I’m sure most people reading this will know that I run a fan site for Eskil Steenberg’s game Love, but for anyone else that may come across this, I’m terribly biased already. I’ve been reading a lot of game diaries lately, with RockPaperShotgun’s Minecraft diaries being specifically being great.

Anyway, onwards.

I joined the UK1 server to some immediate problems, there’s some serious lag going on, making it slightly unplayable. Eskil has been contacted, so hopefully everything should be fine for my next diary.

Meanwhile though, I log in to see it’s currently day time, the day and night cycle is pretty quick in Love, but it can be hard to see at night. There’s no settlement existing as such yet, but someone has put down a Monolith token.

The Monolith token

Looking at the current base, it’s pretty clear that a new player has been in the game, haphazard raised walls everywhere, some weird holes, I keep exploring around a bit to make sure we’ve got no other tokens in the base, which we don’t, I’ll have to go fix that then. The state of the base is slightly annoying. In Love, you always spawn with a Blaster and a Smooth Edit Tool, but because the server is being slow, terrain editing is an absolute chore. So I don’t bother with doing any of that.

Instead, what I do is get my bearings. I’ve always got a compass pointing me back to the monolith, but it’s nice knowing some of the landmarks in the immediate vicinity, and knowing where the pools of deadly water are.

Night’s fallen, and I’ve now got my bearings, so I decide to go exploring. I spot a giant bridge nearby, one of many that dot Love’s procedurally generated world.

The bridge

I don’t spot this immediately, due to Love’s graphics, but the bridge leads to a dead end, over water! Drat. Time to go around another way. I take the back way round, climb up some small cliffs and spot something in the distance.

The thing with Love’s AI, is that they build very recognisable structures. In this case, I spot blue roofs and a blue icon, an Omprelly Enclave settlement! I approach warily, not wanting to run into a hidden tesla turret, or get bombed to shit.

Ruined settlement

My weary approach was unwarranted, the settlement was in ruins, slowly being taken apart by the world generator. I take a look around and notice a passage down.

Passage down

I make my way down, only to be enveloped by a thick yellow cloud when I reach the bottom.

The gas well

It’s a gas well. Annoyingly, I can’t do anything with it yet, its used for upgrading tokens, but I have none in my settlement, add to that, I don’t have the necessary empty pod to collect the gas!

Omprelly AI

I make my way back up the path and notice this guy scouting around, he’s an Omprelly AI character. Annoyingly, with the lag I mentioned earlier, my blaster shots have absolutely no effect, so rather than waiting around near him and getting shot, I choose to get as far away from him as I can. While death in Love isn’t really a problem, you just respawn at the nearest settlement or checkpoint, it’s still inconvenient at this moment.

Making my way around, I found myself on one of the world’s poles. I strike lucky and find what I’ve been after, a token altar.

The token altar

Now, it might look relatively hard to reach, but this being a pole, it couldn’t be any easier. You see, whereas with normal ground you can only edit the ground within your settlement’s sphere of influence, with ice, you can edit it as much as you like. So I’ve got a few options here. I can either drop down to the ice floor and build my way up, or, I can take the even easier option, and use the ice on the left to jump onto the altar and collect the token.

That being done, I start heading back to my settlement. On the way, I run into another AI trooper, this one belonging to the Clondo Tribe.

Clondo Tribesman

Again, I can’t hurt him because of the server conditions so I skedaddle away as fast as possible back to the monolith, using the compass in my HUD to guide me until I can recognise the area I’d previously scouted.

One back at the base I place the Blaster token I’ve just found against a wall, away from my monolith.

Blaster Token in my settlement

And it’s time to leave it at that. The server’s in no condition to let me play much further, and the lag makes any attempt at assaulting an AI base foolhardy.

In next episode, who knows what’ll happen. I suspect this settlement will be dead, but whether I start with nothing, or start at an already finished settlement is another matter.