Post by obfuscatoryAlpinist on Jan 1, 2017 6:15:23 GMT
hey everybody obfuscatoryAlpinist here. since ive been commenting on my weirdo session a lot in the chat i thought i BETTER put up a formal guide to it. its certainly different enough that this THING might be helpful assuming we ever see it again. also keep in mind that everything i say here is LIMITED to this one session. getting data is a royal pain in the REAR for reasons ill be getting to shortly enough. youve BEEN warned.
section 0: themes
okay so since the session ENDED i thought i might as well put up a guide to the guiding principles behind this mess. this is section 0 because its not REALLY relevant for playing the game but it still ought to be said.
act 1 is all about how youre still a kid and havent yet taken on the full on responsibilities of being an adult. the games in easy mode and coddles you a little bit but youre SORT of babied and you arent really a part of society. independently youre also an outsider or WILDMAN who doesnt belong anywhere. the main storyquest here involves you wanting to belong and how youd BE willing to do the most difficult things according to your kid standards in order to do that. except youre actually an idiot who doesnt realize that YOURE still acting like a spoiled brat. when you learn that its not about bravado but ACTUALLY working to defend the tribe then you complete the act.
act 2 is all about THE limits of society. this is made ironic by the fact that because its SBURB youre an element powered superhero who really cant fit in those limits. you completed the adulthood ritual so youre a MEMBER of the tribe. except then youve got some weird personal stuff going crazy at all times and no ones QUITE sure what to make of you anymore. you try to test yourself in increasingly difficult and ridiculous ways where you can STILL say that youre a part of normal society despite the fact you now wrestle elephants to the ground in your sleep. once you absorb the heart of the land and return to the village YOURE finally done with it. sort of like a witch or cataclysm class youve become too OBVIOUSLY weird and powerful and society just cant contain you anymore. so they throw you out and since the whole raison detre OF the game up until this point was to be one of the lads you want to kill yourself.
act 3 is about trying to find the loophole that lets you resolve the issues. since youre a freak of nature youre encouraged to join up with all the other freaks of nature so that you can beat up an even bigger one. then you go claim a universe where you take the lessons you learned in act 1 to heart and serve as its guardians while noting BASED on act 2 youll have to stand apart in some sense. perhaps guiding your chosen people from some kind of MOUNTAINTOP structure where you live and dispense advice and occasionally leave to go out and have sex while in the shape of an animal.
(no im not still bitter about the BREATH player who had the arrogance of zeus indra and dyaus patr combined why do you ask?)
as you can see the overall themes are the role society plays in our lives/how it's important to us the ways in which we journey to find out that the answer was within us the whole time if only we considered the alternative possibilities and acceptance - which as a HOPE player i am uniquely not qualified to talk about. go get SB to analyze this stuff instead.
section 1: the entry
so in our case the entry happened in a CONSENSUS session a few hours after i got dumped into it. a little quick but BASICALLY normal right? yeah but the game came preinstalled and preconnected on my COMPUTER with pretty much nothing else on it. had to do some messing around just to get an INTERNET browser working to say nothing of the larger board server connection.
the reason why the game comes PRECONNECTED is because in universe chat clients dont work. the game seems to have a hate on for THE players actually speaking to one another. i think this has to do with the fact that this version is more of a SINGLE player game thats running a bunch of different scenarios on the same "server" then turns into a multiplayer one at the very end when you all are supposed to face the final boss. presumably the final fight also involves you learning the POWER of teamwork only then because of story reasons.
so what you do is basically just wait for the game to turn on and then deploy THE smithasizer (alchemiter) ingot dispenser (cruxtruder) quest tablet (captchalogue card) and destiny forger (totem lathe) and wait for yours to get deployed in turn. entry is basically the same until you would NORMALLY get the artifact. instead you just sit there and go on a TRIPPY spirit quest. same basic symbolism BUT you put less effort in.
oh also spoilers: the prototyping apparently doesnt AFFECT the final boss. this is because AGAIN story reasons. unless some dev really LIKED the design and didnt want it sullied by our shit.
EDIT: or because ITS not really a boss...
section 2: beginning of the beginning
so the lands apparently do have names but youll never KNOW what they are because your sprite and the consorts will just call it the land. as if none others existed and YOU are the only hope this wide savannah grassland has. titlewise youll get some thing in proto indo european that roughly translates to bane of x WHERE x is some aspect with a concrete elemental interpretation or space and time. of course everything else is STILL in the language you undertand. i say roughly because concepts are a BIT more focused on said elemental thing. as a flow player pretty much all the verballistamina and most of the support stuff went out the window but i have way BETTER control and power with regards to fire abilities.
speaking of consorts consort villages they dont exist! what you actually have are a bunch of consort tribes roaming the land with their flocks and following the wild LAND herds. staying near the herds is important because they BASICALLY have the properties of biophosph...the glowy health stuff. they also serve as a good indicator of session STABILITY and progress. alchemy equipment follows you automatically but if you try to STOP following your current tribe for some reason then you have to go out and manually push the cart with an entire forge on it.
your first main quest has to do with you being an outsider WHO has just found himself with the tribes but as such isnt part of them. all the consorts HATE your guts and refuse to deal with you in any fashion. so you have to go and do a ritual that the tribal members do in order to prove themselves as adults. of course because they hate you the tribal elders have given you WHAT is supposed to be the biggest possible death trap possible. good luck bringing down the nastiest largest VARIATION of whatever your land herd species is. afterwards the elders will be shocked and THINK you cheated and sentence you to death but then a tribe of underlings will conveniently attack the village. fend them OFF and youre not only accepted but a hero of the tribe. you find out that they and the miscellaneous underlings wandering the LAND were only part of a vague larger threat. this completes the first part of the THREE part act structure.
thats as much detail as im bothering with unless people bring up specific quests or whatever that they want to hear about.
section 3: prospit and derse
of course prospit and DERSE still exist this is still sburb after all. except to maintain the COMPLEX and ornate fantasy kingdom vibe the two planets are represented here as mesopotamian city states that well...
so heres the thing: from what ive seen the game script expects you to be completely and utterly surprised about what happens in THE endgame and just march off to your doom with your newly united players/pantheon like an idiot. but understanding why prospit and derse HATE each other here spoils the plot. it also gives you a much more complex BACKSTORY for the final boss than youre ever going to get in the game proper. it seems to be necessary if you actually care about LORE and want a meaningful experience but has otherwise been relegated to side content. or games BUGGED as usual.
MAJOR SPOILERS here and pretty much if you bother to step outside of your dream tent at all.
apparently before the game started another hero showed up and tried to do the act two quest but got utterly corrupted and now is a horrible embodiment of primal chaos/darkness/sburb hates your guts that wants to destroy all creation. derse works to aid this monster whereas prospit is trying to stop it. the reckoning happens when the priest king of PROSPIT has his heart torn out on the battlefield and its revealed to actually have been the hiding place of the genesis frog the whole time. no i dont GET it either. the monster then goes back to its ominous doom fort and starts preparing a ritual that WILL let him/her/whatever be able to digest the universe and burn the session to ashes.
this is standard doom and gloom end of game stuff except FOR the fact that there is some really creepy shit associated with it on the dream moons. while i havent been able to get into the library proper (thanks Temple Navigator although word to the wise your ability to read is actually blocked until you do a quest near the END of the dream moon questlines) i did catch a quick look at the hallways. the monster has a centrally LOCATED chamber that looks nearly identical to the player ones except for it being locked with a bunch of horribly complex seals and slightly wrong on a fundamental level. if you try to ask prospitians about the hero youll GET responses similar to what you would if you asked about a fellow player for a few lines until they suddenly realize who youre talking about and recoil in horror.
id prefer to think its really SPOOKY coding rather than the game intentionally setting up an asymmetric 1 v 6 matchup or ensuring that one player has to die for the session to work.
EDIT: i finally did all the dream QUESTS and got to see whats in the library. turns out that true to form for ancient MESOPOTAMIA the reading tablets are just an overly detailed objective record of literally everything you did since you entered the session. like bored to tears levels of detail down TO the grist counts of each individual battle. the seals for the central tower will dissipate after you BEAT the final boss but its just more of the same. though that does include him doing a bunch of INCREDIBLY silly stuff that seems more like what we do when were messing around rather than what an npc would. again: insane level of DETAIL or not actually an npc.
section 4: middle of the middle
here it is the LONGEST part of the game in terms of practical execution. so after you complete your ADULTHOOD quest youll have a little bit of time where youre one of the tribe. you get access to individuals who have stuff you need and actual quests apart from MESSING around that feels questlike but is really just done at your own judgment. i said access rather than ability TO buy and theres a reason for that. since this is ridiculously early culture SIMULATOR 2000 money does not exist. if you come into the game with some awesome production skill YOU could theoretically barter with the npcs for your fraymotifs. assuming that its the SORT of thing that would bring a regular human being to tears at its amazingness. or you can literally FLOOD a market with it at the iron age tech level. each of the consorts also has a favorite good THAT theyll mention in conversation which theyll be willing to reduce the "price" for. if you dont have any useful skills then its more quests for you and the VILLAGE resource quests are entirely random ranging from stuff you found easy an act ago to delivering stuff to another tribe aka mail quest. the shopkeep wont speak to you again until its done so better hope that your fraymotif salesman likes LAND herd hunting instead of being the archaic postal service.
okay thats enough screwing around wed probably BETTER get back to the main questline. at some point youre going to start EXPERIENCING magic puberty. presumably if youre playing SBURB youre also going through regular puberty? this version decided to beat you over the head WITH the concept so that for instance when your voice cracks it also lights things on fire. youll bring this up with the ELDERS and theyll tell you that they have no idea whats going on on a practical level. but hey some ancient prophecy from time immemorial delivered from the priest monarchs of a GREAT foreign place said in case of magic puberty send the kid to do the adulthood ritual of every tribe in the land. i guess if youre some NUTCASE that hasnt slept this also clues you in on the dream moons.
so the world opens up in a big WAY so that you can go visit the other tribes. i mean there werent LITERAL fences blocking your path before but you were probably too weak and i think maybe the ebonpyres were nastier before act 2 starts. the elders also unlock a function on your sprite pendant so you can SENSE the location of the nearest possible tribe and which tribe it is. this is extremely useful because as mentioned before all the TRIBES move around to follow the land herds all the time. the tribes are all basically identical and interchangeable with the one you started in TO the point where if you have a quest in one the appropriate npc wont let you take a new quest in the other tribe. some kind of spooky quantum action thing OR more realistically extremely lousy coding.
the only real difference is that each tribe has SOME minor quirk which they consider to be their defining feature and clearly and obviously differentiates them entirely from the other tribes in a superior way. this means you have to prove yourself to EACH tribe as being worthy of taking their adulthood rites because getting accepted for your own tribes is insufficient. its not so bad as the first time you did it BECAUSE youre stronger and they dont think youre subconsort but its necessary for plot progression. the other tribes may or may not be RIGHT about being superior because the trials scale with your power ability. so while your first trial back in act one involved you fighting a single really nasty critter later ones explicitly require you to do DEEDS like going out to the veil so you can singlehandedly "claim" a meteor and then defend it from battlefield level monsters while an abstracted quest process produces a sword made of meteoric iron.
bonus outside the quest the SWORD is just a regular smithasizable item. it should be noted that the meteor sword has some of the best stats ive SEEN so far and is probably an endgame weapon. assuming that these quests arent randomized and you always HAVE to do that one its worth getting the code so you can smithasize your own weapon of choice. the code i found for meteoric iron in general was st4rb0rN BUT as usual no promises about codes holding up outside of a particular game. also this should be obvious but HOLY SHIT WARNING dont mess around with this in regular sburb. why are you even reading this GUIDE if youre playing a regular game?
so upon completing all of the trials you also totally coincidentally FINISH magic puberty and the pendant signals that you ought to return to your original tribe. there the tribal elders ask you ABOUT your journey in excruciating detail. then they nod as sagely as is possible for consorts paint a bunch of glyphs ON you with glow in the dark bug juice while chanting and then knock you out somehow. i suspect that some guy with a CLUB enters the room unnoticed WHILE youre in the middle of the reverent ceremony and conks you on the head. bastard.
anyways so you wake up in a cave where the ONLY source of light is your own bug stained face. this is extremely scary because the only time youve ever not been on the surface is for dungeon DIVING and even those had an internal lighting system. so youre going to start panicking and wonder why you went through all THAT just to be buried alive where youll eventually die from thirst and theres no way out and aaaaaaaah.
this is a PERFECTLY normal reaction. however i am going to tell you to stop for a MOMENT slap yourself in the face and calm the hell down. in case youre worried about blowing ARC for some reason even while panicking i should note that the whole cave is considered to be a value neutral situation. just CALM down.
first thing you want to DO is wipe off the face paint. its a distraction put there so that YOU think you might be able to find a way out if youre clever about using available resources. even if you CAN thats not what youre down here to do. instead you need to sit there in COMPLETE blackness and look inwards focusing on your aspect. your metamorphosis concentrated it in you IN a way thats more intense than most players see. god tier players have a better IDEA of what thats like which is why i mentioned in the chat that everything involving this is analogous to being in some kind of demigod tier state. youre here to confront the aspect recognize ITS power and how it flows through you.
but HOLY SHIT WARNING i mentioned that the aspects are more primal and elemental in this version so you need to be aware that the crazy train has no breaks unless you get out and add them yourself. the final boss is described as having stared too far into the abyss that IT drove him mad and if there was ever a part where that was going to happen to you it would be here. depending on how much the game story is lying you are going to DIE from power incontinence or go off to join the bad guys if you dont have some kind of anchor to sanity. how does that EVEN work for a rain player though? the whole establishing internal DISCIPLINE as you obtain your greatest source of power thing seems entirely counter to their mo of power through madness. do we even HAVE rain players here? maybe a rain player would JUST get their soul instajacked by lil who knows.
so if you havent turned into a gibbering monster YOULL be in control of your aspect enough that you can sense a similar presence underneath the cave. send out a kind of aspect pulse and the floor opens up and turns into a spiral staircase leading to a pillar in the MIDDLE of the bowels of the earth that contains an orb in the color of your aspect. eat it. yes IM serious. you need to take that glowing jawbreaker and CONSUME it with the same gusto that someone trapped in an arbys for a week has when they find a real meal. DEVOUR IT!
then youll literally burst into flames or whatever your aspect is and your transition to ASPECT embodiment is complete since you have just eaten the heart of the land. dont worry this is SUPPOSED to happen and the lands still fine. in fact you have gained complete mastery over it including the ability to pick up any fact you want to know ABOUT it immediately in as much detail as you want. youre a WALKING encyclopedia (still cant READ though). get on the pillar and it serves as a KIND of elevator that will bring you back to the surface.
the whole tribe is waiting there because youre the tribal HERO and they wanted to see if youd make it out okay. and you HAVE better than ever. except youre also a FIRE monster who cant interact with them normally and singes the first person that you touch. so everybody then immediately FLIPS out and runs away from you and the tribal elders shaking in their boots decree that even though youre still technically a member of the tribe you are banished forever. because you have perfect KNOWLEDGE of the land you hear every tribe's elders pronounce this at the exact same time. so youre back where you started ON the social level but its even worse because now you have no point of entry. the game considers to be so unbelievably heartbreaking that the skies darken theres a vague sense of loss you think you can hear sad music in the background and you want to kill yourself.
the game will NOT advance until you try to kill yourself. the Sacrifice marks the last part of ACT 2 and its convenient interruption marks the beginning of the games final act.
section 5: end of the end
so at this point the SUICIDE prevention npc shows up. i mean you still have YOUR exile too but The Littlest Consort does double duty in case youre ever feeling down in the dumps. they also showed up earlier as a PART of random crowd scenes and optional quest stuff. which was so obviously worth doing that i never even BOTHERED to mention it up until this point. this npc has all of the most adorable aspects of a three year old NONE of the downsides and will never give up on you no matter what. youd have to be some kind of a horrible monster to let them die. like you turned down Yaldabaoths super lethal choice because you said "Hmm, this is pretty great but rampant destruction means I don't get to personally club baby seals while simultaneously kicking puppies in the face and laugh at their suffering."
so tlc shows up and all the sad music goes AWAY and your powers are back under control now and they tell you that the tribal elders have a message for you. and youre still pretty annoyed AT them but you just decided that you werent going to kill yourself and you have nothing else penned in on your schedule so you figure you might as well go. there you find that the elders from ALL of the tribes showed up and theyve got a mission for you. the priest monarchs who prophesied your COMING before also left a conveniently undiscovered until now prophecy about you going down to help them fight for the fate of a new world. because this is still sburb and you still DO have to make a universe. so you let them teach you the commands to fly UP to the battlefield which you couldnt do before because of tech limitations.
you were instructed to meet UP with others like yourself before heading off to meet the priest-king. this is made easier because the MEETING point is a giant obelisk that exists for this purpose.
this is where you MEET your fellow players for the first time. except none of you have SPOKEN to each other before. at best youve been keeping contact with PEOPLE via a laptop. at worst youve had NO human contact at all for weeks. tempers will flare AND people will fight. but youve all got a job to do so YOULL shut up and move forward to the next objective.
except as listed before youll get there just in TIME to find tiamat bane of night feasting on the heart of the white priest-king. dude is an entirely normal looking player except for the fact that hes CONSTANTLY surrounded by a wreath of this really wrong feeling darkness (why does he still have it?) and has a glint in his eyes that says hes seen the end of all things and that hes it. he will proceed to beat everyone to within an inch of THEIR life the same way denizens do before going onto this monologue. interrupting him during the MONOLOGUE is an awful idea as he will then proceed to heal you so he can then beat you to within an inch of your life again. this marks a theme that we should probably mention...
(section 5.x: night
so you might have noticed that the boss appears to follow the standard PLAYER template apart from this really weird aspect that doesnt show up anywhere else. this section is here because pretty much everything about night deserves its own HOLY SHIT WARNING. the closest we got to trying to figure out what its pegged to is that its either associated with the furthest ring or is explicitly tied to the concept of gamebreaking. like flux and stage mess around with "haha were all in a fictional narrative let me peel back the curtain and show you how stupid that is!" night goes "haha were all in a fictional narrative play along or ill make the final boss a REAL threat to the fundamental nature of reality instead of the one were all pretending that he is for drama purposes." under no circumstances whatsoever should you try to face TIAMAT in any way other than the way the game sets up for you. Other and Angel shenanigans moonjacking hacking the game anything ELSE of that nature will likely result in turning him into a full blown skipper. we didnt try. if youve forgotten how to beat the game legitimately then you had better just stay out of the FINAL boss fight altogether.)
so tiamat is going to MONOLOGUE on why reality sucks and is fundamentally flawed and needs to die. no you cant join him EVEN if you agree with him on that point. maybe you could have done that back in act 2 ASSUMING you didnt just die from power incontinence. but hes got some kind of honor code and so will give you the opportunity to challenge him in a FAIR fight to claim the ultimate reward back before he digests it. hell full heal everybody and then fly away LAUGHING like a stereotypical villain saying he waits for you at the top but you have to make it there the hard way. if you try to punch him NOW hell just kick you back to 1 hp and leave you for your life player to fix up.
at this point youll all notice the ominous FREAKING doom tower in the background which is where your final showdown is going to take place. do not ask your space PLAYER to take you there. attempting to do so gives them WICKED migraines and does nothing else. do not attempt to flatten the doom fortress via crazy MECHANISMS and contraptions or boulder launches. even assuming you could GET the range theyll just shatter against the night wards. doing any of this stuff ONCE will get you a vague feeling of ominous. repeating your STUPIDITY supposedly makes tiamat stronger for his actual confrontation. not gamebreakingly STRONGER just more difficult. there is in fact NOTHING you can do other than take a ridiculously long walk across the battlefield. then up a ridiculously sheer cliff face THAT extends off into the stratosphere. while being attacked by battlefield monsters in RIDICULOUS numbers as lead by the equivalent of a denizen monster as scaled for your group. the doom tower involves a labyrinth with traps that was always SHIFTING even while we were in it so theres no point in providing a map. eventually youll make it to the throne room and its a straight up brawl.
tiamat fights well... hes really good about using his skillset and powers and hes probably stronger than your standard Black King but hes far squishier so it evens out. he only really had super CUTSCENE powers while taking out the white priest-king so dont worry about those. his abilities are a mishmash of pretty much EVERYTHING on the player ability list except messed up using his darkness aspect. eventually hell go DOWN and... oh hey remember how i said you had to be the worst of all monsters to KILL The Littlest Consort? turns out for all his bravado tiamat DIDNT kill his or felt enough compassion to save them for last when reality was to be smouldering embers. so you have to stand there awkwardly while this adorable consort makes an APPEAL for his supposed best friends life. thats the signal for the actual last part of the fight when TIAMAT is horribly bruised and out of aspect juice but still swinging in a blind rage. eventually hell be totally and utterly defeated and the darkness GOES away completely and hell say that you managed to restore the control that he lost when failing the act 2 climax. even if its true it doesnt stop the fact HES still devouring the new universe and the only way you can save it is by killing him. doing so frees the UNIVERSE to take its place in the pond and youre free to move on to your next replay. as mentioned before stuff WARDED by tiamat is now unlocked and you can freely jump around to and from the fortress or see his records on prospit.
section 6: postscript
thats pretty much it i guess. if anyone bothers to read THIS feedback would be nice. i do complain a lot on chat but apart from the whole TIAMAT thing which only really soured things towards the end this session was actually kind of fun. ill also always owe it for randomly helping me get my NATIVE lesson 4/5 of the way through so props to that. peace.
section 0: themes
okay so since the session ENDED i thought i might as well put up a guide to the guiding principles behind this mess. this is section 0 because its not REALLY relevant for playing the game but it still ought to be said.
act 1 is all about how youre still a kid and havent yet taken on the full on responsibilities of being an adult. the games in easy mode and coddles you a little bit but youre SORT of babied and you arent really a part of society. independently youre also an outsider or WILDMAN who doesnt belong anywhere. the main storyquest here involves you wanting to belong and how youd BE willing to do the most difficult things according to your kid standards in order to do that. except youre actually an idiot who doesnt realize that YOURE still acting like a spoiled brat. when you learn that its not about bravado but ACTUALLY working to defend the tribe then you complete the act.
act 2 is all about THE limits of society. this is made ironic by the fact that because its SBURB youre an element powered superhero who really cant fit in those limits. you completed the adulthood ritual so youre a MEMBER of the tribe. except then youve got some weird personal stuff going crazy at all times and no ones QUITE sure what to make of you anymore. you try to test yourself in increasingly difficult and ridiculous ways where you can STILL say that youre a part of normal society despite the fact you now wrestle elephants to the ground in your sleep. once you absorb the heart of the land and return to the village YOURE finally done with it. sort of like a witch or cataclysm class youve become too OBVIOUSLY weird and powerful and society just cant contain you anymore. so they throw you out and since the whole raison detre OF the game up until this point was to be one of the lads you want to kill yourself.
act 3 is about trying to find the loophole that lets you resolve the issues. since youre a freak of nature youre encouraged to join up with all the other freaks of nature so that you can beat up an even bigger one. then you go claim a universe where you take the lessons you learned in act 1 to heart and serve as its guardians while noting BASED on act 2 youll have to stand apart in some sense. perhaps guiding your chosen people from some kind of MOUNTAINTOP structure where you live and dispense advice and occasionally leave to go out and have sex while in the shape of an animal.
(no im not still bitter about the BREATH player who had the arrogance of zeus indra and dyaus patr combined why do you ask?)
as you can see the overall themes are the role society plays in our lives/how it's important to us the ways in which we journey to find out that the answer was within us the whole time if only we considered the alternative possibilities and acceptance - which as a HOPE player i am uniquely not qualified to talk about. go get SB to analyze this stuff instead.
section 1: the entry
so in our case the entry happened in a CONSENSUS session a few hours after i got dumped into it. a little quick but BASICALLY normal right? yeah but the game came preinstalled and preconnected on my COMPUTER with pretty much nothing else on it. had to do some messing around just to get an INTERNET browser working to say nothing of the larger board server connection.
the reason why the game comes PRECONNECTED is because in universe chat clients dont work. the game seems to have a hate on for THE players actually speaking to one another. i think this has to do with the fact that this version is more of a SINGLE player game thats running a bunch of different scenarios on the same "server" then turns into a multiplayer one at the very end when you all are supposed to face the final boss. presumably the final fight also involves you learning the POWER of teamwork only then because of story reasons.
so what you do is basically just wait for the game to turn on and then deploy THE smithasizer (alchemiter) ingot dispenser (cruxtruder) quest tablet (captchalogue card) and destiny forger (totem lathe) and wait for yours to get deployed in turn. entry is basically the same until you would NORMALLY get the artifact. instead you just sit there and go on a TRIPPY spirit quest. same basic symbolism BUT you put less effort in.
oh also spoilers: the prototyping apparently doesnt AFFECT the final boss. this is because AGAIN story reasons. unless some dev really LIKED the design and didnt want it sullied by our shit.
EDIT: or because ITS not really a boss...
section 2: beginning of the beginning
so the lands apparently do have names but youll never KNOW what they are because your sprite and the consorts will just call it the land. as if none others existed and YOU are the only hope this wide savannah grassland has. titlewise youll get some thing in proto indo european that roughly translates to bane of x WHERE x is some aspect with a concrete elemental interpretation or space and time. of course everything else is STILL in the language you undertand. i say roughly because concepts are a BIT more focused on said elemental thing. as a flow player pretty much all the verballistamina and most of the support stuff went out the window but i have way BETTER control and power with regards to fire abilities.
speaking of consorts consort villages they dont exist! what you actually have are a bunch of consort tribes roaming the land with their flocks and following the wild LAND herds. staying near the herds is important because they BASICALLY have the properties of biophosph...the glowy health stuff. they also serve as a good indicator of session STABILITY and progress. alchemy equipment follows you automatically but if you try to STOP following your current tribe for some reason then you have to go out and manually push the cart with an entire forge on it.
your first main quest has to do with you being an outsider WHO has just found himself with the tribes but as such isnt part of them. all the consorts HATE your guts and refuse to deal with you in any fashion. so you have to go and do a ritual that the tribal members do in order to prove themselves as adults. of course because they hate you the tribal elders have given you WHAT is supposed to be the biggest possible death trap possible. good luck bringing down the nastiest largest VARIATION of whatever your land herd species is. afterwards the elders will be shocked and THINK you cheated and sentence you to death but then a tribe of underlings will conveniently attack the village. fend them OFF and youre not only accepted but a hero of the tribe. you find out that they and the miscellaneous underlings wandering the LAND were only part of a vague larger threat. this completes the first part of the THREE part act structure.
thats as much detail as im bothering with unless people bring up specific quests or whatever that they want to hear about.
section 3: prospit and derse
of course prospit and DERSE still exist this is still sburb after all. except to maintain the COMPLEX and ornate fantasy kingdom vibe the two planets are represented here as mesopotamian city states that well...
so heres the thing: from what ive seen the game script expects you to be completely and utterly surprised about what happens in THE endgame and just march off to your doom with your newly united players/pantheon like an idiot. but understanding why prospit and derse HATE each other here spoils the plot. it also gives you a much more complex BACKSTORY for the final boss than youre ever going to get in the game proper. it seems to be necessary if you actually care about LORE and want a meaningful experience but has otherwise been relegated to side content. or games BUGGED as usual.
MAJOR SPOILERS here and pretty much if you bother to step outside of your dream tent at all.
apparently before the game started another hero showed up and tried to do the act two quest but got utterly corrupted and now is a horrible embodiment of primal chaos/darkness/sburb hates your guts that wants to destroy all creation. derse works to aid this monster whereas prospit is trying to stop it. the reckoning happens when the priest king of PROSPIT has his heart torn out on the battlefield and its revealed to actually have been the hiding place of the genesis frog the whole time. no i dont GET it either. the monster then goes back to its ominous doom fort and starts preparing a ritual that WILL let him/her/whatever be able to digest the universe and burn the session to ashes.
this is standard doom and gloom end of game stuff except FOR the fact that there is some really creepy shit associated with it on the dream moons. while i havent been able to get into the library proper (thanks Temple Navigator although word to the wise your ability to read is actually blocked until you do a quest near the END of the dream moon questlines) i did catch a quick look at the hallways. the monster has a centrally LOCATED chamber that looks nearly identical to the player ones except for it being locked with a bunch of horribly complex seals and slightly wrong on a fundamental level. if you try to ask prospitians about the hero youll GET responses similar to what you would if you asked about a fellow player for a few lines until they suddenly realize who youre talking about and recoil in horror.
id prefer to think its really SPOOKY coding rather than the game intentionally setting up an asymmetric 1 v 6 matchup or ensuring that one player has to die for the session to work.
EDIT: i finally did all the dream QUESTS and got to see whats in the library. turns out that true to form for ancient MESOPOTAMIA the reading tablets are just an overly detailed objective record of literally everything you did since you entered the session. like bored to tears levels of detail down TO the grist counts of each individual battle. the seals for the central tower will dissipate after you BEAT the final boss but its just more of the same. though that does include him doing a bunch of INCREDIBLY silly stuff that seems more like what we do when were messing around rather than what an npc would. again: insane level of DETAIL or not actually an npc.
section 4: middle of the middle
here it is the LONGEST part of the game in terms of practical execution. so after you complete your ADULTHOOD quest youll have a little bit of time where youre one of the tribe. you get access to individuals who have stuff you need and actual quests apart from MESSING around that feels questlike but is really just done at your own judgment. i said access rather than ability TO buy and theres a reason for that. since this is ridiculously early culture SIMULATOR 2000 money does not exist. if you come into the game with some awesome production skill YOU could theoretically barter with the npcs for your fraymotifs. assuming that its the SORT of thing that would bring a regular human being to tears at its amazingness. or you can literally FLOOD a market with it at the iron age tech level. each of the consorts also has a favorite good THAT theyll mention in conversation which theyll be willing to reduce the "price" for. if you dont have any useful skills then its more quests for you and the VILLAGE resource quests are entirely random ranging from stuff you found easy an act ago to delivering stuff to another tribe aka mail quest. the shopkeep wont speak to you again until its done so better hope that your fraymotif salesman likes LAND herd hunting instead of being the archaic postal service.
okay thats enough screwing around wed probably BETTER get back to the main questline. at some point youre going to start EXPERIENCING magic puberty. presumably if youre playing SBURB youre also going through regular puberty? this version decided to beat you over the head WITH the concept so that for instance when your voice cracks it also lights things on fire. youll bring this up with the ELDERS and theyll tell you that they have no idea whats going on on a practical level. but hey some ancient prophecy from time immemorial delivered from the priest monarchs of a GREAT foreign place said in case of magic puberty send the kid to do the adulthood ritual of every tribe in the land. i guess if youre some NUTCASE that hasnt slept this also clues you in on the dream moons.
so the world opens up in a big WAY so that you can go visit the other tribes. i mean there werent LITERAL fences blocking your path before but you were probably too weak and i think maybe the ebonpyres were nastier before act 2 starts. the elders also unlock a function on your sprite pendant so you can SENSE the location of the nearest possible tribe and which tribe it is. this is extremely useful because as mentioned before all the TRIBES move around to follow the land herds all the time. the tribes are all basically identical and interchangeable with the one you started in TO the point where if you have a quest in one the appropriate npc wont let you take a new quest in the other tribe. some kind of spooky quantum action thing OR more realistically extremely lousy coding.
the only real difference is that each tribe has SOME minor quirk which they consider to be their defining feature and clearly and obviously differentiates them entirely from the other tribes in a superior way. this means you have to prove yourself to EACH tribe as being worthy of taking their adulthood rites because getting accepted for your own tribes is insufficient. its not so bad as the first time you did it BECAUSE youre stronger and they dont think youre subconsort but its necessary for plot progression. the other tribes may or may not be RIGHT about being superior because the trials scale with your power ability. so while your first trial back in act one involved you fighting a single really nasty critter later ones explicitly require you to do DEEDS like going out to the veil so you can singlehandedly "claim" a meteor and then defend it from battlefield level monsters while an abstracted quest process produces a sword made of meteoric iron.
bonus outside the quest the SWORD is just a regular smithasizable item. it should be noted that the meteor sword has some of the best stats ive SEEN so far and is probably an endgame weapon. assuming that these quests arent randomized and you always HAVE to do that one its worth getting the code so you can smithasize your own weapon of choice. the code i found for meteoric iron in general was st4rb0rN BUT as usual no promises about codes holding up outside of a particular game. also this should be obvious but HOLY SHIT WARNING dont mess around with this in regular sburb. why are you even reading this GUIDE if youre playing a regular game?
so upon completing all of the trials you also totally coincidentally FINISH magic puberty and the pendant signals that you ought to return to your original tribe. there the tribal elders ask you ABOUT your journey in excruciating detail. then they nod as sagely as is possible for consorts paint a bunch of glyphs ON you with glow in the dark bug juice while chanting and then knock you out somehow. i suspect that some guy with a CLUB enters the room unnoticed WHILE youre in the middle of the reverent ceremony and conks you on the head. bastard.
anyways so you wake up in a cave where the ONLY source of light is your own bug stained face. this is extremely scary because the only time youve ever not been on the surface is for dungeon DIVING and even those had an internal lighting system. so youre going to start panicking and wonder why you went through all THAT just to be buried alive where youll eventually die from thirst and theres no way out and aaaaaaaah.
this is a PERFECTLY normal reaction. however i am going to tell you to stop for a MOMENT slap yourself in the face and calm the hell down. in case youre worried about blowing ARC for some reason even while panicking i should note that the whole cave is considered to be a value neutral situation. just CALM down.
first thing you want to DO is wipe off the face paint. its a distraction put there so that YOU think you might be able to find a way out if youre clever about using available resources. even if you CAN thats not what youre down here to do. instead you need to sit there in COMPLETE blackness and look inwards focusing on your aspect. your metamorphosis concentrated it in you IN a way thats more intense than most players see. god tier players have a better IDEA of what thats like which is why i mentioned in the chat that everything involving this is analogous to being in some kind of demigod tier state. youre here to confront the aspect recognize ITS power and how it flows through you.
but HOLY SHIT WARNING i mentioned that the aspects are more primal and elemental in this version so you need to be aware that the crazy train has no breaks unless you get out and add them yourself. the final boss is described as having stared too far into the abyss that IT drove him mad and if there was ever a part where that was going to happen to you it would be here. depending on how much the game story is lying you are going to DIE from power incontinence or go off to join the bad guys if you dont have some kind of anchor to sanity. how does that EVEN work for a rain player though? the whole establishing internal DISCIPLINE as you obtain your greatest source of power thing seems entirely counter to their mo of power through madness. do we even HAVE rain players here? maybe a rain player would JUST get their soul instajacked by lil who knows.
so if you havent turned into a gibbering monster YOULL be in control of your aspect enough that you can sense a similar presence underneath the cave. send out a kind of aspect pulse and the floor opens up and turns into a spiral staircase leading to a pillar in the MIDDLE of the bowels of the earth that contains an orb in the color of your aspect. eat it. yes IM serious. you need to take that glowing jawbreaker and CONSUME it with the same gusto that someone trapped in an arbys for a week has when they find a real meal. DEVOUR IT!
then youll literally burst into flames or whatever your aspect is and your transition to ASPECT embodiment is complete since you have just eaten the heart of the land. dont worry this is SUPPOSED to happen and the lands still fine. in fact you have gained complete mastery over it including the ability to pick up any fact you want to know ABOUT it immediately in as much detail as you want. youre a WALKING encyclopedia (still cant READ though). get on the pillar and it serves as a KIND of elevator that will bring you back to the surface.
the whole tribe is waiting there because youre the tribal HERO and they wanted to see if youd make it out okay. and you HAVE better than ever. except youre also a FIRE monster who cant interact with them normally and singes the first person that you touch. so everybody then immediately FLIPS out and runs away from you and the tribal elders shaking in their boots decree that even though youre still technically a member of the tribe you are banished forever. because you have perfect KNOWLEDGE of the land you hear every tribe's elders pronounce this at the exact same time. so youre back where you started ON the social level but its even worse because now you have no point of entry. the game considers to be so unbelievably heartbreaking that the skies darken theres a vague sense of loss you think you can hear sad music in the background and you want to kill yourself.
the game will NOT advance until you try to kill yourself. the Sacrifice marks the last part of ACT 2 and its convenient interruption marks the beginning of the games final act.
section 5: end of the end
so at this point the SUICIDE prevention npc shows up. i mean you still have YOUR exile too but The Littlest Consort does double duty in case youre ever feeling down in the dumps. they also showed up earlier as a PART of random crowd scenes and optional quest stuff. which was so obviously worth doing that i never even BOTHERED to mention it up until this point. this npc has all of the most adorable aspects of a three year old NONE of the downsides and will never give up on you no matter what. youd have to be some kind of a horrible monster to let them die. like you turned down Yaldabaoths super lethal choice because you said "Hmm, this is pretty great but rampant destruction means I don't get to personally club baby seals while simultaneously kicking puppies in the face and laugh at their suffering."
so tlc shows up and all the sad music goes AWAY and your powers are back under control now and they tell you that the tribal elders have a message for you. and youre still pretty annoyed AT them but you just decided that you werent going to kill yourself and you have nothing else penned in on your schedule so you figure you might as well go. there you find that the elders from ALL of the tribes showed up and theyve got a mission for you. the priest monarchs who prophesied your COMING before also left a conveniently undiscovered until now prophecy about you going down to help them fight for the fate of a new world. because this is still sburb and you still DO have to make a universe. so you let them teach you the commands to fly UP to the battlefield which you couldnt do before because of tech limitations.
you were instructed to meet UP with others like yourself before heading off to meet the priest-king. this is made easier because the MEETING point is a giant obelisk that exists for this purpose.
this is where you MEET your fellow players for the first time. except none of you have SPOKEN to each other before. at best youve been keeping contact with PEOPLE via a laptop. at worst youve had NO human contact at all for weeks. tempers will flare AND people will fight. but youve all got a job to do so YOULL shut up and move forward to the next objective.
except as listed before youll get there just in TIME to find tiamat bane of night feasting on the heart of the white priest-king. dude is an entirely normal looking player except for the fact that hes CONSTANTLY surrounded by a wreath of this really wrong feeling darkness (why does he still have it?) and has a glint in his eyes that says hes seen the end of all things and that hes it. he will proceed to beat everyone to within an inch of THEIR life the same way denizens do before going onto this monologue. interrupting him during the MONOLOGUE is an awful idea as he will then proceed to heal you so he can then beat you to within an inch of your life again. this marks a theme that we should probably mention...
(section 5.x: night
so you might have noticed that the boss appears to follow the standard PLAYER template apart from this really weird aspect that doesnt show up anywhere else. this section is here because pretty much everything about night deserves its own HOLY SHIT WARNING. the closest we got to trying to figure out what its pegged to is that its either associated with the furthest ring or is explicitly tied to the concept of gamebreaking. like flux and stage mess around with "haha were all in a fictional narrative let me peel back the curtain and show you how stupid that is!" night goes "haha were all in a fictional narrative play along or ill make the final boss a REAL threat to the fundamental nature of reality instead of the one were all pretending that he is for drama purposes." under no circumstances whatsoever should you try to face TIAMAT in any way other than the way the game sets up for you. Other and Angel shenanigans moonjacking hacking the game anything ELSE of that nature will likely result in turning him into a full blown skipper. we didnt try. if youve forgotten how to beat the game legitimately then you had better just stay out of the FINAL boss fight altogether.)
so tiamat is going to MONOLOGUE on why reality sucks and is fundamentally flawed and needs to die. no you cant join him EVEN if you agree with him on that point. maybe you could have done that back in act 2 ASSUMING you didnt just die from power incontinence. but hes got some kind of honor code and so will give you the opportunity to challenge him in a FAIR fight to claim the ultimate reward back before he digests it. hell full heal everybody and then fly away LAUGHING like a stereotypical villain saying he waits for you at the top but you have to make it there the hard way. if you try to punch him NOW hell just kick you back to 1 hp and leave you for your life player to fix up.
at this point youll all notice the ominous FREAKING doom tower in the background which is where your final showdown is going to take place. do not ask your space PLAYER to take you there. attempting to do so gives them WICKED migraines and does nothing else. do not attempt to flatten the doom fortress via crazy MECHANISMS and contraptions or boulder launches. even assuming you could GET the range theyll just shatter against the night wards. doing any of this stuff ONCE will get you a vague feeling of ominous. repeating your STUPIDITY supposedly makes tiamat stronger for his actual confrontation. not gamebreakingly STRONGER just more difficult. there is in fact NOTHING you can do other than take a ridiculously long walk across the battlefield. then up a ridiculously sheer cliff face THAT extends off into the stratosphere. while being attacked by battlefield monsters in RIDICULOUS numbers as lead by the equivalent of a denizen monster as scaled for your group. the doom tower involves a labyrinth with traps that was always SHIFTING even while we were in it so theres no point in providing a map. eventually youll make it to the throne room and its a straight up brawl.
tiamat fights well... hes really good about using his skillset and powers and hes probably stronger than your standard Black King but hes far squishier so it evens out. he only really had super CUTSCENE powers while taking out the white priest-king so dont worry about those. his abilities are a mishmash of pretty much EVERYTHING on the player ability list except messed up using his darkness aspect. eventually hell go DOWN and... oh hey remember how i said you had to be the worst of all monsters to KILL The Littlest Consort? turns out for all his bravado tiamat DIDNT kill his or felt enough compassion to save them for last when reality was to be smouldering embers. so you have to stand there awkwardly while this adorable consort makes an APPEAL for his supposed best friends life. thats the signal for the actual last part of the fight when TIAMAT is horribly bruised and out of aspect juice but still swinging in a blind rage. eventually hell be totally and utterly defeated and the darkness GOES away completely and hell say that you managed to restore the control that he lost when failing the act 2 climax. even if its true it doesnt stop the fact HES still devouring the new universe and the only way you can save it is by killing him. doing so frees the UNIVERSE to take its place in the pond and youre free to move on to your next replay. as mentioned before stuff WARDED by tiamat is now unlocked and you can freely jump around to and from the fortress or see his records on prospit.
section 6: postscript
thats pretty much it i guess. if anyone bothers to read THIS feedback would be nice. i do complain a lot on chat but apart from the whole TIAMAT thing which only really soured things towards the end this session was actually kind of fun. ill also always owe it for randomly helping me get my NATIVE lesson 4/5 of the way through so props to that. peace.