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brokenmnemonicFor this Fannish Fifty post, I thought I'd rec moddable games that I play to chill out. I don't play a wide variety of games because I tend to spend a lot of my time playing the smae few games I like over and over, but there are definitely games that I play when I want to chill out with.
My first rec is for Stardew Valley, which is a gloriously chilled-out farming game. You inherit your grandad's farm, and play through the seasons solving small quests, bribing people into liking you by giving you gifts and attending events. I really like the music, and even on a bad day I like being able to go in and spend 20-30 minutes playing a day in Stardew Valley. There's always something useful and productive I can do, whether it's clearing rocks and weeds off the farm, going to the pub to give people presents, goinginto the mines to forage for metal and get attacked by slimes, or even go to a tropical island to hunt for gold walnuts. The game's had several big updates since it first came out, and has a lovely 8-bit appearance that I've come to adore. You can romance about a dozen different characters with various cutscenes for each one, and there's an enthusistic modding community that have added loads and loads of different optional modes. Some are essential quality of life mods (at least for me) like mods to make the fishing mini-game easier, but there are also reskins for animals, new crops of various kinds, new items of clothing, even a couple of new quest areas. I think I originally came across Stardew Valley because of vids about it by LadyShelab, possibly via this playlist on youtube:
One of the things I appreciate is that ConcernedApe has taken on board some comments from the community during changes - for example, some people weren't happy that marrying characters resulted in them moving to your farm full-time, so now when you get married, your spouse may move onto the farm but they carry on doing a lot of the things they were doing before.
My second rec is for Thea: The Awakening. Thea: The Awakening is based around the idea of an event in the past driving most of the gods away from the world and darkness falling centuries ago; the village you're responsible for has managed to survive, and you may now be able to restore the god or goddess you worship and solve whatever it was that broke the world. Part of the game is managing your village, where you make things, and part of the game is sending out one or more adventuring parties to go on quests, fight monsters and gather resources. There are random events and quest events that can occur in your village or to your parties out and about in the world, and the difficulty scales over time. Encounters are all card-driven, and your characters have about 20 different stats; different types of encounter give different types of challenge, and often you'll have a choice of different types of challenge. For example, if your party finds themselves in a tower that's collapsing, you can opt to try a physical challenge to move enough rubble to escape, or an intellect challenge to try and find a new route out. If you see a hostile group of monsters and move to their location, you may find that you can defeat them in a social challenge to convince them with words to go away; you might be able to sneak up and ambush them, or you could fight them in an out-and-out fight. One of the things I really like is that fight challenges are often the most difficult and dangerous option, but are rarely the only option - unless something moves into your location, rather than vice versa. Different character stats are used in each of the different types of challenge, and while your village starts out with a mix of basic character types like warriors, gatherers and crafters, they have different strengths - crafters are often good at intellect challenges, for example, while gatherers are often good at social challenges. You can build up to ten different additions to your village that have effects on your village, and can often generate the chance for you to attract new characters/character types, or have children grow up to take on new professions. For example, if you build a herbalists hut, your children that survive to adulthood can choose not just from the basic warrior/crafter/gatherer profession, but could also choose to be a healer. Other classes you can unlock include witches, sages and hunters. If you've built a barracks, you don't get a new character type option - but children who choose to be warriors when they grow up will get more skill points. If you build your herbalist hut using elven wood as one of the components, you have a chance of elven characters joining your village, but if you build it out of obsidian, there's chance goblins may join your village. Make it out of bones, and there's a chance animals will join you. I really like the different options, and the art for the locations differs depending on what you build the expansions out of.
It was a playthrough by Aavak that bought Thea: the Awakening to my attention:
Two of my favourite things about the game are these: firstly, the mythology of the game is rooted much more in Eastern European mythology than other games I've played. You'll meet orcs and goblins and dwarves and elves, but also beings like Mroki, Striga, Bugay and Cmuch. There are 8 different gods you can choose to worship, including Horos, Perun, Lada, Morwena and others. As you spend time in game you earn points; even if you don't finish the game, when you choose to end that playthrough, those points count towards the god you worship, and those points unlock advantages for future games.
The other thing that I really like is that included in the game is the building kit the publisher used to build the events and quests, along with online instructions on how to use it. You can create your own events, quests and plotlines, and save and export them in modules to add into your games or other peoples' simply through dropping them into the modules folder, just as you can add new artwork by putting images into another game folder. There aren't a lot of custom modules out there that I've found yet, but I've tinkered with adding extra things myself, and had a good time doing it. It helps that you can see the module from the DLC that was added to the game, and see how the events in that work, which makes for some good examples.
My third rec is for Rimworld. Given the different startup options you can choose insane difficulty levels to play with in this colony-building game if you want, but I like playing it on low difficulty so that I can see what kind of colonies I can build, and how the meeples grow and develop while fending off attacks from insects, hostile mechanoids and bandits. There've been some big DLC updates that let you do more fun things, and the range of terrain and biome types give a whole range of different levels of difficulty in creating viable colonies.
The modding community for Rimworld is incredibly prolific. There are a huge range of mods ranging from new crops and building options through to completely reskinning the game into Old One-worshipping cult simulators, fantasy inn simulators, etc. With the basic game tech levels, you can choose to build a high-tech society or a primitive cave-dwelling society and everything in between, but there are mods giving loads of additional options. I think the only other game I've played that has a similar range of mods available is Skyrim, and that doesn't offer me optional space combat. Also, Rimworld has things like exploding animals (boomrats and boomalopes) and it's surprising how often you can arrange things like routing attacking bandit groups through neutral caravan camps when you need someone else to do your fighting for you...
One of the things that links all three of these games is that as they've been out for a while, they're nicely cheap. Thea: The Awakening now includes an expansion as standard; Stardew Valley has had several major updates at no extra cost, and while Rimworld has some DLCs available for purchase, the basic game is already a bargain even before you throw in all the available free mods, and the DLCs offer genuinely new and interesting options, like building your own religions. All of them are games you can dip into or out of with relatively little time pressure, although the difficulty in Rimworld and Thea the Awakening does increase with time.
My first rec is for Stardew Valley, which is a gloriously chilled-out farming game. You inherit your grandad's farm, and play through the seasons solving small quests, bribing people into liking you by giving you gifts and attending events. I really like the music, and even on a bad day I like being able to go in and spend 20-30 minutes playing a day in Stardew Valley. There's always something useful and productive I can do, whether it's clearing rocks and weeds off the farm, going to the pub to give people presents, goinginto the mines to forage for metal and get attacked by slimes, or even go to a tropical island to hunt for gold walnuts. The game's had several big updates since it first came out, and has a lovely 8-bit appearance that I've come to adore. You can romance about a dozen different characters with various cutscenes for each one, and there's an enthusistic modding community that have added loads and loads of different optional modes. Some are essential quality of life mods (at least for me) like mods to make the fishing mini-game easier, but there are also reskins for animals, new crops of various kinds, new items of clothing, even a couple of new quest areas. I think I originally came across Stardew Valley because of vids about it by LadyShelab, possibly via this playlist on youtube:
One of the things I appreciate is that ConcernedApe has taken on board some comments from the community during changes - for example, some people weren't happy that marrying characters resulted in them moving to your farm full-time, so now when you get married, your spouse may move onto the farm but they carry on doing a lot of the things they were doing before.
My second rec is for Thea: The Awakening. Thea: The Awakening is based around the idea of an event in the past driving most of the gods away from the world and darkness falling centuries ago; the village you're responsible for has managed to survive, and you may now be able to restore the god or goddess you worship and solve whatever it was that broke the world. Part of the game is managing your village, where you make things, and part of the game is sending out one or more adventuring parties to go on quests, fight monsters and gather resources. There are random events and quest events that can occur in your village or to your parties out and about in the world, and the difficulty scales over time. Encounters are all card-driven, and your characters have about 20 different stats; different types of encounter give different types of challenge, and often you'll have a choice of different types of challenge. For example, if your party finds themselves in a tower that's collapsing, you can opt to try a physical challenge to move enough rubble to escape, or an intellect challenge to try and find a new route out. If you see a hostile group of monsters and move to their location, you may find that you can defeat them in a social challenge to convince them with words to go away; you might be able to sneak up and ambush them, or you could fight them in an out-and-out fight. One of the things I really like is that fight challenges are often the most difficult and dangerous option, but are rarely the only option - unless something moves into your location, rather than vice versa. Different character stats are used in each of the different types of challenge, and while your village starts out with a mix of basic character types like warriors, gatherers and crafters, they have different strengths - crafters are often good at intellect challenges, for example, while gatherers are often good at social challenges. You can build up to ten different additions to your village that have effects on your village, and can often generate the chance for you to attract new characters/character types, or have children grow up to take on new professions. For example, if you build a herbalists hut, your children that survive to adulthood can choose not just from the basic warrior/crafter/gatherer profession, but could also choose to be a healer. Other classes you can unlock include witches, sages and hunters. If you've built a barracks, you don't get a new character type option - but children who choose to be warriors when they grow up will get more skill points. If you build your herbalist hut using elven wood as one of the components, you have a chance of elven characters joining your village, but if you build it out of obsidian, there's chance goblins may join your village. Make it out of bones, and there's a chance animals will join you. I really like the different options, and the art for the locations differs depending on what you build the expansions out of.
It was a playthrough by Aavak that bought Thea: the Awakening to my attention:
Two of my favourite things about the game are these: firstly, the mythology of the game is rooted much more in Eastern European mythology than other games I've played. You'll meet orcs and goblins and dwarves and elves, but also beings like Mroki, Striga, Bugay and Cmuch. There are 8 different gods you can choose to worship, including Horos, Perun, Lada, Morwena and others. As you spend time in game you earn points; even if you don't finish the game, when you choose to end that playthrough, those points count towards the god you worship, and those points unlock advantages for future games.
The other thing that I really like is that included in the game is the building kit the publisher used to build the events and quests, along with online instructions on how to use it. You can create your own events, quests and plotlines, and save and export them in modules to add into your games or other peoples' simply through dropping them into the modules folder, just as you can add new artwork by putting images into another game folder. There aren't a lot of custom modules out there that I've found yet, but I've tinkered with adding extra things myself, and had a good time doing it. It helps that you can see the module from the DLC that was added to the game, and see how the events in that work, which makes for some good examples.
My third rec is for Rimworld. Given the different startup options you can choose insane difficulty levels to play with in this colony-building game if you want, but I like playing it on low difficulty so that I can see what kind of colonies I can build, and how the meeples grow and develop while fending off attacks from insects, hostile mechanoids and bandits. There've been some big DLC updates that let you do more fun things, and the range of terrain and biome types give a whole range of different levels of difficulty in creating viable colonies.
The modding community for Rimworld is incredibly prolific. There are a huge range of mods ranging from new crops and building options through to completely reskinning the game into Old One-worshipping cult simulators, fantasy inn simulators, etc. With the basic game tech levels, you can choose to build a high-tech society or a primitive cave-dwelling society and everything in between, but there are mods giving loads of additional options. I think the only other game I've played that has a similar range of mods available is Skyrim, and that doesn't offer me optional space combat. Also, Rimworld has things like exploding animals (boomrats and boomalopes) and it's surprising how often you can arrange things like routing attacking bandit groups through neutral caravan camps when you need someone else to do your fighting for you...
One of the things that links all three of these games is that as they've been out for a while, they're nicely cheap. Thea: The Awakening now includes an expansion as standard; Stardew Valley has had several major updates at no extra cost, and while Rimworld has some DLCs available for purchase, the basic game is already a bargain even before you throw in all the available free mods, and the DLCs offer genuinely new and interesting options, like building your own religions. All of them are games you can dip into or out of with relatively little time pressure, although the difficulty in Rimworld and Thea the Awakening does increase with time.
