape for a fight, anyway.

Still, I'd found a few snacks and a bottle of lemonade. And nothing was trying to eat me right this minute. There were even a few magazines inside - Cosmopolitan and Sports Afield, to be precise. But it was pouring rain and too dark to read, and when I tried out the bed, I couldn't sleep either.

So I explored a couple of nearby homes and found a backpack! Finally, I could carry stuff. I didn't find much else, but I made a crude knife out of a stick, a sharp stone, and a piece of string (not for fighting, but for crafting).

Finally, I went back and tried to sleep again, but I was too sick. I kept throwing up, which just made me hungry and thirsty again. When it got dark, I cleared out a nearby grocery store, finding a shopping cart with wobbly wheels to carry everything. Still no medicine, unfortunately.

I tried exploring a couple more houses, too, and I almost died stumbling into a dark basement filled with zombies (still no flashlight, either). Luckily, the zombies weren't smart enough to do anything but stumble around in the dark themselves, and they made enough noise to mask my own movements. So I escaped with deep scratches and torn clothes.

I headed back to the house I'd found (still zombie-free) and tried to sleep again. After a few tries, and numerous fits of vomiting, I finally got to sleep, and when I woke in the morning, I was no longer sick. I'd survived one really bad day in the zombie apocalypse.

___
Note: I'm not sure if I'll continue with this or not, but the rest of my game-related posts can be found here.

Ben Carson was right

OK, I poked fun at Ben Carson yesterday, and certainly liberals are having a lot of fun with his pyramids-were-grain-silos idea (here, here, and here, for example).

But this guy points out that Carson might actually be right, in a way:

Remember when Cain was peddling the 9/9/9 tax plan that turned out to come from Sim City?

Well Carson's statement about the pyramids being used to store grain is actually true in Civilization II where building the Pyramids wonder gives you a granary in every city.

Obviously, Ben Carson was just talking about my all-time favorite computer game, Civilization II. Hey, maybe he's not so crazy after all, huh?

Of course, do we really want a president who confuses a computer game with reality? How about one who confuses fantasy with reality?

The GOP frontrunner's theory that archaeologists are wrong and that the Egyptian pyramids were really built by the biblical figure Joseph to store grain wasn't created in a vacuum. In the fringier corners of the Internet, variations of the pyramids-as-grain-storage argument has spawned entire blogs and a 30-minute documentary.

Carson -- who is continuing to defend beliefs that were surfaced this week in video of a 1998 commencement address by the acclaimed neurosurgeon -- joins the ranks of pyramids truthers who believe that, warned by God of an oncoming famine, Joseph built grain storage units that exist today in the form of the ancient pyramids. ...

According to [Richard] Flower, the theory gained traction in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, written in the 6th century, where the bishop wrote about a “city in which Joseph built granaries from squared stones and rubble with marvellous workmanship."

“He made them larger at the base and very much smaller at the top so that wheat could be thrown in there through a tiny hole. These granaries are still visible even today,” Gregory wrote at the time,...

Clearly, this is why Ben Carson is leading in the polls. While the rest of the Republican Party wants to return us to the 12th Century, Carson wants to return to the 6th Century. Now that's conservative!

Also batshit crazy, of course. But that seems to be an advantage in today's GOP.

Cataclysm: a very bad day, with zombies

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a free zombie survival game, developed and maintained by volunteers. Yet it's become one of my all-time favorite games. Every year or so, I'll install the latest version and play it again. (See my previous posts here for the details.)

I've been playing it a lot in recent weeks, but I got to the point where my character didn't really need anything else to survive. By that point, he was highly skilled, with good weapons, tons of useful items, and several secure hideouts.

Note that the gameworld is procedurally generated and nearly infinite in size, and there are many, many dangerous locations, even for an advanced character. And the content is just incredibly varied. I had all of the equipment I needed, but not even close to everything the game has to offer. And after years of play, I've never even seen most of the special locations in the game.

But I had all I needed to survive, and from a role-playing perspective, I couldn't see putting myself at risk for no reason. I'm a role-player. Why would I do something like that, in a zombie apocalypse? Well, I always get this way. The early part of the game is always more fun for me.

You see, a zombie survival game is all about a desperate struggle for survival, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead does that perfectly. You start out with almost nothing and with few, if any, skills. With the default start, you're not immediately at risk, but you're forced to put yourself in harm's way in order to survive.

After all, you won't survive without food, clean water, warm clothing, shelter, weapons, tools, and other items. And the vast majority of those critical necessities are found in buildings, usually in towns, and that's where the zombies are. (There are other dangers elsewhere, but this is the main issue at the start of the game.)

Hunger and thirst will kill you just as surely as zombies will, if not as quickly. So you have to explore. You will not survive without taking risks. That's the brilliance of the game.

And nearly everything is useful. (I admit it, I love loot in role-playing games!) At the start of the game, in particular, you need everything. You may not be able to carry what you find - one critical necessity at the start of the game is to find items to increase your carrying capacity - but nearly everything can be used (often to craft other items).

But towns are very dangerous for a beginning character. You're a mouse in a roomful of cats. If you find a weapon, even an unskilled character can probably destroy a lone zombie (at least, if it's not one of the more dangerous types). But if you're injured, pain will slow you down. And a mouse that can't run away from cats may find himself in big trouble, especially since the house is full of cats, and if he hopes to survive at all, he can't stay away from the litter box.

Anyway, I reached the point where my survival seemed assured, unless I started exploring very dangerous places for no real reason. And that didn't sound appealing, because it didn't seem to make sense. Of course, I could build a cabin in the forest or along a river and spend my time hunting and fishing. I could even start farming.

All of those things, and more, are possible, but... just didn't appeal to me. I love the early part of the game, where survival is a desperate struggle against hunger, thirst, the elements, and pretty much everything that moves in the game. So I started over in a new world.

This time, I chose the Very Bad Day scenario, the most difficult beginning in the game. My character started out drunk "to the point of incapacitation," depressed, with an infected injury, and sick with the flu, wearing only a wet towel (the Shower Victim profession) in the middle of a city full of zombies.

Note that it's also freezing cold,... and the house is on fire.

Note that I'm no longer drunk or sick here.

I started in the living room of a house, and the fire was small. But I'd had previous experience with fires in Cataclysm! The nearest door - to the kitchen - was only two steps away. I made it through the door, but before I could even close the door behind me, the ceiling of the living room caved in. Yeah, you don't want to mess around in a house that's on fire!

At first glance, there was nothing in the kitchen, but I didn't even bother to check the cabinets. My wet towel didn't have any pockets, anyway. The door to the bedroom was nearby, so I went that way, and on my way to the north window, I found a robe.

Funny, but I don't ever remember seeing a robe in this game before that, but even after playing Cataclysm for years, I'm still finding new items. In this case, a robe was far better than a wet towel, both for warmth and because it had pockets. So I quickly slipped it on, although fire was already eating through the east wall of the room. No time for anything else, so I opened the north window and jumped out.

Most homes in this game have (open) curtains on the windows, but the curtains in this house had been closed. Thus, although I started in a town full of zombies, they couldn't see me until I left the house. They could hear the roof of the house collapsing, though, and noise will also attract them. So will scent, though I'd just taken a shower. Heh, heh. (Actually, my character had the Weak Scent trait, so I was harder to track that way.)

I needed to get to the edge of town, but being drunk, depressed, injured, cold, and sick all lowered my movement speed. Until I recovered, anything would be able to catch me. And that low movement speed - even more than my complete lack of a weapon - meant that I'd have no hope of fighting anything, either. I wasn't just a mouse in a roomful of cats, I was a slow, weak, sick mouse in a roomful of cats.

But luck was with me - remarkable luck, in fact. There weren't any zombies to the north, and only a couple of zombies even saw me before I made it to the nearest house in that direction. As slow as I was, I could smash a window and dive into the house before they got there, then close an interior door on the pursuit. (Zombies can smash through a window fairly quickly, but it takes longer to beat down a door.)

And there were useful things in that house - boots and clothing that actually fit me, for one thing. I moved through the house, looting what I could, then slipped away to a neighboring house, where I repeated my actions. Each time, when I spotted a zombie - one time, inside the very house I was looting - I was able to close a door on them and gain enough time to escape.

My luck was just unbelievably good. I made it to the north side of town without any zombies following me and with a remarkably good start on equipment - all of the clothing I needed to keep from freezing to death, plus a backpack full of food and drink. And a needle and thread, and a steak knife, and several magazines with sewing and cooking tips. (Let me tell you, sewing is a critical skill in the zombie apocalypse, and cooking is quite important, too.)

I was in a house with no zombies, on the edge of town, and I could finally relax. My infection had even healed up. Remarkable luck. Only,... I wasn't tired, so I couldn't sleep. Otherwise, I would have slept until I was sober again. And the weather had changed to thunderstorms, so it was too dark to read my magazines.

But there weren't any zombies around, that I could see, so I decided to try for the house to my east (also on the edge of town). Bad mistake! Halfway there, a moose killed me.

Moose aren't normally hostile unless you get too close to them. But this one had apparently been fighting zombies. They're big, they're strong, and they're fast. Even if I'd been healthy, I wouldn't have been able to run away from it. As it was, there was just no chance. And no chance to kill it, either, even if I'd had a better weapon. (I'd picked up a stick.) I was just dead. Game over.

Oh, well. Twice more, I tried that Very Bad Day start, with results more like what I expected. Both times, I was killed before I'd even made it to the next building. I was just too slow to get away from anything that saw me.

True, I didn't die immediately, in either start. There were wrecked cars nearby, and zombies aren't smart enough to go around obstacles, so I avoided them for awhile. But I was surrounded by zombies, and I couldn't get them all smashing into a vehicle. Not for long, at least. Not long enough to get to, and into, a house.

When I tried a fourth start, it seemed at first to be just as hopeless as the previous two. I did make it to a neighboring building, but there was just nothing there. In fact, even after the second house, I was still wearing my wet towel (and it was snowing). There was a business very close to my north, but the windows were barred, so I couldn't go that way.

I'd started right in the middle of the city, too. On the map, I could see the outskirts of town to the east and the west, but they were equidistant, with a lot of buildings in between. There were zombies on all sides of me, and no other building was even close. It really looked hopeless.

A mansion, with my stash of loot. (Note that these three screenshots are from later in the game, since I keep forgetting to take screenshots as I play.)

I wasn't willing to give up without a fight, though, so I tried to lure zombies into the house with me, then escape from a different room (closing the door behind me). That worked for a couple of the zombies, but not all of them. I was just too slow.

But I did make it to some vehicles in the street and, again, I tried to lose them that way. There were two vans (neither one drivable), but when I moved into the back of the first one, I discovered that it was a mobile meth lab - with some low-grade meth already prepared! Ah, aren't drugs great? :)

Yes, meth has dangers even when you're healthy, let alone when you're already drunk, sick, and infected. But zombies were going to eat my brain, so what did I have to lose? So I ate some and doubled my speed. (Admittedly, that was from an unusually low level, but I ended up half again as fast as I would have been fully healthy.)

Now I could run away from everything - at least, for a time. Certainly, I could make it to the next house, and then the one after that and the one after that. I didn't find much - I was still having quite poor luck in that respect - but I was alive. And I made it to the edge of town, then lost the zombies following me as I ran into the open field to the west.

I was still freezing. And as I started to come down from that meth high, I became completely exhausted. I went south to a house on the outskirts, hoping to be able to rest there. There was a zombie - a 'boomer' - inside, and I still had no weapon (or any ability to use one). But the meth hadn't completely worn off, so I was fast enough to stay away from it. I lured it outside, away from the town, and threw rocks at it until - finally - it died.

I was still drunk, still sick, and still injured (though I'd disinfected my wound), and with meth withdrawal on top of that, I thought I'd pass out before getting inside the house. Despite my exhaustion, I could only sleep for a short while before hunger woke me. I ate everything I had, tried to sleep again, woke hungry again, and explored the house for anything I could eat.

I was still exhausted when I woke the next time - again, because I was starving - but it was night. So I went across the street and looted a couple of houses for food (luckily, without encountering any monsters). I ate what I found, slept again, and the next time I woke, I was only 'very tired,' not exhausted. Of course, I was hungry again. (Mostly, that was because of meth withdrawal, I suspect. But my character also has the Heavy Eater trait, so he needs more food than most characters.)

It was still dark, and I was able to loot a grocery store this time. It was a very small grocery store - disappointingly small, in fact. But in addition to food, there was a shopping cart there, only slightly dented. So I could haul everything I looted.

I went back to bed after that - it was lucky nothing found me, especially since I'd smashed the window beside the bed in order to get inside - and slept until morning. I was sober. I was straight. I was healthy. Even my flu had gone away (and usually, flu hangs on like... well, the flu).

In effect, I was in the same situation as a normal starting character. OK, I did have a shopping cart. And a few other items, too. It wasn't that bad. But the only way I kept from freezing was by wrapping the blanket around me as I slept. And I couldn't use most of the stuff I'd looted from the grocery store, not yet. (Raw macaroni doesn't make a very good meal.)

I was still unskilled and poorly equipped. Yet, the difference was just incredible! I could move again. I could run away, if I had to. And I was on the edge of town - a very large town - so I had lots of options. Well, assuming that a moose didn't attack me, or a cougar, or wolves. But although the countryside isn't safe, it's usually a lot safer than cities.

Yesterday had been a very bad day, with zombies. Today? Well, today still had zombies, and it was still cold, and I wasn't at all prepared to take on the world,... but I was optimistic. I was sure I could survive the day, and that made it a heck of a lot better than the previous day. :)

I love this game!
___
PS. My other posts about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and other computer games, are here.

Robot horror

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Settling down in Kenshi

Michelle, Doc, and Soo ganging up on a dust bandit

I'm still playing Kenshi like crazy. (See my previous posts about the game here and here.) I've recruited nearly 30 followers, so far - all women - and I've started to build my own city.

I intended mostly just to post some screenshots here. (As usual, I got carried away.) But first, please note that Kenshi is still in development - still in alpha, in fact. It's unfinished. It's buggy as hell. It's still lots of fun, but this is very much a work in progress.

Nice doggie (not as friendly as he looks)

In my last post, I described a journey through the desert from one town to another. I've continued that, because I need to recruit more people for my faction. You can only recruit people in bars. Two people are available for hire in each establishment, and there are two bars in most towns.

Of course, I'm only recruiting women (don't ask), and you can change everything else about your recruits, but not their gender. So, on average, I find slightly less than two potential recruits per town.

Woo, hoo! Four new recruits from a single town!

NPCs don't respawn - not yet, anyway. And sometimes bandits kill these people, or some of the merchants in a town. But after visiting every town to gather followers, I can just import my saved game into a new game. That repopulates the world again. I keep my existing followers, while getting new people to recruit.

There are animals in the game now - in the experimental version, at least. Wolves (wild dog-things) are everywhere, and very, very tough. We encountered one beak thing, too - like a carnivorous giraffe, very large - but that's all, so far.

We fight a beak thing.

Unfortunately, animals don't drop any loot. I can't even figure out a way to kill them, after they're unconscious. If you stick around, they're likely to stand back up and start fighting again (admittedly, much easier to strike down again, since they remain critically injured).

The neat thing is that all of our enemies are enemies of each other, too. We were resting up in town, almost recovered from injuries, when we were attacked by hungry bandits. No problem, since I had my best fighters in the squad, and hungry bandits are easily the weakest faction.

A broad pass through the mountains. A city might do well here.

But as we were finishing them off, a band of dust bandits ran into town and attacked all of us - my people and the hungry bandits both. And right on their heels came a pack of wild dogs. Apparently, the dogs had seen the dust bandits and were chasing after them. But they smacked into the free-for-all and attacked anyone within reach - dust bandit, hungry bandit, and my people, alike.

Fun! (Luckily, the dogs came from the same direction as the dust bandits - as I say, they were probably following them - so those two groups were on the same side of the battle and mostly fought each other.)

Looking north to the future site of Darwin (that pass through the mountains is centered in this view)

Anyway, while traveling from town to town, I wasn't just recruiting, but exploring. I was looking for a good location for founding my own town. First, you need resources - stone, iron, water, and/or fertile... um, sand (with irrigation, you can grow crops at low elevations).

Then you need defensible terrain. Yes, you can build anywhere and put walls all around your city. But that takes time. At first, it's useful to have impassible terrain in some directions - natural walls, basically.

Very rough ground to the east.

Finally, I was looking for a place that made sense. Ideally, I wanted a location on a natural trade route (whether or not that trade route existed in the game, I wanted a place which would make the most sense in the real world).

And I found a great location towards the east of the map, far from any existing towns. Stone and iron were both abundant on the ridge, and there was a deep, narrow, dead-end canyon just to the north with water and fertile soil.

Looking NW, another view of the pass. That steep, dead-end canyon - for water and crops - is just to the right.

There's a range of mountains dividing the desert to the north from the rougher, higher land to the south, and this location was very near one of the few passes connecting the two. A narrow ridge next to a narrow valley made two clear trading paths to the town of Bark, far to the south. This was where trading caravans would travel, if the world were real.

Another narrow ridge led northeast into very rough land (I haven't explored that yet), so we had natural defenses from the northeast to the southeast. The north, as I say, led into a dead-end canyon. The west was relatively open, but I could start my town on a narrow ridge and expand into the open area later, if I wished.

Looking southeast - easy, but defensible, passage to Bark.

Basically, there were only three ways into my starting location, all quite narrow. Now, when I first came through the area, there were bandits everywhere. But we cleared them out, before traveling on to Bark. Since we've returned and started to build the town of Darwin, we haven't seen any bandits at all - or only from a distance, at least.

We haven't had any problem with wild dogs, either, but we've seen dogs attacking bandit gangs - again, just from a distance. In most directions, it's difficult to get to us. And for bandits and dog packs alike, too much backtracking is likely to find them other enemies before they get here.

Another view SE towards Bark.

As I say, Darwin is a long, long way from other towns. That means I can't rely on trading to get supplies. (If you build a town near another town, you can grow wheat and make rum, for example, and trade that for the money needed to buy building supplies from the existing town.)

Given our location, I needed to make my own building supplies, which meant bringing enough with me to build a stone quarry, a stone processor, and an electrical generator to power them. With that, I can make the building supplies needed to build everything else. It takes awhile, but your people become more effective at everything the more they do it.

Wide open to the southwest, but abundant reserves of iron, too.

Right now, my A-team of fighters is looping around the world again, recruiting more NPCs (a town requires a lot of laborers). The rest of my people are guarding Darwin, building it, and researching new technologies. (The game has a huge technology tree, with multiple levels. I still don't know how far it goes.)

I imported my existing characters, and our existing research, into a new game, just before I started building the town. Importing buildings is supposed to be very buggy, so it's possible that we'll lose what we've already built when I do that again.

But no problem. I'll need to keep importing the game in order to get the number of people I need. Before I do that again, I'll make sure my engineers have plenty of building supplies in their backpacks, enough to start the process of building all over again, if necessary.

The initial settlement of Darwin - stone mine, stone processor, electric generator, and storage boxes - looking NW towards the pass.

Note that dismantling structures is very quick, but you don't get any supplies at all from it. On the other hand, your people keep their skills. Your engineers become faster at building through experience. Your researchers become faster at researching through experience. And your laborers become faster at producing useful supplies through experience.

If I do have to rebuild my initial structures in Darwin, it will go much quicker the second time. And as I research new technologies, I often have to do that, anyway. (Most structures can be upgraded, but others have to be torn down and rebuilt.)

Kenshi is addicting, it really is. It's been years in development, and I'm sure it will be years before it's finished - if it ever is. It's really buggy. The game crashes frequently, there are a lot of things that don't work right, and you have to save the game regularly, to avoid complete frustration. (There's an auto-save and also a quick-save key, as well as regular saved games.)

But it's been worth every bit of that, so far. I expect to build up my city, then set the game aside for awhile. When I come back to it, months later, there will be new features to check out. (In particular, they're supposed to be developing a brand-new map. That sounds intriguing!)

___
Note: My other posts about Kenshi, and many other games, can be found here.

Kenshi - a journey through the desert

Willam Pathfinder of Phoenix Rising, last man standing, facing a horde of dust bandits charging towards him

I mentioned Kenshi, the squad-based sandbox RPG, on Wednesday. (Check out the video there if you want to know more about it.)

At the time, I said I hadn't been posting about computer games lately, and I really didn't intend to change that. However, I'm having so much fun with this game, I thought I'd describe one recent journey from one town to another.

My character is Willam - not 'William' - Pathfinder, leader of the Phoenix Rising faction (which was just him when I started the game). Since then, he's hired nine female bodyguards, so there were ten of us traversing the desert wasteland from Brink to Catun.

It wasn't far, but it's easy to get lost when there are mountains or mesas blocking off a direct route. There are canyons throughout the mesas, but no roads. So it's hard to tell which canyons dead-end in impassible terrain and which don't.

Mau, our newest medic

Anyway, we were traveling in the desert along the edge of the mesa when sand ninjas ambushed us. There were only three of them, but they're very tough. Unfortunately, we couldn't see them coming, because they were hidden by the canyon walls until they were almost upon us.

Most of our party might have been able to outrun them, but we had some new hires who weren't very fast. In particular, 'Stinks' - our engineer - was lagging behind and clearly wouldn't be able to get away. So we turned around to defend her.

It was ten of us against three of them, but they went through us like a hot knife through butter. I kept my two doctors out of the fight, so they could patch up the fallen, but this isn't like most games, where characters can drink a magic potion or otherwise be instantly restored to health.

No, medics bind your wounds, to keep you from bleeding to death. But a badly injured character usually stays unconscious for a long time. And even after he - or she - can stand up again, it's a very slow process to recover completely (and that's assuming that they haven't suffered an amputation).

But once the rest of us were lying on the ground, unconscious or dying, the sand ninjas quickly dispatched my medics, too. Then, all of a sudden, they were struck by a roving band of dust bandits.

No, they weren't friends of ours. I hadn't realized that different factions of bandits would fight each other, if they had the chance, not just us. That was really neat!

'Stinks,' our young, and rather slow, engineer

Pretty soon, sand ninja bodies joined ours on the sand, and the dust bandits were leaving. My two medics were still bleeding badly, but the leader of my faction was already conscious, just 'playing dead' until his enemies left.

Unfortunately, I needed to quit playing then, for awhile, but I made a big mistake in saving the game at that exact point. Because, when I loaded the saved game later, my character was no longer feigning death. The dust bandits, who'd already disappeared behind a bluff, immediately knew that he was awake and charged back to kill us all.

So I reloaded one of the automatic saves - the most recent one, which put me into the battle again, with only our two medics still on their feet. The sand ninjas were already chopping down one of them, but this time, I knew what to expect. I looked around and saw the dust bandits in the distance, heading our way.

So I sent 'Doc,' our remaining medic, running in that direction. She was slightly injured, but still pretty fast. And with the sand ninjas running after her, I figured that would get the attention of the dust bandits. Well, it worked! The dust bandits also ran towards her, and the two groups of bandits started fighting each other.

'Doc'

The result, however, was completely different from the first time that happened. Instead of the large group of dust bandits hitting the three sand ninjas en masse, most of them started chasing my medic, with only a few taking on the sand ninjas. She kept leading them around in a circle, drawing them back through the sand ninjas again and again, and each time, one or two would be tempted away by their other enemies.

But this time, when fighting only one or two dust bandits at a time, the sand ninjas had no problem. This time, the battle ended not with the sand ninjas bleeding into the sand, but with the whole party of dust bandits lying, and dying, there - at which point the sand ninjas turned their attention to my poor medic again.

They'd all been injured a bit, so they weren't as fast as they had been. 'Doc' had been injured, too, but she could still stay ahead of them, if not by much. Meanwhile, Neko had recovered enough to stand up, and she really is fast (short, but very fast, even after being injured).

So I let them lead the bandits away. Soon, I realized that I didn't need both of them as decoys. At that point, I let the sand ninjas chase Neko, while 'Doc' came back to help bandage everyone else (including Mau, her fellow medic, who was in very bad shape by then).

That was only the start of our adventures, though. Neko was faster than the bandits, but not that much faster. So she was already a long way away when she encountered a lone adventurer. Poor guy, I never got his name. He let Neko hire him for protection for six hours - which turned out to be about five and a half hours longer than he had to live.

Neko

Yeah, I suppose it was a surprise when three sand ninjas immediately came barreling over the dunes, huh? But he stood his ground and fought bravely. Neko couldn't help much, but she kept the attention of one of the bandits, while the other two fought her protector. Unfortunately, it was over very quickly, and she had three sand ninjas chasing her again.

They'd been injured a bit more, though, so she was able to gain some ground on them. Eventually, after a long run, they gave up. They turned around and started patrolling the desert again, back towards where we'd first encountered them.

That was, of course, in the direction of the rest of our party. Most of them had recovered enough to stand (and we'd taken the weapons of the dust bandits, just in case they recovered, too), so we picked up the others and started walking away.

We started towards the adventurer, to see if he was still alive, but since that was directly towards the sand ninjas, we reluctantly turned away before getting to him. Rest in peace, friend. Instead, we headed into a canyon, hoping that it would lead us to Catun after all.

Luckily, we stumbled upon a trade caravan going in that direction - a trader with a couple of pack animals and a large party of guards - so we joined them. (I tried, but couldn't trade with them.) Yes, we were moving pretty slowly, but so were they. They were heading in the direction of Catun, and they seemed to know where they were going. Plus, those guards looked like they could handle almost anything. Things were definitely looking up.

Peace

Switching back to Neko, I had her bandage herself. Then, since she was such a long way from us, on the other side of the mesa, I decided she'd just run to Catun and meet us there. Almost immediately, she ran into five huge wolves (feral dogs, actually, I think).

It was hopeless to try to fight them, but Neko was... well, not faster than they were, but fast enough. As long as she kept running, they couldn't seem to attack her. She certainly couldn't gain on them. They were too fast for that. In fact, graphically, it looked like they were leading and she was chasing them. (The game is still in alpha, remember. It's a long way from being finished.)

When I switched back to Willam and the rest of the party, I saw that the trader had gotten stuck on top of a small mesa. I don't know how, because there was no way up. But everyone else - my people and his - were stuck trying to go up the cliff after him. (Again, this game is still in alpha.)

Furthermore, there was a small party of slavers heading our way! Now, I don't suppose I want to make friends with slave traders. On the other hand, I was pleased to see that they weren't hostile. (You usually start the game with neutral reactions from the other factions - all except actual bandits, at least.) So now we had a bunch of armed men and women, all heading in the same direction.

As I say, I couldn't tell how to get through the mesa, but the game always can. And with two separate squads, I could see two separate parts of the world. So I switched to Neko and ordered her to run to my main party. Sure enough, she headed right into the rough ground of the mesa, taking a shortcut right towards us.

Soo

When I switched back to the main party, though, the trader caravan had disappeared. I suppose the game had finally figured out that they were stuck and just moved them where they were supposed to be. Unfortunately, my people were left behind. We still had four or five slave traders to party with, but there were now five huge wolves heading our way.

And Adi was still unconscious. Soo was still carrying her when Neko and the wolves arrived, and before I could order Soo to put her down, a wolf had brought them both down. I'd thought the sand ninjas were tough, but the wolves were worse.

Of course, my party was all bandaged and limping already, so we didn't even slow the wolves down. But even the slave traders didn't last long, though they dropped one wolf and badly injured another. Again, I kept my medics busy bandaging until they were the only two left, at which point the wolves nearly ripped them apart.

Still, we all survived. I could see another battle in the distance, I don't know between whom. (I couldn't see the people fighting, but only the green damage text from weapons striking home.) So as soon as the wolves finished with us, they ran towards the fighting there, and we never saw them again.

Adi

Eventually, Willam Pathfinder recovered enough to stand up. Both of our medics were dying, bleeding out into the sand, but he got them patched up in time. Eventually, we had everyone bandaged and five of our ten people conscious and mobile (if not moving very fast).

It couldn't have happened quickly enough for me, either, because that wolf lying beside us was just unconscious, not dead. It didn't even look very badly damaged - not compared to all of us, at least. So we needed to get out of there tout suite. (I couldn't figure out how to kill the wolf or skin it or anything. I could loot the body, but it wasn't carrying anything.)

The slavers had been helpful, so we bandaged them, too - after looting their bodies of medical supplies. Then our five walking wounded picked up our five comrades still unconscious and staggered away.

Through sheer good luck, we made it to Catun without further adventures. All of us needed rest and recuperation, but there weren't even enough beds we could rent for all of us. Oh, well, we put the unconscious to bed, then drew straws for the remaining one. We'd need to stay long enough for everyone to heal, anyway.

Catun, at the west edge of the desert

We'd come to Catun to buy building material, since there wasn't any in Brink. We'd purchased a cheap house in Brink, and we needed to make some improvements. I'd love to start my own town, somewhere in the wastes, but it's going to take a lot of searching to find a good location.

Meanwhile, we can leave a few people behind to do research on what we'll need. It's possible we might even be able to make some supplies - either for sale or for our own use. Catun had the supplies we needed, and there's another female medic available to recruit here, too, if we want.

As soon as we recover from our wounds, it's back again through the desert. I hope the journey is less eventful this time! :)

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