Starcrash

No, not that one.

I get most of my writing done on weekends. And house cleaning. And there are all those errands that have to be run then. And, yes, you can fit a futon in a Smart Fortwo.

The third try on the "priest" scene is finally working. I think. I had to rewrite the previous scene completely, and I've ended up adding a following scene as well. Going to the Parc Louis-Michel now (at the foot of that big flight of stairs up to Sacre-Coeur.)

But after all that productive work I had to unwind.

Whether it is my revamped computer or the optimization Bethesda promises they were doing somewhere between adding special hats and trying one again to force paid mods, the loading screens are shorter...until they aren't. When it is actually working right, it almost feels like actually flying off a planet and going somewhere. Well, aside from getting killed by Va'ruun while waiting for the controls to load in on my ship so I can put up the shields. And un-skippable dialog sections right in the middle of things that freeze the ship controls. Oh, and did I mention the same button for "answer a hail" is the one for getting out of your pilot couch and walking away?

But it sort of runs and I am sort of getting invested. Started on the UC quest (it is generally true that the Main Quest in a Bethesda game is the garbage one and the fun is in the faction quests). But after about thirty minutes of play the memory leaks get so bad the game locks up completely.

This ain't a "turn down the graphics to improve performance," boys.

Started a few outposts, fiddling around trying to actually get them to something functional. Here's a fun one; to get enough POWER to your nascent colonies so they can do anything, you need He3. Most of the places you extract it from are frozen worlds that takes two or three levels in Outpost Engineering skill before you can start an outpost there.

The Outpost Engineering skills are third-tier, meaning you have to put 8 points or more in science skills. Which, because of the two-track skill system is already a chore (you unlock a skill, then you have to qualify it by doing something; to go from Pilot Rank 2 to 3 you demonstrate your ability to handle a large complicated ship by...shooting holes in thirty or more other ships).

And you get one skill point per level. And if you don't put points in combat skills, you won't survive that long. So, practically speaking, you are at level 40 and well past mid-game before you can even START making properly self-sufficient colonies.

So I closed that and went back to Satisfactory.

Much, much more relaxing.

(I actually hate the swamp...it is gray and often misty and it is all weird fungi. But that's where I started my big aluminium production line and chose to make the all-electronics-parts factory as well.)