Tag Archives: PC

New Year, New PC

“Big, expensive pile o’ hardware.”

As mentioned in my last post, here’s a little insight into the decisions that went into my new build. This could hopefully help some new builders make decisions regarding their own component selections in the future, though many of the parts selected for this build will be ancient history in only a matter of months. So it goes!

Initial Goals:

Since I’ve had the luxury of enough money to be selective, I’ve used a simple methodology for my own personal PC builds, and I’ve always been pleased with the results. I start by looking at popular, commonly recommended specs and specific components, and then do a huge amount of research on those components, tweaking them to avoid technical issues as well as conform to my own brand and feature preferences. Most importantly, I will adjust those components until I hit the sweet spot between performance and price – usually there is a very obvious cutoff where spending more goes above what I’m comfortable with and/or no longer feels like a reasonable upgrade for the cost. The end result is typically a premium spin on a mid range gaming machine that has just enough added oomph to serve me well for productivity purposes, and last a very, very long time with (hopefully) minimal issues. My current (now old) machine has lasted me 8 years and is still going relatively strong, with only a couple of minor upgrades along the way, and I had my last machine for a similar amount of time.

The thing is, having my PCs stick around so long was never really a stated goal. It’s a combination of being somewhat frugal with my money (read: cheap) and also absolutely hating migrating from one primary machine to another. I usually make a ton of tweaks to my systems, I run servers, do development, and do a bit of casual data hoarding. It’s by far the most unpleasant part of building a new machine for me. This time around, I’ve decided that I can no longer deny that truth – I’m going to purposely build a machine that can last me a ridiculously long time. Of course, it’s hard to predict everything that could happen in the next ~8 years, but I can at least do a couple of things that can help.

First, I’ll invest more in the basics like CPU and RAM upfront. Since heavy multitasking, including running some VMs, will be my primary use-case outside of gaming, I’ll want to go with a processor which both has a ton of cores as well as great gaming performance. I’ll also start with an unreasonably large amount of RAM. Second, I’ll spec some of these parts in a way that will more easily allow for an upgrade at around the midpoint of this PC’s lifespan – For example, I’d like to be able to relatively easily swap in a new CPU and/or GPU without needing to replace my motherboard, if possible. This means perhaps spending a tiny bit more now for features I might only be using down the line.

The timing of this build is interesting and needs a mention too. I’d originally had loose plans to build a new machine sometime later in 2025, but as an American, the threat of large tariffs on imports from many countries, not the least being China, possibly driving up component prices became much more realistic after the election in November 2024. My decision to bump up my build to late 2024 also happened to coincide with the innumerable end of November sales associated with the the holidays, particularly the weeks of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As such, despite the very recent launch of AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 series and looming announcements from NVIDIA about the RTX GeForce 5000 series, I decided to dive in right then and there.

CPU Selection:

This is usually the most logical place to start with any build, as it will dictate my motherboard selection, what memory I need, etc. and the rest will kind of fall into place from there.

I was immediately confronted with a lot of unexpected complications right out of the gate. While I won’t go into detail here, the high-end Intel CPUs like the 13900K and 14900K I was looking at, really all 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs, have had some controversial issues around stability. I also have some (relatively minor) concerns over their whole “performance core” vs “efficiency core” scheduling thing.

This led me to looking at AMD’s Ryzen processors, which have been making big waves for a while now. I was immediately impressed to learn how much less power they draw and heat they generate, which practically sold me all by itself. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D seemed like the obvious choice for both gaming and productivity, but I quickly discovered all of the numerous multitasking issues associated with its 16 cores being divided between 2 different chiplet dies, and only one including the 3D cache. I almost went with this regardless, as the common workaround of using Process Lasso or similar tools to manually assign programs to the two different CCDs didn’t seem too challenging, but the deeper I looked, the more I discovered reports of incompatibility with certain programs (specifically games) and some other big issues that only added to the potential headaches involved in using this processor. I run a lot of older applications and games, so such incompatibilities are a bit scarier to me than they might be for your average gamer who is only playing the latest releases.

Speaking of gamers, a lot of people recommended the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which apparently still beats the 7950X3D and virtually all other newer processors when it comes to pure gaming. With only 8 symmetrical cores/16 threads living on a single die, the 7800X3D doesn’t have any of the core scheduling issues the 7950X3D has. Of course, it also has half the cores. That said, I find the commonly repeated recommendation that you need a 7950X3D for productivity while the 7800X3D is only for gaming to be a little reductive. My relatively ancient 4 core I7 can handle productivity tasks, including running a dedicated VM, quite well. With double the cores, and many games using 6 cores or less, this should be a huge improvement for me. I’m also not gaming for hours every day these days (sadly) and the type of productivity work I do doesn’t require crunching a huge amount of data (rendering, etc.) that would greatly benefit by throwing more cores into the mix. With that, I settled on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

“Freshly installed!”

I should mention that when I started working on this the Ryzen 9 9800X3D had only just been released. Coming in at very close to the same price as the 7800X3D with all of the other advantages of it along with being ~10% faster, this might have been a more logical choice if it weren’t so new, and availability and subsequent artificial price increases weren’t a thing. I’m not worried about this, but I am really intrigued to see what the next generation or two of 7950X3D equivalent processors look like – maybe some of their issues will be sorted out, whether by AMD or Microsoft. In any case, I’m thinking I’ll end up throwing something from the last line of AM5 processors into this thing when/if I do my mid-life upgrade, assuming my motherboard can support it.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll use a Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE on this for cooling. I used a Silent Assassin on another recent build and these coolers are quite well regarded, especially for their price. The 7800X3D doesn’t need anything too crazy, but this is a nice enough cooler to work with something beefier way down the line, and I’d rather go a bit heavy handed with cooling than have thermal issues later, and this thing is still quite cheap regardless.

Motherboard Selection:

This is the decision I struggled with the most. At first, I was pointed to B650 chipset motherboards, of which there are a huge number and some with very nice feature sets, though uncomfortably high prices and a general lack of availability often accompany the higher end boards. Initially I settled on the MSI MAG Tomahawk B650 WIFI due to having great VRM timings which would hopefully help support a future processor upgrade and/or future overclocking endeavors, along with the rest of its feature set. There are better choices, but again, my selection was heavily tempered by price and availability, and I’ve had good luck with MSI products in the past.

The biggest thing the Tomahawk B650 lacked was PCIe Gen 5 support. Now, I don’t currently need PCIe Gen 5 support, but I kept coming back to the idea of “future proofing” this build for a mid-life upgrade. While a Gen 5 GPU likely won’t be required even then, having it available will at least give me more options. The same is true with PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives – current testing suggests that they run incredibly hot, and unless you’re very comfortable with an optimized cooling setup, should probably be avoided for now if you don’t have a legitimate need for such blazing speeds, so I’m not going to worry about them. In the future, Gen 5 NVMEs might improve in that area, so this is another “nice to have.”

Naturally, I started looking at the MSI Tomahawk X670E WIFI instead. This motherboard includes a single Gen 5 PCIe x16 slot and a single Gen 5 M.2 slot, while overall being a fairly similar board. Another notable feature is the inclusion of an ALC1200 chip instead of ALC4080 for sound. This is a minor concern, and which one of these codec chips is better is fairly contested, but the tried and trusted ALC1200 feels like less of a potential problem, and sound is important to me. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve put together a personal build that doesn’t include a dedicated sound card (although, if I do end up having any sound issues, that will be an early upgrade!)

Anyway, one basic requirement this motherboard doesn’t meet is that I was hoping to have two onboard NICs. One improvement I’m going to make to my server setup with this machine is to have my primary VM use a dedicated NIC on its own a segregated VLAN. I could accomplish this with only one NIC using VLAN tagging, sure, but quite a lot of desktop NIC drivers don’t support 802.1x and I’ve even had one that did lose all of its associated configuration options after a driver update. Yikes. Two NICs is ultimately more reliable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any AM5 motherboards that included this option and were reasonably priced, so I’m going to throw a Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Gigabit Network Card into one of my slower PCIe slots.

Back to the subject of the motherboard, unfortunately, the more I researched MSI’s line of AM5 motherboards, the more issues I ran across. Honestly, you’ll find issues that are at least a little concerning with ANY motherboard if you dig enough, but there were a couple of widespread issues that required me to make some major changes to my early part choices. This almost scared me off of MSI entirely, but ultimately I feel like my concessions were fine.

Memory Selection:

Continuing from the above, first of all, people complaining about memory issues and associated stability problems, often related to using XMP and especially EXPO, with DDR5, is common. During troubleshooting, whether or not the memory is officially supported is one related concern. I’d initially selected the cheapest set of G.Skill EXPO RAM I could find, the Flare X5. While lower capacity kits are in the compatibility list, the exact one I picked was not. After looking at my options for quite a while, I eventually settled on the slightly more expensive G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo which is on the list, is well regarded, and reviews suggest it works well with EXPO.

As for how much, I opted for 16 GB on my current build, but decided to throw another 16 in a year or two ago after running into some issues while gaming with my RAM hungry web browser (with far too many tabs open) running. 32 GB is plenty, but again, future proofing! Initially I only wanted to make sure I had a motherboard with 4 DIMM slots (spoilers: they almost all do) but quickly discovered that with these AM5 chipsets, running more than a single pair isn’t advised. At the very least, you’ll probably need to run your memory at a lower speed, and at worst, stability issues seem to be common. This is pretty lame, but reinforces my impulse to double what I currently have and start with 64 GB. Hopefully I won’t need to replace it if I do my mid-life upgrade.

Storage Selection:

Obviously I’ll want a Gen 4 M.2 NVME drive for my OS and primary storage. Right now I have a 500 GB SATA SSD and I threw another 1 TB M.2 drive in there a couple of years back to have more places to dump games after getting a little low on storage more than a few times. Given my current usage habits, a 2 TB drive seems perfect.

I also have a 3 TB spinning disk RAID 1 for more archival storage, though my VM disks also live there. My initial impulse was to forgo the RAID this time and just throw another, bigger Gen 4 M.2 NVME in. This was cemented after researching what RAID options were available to me with this motherboard and discovering that it’s apparently an “all disks or nothing” setup, which is frankly terrible. I could always try to find a more suitable motherboard or perhaps an add-on RAID controller card, but for now I think scheduling a backup job to replicate some of my storage data to my NAS (which is a 13 TB RAID 1) will be adequate. A single 4 TB drive it is!

Originally, I chose the universally lauded Western Digital Black SN850X for both purposes. There are cheaper drives to be had, of course, but these ones are always recommended for speed and reliability and are often on sale for good prices. Returning to the subject of motherboard issues, however, apparently there’s a defect with these Tomahawk AM5 boards (and perhaps others?) where the SN850X won’t be detected at boot up. While it seems not everyone is impacted, apparently this issue suddenly appeared after a BIOS update and still hasn’t been fixed a year or two later, leaving people stuck running a much older BIOS release or moving their disks to another, slower M.2 slot. I decided to avoid this potential debacle altogether, and began looking at alternatives. I finally settled on the Crucial T500 for my OS drive. Crucial has been a trusted name for me in the past, and this drive includes DRAM cache, performs similarly to the SN850X, and is priced similarly too. I also chose a Crucial P3 Plus for my storage drive. This is also a speedy Gen 4 NVME, but lacks that cache for a price that’s a little easier to swallow.

GPU Selection

While I bounced between NVIDIA and AMD (ATI) graphic cards a lot back in the day, I’ve been a staunch NVIDIA GeForce fan for a long time now, and a recent build in which I used an AMD renewed that preference yet again. I just don’t love their driver / configuration utility. I’d personally prefer to pay a bit more for what I feel is a much smoother experience in terms of features and functionality. That’s not to say I’m afraid of change though – I’ve also been a 1080p 60 holdout for ages now, and I think it’s finally time to go to 1440p after being very happy with the results of that same build. Given the prevalence of G-Sync and FreeSync compatibility these days, it also seems reasonable to also go up to a higher refresh display, which I can always lock to a lower refresh rate if I can’t stand for one reason or another.

“It’s alive!”

Now, my GPUs selection strategy has always been to go with an upper end, middle tier card. For instance, my current build has a vendor overclocked GTX 1070 which I got near the start of that generation in it and it’s still going fairly strong – zero regrets! With all of this in mind, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4070 Ti Super seems to fit the mold perfectly. A bit more expensive, sure, but again, I’m going for longevity here. I was originally going to go with one of the cheapest ones available, the MSI Ventus 3X, but discovered that I could get that card’s slightly shorter, and now on sale, little brother the MSI Shadow 3X OC for cheaper, and without needing to order it directly from MSI. In any case, between my mobo and now my GPU, I guess this is going to be an MSI heavy build.

Monitor Selection:

So, given what I just said about picking a GPU, I don’t have to say too much here. Essentially, I just wanted a well-reviewed 27” or bigger 1440P 120 Hz+ monitor. I took a look around at some YouTube recommendation videos and narrowed my choice down to a few readily available budget monitors pretty quickly, settling on Acer Nitro XV1 XV271U which is a 1440P 180 Hz IPS monitor with pretty great reviews within its tier, with the usual caveats for a cheap IPS panel that it’s not going to have anything resembling decent HDR and its black levels and back lighting in general probably won’t be anywhere close to amazing. I’m fine with that for now, as just with TVs, while you can get some really good stuff for really cheap these days, the very best screens are still quite expensive. For the price I paid for this ($170 new) I can always replace it down the line if I feel particularly compelled to, and I probably won’t!

I also grabbed a little HDMI to DVI converter so I could keep using my old Dell 2007FPb 20” 1600×1200 monitor as a secondary display. Hopefully this works well enough, as I’ve been unable to come to grips with possibly abandoning my second screen. If I had, I’d probably have gone with a bigger primary monitor. For now, I prefer using multiple monitors, and having a dedicated 4:3 for running older PC and console games full screen is a nice bonus.

Case, Power, and Cooling:

The only real requirement I had for a case besides supporting my ATX motherboard and not looking like something off the Vegas strip, was that I wanted to bring my Plextor DVD-RW drive over from my current PC. Call me a fossil, but I do still have the rare occasion to read a CD or DVD, and possibly even write one. For better or worse, this requirement VASTLY slimmed my number of options down to single digits. I mean, I knew cases without any exposed drive bays were popular these days, but I didn’t know that they were being made almost exclusively that way. I ended up opting for a Fractal Design Pop Solid which is a pretty nice, somewhat budget case with two 5.25” drive bays hidden behind a little door. I’ve been happy with Fratcal’s cases in the past – in fact, my current machine is using one which I could have just re-used if it weren’t for making the transition practically impossible to do without a lot of downtime.

As a quick aside, in retrospect I’m a little upset with myself for not looking into smaller form factors. While they don’t save you a ton of space unless you specifically target going for as small of a footprint as you can handle, I still hate how monstrously big even a modest mid tower ATX case can be. My last build was a Micro ATX and I’m happy with it. I’ve also been reviving an old ITX build recently too. There’s two main reasons why I didn’t put much effort into going that route. First of all, case availability, as mentioned. Yet, there is actually a ”Fractal Design Pop Mini” which is practically the same case, only downsized for mATX builds, and it still includes those external bays. So, no excuses there. Beyond that, I could have easily sourced an older mATX case with external 5.25” bays too. The second, actually decent reason, is that there aren’t a lot of mATX options in the AM5 range that had the features I was looking for. In fact, there’s only a single nice mATX X670E board out there, and it’s been discontinued for long enough to drive the prices up to insane territory. Oh well. That size and weight should only be an issue when I want to move my box around for cleaning or other maintenance.

As for cooling, at first I figured the 3 included 120 mm case fans should be enough to keep the air moving well enough, but upon watching several reviews of the case I noticed a pattern of comments related to airflow, particularly affecting GPU temperatures. An easy fix is just to replace the 3 120mm Fractal Designs Aspect 12 fans with something a bit better. Since this was an unplanned, last minute addition, I ended up staying on the inexpensive side, but a Thermalright TL-G12B (120mm) for rear exhaust and 2 Thermalright TL-C14s (140mm) for front intake should greatly improve the situation. Both models have superior airflow to Fractal’s stock fans and are PWM controlled so can run slower and more quietly when I’m not gaming to boot. These replacement fans may not have really been needed, but could hopefully help in a future upgrade scenario, and this was only a ~$24 addition.

My PSU is another area I purposely went a little overboard with. By my estimates, a 750 watt power supply would have been totally fine with this build, but just in case of mid-life upgrades, I bumped it up to an 850 watt unit. I also don’t like to cheap out too much on my PSUs, so a 80+ Gold certified or better PSU is a must. Looking at some detailed reviews, tier lists, etc., I settled on a be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 850 W Fully Modular ATX Power Supply. It’s also ATX 3.1 spec’d, making wiring it up to my 4070 Ti Super a little cleaner, and further hopefully helping to ensure compatibility with a new GPU 4 or 5 years down the road. This is my first “be quiet!” brand anything, but reviews are great and the company has quite a generous warranty, so I don’t have any real worries there.

Peripherals:

I didn’t have much reason to abandon my current peripherals for this build, so I’ll be migrating my HyperX headset, my Razer keyboard and mouse, and my old Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers over. Yes, I’m as shocked as anyone that my old Razer gear is all still working after all these years (although I did replace my old DeathAdder Chroma mouse with Naga Trinity several years back, but more for the optional MMORPG button configuration than any functional issue with the DeathAdder.)

“I don’t actually play Helldivers 2 with a controller…”

The one purchase I did make was an 8bitdo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller. This is a significant change of direction for me, because outside of emulating much older consoles, I don’t ever play PC games with anything but mouse and keyboard. With this new build though I’ve decided to tee up some console-like games in my Steam backlog, and wanted a suitable controller. I could have gone with my tried and true Xbox Series X or Xbox One controller, but instead decided to purchase something completely dedicated. The Ultimate 2C has very similar ergonomics to my beloved Xbox controllers, but despite its dirt cheap price tag, has scored some pretty impressive reviews. I’ve barely used it, but so far so good. Oh, I went with the limited edition “blueberry” color scheme, for the record.

That’s about it. Beyond all of this, the logistics around ordering so many things from numerous places can be a minor challenge, and the actual assembly is, of course, its own thing, as is making numerous adjustments to Windows 11 to make it suck a little less. In some ways, Windows 11 has been far more of adjustment than I’d have hoped for, and I definitely vastly prefer Windows 10. Back to hardware though, the only post-build change I’ve made so far has been to replace all of my case fan mounting screws with rubber pop-in “screws” (like this) to dampen an annoying pulsating hum I was getting from my 140mm fans. Despite seeing them around and probably even getting some as pack-ins before, I’d actually never used them personally or professionally before, but I’m glad to report that they seemed to do the trick. Anyway, you made it to the end. If you found this while working on your own build, good luck!

Surviving Survival Part 2

As I teased at the end of my original “Surviving Survival” article, Enshrouded was the next game on the menu. Seemingly along with a whole lot of others, previews of this game really caught my eye and I wasted no time jumping in by myself and exploring the world once it hit early access. While I liked what I played, I quickly decided to save it for a future cooperative playthrough, and it ended up being the next game my partner and I played after wrapping up Raft.

“First Steps into Enshrouded’s Embervale”

Unfortunately, this is going to be a pretty quick synopsis, because she totally bounced off of this game. I shouldn’t have been surprised as Enshrouded tends to feel much more action RPG or action-adventure heavy than your typical “tree-puncher” game, while she’s particularly into the building and decorating, as well as the crafting and organizing aspects of these games, often leaving much of the combat, exploration, and gathering up to me. She also commented on how she wanted to play a game where building bases actually has a purpose. That is, in Enshrouded, like in so many survival games, your base is simply a place to store your stuff and do your crafting and, at least up to where we played, serves very little other purpose. She specifically mentioned preferring 7 Days to Die, in which it’s critical that your base also becomes a stronghold due to its “Blood Moon” events and the ever-present threat of wandering zombies.

In retrospect, I guess Enshrouded does feel a bit more like a hybrid between a very adventure-forward, RPG-light action RPG – something like the Fable series, for example – combined with a more stereotypical voxel-based, open world crafting/survival game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that sounds utterly fantastic to me, but I suppose I’m still trying to figure out exactly what really grabs her about the genre. Still, she’s played through Breath of the Wild and similar games, so I thought she might still find a lot to like in Enshrouded. Sadly, after a couple of sessions, she pretty much lost all interest. Personally, I know that Enshrouded has had something like 4 major patches since I first picked it up in February, so I’m sure it’s only continuing to get more content and develop its already fairly polished systems, and I enjoyed the 10 or so hours I’ve put into it so far, so I think I’ll be going back to it at some point. Whether I go back by myself, with her, or with our larger co-op group, who knows?

“A chaotic sprawl is practically unavoidable in late-game Satisfactory…”

Speaking of our larger group, after wrapping up Grounded, we decided to go for something a little different, and played through an entire run of Satisfactory. I’d never played Satisfactory, nor similar manufacturing focused games like Factorio, so this was all new to me. It’s perhaps a bit of a stretch to toss these types of games into the open world survival category, though there’s certainly a common lineage in my mind. That is, if Astroneer perfected the mindlessly enjoyable mining/gathering aspect of Minecraft’s survival mode, Satisfactory and its ilk are doing the same with late game large-scale crafting and automation, and personally, I fucking loved it!

Dropped onto a planet with practically nothing, the game generously drip feeds you your first string of goals, and soon you’ll have a base of operations and have extracted your first few types of resources. Very quickly, you’ll be installing automatic extractors and the means to power them, and automating getting those resources to your processing and manufacturing devices and/or storage containers… and that, well, that’s basically the whole game!

Satisfactory could very easily cut the umbilical right there and let you figure out how to move up the tech tree on your own, but instead it continues to push you forward via a series of milestones in which specific numbers of certain finished resources are shot up a space elevator in exchange for unlocking new recipes for new and upgraded machines and other gear to help you in your efforts to, of course, meet the next, even more demanding requirements. This progresses until the final couple of tiers have you manufacturing parts used to manufacture parts used to manufacture parts (and so on…) for end products that require multiple of sets of such complex components, turning your once humble factory footprint into a massive sprawl of extraction units, automated assembly, manufacturing machines, mazes of twisting conveyor belts, nuclear power plants belching waste, and delivery drones, trucks, and even trains darting about, blighting the once pristine landscape, while you keep focus on growing and especially optimizing every aspect of your operations.

“Have ramps, will travel.”

There’s also an exploration component of the gameplay, as the players have to explore to seek out more and more natural resources as the demands increase, and find special power-ups hidden throughout the world to increase your output. There’s also a slightly more free-form research component to go along with the milestone system which ties directly into that. Playing cooperatively provides the benefit of letting one or two people go on these scouting runs while others continue to focus on meeting the manufacturing tasks at hand. Building utterly ridiculous transportation systems to bring materials (or even finished components) from extremely remote harvesting sites and exploring some treacherous new biome looking for more cleverly hidden Power Slugs were some of my favorite parts of the game, in fact.

We ended up completing Satisfactory not long before the 1.0 patch was released, which would have added finished versions of some exploration related systems we only had placeholders for, and would likely make the final milestone tier a little less insane than what we went through (which eventually saw us just leaving our server up for a few days while as, close to as large and fully automated as we could will ourselves to get it, we let our collective factory run for hours and hours on end.) Apart from a few annoying bugs (like the often incredibly janky Hypertubes) the game felt finished enough, but had we known it was coming, I think we’d all have preferred to wait until the game was actually finished to do this play through. As it is, I think we’ll be back at some point to see what the actual ending looks like, and what other new goodies the developers add between now and then. All told though, I really enjoyed Satisfactory.

“*Cues Immigrant Song*”

After that, we decided to move back to more traditional territory, and headed to beautiful sunny grasslands and dark forests of Valheim. I talked a fair bit about Valheim in my first Surviving Survival post, though that playthrough was with a group of work friends rather than my normal weekly co-op group, so this was new territory for us. One of the other members of the group had played it before, though closer to its original early access release, and he and I dove right in with building a small village and exploring our surroundings. I think the other two members of our group, including my partner, struggled a little bit with the combat until we got a round or two of gear upgrades under our belts, but overall it seemed like everyone was getting to grips with the gameplay well enough.

Despite being ideally placed for the start of the game – that is, right on the sea and very close to big chunks of black forest and mountain biomes – the randomness of the map found us having to go on epic sea voyages to visit the swamps. Of course, we quickly established a forward base complete with a portal back to our village, but between that, and that biome’s less than friendly inhabitants (we were almost wiped by a Wraith at night more than once, and chased around the entire area by Abominations on several occasions) our group’s enjoyment of the game started to wane considerably, culminating in a group Sunken Crypt clear that went a little sideways, causing one of the party to need to make a seemingly impossible to solo corpse run multiple times, coming perilously close to resulting in a rage quit.

As with Enshrouded, it really wasn’t just the combat or the difficulty, but more something to do with the overall balance of combat, exploration, crafting, and base building (and I suppose how grindy all of the above feels, which can be a bit of an issue in Valheim) that didn’t sit quite well with my partner in particular. Specific complaints centered around the relatively unguided, sandboxy approach to game’s progression goals, and while I ultimately disagree, I can see where those complaints come from. I was disappointed, but it seems Valheim wasn’t quite the game for her either. Like Enshrouded, I would like to get back to Valheim again in the future, but it likely won’t be until the last big content patch is released, and perhaps even on a modded server as well.

“Green Hell? This doesn’t look so bad!”

It’s ironic then, after just mentioning potential struggles with difficulty, that my partner chose Green Hell as our next duo game. She’s been interested in Green Hell, as well as the similarly themed and probably better known The Forest, for quite some time, and that whole time I’d been a little worried about how much of a brutal exercise in survival it might be, as gleaned from various reviews. It turns out that my concern was warranted. While it wasn’t quite as unbearably difficult as it sounded, we definitely found it falling more on the side of frustrating than fun.

In Green Hell the players are thrown into the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. As is typical with these games, you’ll need to gather material to build tools and structures, hunt, fish, and forage for food, and deal with the sometimes less than friend wildlife. In Green Hell, we can add some rather aggressive native tribesmen, both real and imagined, to the list too. What I mean by “imagined” is that native attacks are often one of the end results of the kind of cool sanity system the game employs. That is, certain actions and conditions affect your sanity, making it, along with food and hydration, one of the basic stats you’ll need to keep track of in this game’s simulated version of survival. I mean that literally too, as even imagined native attacks will kill you. In fact, rather a lot of things in Green Hell will kill you. Just about everything you do, from sustaining a minor injury to simply picking up a rock or a log, or hell, even just moving around the environment, can result in some sort of negative status effect which, if not addressed, mostly by means of crafted healing items, can lead to a very bad time.

At first we decided to play the campaign, which does a fair job of justifying why in the hell you’re in the Amazon in the first place, as well as making the Waraha Tribe more than just an lazy depiction of native stereotypes, but after struggling with navigating the campaign’s tasks while dealing with the constant distraction of basic survival for a session or two, we opted to start over in sandbox mode so we could have more opportunity to learn the mechanics without the added pressures of the campaign’s objectives. Early on, we were fortunate enough to locate an abandoned camp relatively close to a river, and started rebuilding it, making it our base of operations as we got to grips with the basics. Soon, we’d learned to get enough fresh water and nutritious food for it to no longer be a massive burden and developed tools to be more and more efficient at gathering. Even after this new level of progress, things like the aforementioned negative effects could still feel like an annoyance at best.

“Never mind…”

Funnily, I think I was the one who was more frustrated this time around. While I would usually get into the game, at least for the first couple of hours of a session, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of playing it again, and at some point all of the struggles and random-feeling deaths started to just feel absurd. She finally came around when, feeling like we had things around our camp reasonably figured out, we decided to venture out, knowing that we’d yet to encounter some of the resources that would be required to continue to tech-up. We quickly ran into new, even more challenging wildlife, and found ourselves having to run back to our base to lick our wounds. Even after over 20 hours of gameplay, we kind of felt like failures.

To be clear, I’m not calling Green Hell a bad game. In fact, I’d hazard to guess that a harsher take on the survival genre was one of Creepy Jar’s goals here. I do think, however, that overcoming some of these challenges felt less rewarding, not to mention more ephemeral, than many of its contemporaries, which, personally, just didn’t provide the dopamine hit I needed to flip the switch from the gameplay loop feeling like a chore to being entertaining. With this genre, that’s probably a thinner line for most of us than we might think. That all said, even after all of this, I’d still really like to go back to the campaign and try to complete it. Unfortunately, by the time we reached that point, my partner was fully ready to move on.

“Sitting on the throne in Abiotic Factor more often means something very different.”

The next game our larger group played was Abiotic Factor. This was one I was entirely unfamiliar with, but everyone else seemed to think it looked fun. Personally, from the trailers I watched and the little bit I read, I really didn’t know what to expect. Scientists living in an underground bunker, having to craft new experimental devices to survive? I don’t know, I was getting some major Fallout and Silo vibes, though mixed with the primitive graphical style and odd mix of multiplayer scares and zaniness of Lethal Company. Okay…

Now that I’ve played it though, the premise of Abiotic Factor is easy enough to convey. You play as a random worker in a massive underground research facility that is researching… let’s just say, some very exotic things. You know, inter-dimensional portals and the new and lifeforms inhabiting them, that kind of thing. It’s your first day of work and, thanks to some impeccable timing, a major catastrophe occurs and you’re trapped inside as the facility goes into lock down. With almost everyone dead or evacuated and the facility in shambles, your objective is to survive long enough to find a way out. Now, if you’re getting Half Life vibes from this description, you’re right on the money. It seems like the first Half Life was a huge influence here, although, as implied by the comparison to Lethal Company, the whole thing is done in a decidedly less than serious way.

The writing is fun, from humorous voice lines to the fact that at times the size and scope of the facility almost feels more like parody than homage. This is also conveyed by some of the mechanics, like the fact that regular bathroom breaks, complete with a minigame to “ease the passage” are one of the survival elements you’ll need to manage. It’s also present in the graphics, which, particularly when it comes to human characters, border on being preposterous, which I’m fairly sure was intentional. For me, this quickly fell away, as the enemies and environments looked nice enough, and I found myself so immersed in the seriousness of the situation that we, as players, found ourselves in, that I forgot all about that aspect outside of the occasional moment of playful downtime back at our base.

“A Defense Robot versus a Composer?! *Grabs popcorn*”

Initially, the game had us exploring abandoned offices, looting anything we could find, tiptoeing around the alien creatures roaming the darkened facility corridors, and hiding for our lives wherever we could barricade ourselves in when night came. These early areas were fun, and definitely got us on the hook. From there, the temporary base we’d established was relocated to a better location and greatly expanded, and the breadcrumbs the narrative dropped for us to head to our next objectives were more than enough to keep us entertained. Despite these objectives quickly devolving into a treadmill of “Go here, no, sorry, go there instead!” like encounters, they led to some unexpected places, including some challenging navigational puzzles, very dangerous enemies, and some memorably tense and scary moments. Of those, Flathill, particularly the library, the damnable Hydroplant, and the deep-dive to the Neutrino Detector, immediately come to mind.

Mechanically, the game is more or less your typical open world crafting/survival game, though some of the decisions in how those pieces are assembled make Abiotic Factor feel like a fresh take to me. New recipes are learned when acquiring new materials, and then researched via a simple minigame where the player attempts to deduce which other components are required to craft the item. This is used quite cleverly to advance the narrative – a new material and/or recipe is introduced which will then require the players to seek out the other required components, which leads to having to explore new areas which in turn means overcoming new puzzles and enemies. Of course, the more exotic the materials you encounter, the crazier some of the items our team of mad scientists can cobble together become – this is not a game where you spend ages progressing from wooden spears to bronze spears to iron spears. In fact, in some ways, the item progression feels a bit more horizontal. It’s not all perfect – ammo for guns is scarce, perhaps being one of the few things you’d ever need to grind, and unless you’ve purposely built your character to use them, shooting them isn’t a whole lot of fun either. Similarly, many of the other items you get along the way feel like they’re of questionable use, though I’m sure this improves considerably with subsequent playthroughs.

“If your swimming pool yields unlimited fish it’s time to call a pool cleaner.”

Exploring is a big part of the gameplay. Thanks to being so in-step with the narrative, you’re always focusing on new parts of the sprawling facility. While travel time isn’t a huge issue (these areas are connected via a tram system to a central hub area) navigating some of these areas, between confusingly complex layouts and a less than generous in-game map, coupled with situationally respawning enemies can be, so it might make sense to build new, smaller bases in each area as you progress, leading to the more nomadic style of base-building that some other games in the genre, like Return to Moria, employ. For our playthrough, we ended up building our base so close to that central hub that we were able to just stick it out, making our excursions into other areas a major group event. It doesn’t seem like my partner, with her preference to hang back at base and work on building, crafting, and logistical matters, would be into this at all, but, thanks to an early agreement that we’d always try to stick close together when running missions, this really wasn’t an issue.

A lot of the other mechanics in the game are similar to other games in the genre too, of course. Besides your bathroom breaks, you need to manage your food and water, sleep/rest, and body temperature. The latter comes into play in some specific areas, where you may need to equip appropriate clothing to stay warm, or keep cool, but overall, none of these are too hard to manage. Food, for instance, feels like it is going to be a huge burden, but we quickly discovered how easy fishing was and, luckily, our base was situated right next to some water for extra convenience. Really, pretty much every challenge we ran into was soon met with some sort of solution to ease the burden, if not outright remove it. I’ve yet to play it myself, but I’ve seen many of the mechanics of this game compared to one of the early standouts of the genre, Project Zomboid, which it seems most people would consider high praise.

“Hey Project Zomboid, we’ve got zombies too!”

So, pretty much exceeding my expectations at every turn, the biggest negative about our experience with Abiotic Factor is actually how our playthrough ended. After struggling through the last area of the game, which definitely felt like a culmination of the gradual difficulty curve we’d felt up to then, the breadcrumbs just… stopped. You see, the game is still in early access, and not unlike Satisfactory, despite feeling reasonably polished the entire way through, simply wasn’t finished. The difference was that we knew we were reaching the end of Satisfactory, whereas Abiotic Factor just abruptly stops. We were left with no way forward and no conclusion to the story, our characters doomed to spend the rest of their lives trapped in the depths of the GATE Cascade Research Facility. That said, we definitely all enjoyed it enough to go back when there is more to do (one of our group, who plays a ton of games, even called it one of his games of the year) though I suspect we’ll be waiting for the game to exit early access before that happens.

That rounds up this game log, though naturally our group has already moved on, and we’re currently exploring the lush planet of Olympus in Icarus. Next time!

A few of these screenshots were swiped from the Steam Community, as I shamefully didn’t take enough good screenshots of my own. I need to get better at that. New Year’s Resolution?

Surviving Survival

Despite playing some relatively hardcore games, my partner had seemingly always been opposed to the concept of gaming on a computer. On one hand, I understand wanting to keep some kind of separation between work, school, and innumerable other “serious” activities you might use a computer for, and pure entertainment, like gaming. On the other hand, several of her favorite genres, city building and adjacent strategy games, for example, are quite PC-centric. It has also been a struggle to find good opportunities for “couch” cooperative play, regardless of genre, on consoles over the years, yet there is what seems like a constant drip of intriguing online co-op games being released on PC. At some point in the last year she had a total change of heart and decided she wanted me to build her a gaming PC for her birthday. Once completed, we almost immediately dove into the deep end with one of her other favorite genres, open world sandbox survival.

“Zombie horde, meet Iron Fireaxe!”

I’ve talked about 7 Days to Die a little bit on here before, as we’d played the Xbox One version of it split-screen years ago, but the console ports lagged behind the development of the PC version and were eventually entirely abandoned. Once we had our fill of that version, we left and never went back, though often lamented not being able to play the supposedly superior PC version. Playing it on PC promised a lot more content, better graphics and performance, and, as luck would have it, the ability for us to jump in with family who were already fans of the game for a much more lively 4 player romp. Did it deliver? Well, yes!

While I still can’t escape the slightly janky look and feel of 7 Days to Die, it’s undeniably a vastly superior experience all around on PC. One of our team was quite seasoned at the game, so with his guidance, we immediately found ourselves a home base and began gathering equipment and leveling up our characters via the game’s traders and their dynamic quests. We played at least two whole campaigns, and though the game doesn’t really have a true ending, we progressed through all of the quest, gear, and skill tiers in both. In fact, we spent so much time in the game that I think I’ve had my fill for a while. While there’s always fun to be had with the emergent quality of playing these types of open world games, especially with other people, survival games like this tend to be the most fun while first figuring them out, and maybe an additional time after you have a better understanding of the systems at play. After that, the best reason to jump back in is a big new patch that overhauls systems and adds new content, which thankfully 7 Days to Die does yearly or thereabouts. On top of the basic gameplay loop and systems therein becoming a known quantity, I found 7 Days to Die’s character and tech progression to be just a bit boring.

“Sniping zombies as they funnel into our compound during a Blood Moon.”

Moment to moment gameplay isn’t particularly exciting either, and although there’s always a bit of tension when exploring a new building to clear out a zombie infestation in order to complete a quest, for instance, it doesn’t quite pull off the same feel of desperate scavenging that made me love State of Decay so much. Where it does succeed magnificently is the “Blood Moon” horde night mechanic which the game is named after. That is, every 7th night a massive horde of zombies spawns, relentlessly focusing on the players. At first this usually plays out like the end of the grandfather of the entire zombie genre, Night of the Living Dead, wherein a ragtag group of survivors has to hole up in a loosely reinforced building and fend off a seemingly unending number of increasingly violent attacks with little to no resources, counting the minutes until the relative safety of sunrise. Later, you’ll have hopefully found (or built) a compound more capable of surviving such attacks, with multiple walls, trenches, tripwires and other traps, automatic turrets, sniper towers, and maybe even a safe room or emergency evacuation route if things totally go off the rails. In either case, thanks to the game dynamically adjusting the difficulty of these events as you progress, the stress of these chaotic nights is real, and the loop of preparing for, participating in, and recovering from them makes up for just about all of the game’s other shortcomings

“The locals sometimes get a little feisty.”

At around the same time that we were playing 7 Days to Die the most, I’d also hopped into a Valheim server some of my coworkers setup after the release of the Mistlands patch. While I had briefly checked out Valheim solo a few months prior, for all intents and purposes, this was my first time playing the game. It was fun to play these two games so close together, since they’re quite similar, but diverge in some very interesting ways, with Valheim coming across as having much more carefully designed, less punitive systems, seemingly in response to earlier titles in the genre. Most notably, Valheim is less focused on “surviving” which means the fiddly bits (and therefore much of the hassle) of things like eating and drinking, repairing your gear, watering crops, feeding animals, upkeep on buildings, etc. are mostly eliminated. That’s not to say they’re not there at all; the comfort awarded by a good warm, dry structure and a full belly come in the form of increasingly large buffs, and these buffs are as essential as upgraded gear as you get further into the game.

As for gear, progression largely comes in the form of the typical material to tool to material loop, which is somewhat gated by individual biomes. That is, while you’re technically able to explore the entire map from the get go, and exploring is definitely compelling, each biome also has a “boss” which rewards you with items and abilities that will often be required for getting certain resources from the next biome. It’s a simple but clever progression mechanic. Likewise, enemies in each new biome serve as something of a soft gate as well. Heading into an area more than one above where you’ve progressed is likely a death sentence until you have better gear and better buffs. While it feels more natural than level-based “zones” of theme park style MMORPGs, it has a similar effect.

“Finishing off The Elder, the Black Forest’s boss.”

Construction, along with the systems and physics around it, is quite nice too. Like 7 Days to Die, Valheim has a voxel-esque engine which allows for fairly robust terrain deformation and reasonably free-form building (like Minecraft, to use my usual reference) and while It does have less realistic, far simpler graphics, it makes up for that by the use of a combination of a nice art style and quite few effects, resulting in a unique, cool aesthetic. Your home base will grow, especially in multiplayer games, into full on compounds, and these will need some defenses due to the denizens of whatever biome you’re in, and more importantly, enemy raid events which tier up along with your biome progression. These tend to be more of a minor annoyance than the session defining white-knuckle Blood Moons of 7 Days to Die, but I appreciate that they at least give me another reason to build new things and improve old ones.

On the other hand, building and crafting is where the game can get a little grindy. The more ambitious you are, the more material you need. Upgrading our little town from mostly wood to mostly stone wasn’t so bad, but when we decided to add stone basements to all of our buildings and connect them with a tunnel system, and then later build a massive wall and moat around the entire thing, we were suddenly spending a lot of time mining and hauling stone. The move to higher tier metals and other materials was even worse, with hours on end spent mining ore and rows of smelters cranking out ingots like some kind of Victorian factory.

It’s around that time that I fell off of Valheim. We made it as far as the mountain biome, and while there was definitely more to see, by then I felt like I had gotten to know what to expect from the gameplay loop. There’s a lot more I could talk about, like sailing, the cool fire propagation system, portals, the boss battles themselves, and the mini dungeon crawls, but in summary, Valheim was absolutely excellent, and I’d guess I’ll return to it as more content continues to be released for it.

“Meet Bruce. You’ll probably spend more time with him than your co-op partners…”

While playing 7 Days to Die, I wanted to start a game with my partner that we could play on our own time, separate from organizational constraints of playing with a larger group. I also wanted to play something a little more “chill” than 7 Days. We ended up settling on 2022’s Raft.

Raft is, well, it’s kind of all in the title. The basic premise is that you start on a tiny raft floating in a more or less endless ocean. You need to gather material from debris floating around you, on islands you’ll randomly encounter, and in the reefs around them, to expand and improve your raft, take care of your hunger and thirst, and of course, improve your gear. I almost immediately found the simplicity of most of the mechanics around gathering and crafting, as well as the amount of interesting tools and purely cosmetic items (furniture, etc.) to be quite fun, giving the game a really solid foundation that thankfully lasted throughout our entire playtime. Additionally, Raft has some great aesthetics. Likely thanks in large part to now classics like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2, it seems like slightly cartoony, minimalist art styles are quite prevalent with sub AAA games these days, and ever since falling in love with Firewatch, I’ve been a big fan of this kind of look when it’s done competently.

“Home sweet home, near endgame.”

That all said, this game definitely isn’t quite as chill as I’d originally expected. From the get-go, you’re nearly constantly harassed by a huge great white shark who seems to have a personal vendetta against you. While you’ll need to stop it from taking chunks out of your raft fairly regularly, it’s at its most annoying when you’re diving for resources. There are also other aggressive animals, such as bears, on some of the islands, and both they and the shark seem to have fairly aggressive respawn timers to boot. Combat is really simple, and while it won’t blow anyone away, I didn’t find that it detracted much from the game either. Survival has even less chill, as with little in the way of tutorialization to go on, we found ourselves having to restart our first several games due to running out of food, losing our raft entirely, and one time being stranded in an area with next to no wind to sail by and broken oars – we’d run out of material to build new ones, and there wasn’t any floating debris in sight. Even once we had a pretty good grasp on what we were doing, it took us forever to discover the blueprints for the receiver and antenna, upon which your progress for the rest of the game depends. That was probably just a bit of bad luck with “RNJesus”, though.

One thing that had initially really intrigued me about Raft was that, unlike the almost completely absent stories of 7 Days to Die and Valheim, it supposedly had an actual narrative. Unfortunately, I found that aspect of the game a little disappointing. There are “story islands” that you progress through linearly which are special handcrafted locations featuring puzzles, backstory in the form of audio and text logs, and sometimes special items and even boss fights. There is also a way to guide yourself from story island to story island (the aforementioned receiver and antennas) which hopefully means you’ll never get too far off the beaten path. While there’s definitely a bit of mystery there, like why the planet flooded or, hell, why our characters are floating around on a tiny raft with no supplies at the start of the game, I don’t feel like Raft capitalizes on it anywhere close to well enough. The whole thing, particularly the end, felt a little rushed. Was I the only one who found the repeated references to “Forward Scouts” on the last story island when I think that term had only been used once or twice prior in the entire rest of the game to be a bit jarring? Besides, how am I a “scout” when I don’t seem to have relayed any of the information I’ve gathered back to anyone, and who am I scouting for, exactly? It’s not distracting while playing, but upon further reflection, it just all feels just a little half-baked.

That all said, we did eventually beat Raft, and I think in the end, we both really enjoyed the experience.

“Stand aside insects, we have a huge quest list to complete.”

Once our 7 Days to Die crew reluctantly decided to move on, I urged them to check out Grounded. Grounded follows a lot of the same open world sandbox survival tropes as the other games in this list, but two things immediately made it stand out to me.

First, the theme. Grounded is essentially Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Set in the early 90s, you play as one of 4 teens shrunken down to the size of a bug, lost in a backyard. It’s a pretty damn cool concept for a game, especially to an old man like me who played countless “giant” deathmatch maps in Unreal Tournament. I’m sure it won’t appeal to everyone, but hopping across clover leaves, sawing down blades of grass like they’re towering trees, and battling huge stink bugs, it’s quite compelling to me, and it’s executed extremely well to boot. Unlike large parts of all three of the above games, the world in Grounded is completely handcrafted rather than procedurally generated, which means, while maybe it is a little less replayable, it’s full of interesting touches.

That’s actually the second thing. Grounded is developed by a studio that a lot of people reading this will be very familiar with, Obsidian Entertainment. I don’t mean to be disrespectful in any way to the developers of these other games, but Obsidian is in a different league, and thanks to their acquisition by Microsoft, one with a bigger budget too. Obviously this isn’t an automatic selling point for everyone, as Obsidian is mostly known for their CRPGs. That, and for putting out… ummm, quite often less than finished games. That said, while I’ve not played many of their more recent titles, Grounded is by far the most polished Obsidian game I’ve ever played. It looks fantastic, sporting a minimalist art style not unlike the sort I mentioned admiring in Raft. It also sounds great, the UI feels well designed, and the whole thing is responsive and smooth. Thanks to its Microsoft association, it’s also on Gamepass and supports crossplay with consoles to boot!

“Cornered by two massive, deadly spiders. Ugh!”

Like Raft, it also has a narrative. Thankfully, I think it succeeds a lot better than Raft on that front, taking an approach similar to many single player open world games, with cutscenes, info dumps, and new missions punctuating the completion of old ones. It has the obligatory text and audio logs too. Of course, like a lot of other open world games, you can tackle many missions in whatever order you want, but my crew quickly discovered that, as an example, you should maybe clear each of the science labs in order rather than attempting to clear out the last one first just because you happen to be near it. Speaking of having less than expected levels of chill (another trait it shares with Raft) I suspect the difficulty of Grounded is one of the main reasons the game isn’t more popular. Despite its cartoony graphics and kid-focused plot, this game is brutal as fuck! It wasn’t uncommon for some of us to get two-shotted by hostile insects early on in the game, and I had a particularly harrowing round of cascading drowning deaths as each subsequent attempt to recover my backpack from a long, dark, underwater tunnel failed spectacularly. Oh, and absolutely turn on that “arachnophobia safe mode” if you’re not down with spiders because, frankly, fuck those things! We narrowly avoided some rage quits and eventually learned a few tricks that really helped us out, and after that, quickly made progress.

Beyond the typical open world survival game gathering and crafting loop, there’s something of a currency called “raw science”. RS is awarded for completing missions, discovering and analyzing new materials, killing certain larger enemies, and can even just found placed throughout the yard. RS can then be used to purchase sets of new crafting plans, recipes, and even mutations. Mutations are a form of character customization perk mostly found when completing certain milestones in the world, which you can then apply a couple of to grant your character special abilities and buffs. There’s also “milk molars” – big teeth you can find in the world and harvest, rewarding you with points you can use to upgrade your stats, including the ability to raise your active mutation count as high as 5. After we hit that aforementioned rough spot when trying to clear the labs, we spent a whole multi hour session farming molars in the world to give ourselves a bit of an edge.

“Surveying our WIP preparation for the final battle.”

As we progressed, the missions eventually focused into a more linear path, culminating in a huge final battle which was sort of a more hardcore version of the much smaller MIX.R wave defense side challenges scattered around the map. I suppose we never took those MIX.R challenges all too seriously, and we failed the final battle in an utterly humiliating fashion the first time around, despite thinking we had a winning strategy. This caused us to over prepare for the next attempt, spending quite a while grinding out more advanced (and stronger) material so that we could build multiple layers of fortifications, ultimately leading to a glorious victory the second time around. It was actually quite fun, looking back, though we were surprised to find the end cutscene representing something of a “bad” ending. It turns out, the bad ending is the normal one, and the better ending is only available to players who defeat some not-at-all signposted side objectives before the final fight. A slightly disappointing end to an otherwise excellent game.

That’s it for now. Next on the list: Enshrouded!