Choose My Adventure: A bit of realmwalking and a whole lot of house building in Nightingale

I have the rather unique challenge this week: I’m trying to make hours’ of game time in Nightingale spent building a house interesting to read.

Obviously this means that the poll choice of building a Tudor-style house in the middle of a forest was one of my primary foci, and it ended up being both a bigger job than I had anticipated as well as a nice bit of mental resetting from all of the story questing and other stuff I had been doing prior to this point.

The first job was to find a nice forested area to plop down new roots. I had not actually scouted a wooded location during the earlier poll, but I also knew that there were more than enough sections of woods that would make for a good place to build. And after a bit of wandering around, I found a place that seemed to be pretty suitable – a place that was dense enough that the trees were surrounding me, but not so dense as to be wholly inconvenient to go to other place, as well as somewhere placed right near where a portal was located.

In spite of the fact that I was building in a forest, which would lead one to try to work around nature, the Tudor style of building kind of meant that I was effectively slamming a small manor within a bunch of trees. Not exactly natural, but I also was trying to design the homestead around as much of the natural setting as I could.

To that point, one of my first jobs was creating a sort of entry hallway that lead right to the foot of the portal. I envision this as a sort of “gateway to adventure” set up, where there will be storage chests full of items ahead of expeditions and other places of storage where any found treasures and valuables could be placed. After that, I mostly built outward from that hallway, placing a foyer arrangement that spread out fairly wide but not too far, followed by an upper level where my character’s bedroom would be.

Of course my character gets her own bedroom. One of the first things you ensure when playing a survival sandbox is that you make nice and cozy little places.

As the blueprints for this new place started to build up bit by bit, I began to work through the admitted tedium of crafting necessary items to build the new manor out. The things I required to make a Tudor home weren’t what I would call complex, but they were pretty hungry materials-wise, requiring hundreds of logs and a bunch of stone to make lumber, bricks, and beams. I dived in to this task with a sort of deeply nerdy approach, placing large sections of the house to make sure the layout was going to suit, writing down the mats I needed, walking my way back to my old home base to craft what I needed, then fast traveling to the new respite to plonk the items down.

It wasn’t what I would call thrilling gameplay – boy am I glad I decided to not stream this part of my journey because I’m pretty sure that would be digital tryptophan – but like I said, it was fun in that sort of “work sets you free” kind of way. There’s always that sense that making a new base in a survival sandbox is an expression of having leveled up in both understanding and skill, and that was definitely the case compared to my stick-and-rock box I had made before.

I also found ways to amuse myself along the process, mostly by making very dumb notes of materials as I went along. 34 lumber, 24 bricks, one pole. 22 lumby, 10 brickabracks. Four beems and un poquito pole.

Finally, my new house in the woods was assembled, and while it has all of the environmental integration of a casino slapped on to the side of a mountain in terms of how it looks, I was quite pleased. This ended up looking and feeling like a definite upgrade. I’ve still got some work to do, mostly focused on crafting lighting because things are hella dark in there right now, but overall the whole project went well.

Incidentally the need for lighting led right in to the other poll decision of opening up a random realm. As it turns out, I need a whole lot of ore in order to make ingots for my wide assortment of lighting fixtures, so I played an astrolabe forest realm card, which was described as one being rich with ore.

After knocking down a couple of enemies and stepping through the portal, it also turned out that this was a realm of endless darkness. The sky was covered in blood red, the morning never came even when I slept until morning, and monster spawns were a regular threat that could pile on top of the other POI encounters, all while some airships lazily flew about overhead.

It wasn’t what I would call dire, but it also wasn’t a particularly inviting or charming visit, especially since things were so dark that I had to crank up my gamma to even spot things. That does bring up a problem with Nightingale that I keep having but forgetting to note: This game is really, really bad at lighting things. I get that the darkness is meant to be dark, but the lantern that I hold often feels like it puts out a pretty meager glow, and the lighting I’ve put in my new manor doesn’t really illuminate things well.

Regardless, I did a couple of combat-focused POIs and managed to hoover up a whole bunch of ore that I needed for future wall sconce crafting projects, then elected to come back home. Overall this generated map was rather teensy and it didn’t have a lot of places to explore, but it at least did have lots of ores. That could come in handy!

… or perhaps it couldn’t. I don’t recall when this was added, but Nightingale now has the ability to gather additional NPCs as workers who can be assigned to gathering locations, which in turn generates a whole bunch of mats. Last week I built a farming plot, assigned an NPC to it, and told them to gather wheat, and without looking, my cairn is sitting on almost 1,000 sheaves of wheat. I can make so much hard tack, you guys.

Also, for the record, I did indeed apply the Cozy Winter realm effect, and while it did apply a cold debuff that lowered my maximum health, I’m also in an abeyance realm where I’m absolutely not in any danger, and it makes things look really nice if you ask me.

We’re at the final leg of this return journey through Nightingale, so let’s close out strong. As mentioned earlier, I’m right next to a portal, so I can just craft and play realm cards any ol’ time I want to get resources. However, the convenience of having NPCs hoovering up materials is pretty good. Almost too good, actually; I worry that I’m going to drown in wheat or ore or other things. So, what say you? Go with convenience or go with adventure?

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The second poll is yet again about primary gameplay focus. I plan on doing both of these things over this final week of time in Nightingale; it’s just a question of what will take priority.

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Polling will wrap up at the usual time of 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, April 25th. In the meantime, I think I’ll at least make sure that I’ve got materials gathered and ready for what comes next, whether that’s girding for a dive into the Magwytch Marshes or improving my tidy Tudor home.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.