Holiday Grab Bag: Dune, Palworld, Quest 64

Every day, the leader of the Prophets of Melange guild hosts a control point capping party in the Dune: Awakening Deep Desert. I’ve not been on one; I guess you can capture a control point each day, and if you’re in a group when it’s done, everyone gets the credit. I have a mission that requires me to do this, just once, and it’s been sitting there, undone, for months, as by the time I get on to play, it’s been done.

Calrain wasn’t working Friday. He was able to join the party and got talking to Vak, PoM guild leader, about our worries about the upcoming server merges. That wouldn’t affect us directly; we’re on a private server (thanks, Scopique!) and the merges will only affect public servers. Our characters are radioactive; having been created on a private server with its own server rules, they cannot be transferred to a public server. Still, our server cluster is nearly dead, and we would like to be in a cluster with a little more life to it.

Vak couldn’t do anything about that, but he did invite us to jump to his own private server. The new Base Relocation tool makes this pretty simple; break down your vehicles, save the base into a special tool you can make, restore it somewhere else.

At Calrain’s suggestion, I built a cargo container and filled it with my disassembled sand bike, dune wheel, buggy, cargo scout and rocket assault. I then used my carrier to haul it to our Deep Desert base, returned, logged out of International Wombats and logged into Prophets of Melange. I used my thopter to look around for a new place for my base. My old location was too close to the PoM guild hall, unfortunately. I logged back into the Wombats server to store my base.

I hadn’t pocketed my thopter, though, so I logged in at the Griffin’s Reach trading post, a harrowing distance away from my base, impossible to traverse by foot. I wasn’t even wearing a stillsuit. I begged Calrain for a ride up; he suggested a buy passage from the local thopter pilot to the Pinnacle’s Reach trading post; from there I could grab a scrap bike and make my way back. I logged back to PoM, sold some stuff to get the necessary Solari and did just that; easy peasy. Calrain was trying to find out what had happened to my thopter, as it didn’t come with me. I rode up on my scrap bike and found it instantly, right in front of the PoM guild base.

Forced to choose a new location for my base, I moved closer to the Pinnacles station on the Eastern Shield Wall and found an acceptable spot. Flatter than my previous location. The base storage tool can compensate for this by making new foundations and pillars to get things working, but it isn’t pretty. I had a couple hours of work to make the base habitable again, ahead of me.

Meanwhile, Calrain had gotten himself into the exact same fix I had done. I swooped down to Griffin’s Reach to hand him enough Solari to get himself back to his base.

I went back to the Deep Desert and flew my carrier and its precious cargo back to Hagga; rebuilt my vehicles, and I was moved.

In the picture up top, my base is front and center. Way in the distance on the left, is Calrain’s base. Way in the distance on the right is the PoM guild hall. We’ve been invited to join PoM; we probably will. We’re on their Discord, because of course they have one.

If Pokemon has a certain Pokemon, Palworld is going to have their own version of that Pokemon. Enter Hartalis, the Arceus clone — Palworld’s “King of Salvation” vs Pokemon’s creator of Time and Space (as represented by his children Dalgia and Palkia). Hartalis came as part of the recent “Home Sweet Home” update.

Aside from the Hartalis raid, there’s a whole new raid mechanic; when you start a raid, you’re given the option to be transported to a special raid dimension where destruction can happen without killing your current base. This is a Good Thing as Hartalis has a “destroy everything” move which you must shelter against. The Ultra version does this twice.

I was woefully unprepared for this raid; I needed electricity, fire and dark Pals for this raid, and I didn’t have many of them at the required level 65. That needed a lot of work. Luckily they added expeditions that can return a lot of level up tomes; I was able to get sufficient resources to pull a team together and managed to win with them the first time, though I hadn’t really looked up the fight and just YOLO’d it. I didn’t know about the “kill everyone” move and died at the end. Still got the egg for a baby Hartalis, though. The next time I did it, I went to the special raid dimension where I could hide behind stuff.

Two eggs! I could breed them… if they weren’t both girls. Thankfully, Dr. Brawn had his surgery all set up and fixed that issue in a moment. Ms. and Ms. Hartalis became Mr. and Ms. Hartalis, and I spent a happy afternoon breeding them and their descendants to get almost perfect stats (97/100/100, so close) and decent running skills. New ground mount! Fertallis was sad.

The update also brought new building pieces and the ability to recolor a lot of the building pieces, so… I went a little crazy there, for awhile.

Quest 64 continues. I’ve killed two bosses holding the Earth and Wind crystals, and after passing through the endless Blue Cave, I am just about to take on the third. I’ve heard rumors about the boss I have to defeat for the Water crystal, and we’ll see how true these rumors are.

Analogue 3D still doesn’t support streaming, making movies, or screen shots — the picture above, I took with my phone and cleaned up in GIMP — so I think I will be forced to unhook the 3D from my 4K HDR display and pipe it through my HDMI to USB converter into OBS so that I can be ready to record the next boss fight; phone photos don’t really tell the Quest 64 story very well.

Lots of people rag on Quest 64 as the worst of the Nintendo 64 RPGs, pointing to Perfect Dark, Hybrid Heaven, Paper Mario, Aidyn Chronicles and others as being far superior.

Yeah, well, maybe, but this far into it, I’m feeling a little bit of affection for Brian and his strange quest, and I want to see it through.