A Week of August…

…Time spent working for a Community Goal, some personal Achievements and dipping a toe in the Dungeons and Dragons water.

Much of this first week of August has been spent in American Truck Simulator. With the release of the Oklahoma map DLC came the usual Community Event – Take deliveries to or from each of the 10 cities in Oklahoma. That’s the personal target. The Community target is to complete deliveries to or from any city in Oklahoma with a Mileage goal of 111 million miles.

I completed the person goal very quickly. All the early deliveries were done by Chance, my Mack Anthem – now painted in a ‘Sheriff’ paint scheme…

…Now I am pressing on to complete the new Steam Achievements that came with the DLC. Two of these were straight forward. visit each of Oklahoma’s cities was a given if you were to achieve the Community Event goal although it was somewhat easier given that some cities log as visited just because you passed through! The second was to visit all the view points dotted around the map – another simple challenge provided you have the time to stop off along the road to enjoy some cutscenes of the scenery that the developers wish to share👍 One example of these is Beavers Bend Park and the associated Broken Bow Reservoir and Spillway…

With these tasks done, I’m now working on completing some load related delivery challenges – Tyres from the two major tyre manufacturing plants in Ardmore and Lawton. Then there are Bus parts to a manufacturing plant in Tulsa from which we then deliver School Buses…

…These challenges are more difficult as we have to rely on jobs dropping. On Tuesday (IRL) I completed 1 parts delivery, 1 bus delivery and 2 tyre deliveries. Today, I could find none🙄 Tomorrow is another day😅 Chance has handed over responsibility to Autumn Gal for the deliveries and I’m enjoying doing some manual driving without the safety net of adaptive cruise control and an automatic emergency brake. The ‘Gal has had a respray since you last saw her…

…Though she still comes with her faithful travelling companion, Juliet…

…I sometimes wonder what she makes of it all, including the bad language 😅

Pursuing achievement perfection in American Truck Simulator has left little time for anything else. I have, however, taken my first faltering steps into Baldur’s Gate III. The full release is very different from the pre-release version. I had intended to play as a Ranger Class – here’s my Half-Wood Elf character as of then…

…The changes in the game brought in some more options. I still thought I’d be playing as a Ranger but, with so many new options, I found myself torn between classes and races. In the end I have wound up playing as a Wood Elf Druid…

…I hope I can show more from this game in the future. What I can already report is – this game can eat time! I stepped into my office to do an hour or so to get my first play through underway and emerged 3.5 hours later😜 Even at this very early stage in the game I can feel tensions between some of my companions born out of their different races and beliefs, and I already have to chose 4 out of 5 for each new period of exploration. The mantra ‘choose your strongest’ just leads to doubt about who is strongest – it’s not just about physical strength. Some people are dubbing this game the RPG of the decade – I’m not in a position to judge as my home has been simulation but I suspect they may be right!👌

Finally, I have done some farming in Osada and I hope to present the tale of our Winter soon😎👍 And, with most of the achievements in the bag for American Truck Simulator, I hope I can return to some of the photo challenges before the end of the week😀