4-7: Playing Limbs

The next few days see various parts of the base coming to fruition. Food is still a struggle but the gang is managing to slowly, gradually expand the farms while Ells cooks enough to not have to rely completely on the Smugglers Inn. Karst builds some workstations for tailoring and leatherworking, with plans to expand into chain and plate metal armour smithing once those technologies are researched.

The armour workshop will be Keys' domain. She's been feeling inspired ever since meeting Armour King, walking around in the chainmail hood and plated boots she bought off him and feeling the difference quality armour makes. Outlaw Hana and Cat have their research, Karst has their engineering, Green Finger has his farming—Keys hasn't had her own niche until now but this could finally be something in which she could really excel. Having met the undisputed master of the trade ignites her competitive spirit. She knows she won't get the thousands of years Armour King has had to hone his craft but that's beside the point. The point is that his level of mastery gives her something to strive for.

In terms of game mechanics, the smithing skills are among those where a higher skill level affects work quality as well as speed. The higher your skill, the higher grade of armour you'll craft, with a small chance of crafting one grade higher. While a character will never be able to reliably craft Masterwork armour even with Armour Smithing maxed out, reliable Specialist-grade with a chance at Masterwork is still an incredible accomplishment.

Keys is the perfect candidate for such a job; as a scorchlander human, she gets an experience bonus to weapon and armour smithing. While I'm not generally concerned with minmaxing, smithing takes a lot of grinding and a lot of resources to level up, so I do tend to stick with scorchlander smiths.

Curiously, crossbow smithing is the odd one out. No “race” gets a bonus or penalty to crossbow smithing so when we get around to that, the field of candidates is wide open.

As things come together, stretches of construction management are punctuated by bandit and beak thing attacks. The latter tends to result in construction delays by knocking Karst unconscious but the gang can't complain—the beak thing meat helps tide them over.

I'll be real with you: The main reason I included that last screenshot is so you can see just how tiny Ankle is as a pup. Look at her! She doesn't even come up to people's knees! Ohh, she's such a little creature.

While all these roving squads of beak things and hungry bandits haven't been a problem so far, that's only because most of the gang has been here to fight them off. That's not always going to be the case. They're not exactly retiring and settling down—they do want to get back to adventuring, which'll mean leaving a skeleton crew (so to speak) at home. As such, the base is going to need some defenses.

Defenses means a few things, but first and foremost, it means it's time to build some walls. Karst shivers with antici-

-pation.

The interface for building walls is simultaneously really easy and flexible and a finicky pain in the ass. You place the starting point of your wall by clicking wherever, then drag in a straight line as long as you want, clicking to place a pivot point wherever you want to change directions. The game intelligently segments the wall, using long segments wherever possible and short ones when necessary. The system feels good to use and on relatively even ground, it takes very little effort to make a nice-looking and functional wall around your base.

The finicky part comes when you have to work with steep slopes. Building your base on a flat plane is a nice idea and all, but across my playthroughs, I've never managed it. If there's a flat part of the world with water, stone, iron, copper, and fertile soil, it's eluded me. The problem this introduces with walls is not that you can't build walls on steep-ish slopes—the game is quite generous in that regard—but that doing so means the segments of your wall will be at extreme angles relative to each other, leaving wide gaps.

Sometimes these gaps are just cosmetic and sometimes they mean people can walk right through; it's not always clear which you have on your hands until the walls are built. You can avoid this issue with careful, exacting construction, but that's why I called the process “a finicky pain in the ass” and nothing harsher. It's just not always as smooth and simple as it seems at first glance.

There's also a problem where if you get a bit too ambitious and build your walls too far out from the core of your base, the game can get confused and decide those walls you built actually belong to a different settlement. You'll still own them but you won't be allowed to demolish them and the game's confusion can cause all sorts of pathing issues. I highly recommend saving before building walls just in case that problem crops up.

Let's not leave Karst in the lurch any longer, though. They've waited long enough. It's time to build this wall.

When I hit Confirm, Karst scoops up a bunch of building material and takes off like a shot. As we're building Tier 2 walls (out of a total four tiers), each of the longer segments will take 2 building materials—Riddly, Beep, and Burn will be working hard the whole time to keep them supplied.

A couple days later, the wall is very nearly done. Karst and Jam are just about to start work on the final segment when a mob of hungry bandits spots the base, spots the gap in the wall, and makes a beeline for it.

Karst and Jam race the bandits, managing to get enough of the wall up just in time to keep them from running through the gap. At this point, the gang could shut the gate to keep the bandits out completely... but they'd just bash the gate down. Just because the walls are done doesn't mean the defenses are—in order to actually be able to keep hostiles out, the gang will need to build turrets to shoot attackers down before they can break the gate.

They'll get to it when they can. Right now, there's bandits to fight off.

At this point, the hungry bandits are pretty much throwing themselves into a meat grinder. I keep Pilaf out of it as her mighty horns can down three or four bandits in a single attack and I don't want the fight to end too quickly—I want the newer members to at least get some combat experience out of this. Even without her participation, though, it's a massacre. Flashing steel leaves bodies in a heap and streaks of red across the ground. When a few of the bandits are fool enough to approach Burn, limbs fly.

On the gang's side, the only ones knocked out are Karst, Green Finger, and little Ankle. For the first time, though, Karst manages to clamber upright again before the fight is over—progress! They're getting tougher.

Ankle takes a little longer to recover but when she does, she springs up, grabs a bandit's severed leg in her jaws, and starts bounding excitedly all around the base.

Severed limbs are a bonedog's favourite snack. They love 'em so much that when they get a hold of one, they get the zoomies and run around with it in an act the game refers to as “Playing ‘Limbs’”. It's gruesomely adorable.

Feeling pretty secure in their ability to take on all comers, the gang delays building those turrets for a bit, prioritizing a couple other things first. That night, the Black Dragon Ninjas decide to take advantage.

It's been a while but the gang has encountered these ninja once before. They beat up one of the ninja leaders, a woman named Dimak, and took her stuff. The rest of the ninja then beat them up in return, the gang patched up Dimak's wounds after the fight, and it seemed like everyone was willing to let bygones be bygones. Apparently that is not the case.

These guys are significantly stronger than the hungry bandits but not strong enough. The only thing they manage to accomplish is making relations between the gang and the Black Dragon Ninjas hostile again, the reputation score taking a hit as the gang defends themselves. Ah well. If they don't want to be friends, that's on them.