Jogo replied to More challeneging? March 25, 2023 @ 5:07:21 am PDT

I have been upping my solo run's difficulty for some time now, perhaps you'll find inspiration here. :-)

*** POTENTIAL END GAME SPOILERS AHEAD ***

- I switched Jotun Bane (already believed to be inferior to other weapons of its tier) for flint axe (kept the carapace buckler though)

- I am out and about at night (more eerie, more enemies, higher chance of starred mobs)

- I eat food unfit for the biome (for a time, when I lived on sausages from infested mines, I was dying a lot more, now I regularly get by on cooked seeker meat as my only health food, just because it is so plentiful)

- I prefer to explore mistlands closer to the edge of the world (higher chance of starred mobs, more difficult to keep the boat intact amidst the deep north blizzard)

- I will do a temporary no-portal mini run (dock at a new mistlands area at night, start surveying the coastline, go as far as I dare for days and nights, just until I almost run out of food, get my 8-10 minutes of 'rested' as and where appropriate, get back to my boat and sail back to my portal of choice)

- I raise my blocking skill to about 60-70 and only use the staves as my weapon/shield + I only hit back with a single ice shot after a successful parry. If I am overrun, I switch to the fire staff (anything higher than regular seekers and soldiers will give you a massive hard time, regular seekers in groups of 3 or more will be similarly difficult to deal with). No dodge rolling.

- I protect the lone dverger (I try to aggro the seekers and kill them with staves without turning the dverger hostile. It is not possible to do this with soldiers, because their ground slams obliterate the dverger who always try to get close to them)

- I face a 1-/2-star soldier with a flint axe (and carapace buckler) just to test how many successful parries I can pull off in a row, I'm taking them on face to face without exploiting their weak spot (with a 2-star, my hands are sometimes shaking and sweating so much that I indeed miss a parry or two and I died to 2-stars more than once)

As I am trying to show here, most of the difficulty can really be adjusted by the player not using the best options that are available to them, given the biome they are in. If you combine the less-than-ideal options to your liking, you can significantly spice up your ability to traverse mistlands.

Other than these self-imposed hurdles, the obvious choices for a seasoned viking are /nomap and /noportal -- these two command line parameters, when used together, finally turn the game into the brutal survival adventure that it claims to be. In fact, after 650 hours in, I am still not convinced I am skilled enough to even attempt that kind of a run.

Enjoy the game. :-)
12:13 pm, March 25, 2023
Jogo 0 comments 0 likes