Choose My Adventure: The westward adventures of the Goldiyacht in Lost Skies

“Go west, middle-aged man!” That’s effectively what you fine poll-answering folk told me to do this week in Lost Skies, and I don’t know if I was being trolled by the wider community of this game or people were just genuinely curious, but this directive ended up being a lot more challenging than I had anticipated.

Now mind you, I’m not against some challenging encounters, and I still feel as if overall skill can definitely trump raw enemy level in this game, but when the margin for error is especially razor thin, it can make things move from interesting levels of difficulty to just straight-up frustration. But the first hurdle I had to cross was actually getting there.

When I had gathered up the resources I felt I would need to make my westward flight, there was an immense wall of cloud along the sky, meaning I didn’t really have any sort of focal point to use as a bearing beyond the full-on cardinal direction. Even so, the pollsters demanded and I must answer, so I took off.

…yeah, this was just as rough as I was expecting. The visibility as I pushed through this cloud wall was unsurprisingly poor, and the fact that my ship is still wind-powered made the travel feel just that little bit more arduous. After a certain point, I was growing a bit impatient and concerned that I was pushing too far away from my established home base, so I started shifting directions just slightly – enough to hopefully move through the clouds but not enough that I couldn’t navigate back.

Eventually the skies started to slightly clear, and I sighted at least two islands along the horizon. Any port in a storm, I thought to myself while I pointed the nose of the Goldiyacht towards one of these new lands.

Once again I have to kind of pat myself on the back for my airship piloting abilities. I’m beginning to get a hang for the angle of approach in terms of elevation and the best practices on how close to the ground I should be to land. The ship’s core projects a column of light that I can use to teleport back to its position in the Goldiyacht’s interior, but it reaches down only so far. Getting acclimated to the length of that column pets my brain.

What didn’t offer pets and what offered bites instead was the fauna on this island. Things started off poorly when a deer started to almost beat my ass while it required an alarming number of bullets to take down even with headshots. Then it went worse when I was attacked by a bull manta; I mentioned last week that killing mantas in this game sucks owing to their erratic movement and the extremely small window of attack times, but this one was compounded by another overly beefy health pool and attacks that constantly one-shot me.

I think I ended up falling to this thing about four or five times before I elected to cut my losses and leave. And then I died another three or so times as I was trying to get back to my ship and get out. I’m thankful that there’s no equipment degradation or repair requirements for gear in Lost Skies, but constantly going back to get my dropped goodie bag while being taken down constantly was not fun at all.

Once I headed out of the Island of Angry Mantas and Deer (that’s what I’m calling it now), I made for the second island I encountered. Here again were furiously hard deer, but there was also a couple of interesting looking structures. Structures usually mean treasures and tech to gather, so I girded myself and made berth.

Entering the primary structure that dominated this island’s landscape was no small feat owing to having to take down a deadly sniper turret while dodging a deer’s constant charging. Through persistence, careful aim, and a bit of geography cheese to cause the sniper turret to fire into a slight hill, I pushed my way in and found a whole bunch of stuff, not least of which being data disks, aka the resource I need in order to unlock more main recipes and advance down the skill tree.

This delve was even more interesting when I started plumbing further to find a rather tricky and vertical tunnel with massive metallic structures clogging up ares. Climbing and grappling was pretty harsh here, but I managed to get another data disk and at least a few more tech briefs used to upgrade recipes. I did lose a couple of things to the bottomless abyss, unfortunately. A couple more puzzles and disks and I elected to make my way out. While avoiding more mantas. Just in case.

Worn out and short on materials, I decided to move away from these islands and the western skies and make way back home. Once again the massive cloud wall made navigation hard, and since these islands were a bit off center from my initial heading, I ended up getting a tiny bit lost. Eventually I pushed past the clouds and found multiple islands around me. This felt familiar, but I wasn’t sure. So again, I aimed for the nearest island to try to get my bearings.

This landing confirmed that I was mostly back around where I started while also giving me more treasures while most importantly not giving me super-hard fauna to fight. After I started to take flight, I just happened to push my ship toward my established base camp. I want to say there was some navigational skill involved – I was pretty sure I recognized the island’s shape from a distance – but honestly I’m mostly chalking this up to dumb luck.

This little adventure once again illustrated some delights and problems with Lost Skies. On the one hand, the sense of exploration and finding new things continues to be one of the best motivators I’ve experienced in any survival sandbox. On the other hand, the lack of a map was really beginning to hurt, as was the fact that I just am not seeing any new armor schematics drop whatsoever. I’ve gotten six recipes for spicy tomato sauce, sometimes twice in one treasure chest, but damn if I can’t find some better armor anywhere.

I’m still glad that I did what I did and made out with as many shines as I gathered, but I’m also pretty much not going to go in that direction ever again. At least not until I’ve found some upgraded armor. But where defense fails, offense grows; I had enough tech briefs to upgrade my favored weapons to level five, have found a new revolver weapon that I could build, and have upgraded that to level five also.

I should also point out that, while personally navigating and charting the islands has its own sense of adventure, I’m beginning to see the value in using community-made maps, which appear to have confirmed that I landed on some rather hard islands indeed – namely, Time Devours All and the Well, which are levels 12 and 10 respectively.

So with that in mind, I think it’s time to choose a new direction. Besides westerly, anyway.

As for the second poll, along with recipes for weapons and spicy sauce, I also found a few new ship pieces and weapons, which leads me to think that perhaps it’s time to adjust my ship. On the one hand, the Goldiyacht has served me well, and I could just simply add a couple of things, but I also can’t escape the feeling that this is like those initial rectangular homes you always end up building when first playing a survivalbox, and so it could do with some added design. I will have to unlock and build an upgraded shipyard, but I’m also just one disk away from that unlock. So, yea or nay?

Polling will once again close at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, May 23rd. For the time being, I’ll busy myself with some reorganization of storage and materials gathering. I don’t know who told Bossa Studios that making inventory management involve fitting various square item shapes is fun design, but they were freaking lying to them.