[Coldsaturn]

My most recent bad decision. I need to be SO careful with this because it could consume tons of hours without me even realizing it, but hey it's an incredibly huge game and it's totally free to play (you only pay for cosmetics and extra stuff that you don't actually need to "win") and it is completely unhinged and chaotic, and I couldn't recommend it more if I tried.
It's Elden Ring meets Skyrim meets GTA meets Genshin Impact meets The Sims? 
I don't even know how to explain what it's about because it has literally everything in it. Wuxia sandbox on crack? IDK you can try to cure a goose but if you fail it becomes a boss and kicks your ass. Looks amazing, too.

[ChicletPrime]

oh my god, YOU TOO?!

Where Winds Meet has been an adventure and then some. I've only played about 20 hours because I find it very overwhelming (in both good and bad ways) but my online buddy who I kibitz with and play games with sometimes has fallen hard into the wuxia rabbit hole and has managed to put in 150 hours since it launched. he is wayyyy into the stratosphere with this and here i am, sitting back and watching him sprint across the landscape with my opera glasses.

behold! I am SUPER PRETTY. i tried to make Hua Cheng but got a little off track.

• took me three tries, but eventually figured out Pitch Pot and got a win
  
• took me three tries, but did not figure out how the war chess game worked but managed to win once anyhow
  
• bought 2 cosmetic sets out of the shop for $1.50/ea because gatcha has me conditioned
  
• i am terrible at the combat, i don't play Dark Souls for a reason. i did set it on Super Easy Story Mode so I have hopes that eventually it will just click. I am definitely better at it than when i started.
  
• I tried to cure my friend of beast venom coursing through his brain and only made it worse, so now i am afraid to consult my inner doctor at all :P 
  
• this game feels like you need to commit your life to it though, which i am unsure about? i could use a good solid grind! but i still have things that take time for LaDS (Sylus' myth and Death&Rebirth) and my attention is already split to pieces. i only get a couple of hours on a weeknight for frivolity! so i am weirdly hesitant to "really start" even though this is So Fun To Play, because of the sheer time and attention it will need to actually get anywhere.
  
• So Many Menus!
  
• the one image in the middle is me bowing to my "Master" and me, the cheap Disciple along with another random person who also wanted to be a Disciple so now I am in a master-disciple relationship? somehow? i don't know what it meeeeans.
  

[Coldsaturn]

Hahahahahah 



I should have known someone would have dragged you into it the second it was available on this side of the world!
- I am getting used to the combat but I'm also using a terrible controller (the only one currently available to me, I should really take advantage of black friday). I have managed to beat a few dungeon/fort bosses but I can also still die because of the random bandit camp the second they take out fire arrows. I'm terrible at dodging, mostly. 
- Medicine is going too well with me actually, I'm not part of that sect but I'm already getting summons from other players who want to be cured but I'm trying to enjoy at least the first act of the story in full solo immersion. Online mod is way too chaotic for me, and I fear my computer would melt trying to make sense of hundreds of players in the same frame doing everything possible. One hop on the mega ship was enough.
- Hard agree on this game trying to suck the life out of you because of the sheer amount of things and time you can pour in. As of now I'm carefully managing it as an alternative to LADS once I know I'm done with all my tasks on that side, but I don't want it to take over. 
- Careful not to get scammed into joining the Nine Mortal Ways sect (unless that's what you want)! They're very successful at that.
- Not entirely decided on my boy's face yet, but we'll see. They should also add the option to play more than one character with one of the next patches, so that should also fix my eternal indecisiveness. 
For now, here he is dungeon crawling <3 



And this little girl trying to seduce a poor kid lmao

[ChicletPrime]

as always, joo look mahvelous!

I cannot deal with controllers at all - I used to use them all the time for Playstation but when I got my first gaming computer it ended up in a closet under five feet of dust and now a controller feels like an alien creature in my hand. one day i will convince myself to play a game that requires it and re-learn the skill. it helps (doesn't help?) that i have a 12 button gaming mouse so i am just sincerely used to being a bad ass with just my right hand ( * cough * )

i love the bow! it took me forever to realize that you could set the arrows on fire by holding it down for a charge. now i stare down the incoming bad guys until i can see the white of their eyes and then i nail them like the second coming of jesus christ, right in the forehead.

multiplayer (not co-op, different thing) is a hoot. my rig has a problem with rendering 100 people in full regalia right away so my first three minutes with a pile of other people is watching their spears manifest and run around. then their heads pop in and i am in a ghost story. then boots, then pants. eventually at some point the center body shows up and all is right with the world.

i thought i figured out where the screenshots you can take in game get stored, but apparently not, so now i have some nice pictures somewhere on my hard drive, just chillaxing. i will try and find them this weekend!

but... but i want to join the Nine Mortal Ways! they have a rope-dart thing i want to try out, although i think i saw that you can steal the skill from somewhere without having to join the sect. i want to try the rope-dart thing So Bad.

i would love any sort of "here is how you balance the four humors" when it comes to the healing mini game. i did not really understand it (naturally, since it was the first time i'd ever actually tried to do it) and all the youtube videoe are exhaustively long. do you know if there's any sort of 12 point cheat sheet out there for it?

[Coldsaturn]

Here's a short guide giving you all the info that you need. The healing game is basically a card game played on 10 rounds where you try to get the illness' HP to 0 and the illness tries to get yours to 0. Whoever gets there first wins. You get 3 "stamina points" per round, and the cards available to you each time will cost anything from 1 point to all 3. Once you exhaust the 3 points you're forced to close the round and get to the next one. The cards vary from dealing pure damage on the illness to reducing its defense or raising yours (the illness will try to "attack" you too).

The debate sparring game was way more difficult for me to understand, especially because it's so insanely fast. And apparently if you get into one before having properly run through the quest that gives you the tutorial for it, you'll never have enough points to win to begin with. Curing NPCs/animals/players is more relaxing, somehow lol

I totally get you, I've always played with keyboard and gaming mouse as well (that's how I played the secret world, too), but my mouse died on me and I just ended up picking up the controller for this. For now it's working as there aren't that many skills I have to manage, but soon as I start hitting the second mystic wheel I feel like I'll need to switch to keyboard+mouse again.

They really need to fix the menus and tutorials because so many things are either completely hidden or lost inside sub-menus that I don't even think they remember exist. Case in point I only learned today (like, 30+ hours into the game) that with those purple poisonous flowers you need to shoot fire arrows at the butterflies hovering above them so you can get the flower.

For me (windows) the screenshots are in the Roaming folder, subfolder named "yysls" 
If you play through steam then you have them in the 
SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Where Winds Meet\LocalData\ScreenShot\ folder
But you can always change it in settings (it should be setting>other>bottom of the page or something)

Same with the rope dart but the rules of that sect give me a headache, so I just marked on the map where I need to go to steal the skill. The rope dart I already have from looting the body of an NPC I killed once.

[ChicletPrime]

today, the plan is to find the Healer point and actually unlock the "job" so I can practice it properly. wish me luck!

you don't want to know how long it took me to realize i could charge the arrow to set it ablaze.

[Coldsaturn]

Evercare Clinic is on the left side of the qinghe map, you should be able todo it there! Though I'm pretty sure I ended up there after I had already started healing NPCs. Good luck! And even with the little knowledge I have of this game, if I can help I'm here!

Unsurprisingly, I found there's a guide on how to gather all the oddities in one of the 4829 menu pages, but fuck if I can find it again. If I somehow end up there I'll send it your way.

[ChicletPrime]

today i played about four, maybe five hours with amigo who happily tagged around with me while i tried to do story stuff, which we eventually abandoned to do "duo" things.

-- we entered into a "partnership". we are now partners. he wrote me a love poem that was super mangled and we giggled ourselves sick over it. it went something like "roses are read violets are... no wait, roses are supposed to be red, let me start over i think i mes..." and then it just ended because he ran out of characters.

-- we both bought the "bridal carry" emote out of the partnership store and that was outstanding. i very much adore that there are duo actions in the game that you can enter into.

-- i had to explain to him what "dual cultivation" actually means in wuxia stories. we agreed solemnly never to speak of it again.

-- we fought each other as sumo tigers.

-- we did some sort of squad raid or something that is for a team/bunch of people to invade five sequential forts but we did it just me and him and its a good thing he's way higher level than me because phwoar otherwise

-- i switched to controller and it might be better? i am so awkward with it. and there were few times when the game would ask for a button input but would refuse to accept it so i had to go back to keyboard for a hot second. no bueno, that.

-- discovered that braziers let you loot 'fire oil'? i am not sure if it was just that area or if that stuff is scattered everywhere. something to check!

-- i did, in fact, in find the healer guy! then promptly forgot everything about it and didn't heal a single thing after that because we ended up in the Blessed Land trying to dance in sync to the prompts. then there was a trivia game and something about a goose. :D

[Coldsaturn]

- Congratz on your marriage! I've read there's a sect where you can marry up to 5 people but if you leave the sect you need to divorce 4. Don't quote me on that, sects still confuse me and I haven't decided who will be blessed with my presence.
- There's also a minigame where you play an instrument and need to hit the 6 buttons at specific times but the game doesn't register it as error if you hit all 6 buttons at once, so people smash all the buttons on time and get a perfect score. I tried it and it works. Game of the year.
- I like the controller better when I move around, I can control the camera way better somehow. In combat it's also still fine. Navigating menus and using the camera mode require mouse+keyboard though, there's no other way.
- You can in fact gather fire oil from any inflammable source currently on fire!
- My steam page now counts 46 hours, but you need to take out at least 8 because I leave the game on in the background sometimes.

I'm advancing the main story but stopped before possibly unlocking kaifeng (I'm not sure) because I'm scared I'll lock some side missions, so I'm finishing whatever I see around me first. I know this game doesn't work that way but the completionist in me demands it. Also, needless to say, unlock the flying mechanic as soon as you can if you haven't done it already, it makes your life so much easier.

- boss area was cool as fuck


- got emotionally attacked by this dungeon plot, then sweet zombie/mummy boy offered me a new face and I was feeling sad because I had to leave him there so I accepted. In case you still haven't played the first act of the main story, you'll get the chance of changing your appearance (I believe without paying for it as it's usually the case).



- Until I finish my side missions, my hometown will be perpetually stuck in festival mode (unless they keep it as it is). It's very pretty.

[ChicletPrime]

that looks so pretty!

i haven't gotten very far at all with "main story" - i am currently in a level 30 (?) dungeon with bad guy zombies that are kind of kicking my ass. i think its a combination of me being terrible at twitch combat and also they are tough. because i am terrible at fast combat (i'm surprised i do as well as i do in LaDS and i do terrible there too).

i am going to eat my breakfast (at 1:30pm don't judge) and then play a couple of hours. today i also will be focusing in trying to do whatever i'm missing in qinghe, which is about half of it according to the one page i found that lists everything that is still undone.