The first time I played My Time at Portia, I had the same issue, and it felt like it took ages and ages to do the bridge. It was much easier on subsequent playthroughs. Basically what I did was build about 6 furnaces to get the crafting going early on, and always had at least 2 of each subsequent crafting station (more as space and resources allowed, although there were a few that just one was sufficient for. Making sure you get a crafting commission every day really helps as well, because that’s your main source of income, which makes it easier to afford more land, inventory upgrades, etc. Fishing is also ridiculously lucrative once you get good at it.

What my Portia daily routine normally looks like is something like this:

• Wake up, check mail (if any).

• Grab resources that have crafted overnight (if any).

• Go to town hall and pick a commission, looking for something that I have most or all of the materials to craft. The plan is to get it made and delivered that day if possible, so if there’s a choice of something that doesn’t pay well but can be done immediately or something that pays better but will take 2-3 days to make happen, I pick the low paying one.

• Check map to see if any locals have quests that day. If they do, go and get the quests.

• Go home and craft the commission item, plus any items required by other quests picked up that day. If any crafting stations have finished production, set them going again.

• Deliver crafted item to recipient(s).

• Gather resources for the rest of the day. I usually pick one activity and stick to it, say mining, fishing, hunting (the sound of dying colourful llamas makes me sad, but I want their pelts), etc.

• Check crafting stations when stamina has run out. Set more crafting going if needed.

• Go to bed.

The other thing is that the big “main” quests for building those major projects aren’t necessarily meant to be done quickly, as they’re the bigger story events that gate your progress through the game. Once I stopped trying to get them done as quickly as possible, and let myself get sidetracked on other stuff, I enjoyed the game a lot more. I spent quite a lot of time just spending whole days on, say, just mining, or harvesting wood, or fishing, while ignoring the bridge entirely. (I actually think I spent about two weeks fishing once. I got really, really into it. It then took me another week to sell them all.) By the time I thought “oh yeah, I should do that bridge thing”, I had more than enough of all the resources needed, and then it felt really quick to do. I ignored quite a lot of main quests for a really long time, including one that narratively I should have done much quicker. Let’s just say that

Speaking purely from my own experience, the mistake I made with My Time at Portia the first time I played it was I was too focused on being goal-oriented by following the main quest. But the game’s not really about that. I had a much better time when I slowed down, focused less on the main quest, and more on crafting stuff for the locals (so many stone stools) and selling them preposterous amounts of fish.

I don’t think so. My Time at Portia has a day-night cycle and I love that game.

The weird thing about Stardew Valley is I cannot understand why I don’t like it. I’ve tried to like it. I’ve poured many hours into games in the same genre, but I haven’t even managed to get 2 hours into Stardew Valley and I do not understand why. I can’t point at anything in particular that doesn’t work for me, and it’s exactly the kind of game I love to play, so I’m honestly perplexed as to why I don’t like it.

I’ve played Sims 2 and 3, and generally enjoyed them. I think I would have played both a lot more if they hadn’t been prone to such severe performance issues. Especially 3. I was in a better position financially back then, upgrading my PC every 2 years, and somehow even a brand new PC built around gaming performance could not run Sims 3 without severe lagging and stuttering. I tried various mods intended to improve performance, but never really made any headway on the issue. Gave up, haven’t tried Sims 4 because the quantity of DLC is huge and expensive.

Please learn elementary anatomy and physiology. You don’t have to get a medical degree. High school level knowledge will do.

Or failing that, learn enough critical thinking skills to be able to tell the difference between a reputable source and a wannabe celebrity influencer who will say anything for attention.

I don’t have a huge level of knowledge of anatomy or physiology, but I can tell the NHS website is going to have more accurate and trustworthy information than an attention-seeking influencer.

I pretty much only use it for brainstorming ideas.

I thought about this too, but then I checked the end date of the petition. It’s in October, as petitions have to run for 6 months in order to give them enough time to get to the 100,000 signatures. So by the time this petition ends, and then rises to the top of the list of petitions to be debated, we’ll definitely have a new government. 😉

Of course they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. Releasing the source code doesn’t absolve them of a responsibility to make sure the game is actually working when they end support. “We fucked over all our players, but here’s the source code so someone else can fix it for nothing” would be a really shitty thing to do and they shouldn’t avoid penalty for fucking over the majority of their players (and the unpaid people who will have to fix it for them).

On the other hand “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it” benefits most players, and “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it, AND here’s the source code so others can expand/modify it if they feel so inclined” would satisfy everybody. It just shouldn’t be a legal requirement.

Also keep in mind that in the UK system, if a petition reaches its 100,000 signature minimum in order to be considered for debate in parliament, that’s only the beginning of the process. It doesn’t just get put into law exactly as the petitioner words it. It goes through multiple debate stages, where the MPs consider all the options, and then the law gets written - and then it usually gets amended a few times. So I would expect that if this petition did lead to a change in the law, the resulting legislation would have considered multiple options for what “leaving the game in a working state” would look like. A surprisingly large amount of UK legislation on this kind of stuff sort of goes “this is what we want, but companies have freedom to choose how they will implement it”.

“Release the source code” isn’t going to be considered a reasonable thing to ask a government to legislate on. “Make sure the game can still be played after support ends”, which in practice means patching it so it doesn’t require an internet connection to servers that no longer exist and/or allowing players to self-host their own servers, is far more likely to succeed. It’s a reasonable request that someone who has bought something should be able to continue using it for as long as they want, no matter what happens to the company that sold it to them.

It’s a request that stands a decent chance of success if a politician can be made to understand what the problem is, because it is an easy extension of existing consumer rights law. Requiring game studios to hand over their source code to gamers would be considered excessive and unreasonable, and is therefore much more likely to be denied outright.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. For the majority of gamers, the changes proposed would be more than sufficient, so that’s a good reason to push for it even if it isn’t what an open source idealist would want.

A requirement to leave a game in a “working state when support ends” doesn’t mean continuing support (ie, running the server). It means the game should still work when the server is gone, which means either fully offline play, or a means for players to run their own servers. That’s the whole point of this campaign, which is taking place across multiple countries.

Ah, it’s active! I saw this a few weeks ago when the petition had been created but was being reviewed by the petitions team. Been waiting for it to be open for signatures, so thanks for the reminder. I have signed it.

I don’t expect the government to do much about it, though. I’ve signed a number of these petitions over the years and the government response is always very non-committal. They can get more traction when an MP can be inspired to care, so if anyone has a youngish MP who might actually be capable of understanding what the problem is, it could be worth writing a letter to them directly (regardless of what party they’re in - a 35 year old Tory MP isn’t a complete write-off and may be more sympathetic than you’d expect.)

That said… could be the kind of thing the next government could be pushed to act on. We’ll likely have a cash-strapped Labour government that’ll be looking for stuff they can do to make things better for normal people which also don’t cost the government any money, and this is a simple adjustment to consumer rights that would achieve that.

Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I loved Abzu, and Journey went on my wishlist because so many people had said how similar they were. I’d have probably played it already if I wasn’t ill - I can barely hear anything right now, and that’s not the best time to play a game where the music is a big part of the experience!

I haven’t played it yet, but it was on my wishlist for a while, so when I saw it on sale a few days ago, I snapped it up and immediately installed it. I’m really excited to play it as soon as I have some free hours.

A good read from Cory Doctorow, as always.

Yep, I agree with that breakdown. It’s the people in the middle: tech literate enough to need their computer to do a lot, but not sufficiently interested in tinkering to spend time arguing with their OS, that are often better off using Windows or MacOS.

Yeah, good luck enforcing that contract in any country that has a legal concept of “automatically unfair contract terms”.

That is kind of the problem with Linux though. I definitely had hardware-distro compatibility issues, and I get how for some people, trying out a dozen different distros to find the one that works best for them is a lot of fun, and that’s totally valid. It’s just not a good fit for everyone. I think fans of Linux can overestimate its stability, ease of use, and suitability for all use-cases. It’s right for some people, but not everyone.

My relationship with my Linux installation was disfunctional in its own way. It was that partner that went into a meltdown when presented with any new, slightly complicated situation that was outside of its extremely limited comfort zone. I guess that works for people that have the time and patience to hold its hand and convince it that it can actually do everything. But Linux definitely isn’t suitable for all people in all situations.

That’s what I was thinking. A multitude of small businesses are less efficient, so need more people to do the same amount of work as a single large company. And I would imagine that the competition created by many small companies all chasing after the same pool of employees would have a lesser ability to suppress wages: if one business won’t pay their employees well, those employees will just go and work for someone else instead.

I’d really love to know if “job creators” are actually job creators, or if many small businesses actually create more jobs than one large one. Are “job creators” actually job destroyers?