The Queue: Daylight Saving Edition

I grew up in rural Upstate New York — so Upstate we stubbornly called it Central New York, like that doesn’t mean Broadway to everyone else. The house I grew up in was literally across the road from a corn field. As a result I have a lot of love for family farmers, their struggles, and the things they have to do to maintain a living.

But two weeks out of every year… eh.

This is The Queue, where you ask questions and we pretend we’re not too sleepy to answer them until we adjust to the time change.

I’ve been a double agent for a very long time. Stuck with Alliance through Vanilla and half of Burning Crusade, then rerolled Horde. Went Alliance for Wrath, then sat out most of Cataclysm. Came back Horde for the advent of LFR and the beginning of Mists of Pandaria.

When pets came out I knew I had to maintain at least one decently high-level alternate faction alt, and that whole time I was on a PVP server so I wanted the heck off Mr. Holinka’s Wild Ride. Right now I have a Gnome Monk I’m trying to get back up to speed (doing Wrathion’s quest at 350 ilvl is Not Something I’d Recommend) plus my Blood Elf BM Hunter. I plan on maintaining those two, then using the Undead Priest I’m doing lowbie quests with on the leveling stream and my newly rolled Vulpera Rogue to round out the four Covenants in Shadowlands. I just have a sinking feeling that between pets, mounts, and those juicy cosmetic appearances I’m going to want to keep current with each.

I’ll add here that it feels like a good idea to play an alt on the opposite faction through most expansions, but the Battle for Azeroth expansion in particular offered a radically different experience on each faction. Yes, you get to kinda sorta go through the zones on the opposite faction, but the actual storylines you miss on each side are really good, and the whole feeling of each side was very different. If you play Horde, this expansion was a technicolor safari; if you play Alliance it’s all about monochrome brown steampunk piracy.

It can also help build empathy. Sylvanas is kind of a bad person but once you have to navigate Dazar’alor on foot for half an expansion, you can kinda see where she’s coming from.

If that were true, it would’ve saved us from two of the worst things ever, so I’m totally cool with it.

Right now I feel like pet battling is in an okay place in terms of both accessibility and end-game play. There’s the Family Familiar-style achievements and the dungeon crawls for people who are all-in. There are a few notable teams that can tear their way through the mid-tier challenges for people who’ve started to buy in but don’t have the huge stables yet. For the newbies, if all else fails you can do all the tamers in Battle for Azeroth with an entirely level 1 team. Knowing which of the level 1 pets you’ve collected can defeat your opponent may take a bit of research — family interactions, mainly, plus some of those first slot abilities are awful — but right now I have three Icy Veins tabs open trying to find out what I need to do to find more Essences, which is both more laborious to do than battling and more reading than most pet strats.

There are always aspects of the game people will just plain get stubborn about for their own reasons. Some people would rather find an elaborate workaround than do any PVP at all. Some people refuse to even look at LFG in any capacity. People have deactivated their accounts over story beats. Heck, I feel all weird about using the Group Finder to do Mythics (but to be fair I don’t know any of the routes or skips or whatever). You could design the best system the planet has ever known, and some people would be mad that they’re “forced” to do it and others would refuse to do it outright.

In those cases, I don’t think any amount of explanation or ease of use solutions are going to help.

Three, added to the single one I’d gotten on all of my alts up to that point.

I would suggest The Long Dark — archery is viable on all settings and super hard difficulty level doesn’t have guns at all — but something tells me you wouldn’t be into wringing the necks of rabbits after chucking a rock at them.

In terms of Stardew-alikes, Terraria is a good choice. It’s a bit more reminiscent of Minecraft, with lots of building and resource gathering. There are also different biomes to visit and eventually bosses to fight, and the difficulty ramps right up. I also like Graveyard Keeper, which is dark in a pixelated macabre way, kinda like Mitch. You’re supposed to be responsible and inter the dead bodies brought to you in your job as the Graveyard Keeper, but hey, if you rearrange a few organs and turn them into zombies, they’ll cut down the trees for you! It’s a win/win.

I also have a lot of love for Donut County. You play as a raccoon piloting a hole. You have to drop small stuff down your hole, which grows with every thing that falls down it, in order to fit bigger stuff. There’s a solid puzzle element in addition to a fun allegorical story. Did I mention the raccoons?

One you might like which has a sort-of gun is Slime Rancher. On your farm you have buildable slime corrals. You go out in the world and find wild slimes to put into your corrals, vacuum them up with your vacuum gun thing, then use it to spit them back out, Kirby-style. Their poop is valuable, for some reason, and they poop more if you give them the food they like. There are a lot of slimes out there in a variety of places, and you have to track them down in order to catch them. Protip: if you bring a couple chickens and a rooster back to your farm they’ll start breeding even outside the coops.

All else fails, House Flipper is both fairly zen and works well as a makeshift CAD program. Not that I’ve used it to plan out my landscaping for this spring and decide how I want to redo my bathroom, or anything.