I finally got to log into Fallen Earth tonight, only to found South Berg was more or less deserted. I guess the hardcore gamers have all moved on to more challenging areas, and we casuals just don’t all log in on a weeknight.

I loved it. I’m not being as anti-social as that sounds, really. After all this *is* a post-apocalyptic world and (it seems to me) population should feel a bit sparse. Plus stocking up on harvesting materials was so much easier than it was when the place was crawling with players. For example, there’s a quest to mine scrap copper from a quarry in South Burg. If memory serves, I needed 10 bits of scrap copper for that quest and I think it took me about 30 minutes to do on the weekend. There was *so* much competition for the limited nodes that as soon as one popped, 3 or 4 players would jump on it. Tonight in about 15 minutes I harvested ~40 bits of scrap copper and could have done more if my pack hadn’t grown too heavy.

Then I set up a ton of crafting jobs. 10 batches of zip gun ammo, a bunch of “fried chicken” (really fried crawler meat, but it tastes just like irradiated chicken! Which is not to be confused with Prairie Chicken, a specimen of which is shown below), a fingerless glove for myself (I’d made one before, not realizing “fingerless glove” was literally 1 glove, so my poor dude is running around with 1 fingerless glove and 1 hand wrap) and 3 pairs of moccasins (to skill up armor-making — if anyone needs a pair let me know). I’m going to estimate that’s about 3 hours of crafting time.

With that done, I decided to jog over to Mumford, another starter town. See, as you gain experience you get APs (I forget what that stands for… Achievement Points maybe? Attribute Points?). You spend these to bump up your stats and skills. But some quests give you bonus AP, and every starter town has different quests that give these bonus AP. So min/max characters are going to do each of the 9 starter towns to wring out every bit of bonus AP they can. I don’t know as I’ll go that far but I’m still working my tradeskills and am happy noodling around in ‘easy mode’ so I’ll at least do Mumford and maybe North Burg.

On the way there I found a nice patch of Woolly Cactus (Cactus is a miracle plant in Fallen Earth. There’s burning cactus that gives acid, water cactus that gives tainted water, cactus cactus that gives cactus and the woolly cactus that gives wool.) and Cotton Plants, so I harvested those and marked the spot on my map for later. Then a decent patch of copper and finally a crashed plane with lots of salvage opportunities, once I took care of the Blade Dancers loitering about. Hey by then I had a few batches of zip gun ammo and that stuff gets heavy. May as well indulge in a bit of target practice and cut down the riff-raff in the area! By that time my pack was full again so I trudged into town. LOTS of work to be done there, but after dumping some extra ore and other heavy items in the bank, I logged for the night.

To a lot of people, this is going to sound like a really dull night of gaming, but to me it was really enjoyable. I love scraping together the odds and ends I need to craft something, and of course I love exploring and finding things.