I Wasn't Too Much Of A Fan Of How The Problems Would Just Disappear Once You Defeated A Main Boss In

I wasn't too much of a fan of how the problems would just disappear once you defeated a main boss in tears of the kingdom. For example, having the blizzard stop would probably have been enough to save rito village, but they instead had all the snow melt in an instant.

Creating fantasy religions: something I'm doing now so thought I would post about my process.

The mistake a lot of writers make is developing a religion from a singular event, and piling a ton of stuff on top of it that makes logical sense. Whereas, in reality, religions are self propelling systems that travel under their own steam and if there is an event that catalyses them, it is never in a socio-cultural or political and economic vacuum.

You also end up with an apparently totally random set of things attached to one figure which does make sense if you know the origins, but otherwise is just accepted even if the meaning is lost.

It is the difference between "the god of Midwinter and festivals around this originated because a cult of necromancers were banished into the frozen wastes and this <event> became the Origin Story for how we got to a midwinter festival with creepy bone puppets in my fantasy world" and a religion that feels ... Real.

Ok so firstly, this is a bit too neat. (This was my original reasoning for a midwinter god called Yarash and I changed it because it wasn't very realistic or interesting for my world.)

Why, let's say, is the god whose feast is at midwinter also the patron of puppet makers and osteopaths?

Well, we could say that this makes a lot of sense because the god's festival was originally to do with remembering the dead, and puppets were used in the festival to represent the dead, as necromancy should have been part of it but people didn't actually know how to raise the dead properly. Then as magic evolved people could actually raise the dead for short periods to deliver messages in these festivals, but this drew internal debate from the conservative priests who thought puppets were the original form and so should be maintained, and necromancy was an aberration, vs the progressives who saw necromancy as the original INTENTION and so the natural and correct progression from the puppets. The debate might rage on for years creating splinters, sects, differing traditions that sit uneasily together but find middle ground in other less controversial topics and practices, and even cults.

At some point, the secular authorities get involved for their own reasons. Maybe some rulers are pro-"The Old Bones" or anti-, or they want to outlaw necromancy or benefit from it for various political reasons, socio-cultural reasons, economic reasons, military intelligence reasons, etc. Whatever happens, happens. Times change. Official attitudes swing back and forth, while internally the religious debates continue, now informed by and perhaps as counters to, this secular intervention.

Then we end up in modern times, the times of the story. Nobody really believes in gods anymore. They do remember the old gods of the seasons and at the secular festival in winter, there are a lot of traditional puppet shows that have a whole history and life of their own. The puppets are called "the old bones" and nobody really remembers why. Osteopaths have the puppets and symbols relating to the midwinter festival on their certificates and college heraldry and nobody really remembers why, but the information is there to look up and is a fun thing to know for trivia nights.

And necromancy... is a controversial branch of science, divorced from its original religious significance for many but not for all, and more integrated as an art or practice in the public consciousness (positively or negatively depending on perspective and propaganda and actual usage).

And now, you have a ton of depth and meat to it without having to flesh out the arguments and debates themselves unless that is plot relevant.

There is a lot you can do with this society now, and by tweaking one thing you can create completely different societies and ideologies. The depth is now there to set your story at any point during this history and to develop numerous ideas. So much stuff can happen.

With the singular event version, and a static fact of a necromancy cult in the frozen wastes, things are much more limited and linear, with less depth to play with.

Also remember that your characters will not be expected to know everything about your world unless they are experts in religion and/or history, and also the 2 subjects are not mutually inclusive so a historian is not an expert theologian and vice versa. How much the average person on the street knows depends on levels of formal education, accessible knowledge beyond formal education, which may include religious instruction and folklore, and propaganda. But it means you can build in some subtle things - like the puppet symbols on the door of an osteopath or bone doctor - that never need to be explained, but have a logical in-world explanation below the surface.

Try taking a static idea and work it into a system and see where it leads!

So like, there's some really shitty video that this toy saw a while back about QoL mods in Terraria and how if you install all of them and then crank all of their settings up to the maximum, then the game basically plays itself. The whole video was weirdly hostile and vindictive and effectively just made fun of the concept of QoL features/mods as a whole. But it stuck in this toy's mind, not because the video itself holds any value, but because the core topic of how quality of life & accessibility features have a tangible impact on a game's design is really interesting and nobody talks about it with any kind of nuance.

So like, Terraria is obviously a very different game from what it used to be. But all of the raw content (hardmode, bosses, biomes, weapons, NPCs, etc.) that always gets the spotlight in updates only makes up a relatively-small portion of that outside of, like, the tinkerer’s workshop from 1.1, and damage classes being added in 1.0.6, both being relatively-early additions. The plethora of things that were changed/added to make the game look nicer also aren't the core thing responsible, obviously. So what is the biggest reason modern Terraria feels so alien when compared to 1.0.X versions, or even 1.1?

It's the quality of life features. Inventory management got exponentially easier/more efficient, you have a minimap at all times, smart cursor lets you expend far less effort mining and dealing with backwalls, there are special equipment slots for grappling hooks and light pets, grappling hooks are bound to a hotkey instead of being an item that you need to manually select and use, you can use items directly from your inventory instead of needing to place them in your hotbar and then select that hotbar slot, you automatically walk up 1-block inclines and open/close doors as you walk through them, there’s a plethora of features to make getting around the world trivial, the start of the game moves way faster due to the player getting access to better equipment faster, block-swapping exists… This toy posits that this is all why Terraria feels like a fundamentally different game. In old versions, it felt like you had to fight tooth and nail to get anything accomplished, but nowadays, everything feels all buttery-smooth. The main friction you encounter in progressing through the game is with boss fights, as Re-Logic obviously intends.

Now, obviously, it would be insane and stupid to claim that Terraria is a worse game, right now, than it was all the way back in the 1.0.X era, and it would be even stupider to claim that it’s worse because it has QoL features. However, this toy does not believe that every single QoL feature added to the game was inherently objectively positive or correct from the game's inception. Rather, they were natural, smart conclusions for Re-Logic to come to with the direction they decided to take the game in as it continued development. But this was not the only direction Terraria’s development could have taken.

There’s a very unique feeling to old-ass Terraria versions, and it sucks that tracking down and playing these versions is so goddamn hard. You only ever have a vague idea of where you are because there’s no map to use as reference so you’re heavily encouraged to keep most of your stuff on the surface, and to build infrastructure to connect important things underground/in the sky so you don’t get lost. Everything is so unwieldy that building a simple house and making it look remotely nice feels like a herculean effort, enemies kick your ass way harder earlygame due to decent gear being much harder to access, and there’s a lot more gravity to the choices you make in what gear you use, because it’s a lot harder to hot-swap your armor and accessories when you're not actually at your base, which is harder to get to/from due to the world being far more difficult to navigate, as a whole.

This all leads to an exponentially slower game than modern-day Terraria is, where every single thing you do needs to be deliberate and well-thought-out, and everything takes a much longer time to do. This toy remembers spending weeks as a kid building housing for the meager number of NPCs that were in the game back then, alongside farms for all of the potion-making herbs and a big obsidian generator, and all of that could be accomplished in a single play session in 1.4.X.

There is a universe in which Terraria saw minimal QoL updates and instead leaned really hard into this direction, making a slow, exploratory game where the player’s power level very slowly increments upwards and you’re encouraged to build largescale infrastructure rather than the (relatively) fast-paced boss rush where your power balloons out of control immediately and your infrastructure is a fast-travel teleportation network that takes minimal effort to set up that the game currently is, and that version of the game would not have been wrong, inherently. It would’ve been more niche, for sure, but it wouldn’t have necessarily been bad, or even worse than the current game is.

This is what makes this toy sad that old Terraria versions are so difficult to get ahold of, as well as what fascinates it so much about the retro Minecraft community. Speaking of, let’s switch gears and talk about Minecraft for a bit.

Minecraft, as it’s sure most of the people reading this are well-aware, has recently been having something of a renaissance in its retro community, the people who prefer alpha and/or beta versions of the game to the modern game. A handful of complete overhaul mods have come out for these versions (notably, Better Than Adventure and ReIndev) that put interesting spins on the game’s design, basically asking the question, “What if Mojang decided on a different direction for Minecraft to take from this point in time?”

A lot of these mods cast aside the instant-gratification convenience and linear progression of modern Minecraft in favor of slower-paced, more survival-ey gameplay, placing more emphasis on the act of exploring your world and gathering resources as the core gameplay loop as opposed to… Well, modern Minecraft really doesn’t have much of a core gameplay loop to speak of, and that’s sort of the problem, now isn’t it? This toy doesn’t want to get too far into all of this, though, as its thoughts on Minecraft’s game design are not the focus of this essay. Rather, it wants to put the spotlight onto Minecraft’s community.

An ever-increasing number of people have been growing more and more critical of Minecraft over the last 5 or so years. It’s obviously always had its detractors, but in recent time, there have been more of them that have gotten more vocal, and it’s become pretty normal to have the take that Minecraft has been getting worse lately. And a big culprit that people keep pointing to is QoL. One of the most common criticisms of Minecraft online is that quality of life features have made it way too easy to trivialize the process of blasting through the game’s content, getting obnoxiously overpowered enchanted diamond (or netherite) gear, reaching the End, and getting access to elytra and shulker boxes.

Despite both being excessively popular games that have been made far easier through their QoL changes and overall polish, that have both been in constant development for over a decade at this point, the critical responses to those features in Terraria and Minecraft could not be more different. This is amusing, and gets at something deeper with regards to game design that this toy doesn’t know it’s ever heard anyone actually say: Quality of life features are fantastic tools for reducing the noise that gets in the way of a game’s vision, but when you add them haphazardly and/or with no real vision for what you want your game to be in the end, you can very easily wind up accidentally removing a large portion of what could’ve otherwise become compelling parts of your gameplay loop. They need to be used intelligently, or they can, in fact, harm your game and make a significant contingent of your playerbase enjoy it less.

do not stop talking about Palestine!

there are Shut It Down For Palestine actions planned for Friday, look for one in your area if you can. they're not all registered on the Shut It Down website, so check social media as well as their list.

Chapter 6: Cloud Castle Resting upon the crown of the world are the ruins of an ancient castle, the very place where the calamity was once defeated. The quiet and desolated peaks offer little resistance on this final stretch of the journey. if even the greatest of heroes could only delay the inevitable, what hope does a broken world have of stopping it?

Chapter 4: Bleeding forest Homeland of the krogues, the bleeding forest gets its name from the golden sap leaking out of its upper branches. The forest is overflowing with life. The Gnarly roots, trunks, and branches of twisted trees spreading in every direction. At the heart of the forest lies the krogue nest, said to be the origin of vigor, a highly addictive substance that provides great joy and life to a person, but slowly warp them into krogue-like creatures. Overall, its my favorite level aesthetically, through that came at the cost of a tileset that's kind of a pain to work with.