a blade of grass

hi, i'm Forest, i like nature and terraria and tiny weird videogames.

Still playing Vilmonic. It's super good for just kind of throwing on a podcast and zoning out and clicking around or just watching to see what happens. Starting to understand it a bit better, I've figured out how to dig up radiation to mutate the lifeforms faster, and I'm getting the hang of building, but trying to actually steer the direction of evolution is pretty hit and miss? I assume if you want, say, amphibious anims, the idea is to shove a bunch of anims into a space that's more watery than they would prefer and wait for evolution to do its thing. Which would be fine, except that mostly when I do this they all seem to die out. Maybe I need more and/or tougher lifeforms.

In other pixely-fungus-and-bugs simulator news, I have also been playing Earthtongue! I honestly kind of love it. It's not an evolution sim, or at least not in the sense of the individual creatures evolving, though you do kind of get to watch an ecosystem evolve and change. It's basically a vivarium simulator: throw in some bugs, some fungus, and see what happens. Maybe they'll all die. Maybe the bugs will reproduce wildly and eat all the fungus unless you keep throwing more in. Maybe they'll find a perfect symbiotic equilibrium!

Slightly morbid note: it seems to take bug corpses a long time to decay, which means that a few times when I've clicked away and left Earthtongue to do its own thing for a while, I've come back to find the bugs scrambling over the corpses of their predecessors stacked 3 or 4 deep. Little bit unsettling at first, but hey, it doesn't seem to bother them.

Really awesome note about Earthtongue: it's only $5, but if you're struggling to afford it, there's also the option to pay by making some fanart.

been playing Vilmonic most of the weekend and I feel like maybe I am just missing something because so far either everything just dies early on, or the island just explodes with life and new shit starts evolving all over the place, and I feel like my actions aren't really influencing things towards one outcome or another. I'll keep poking at it, because I definitely don't feel like I've figured out all there is to it yet.

I really really love the idea of evolution games but nothing I've ever played has really quite got the... thing that I want? I want to be able to go like “Hey I'm gonna put a bunch of fast-moving predators in this area” or “Hey I'm gonna increase the rainfall here” and then just... see what that does to the ecosystem and how the life forms adapt to that. I don't really even want goals or success/failure, I just wanna play God and see what kind of weirdness simulated evolution can come up with. I feel like Vilmonic might do some of that, once I get a bit better at it? But actually, the closest thing I've found so far to what I'm looking for is this browser game.

You can crossbreed flowers. You can sort of introduce environmental pressures, in that you can decide to go 'okay, every generation I'm gonna kill off the two shortest/brightest-coloured/leafiest plants' and watch as the plants evolve to get taller/duller/less-leafy. (You have to do that by manually identifying and killing them, you can't automate it, but still.) Or you can leave them alone and see what random chance evolves them into. It's relaxing and lowkey fascinating and I love it and if Vilmonic comes close to that with its weird cute little animals and fungoids I'm probably gonna end up obsessed with it.

so the idea for this was that i'd write about whatever games i was playing that week and just, i don't know, probably be enthusiastic about them. maybe other stuff. idk.

i love platform games and miney-crafty games and anything you can possibly play as a farming sim. if there's the option to grow crops in it, i will end up doing nothing else... though oddly, with the exception of stardew valley, i usually don't really like actual dedicated farming sim games. much more fun to build a weird 2d vertical farm in starbound and run around doing errands for your colony members and selling carrots to the space shops.

i'm not actually good at platform games, or most genres. fuck it. who cares about getting good? if i love something enough i'll usually persist with it long enough to struggle through to the end, but i'm never gonna pretend i'm particularly good. when i see all that 'SUPER FIENDISHLY HARD' stuff in a game's description it doesn't exactly add to the appeal for me. sure, i love celeste and spelunky, but honestly? i wouldn't love them any less if they were juuuust a tiny bit easier.

so uh, yeah, that's me: i suck at games but mostly love them anyway and i'd like to try to write things down instead of just rambling to myself in my own head. hi.

ok! so i have this up and running now i guess?

gonna try to use this to write about games i play and maybe stuff i read. let's see how it goes.