[Click here to start from the first progress log]

As with any ambitious game, Void Monsters has some bugs. Most of them aren’t much of a problem at all, consisting of harmless weirdness or otherwise being beneficial, but the bugginess is ubiquitous enough that a few have become a real issue; not knowing if a character you can’t find is the result of having missed a path or the result of bugginess can make certain sidequests incredibly annoying, and since these sidequests are the way you level up outside of combat (which I’m still not a huge fan of), having to set them aside can be really aggravating.

I’ve had to ignore some quests

There’s this quest I’ve tried multiple times to finish. It has a back story about infidelity, etcetera, but the point is that someone ran off with a tent and needs to be found in the desert east of the second city. Nice and easy, right? You’d think that all this sidequest requires is to check a couple of tents. You’d be wrong, though; this person is elusive and possibly can’t be found in the game’s current state. I’ve tried on multiple occasions, taking every path I’ve found and searching every tent, and she simply doesn’t exist. There’s a strong possibility this quest is bugged out.

Right now I’m thinking that she’s probably inside tent 23, and the reason I suspect that is that it’s not currently possible to get into tent 23. If you enter it, you instead enter tent 22. Tent 22 also leads to tent 22, which means there’s no entrance to 23. This isn’t the only quest I’ve thrown up my hands on; there’s a late quest from the thieves’ den that tasks you with stealing a set of items without knowing exactly where they are. If I could pick every chest without exception, that would be fine, but there are numerous chests in the second city that can’t be interacted with at all. Experience with similarly buggy chests has taught me that these require approaching them from the sides to register your intent to lockpick, but that’s not an option with some chests because the sides are blocked. Since this quest is long and there’s no indication of where anything is, I’m not willing to risk running around for an hour or more only to discover that something crucial is in a chest I can’t access.

That’s barely scratching the surface of the bugginess, too. Several quests reference igloo numbers despite the igloos not being numbered (there aren’t enough of them for this to be a real problem, but still), the field that tells you how long you have to finish a quest sometimes lists an address instead, and I found some generic RPG Maker dialogue when messing around with my goats. Of course, there are also beneficial bugs like the one in the video above. What happened was that a quest bugged out, giving me a runecard ticket every time I talked to the quest-giver.

Another beneficial bug became possible after I finished a quest to help someone pay off their loan (weakening the evil bank in the process). It’s also possible to personally pay off homeowners’ debt, and the sign that allows you to do so was still outside of the house that had just gotten out of debt. As a result, I could repeatedly pay off their debt of zero gold and increase the world’s prosperity however much I wanted. This is another of those potentially helpful bugs, though I’m still not entirely certain about whether I want prosperity to be low or high. I seem to remember a high prosperity causes interest rates to go up (which would be bad since I haven’t been paying off my loan and you lose the game if you get so far in debt that the villain can take your land) while also having some positive effects that I can’t remember.

Obtaining new void monsters

It was a bit confusing in an earlier progress log when I tried to explain how you recruit new monsters into your party, so here’s a video that makes a bit more sense. Basically, those runecard tickets that I’m now able to obtain an infinite number of can be used in a temple minigame, and winning nets you runes. There are numerous other ways of obtaining runes, too, from beating monsters to stealing them from chests. Anyway, you use the runes on the temple floor and completing a set causes a monster to spawn and be recruited into your party. Nice and simple.

I finally found the third city

While trying to figure out that stupid infidelity tent quest, I stumbled across the portal to the third area. Thankfully, reaching a city allows you to use a much easier warp to return to it, so that was a bit of a relief. Obviously the first thing I did was steal from everyone since it was night, but an NPC also mentioned that there was a nearby monster who claimed to be willing to join anyone who can beat it. Eventually I tracked it down and took it on, and this is the first time I can remember feeling challenged. Part of that is because many attacks did zero damage to it for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, but that could be worked around by swapping in some new monsters (which can apparently be done once per fight) and using status effects so that it has a chance of attacking itself. Once it was beaten, a “new monster” egg showed up in its place and I started using it as a party member.

[Click here to go to Void Monsters: Spring City Tales log #2]

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