Tag Archives: Serbule

Friday Bullet Points All About Project: Gorgon

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The game hasn’t been in its 1.0 version for much more than a week and things keep happening, with updates large and small landing almost every day, so it feels like I need to take a breath and catch up.

Project: Gorgon – It Lives!

I do want to say that Potshot and I are still playing the game and that it has a charm and appeal beyond my expectations, somehow managing to tap into both nostalgia and newness in my brain at the same time.  It one of those “this is not what I asked for, but is apparently what I wanted” situations.

Anyway, I am going to take a moment to catch up on things.  Part of that was figuring out where to even find the updates.  The game puts them up in the login screen, which is great, but I like some place out of game to review them at my leisure.  While they also appear over on Steam, I am favoring the official wiki as my source.

First up, the game seems to be popping since the 1.0 release last week.

I have long maintained a strong opinion that games get one launch date, and that is the day they go into early access.  This has been previously born out for me in the number of titles that never leave early access, shutting down or just lingering there forever, and the few that leave that state and are mostly considered done by the devs.  So having something like a 10x bump in player peaks is not something I would expect.

Project: Gorgon would like a word about that.

Project: Gorgon release peak

The game went from an early access release peak of 677 concurrent players back in April 2018 and, but last year has settled into a routine of 200-300 players online at peak daily.

And then it had its 1.0 release and went up to 1,000.  And then the weekend hit and the news got out and it exceeded 2,200 players, with the all time peak so far hitting around 21:00 UTC on Sunday.

As I pointed out in my first post where I was just going to peek in and see how things were going, it was kind of crazy crowded on day one.  The 1.0 milestone not only attracted new players, but there was also a whole new area for game veterans.

I am not sure that entirely disproves my theory.  I suspect the day that Star Citizen goes to 1.0, which I suspect it never will, there won’t be a big change in players.  Certainly not a 10x increase in players.  PG feels more like a special case, the exception that proves the rule in some odd way.

[Also, I wrote this on Wednesday because I was traveling yesterday and the peak concurrent number for the game is now 2,472 set early this morning UTC… and we’re not even to the weekend yet!  What will Sunday bring?]

As part of the 1.0 launch there was the promise of a new server, a fresh start for new players and the ability to build a new community.  Among other things, this required the creation of a server selection option as part of the login process.  You could go with the original Arisetsu server, or, once it went live, the new Dreva server.

Choose your server

As part of this, in order to allow new players to get established, there was initially a plan to force every character on an account created before Dec. 1, 2025 to play as a pig.  The people who had been around but hadn’t played that much complained about being excluded from the new server or forced to play as a pig.

That led, briefly, to an ability to reset your account date by deleting and recreating your account.  You would lose anything you had already, but wouldn’t be a pig.

That was changed to any account with more than 40 hours of play time facing the pig treatment on the new server.

Then it was dropped altogether as perhaps not the most workable idea.  I went and played on the original server where I had signed in early enough that I had the “Pre-Alpha Survivor” title from making an account back during the early days of the game.

So I did not experience the pig thing.  However, since a pig is a playable beast form in PG, I am not even sure if this was a deterrent or a challenge frankly.

And the whole pig idea got dropped as the crowd rushed in

Two servers… were not enough.  The announcement was already out on Sunday that a third server was on the way.

Whoa! That’s a lot of players! Hardware Incoming

We really appreciate the turn out of new players! This is great! But not great for server performance. Each server is designed to have up to 1000 concurrent players on it, and the new Dreva server is climbing up to the 1500-player mark. There is a lot of server lag in the newbie areas, especially Serbule. We see where some more hardware will help this problem so we’re in the process of getting that in place for Dreva. It also seems like we’d better get a third server up and running or poor Dreva will just get more overcrowded. So the third server will go online later this week.

I can confirm, even on the Arisetsu things were getting a little strange when there were a lot of people on the starter island or in the Serbule zone.  On Sunday around when the all time peak was hitting I was seeing mobs that would die, but wouldn’t, and some strange loot issues in a game that already has a strange loot mechanic.  So a new server is on the way.

The team was doing things to help mitigate the problems, including a new area that is the next bullet point, but even with that the new server was going to happen.

When the hardware for the third server is available, we’re still planning to launch it ASAP. This one will be named Strekios, after the god of Self-Improvement.

We’ll see when it happens, but Strekios is coming.  Also, there will be a hardware upgrade for Dreva as part of this, so maybe they can keep the count to three servers.

Addendum: Strekios is live, three servers running!  There is a channel on the official Discord for the server as well.  Now to see how this trio of servers plays out.

Meanwhile, I was hanging out on the original server which was also seeing its own swell of new players, such that the Serbule zone was frequently a bit crowded.  There is a pretty fine line between just enough people that you run into others when you need them, like when you stumble onto a named spawn… or somebody struggling with that named spawn… and you can help them out and a situation where you just need to find a couple of deer for a task and they have been hunted to extinction for the moment.

Anyway, they patched in a redone area for new players, complete with a some quests to keep you busy and plenty of mobs to slay.

Desert Dreams: I spent the day creating a new adventure area for levels 1-15, called “Desert Dream”. It reuses the Ilmari Desert map and reimagines it as a dream realm. It’s nothing too fancy, but I hope newbies enjoy it. The main goal of this area is to help spread out newbies — our main server bottleneck is having too many players in the same zone. We may or may not keep this area as a long-term part of the game; we’ll see how it goes

So it is through the golden portal at the gates of Serbule and into the desert.

The golden portal calls to you

There is a place where I can work on my reptile and amphibian pathology.

  • Thoughts on This

Not really a news bullet point, just a summing up.

I am pretty happy to see how well PG has been doing in this first week or so.

It does make me a bit nervous when there is a huge spike in users and a rush to get more servers online.  How many times have we seen that peter out and leave a game with under under utilized hardware and empty zones?

I take heart in the fact that, until this past week, the game had been chugging along just fine with daily user peaks at a tenth of what they have been recently.  That, as I understand it, has yielded a strong community and active zones.

But now I have a desert to explore.

On the sands of adventure

We will have to leave tomorrow’s problems until tomorrow.

Addendum:  So this got thrown into the mix as well.

In addition to the above announcement, we are taking further congestion control measures by decreasing the afk timeout to 5 minutes, which was previously 15 minutes, on all servers.

Don’t idle too long!

Project: Gorgon – Learning to do All the Things… Including Death

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After the big 1.0 update for Project: Gorgon I went in and played a bit more.

Project: Gorgon – It Lives!

On Friday night I was definitely feeling the pain of the launch announcement rush.  They had cranked up the number of mobs spawning, but there were still parts of the first island where you couldn’t hit a mob that just spawned because it would be dead before you could target it.

In those locations, especially close to the dock where you first land, the increased spawn rate wasn’t covering the need.  But then, further out, where there were fewer people, the spawn rate meant a bunch of mobs showing up and killing you pretty quickly.

Skeletons a poppin!

All of this reminded me of a Python quote:

Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought!

–Dennis Moore

So it goes.  This will all be alleviated by the second… and now third… server as well as when the initial rush subsides.  But on Friday it was all one server.

Back and new I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do.  Sure, that tower right above the dock seemed like an obvious stop.  And, later on, I would figure out that it was a place to start, because that is where Elmetaph is, who has some intro quests.  The problem, for me, was that his name plate did not stand out at all relative to the mass of people in the tower.  There is, to my old eyes at least, no differentiation in font size or coloration.

His name in a small group

And the quick answer to that image is that he is obviously taller than everybody else, is dressed different, and when you mouse over him the cursor changes… which is all correct.  But I took that screen shot after the new server went up and the crowds at the original server subsided a bit.

On Friday night he was more like this.

You’d think he was one of the Beatles

In that scrum it was hard to even get your cursor to select him, so I initially gave up. [I later found the ability to turn off player name plates, which made NPCs much easier to find.]

I spent time wandering around killing mobs when I could.  I had, whenever I had rolled up this character, picked up a full set of moldy armor and a sword.  Or maybe they just gave it to me after a pwipe or update?  I don’t know.

Anyway, I quickly noticed that just fighting things gained me points toward my sword skill and endurance and, every so often, would add a new skill to my bar.

A nice new way to slay

One of the other things going on with the Friday night rush was people dropping gear all over.  You do not appear to be able to destroy or trash or whatever stuff in your inventory, at least not on the starter island, which led to people just tossing stuff all over.

Dropped gear all over

There were even some upgrades.  I did see that I needed to do some unarmed combat in order to equip some of it.  That necessitated learning how to equip and unequip gear, which isn’t just a matter of dragging it back and forth from your inventory.  Your equipped gear remains in your bag, with a little “E” superimposed to let you know its status.

I managed to unequip my sword after a couple tries and went after some easy stuff using the punch skill.  That leveled up my unarmed skill fairly quickly and got me the Kick skill, which I could use while I had my sword equipped to keep the ball rolling on that.

I also grabbed a shovel from the barrel and started burying my corpses, which upped my compassion skill.  Not sure what that does, but I figured I had better level up all the things, just in case.

Eventually, however, I decided I was missing something and went to the wiki to look up the starter zones, Anagoge Island, where it was quite clear I needed to go talk to Elmetaph in the tower.  This got me a quest to go find some amethysts, which I already had due to the killing of things, which was followed up by attuning myself to the teleport pad on the island, which seemed to be the way out of the starter zone.

I don’t know why I was in a hurry to get out of the starter zone.  I tend to regret such haste.  But what else was I going to do.

I did that, then went back and found out I had been attuned to that pad as my home spot, so needed to gather some info so Elmetaph could attune me to a remote pad so I could go there.  That meant finding four obelisks, which on a small island should have been easy, but I swear I went around the island five times before I finally spotted the fourth one.

In search of that I ended up down in the records facility, which had its own puzzles to solve… I only caught fire once due to failing at simple math (don’t add them, subtract them)… which also got me some additional skills and a bow and a stack of arrows.

Soon I was killing mobs, doing an autopsy, skinning their corpses, and burying them.

I am a regular Jack Klugman

I started to grumble a bit at people who didn’t loot their corpses… if they were going to leave them there at least let me practice my skills as a medical examiner.

I also wandered into Lawara, who has tasks of her own and, more importantly, is in the camp where the porridge is served.

Lawara and the food pot

That pot was important because the game was absolutely on my ass about eating.  At one point, when I had low health after a fight I went to /sit thinking maybe that might help with health regen… and got a pointed dialog popping up that said we don’t sit here for regen, we eat food.  Go find some food.

So I was happy to eat the porridge, if only to get the game off my back.  It was getting to be like my grandmother.  Are you hungry?  You haven’t eaten anything.  You should eat, you’re so thin and look at how slow your health bar fills up.

I am assuming I’ll learn some cooking skills at some future point.  I was grabbing crabs out of the water, which increased my fishing skill, in the hope of making my own awful porridge some day.

Eventually I stumbled upon the last obelisk and, having written down the numbers in the correct order as I had noted them in my quest notebook, relayed them to Elmetaph.  He asked if I was sure, and I said I was, and then he attuned me and sent me back to the teleport pad to try it out.

I did and… it sent me to Gazluk, a bitterly cold place where I was immediately warned I would freeze to death shortly.  So maybe I got the obelisk sequence wrong.

Oh dear, I have none of that

But I did not have to worry about the cold for very long as a I was slain almost immediately by a wandering horrific ghost, who one-shotted me.

Eww, removed my organs?

The respawn point on death was not very close to the teleport pad, and it felt like I needed that teleport pad to get back.  It looked like the pad was far enough away that I would most likely freeze to death before I could get there.  I certainly did not get close on several attempts.

Running back to the pad on the map

This was hindered by the fact that everything in the zone… the wiki says it requires combat skills of 70-80 to survive… killed me in one or two blows.  Polar bear, mountain goat, they all had my number.

So I died a bunch of times.

The respawn point was next to a portal, but when I went through that I ended up in the Kur Mountains, also freezing and also way above my ability to cope with.

Fearing I may have wrecked that character, stuck in the snow in a Groundhog Day death cycle, I logged off and did some things around the house.  Later I came back and decided to go to the Kur Mountains because at least that was different.

I died there as well.  But when I died it respawned me near a portal that said it would send me to Elibule.

Travel to Eltibule? Yes please!

On the far side of that portal I was at least not freezing.

I was at an outpost with a teleport pad, so I went to that and… well… my only skills were to bind to a pad and recall to the pad to which I was bound… and my bind point was back in Gazluk.  So I checked the wiki again and Eltibule was connected at its south end to Serbule, which is the zone where you go after the starter island.

I now had some hope.

Of course, Eltibule was also too high level for me and I died a couple of times on the way, learning to steer clear of all mobs… though I did pick up some random gear on the ground.

Potshot had logged on my then and had a character in Serbule, so I made it a goal to get to him.  You can’t group up or friend list somebody not nearby, so that would have to wait.  After some mild misadventures, I made it to the portal.

Travel to Serbule? Sure thing!

I got in sight of the main town in the center of the map, at which point we were close enough to group up.

Is the princess in this castle?

Then I could see Potshot on the map.

Visible on the map now

I had to run around the wall to find a door, eventually going in the south entrance, where I found a teleport pad and immediately bound myself to it.

I think this is where I should have ended up in the first place, had I not mis-entered the code.

Anyway, I took the long way to the next zone by misadventure, though at least I arrived at my planned destination.  It was all very good for my cartography skill.  I got a lot of updates for that.  And, of course, my dying skill.

Now to figure out what to do now that I have arrived.