Atomicrops - plow, plant, and pow on a farm

I played this for another hour or so last night on Xbox. So good! I really hope they keep this version at 1.4.

I wasn’t able to beat the Winter boss. In the Xbox version I’ve only unlocked Rye so far, and I haven’t ever beaten Winter yet. So I don’t have any of the bonuses you can start unlocking using the bonus thingies yet.

I hadn’t really paid attention to the Farming/Fighting Stats in the old version before they made them super important in the new version, but in the old version, every time you beat a boss, and go to the town mayor, a lot of the rewards you get for harvesting enough that season are increases to your stats. I wonder what Farming/Fighting stats used to do in the old version that’s on Xbox?

The changes are part of an update and not tied to the DLC? I haven’t played since it released.

That’s right, they completely overhauled the base game on PC. If you have an Xbox though, you’re all good! :) I’m betting it’s the same on Playstation.

Just to be clear, they overhauled the way you purchase weapons and how you gain fighting and farming stats.

You now gain fewer stats with your end of season bonuses, instead you have to keep buying weapons to get those stats.

Guns never break, and you can’t use cashews to upgrade weapons. Each weapon now has a set price and comes with a certain number of stats and upgrades, and those are rolled randomly, like when you’d purchase upgrades before, except now you can’t invest more cashews to buy more upgrades.

So it raises the floor for newer players, because the price is higher, and it puts a cap on more experienced players because they can’t invest a bunch of cashews to max out a gun. Fewer options for everybody.

There are still +stat objects in the world, and spouses haven’t changed, so fighting spouses give you fighting stats, and farming spouses give you farming stats.

Farming stat has been changed so it also controls how many pigeons you can hold at one time. It allows you to potentially hold more pigeons than before if you stack farming stat, but I haven’t had a playthrough where I needed to think about it.

So the game is mostly still intact, but they messed up how you buy and upgrade your guns. And poor Rye is now basically irrelevant.

So how does the economy tie into the weapon system now? One of the things I liked about the original/old version was how your farm was the ‘cashew’ engine for upgrading your arsenal and buying more seeds, scrolls, items etc. I’ve not played it since I finished it in 2020 but the ‘snowballing’ power element was a big part of the experience.

It still does.

But before your economy was also important for those end of the season rewards, which among other things prvoided you with stat boosts. The economy is still important for that, except the end of season no longer provides those stat boosts at all.

Now you get them from buying weapons.

Weapons spawn in town with 0-?5? mods (I don’t recall seeing six but I haven’t played in awhile, it’s certainly possible you can get more). The price is based on the # of mods/weapon and probably something tied into how far through the year you are. Late game, you’ll see stuff for thousands of cashews usually. At the start it’s more in line with what you would expect.

But each weapon also offers up some bonus, usually a + to fighting or farming (for some characters - Crow - you can get other stuff too). This is a permanent upgrade. So while weapons no longer break, you’ll need to swap weapons occasionally just to keep those stats going up (especially important for farming sicne max # of pigeon scrolls is now tied to farming stat).

But because you can score a nice find and possibly ride it for awhile, that means more cashews for other stuff. To a point. Like I said I think it still behooves one to swap weapons a good bit.

Of course if you get really lucky and get something you love in the 5 mod range, it means you can snowball for a spell. But eventually the power curve will flatten out and even dip (unless you are getting + combat stats from camps a lot).

Ah interesting, thanks for the explanation. I’ve been meaning to check it out for myself but you know how it is!

Boy, do I.

On the Xbox version last night I got the pea shooter achievement. God, that one is so much fun to get.

On PC I had a lot easier time getting the achievements for things like the cashews. I wonder how I did that. I think back then I hadn’t figured out that I should save all my scrolls for the final boss, so I used to use them within each run, which lead to a lot more cashews than after I figured that out.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time on this game in the past few days, repeating Day 1 over and over to try to get more achievements, but being unable to.

Completing a day without getting hit? Man, it’s just not going to happen, I think.

Same thing with getting 12 flower seeds that I’ll need to plant at the same time. It just makes it so you don’t use the sunflower seeds you have, waiting for more, which means you’re short on cashews, so you can’t get the 15,000 cashews achievement either. Grrrr.

Still, the Xbox version continues to be version 1.4 or whatever it was, before they changed the game completely on PC, and I’m still enjoying it a lot overall. I can’t get these achievements but I can keep trying.

It’s been a pretty good game to play while I wait for Elden Ring.

Yeah, it’s definitely one of my favourites in its niche.

I tried going back to the PC version. Ugh. So bad.

Back to the Xbox version it is! Woohoo! This game is so fun.

I finally got the achievement to get 15,000 cashews. I had to sacrifice that run to do it. I had over 12,000 cashews, because the last 5 rounds my gun didn’t break. But then the last day in Winter, the gun broke!!! Noooooooo! Without buying a new gun and upgrading it, I couldn’t beat the boss. But if I did that, I wouldn’t get the 15,000 cashews achievement. So I went in without buying a gun, and I got the achievement, and I got the shit kicked out of me by a million bunnies.

Oh shit. I came home and launched Atomicrops, just like I do nearly every day. And it immediately kicked me out, because there’s a patch.

Oh man. I think this is it, you guys. The gravy train is over. I think this is the patch that will turn it into the shit PC version of the game. Fingers crossed that this is just a performance patch or something. But I don’t have much hope. If I’d known yesterday was going to be the last time I get to ever play the game, I would have played much longer! Damn it.

Edit: Yep, that’s the patch alright. I should find a different daily roguelite to play now.

I’ve been finding Rogue Legacy 2 pretty addicting.

:( I hate this kind of thing. I’ve never played the ‘shit’ version so can’t comment on that, but it annoys me that I can’t recommend the game I absolutely loved because it doesn’t exist anymore. One day I’ll see what the changes are all about for myself but until then, ugh.

Keep an open mind! You might like the new version better than the old one, you never know. It’s quite the overhaul, and it must have been done because the developer felt the game needed it. So for a lot of users it probably works better.

I picked this up on Steam for all the DLC a while back and it looks like some new content is coming tomorrow:

Steam link

Deerly Beloved DLC is out.

It does make me wonder. As someone who absolutely loved the game, and then felt it wasn’t worth playing at all after the major overhaul, maybe the new DLC makes it worth playing again?

I installed my Steam copy for the first time, just to check the game out.

It’s definitely changed since the last time I played it. I discovered new bonuses and stuff. Like I planted enough desert plants that it unlocked two possible bonuses for desert plants. I picked one, which was a little closed off area where seeds are automatically planted into the moment I harvest the old ones. It’s pretty cool.

So clearly the game has changed since I last played.

(This is the base game, no DLC).

  1. I think sunflower seeds are gone from the game, whicn makes me sad. Starting a new run - coming off a win, so full benefits there - I had more seeds than I am used to, though. Maybe it’s dumb luck. But it’s hard not to read into it (2 seasons down), based on the dev’s history.

  2. No more bridge pieces or whatever. You just walk up to a new area entrance and pay to build the bridge. N/S fields cost 100 cashews. Outer Fields cost 300. So early economic success means you can take chances if you want. Although outer fields remain more difficult, of course.

  3. The evolving crop thing (just plant crops from a given biome) is kind of interesting. The first choice is seeds + picks (20/2) or a garden bed. And all seeds from that biome evolve to a better type of seed. The garden beds prevent enemies from damaging the seeds as Rock8man noted, and they also auto-plant that type of seed from your inventory (you can plant stuff in them on your own, however). Although I don’t think it applies to bosses.

But additional choices open things up further. You might get a chance to get 3 beds for that type of seed. Or a special bed that auto-merges crops. You place beds, they’re 2x2.

  1. I unlocked a new town merchant that replaced the bridge/other stuff seller dude. So far he offers a choice of a tree or a garden bed.

Haven’t seen any new items yet. But I did get into Outer Jungle early, and found what I at first thought was the “special” camp. But it gave me a ghost follower who is pretty powerful (moreso than drones). I don’t know if this replaces one of the old special camps, or what. But this was arguably better than the seeds dude and the fertilizer dude (although I am low on fertilizer). Since seeds work differently than they used to - I think you only get higher tier seeds through crop evolution, and I don’t think they fit neatly into “tier 1/tier 2”, or at least there are clear ranks within tiers - I’m guessing it replaced the seed camp but we’ll see.

A hugely nice visibile upgrade for invincibility from the carrot tractor (a noticeable bubble forms around you). Also, it seems like the game is not as eager to keep using picks after you use one. Maybe there’s a setting to change this. But I had to re-press the button to start digging (unlock crop planting/sowing/weeding). I don’t know what to make of this change yet. Muscle memory kept trying to keep digging. On the other hand it was way too easy to use picks in the wrong place or at the wrong time. So we’ll see.

Addendum:

Ahhh, sunflower seeds showed up finally (getting towards the end of the run). The 20 seed/2 pick choice mentioned something about planting seeds in a row and low and behold you plant those sorts of seeds in an actual row. I’, not sure how big the row is because I’ve gone through quite a few upgrades. But I plant one type of seeds 1x4, so it’s possible it upgrades 1 cell at a time and I just have several, not sure.

didn’t see one of the traditional special camps in Far Desert. But I did see something strange and I’m not sure what beating the camp did yet.