I said that intentionally.
The in game book I’ve heard is really good.
Knittens is fun. :)
Terraformers was fun! No foolin’. And I have the “hours played” to prove it. :)
I didn’t play enough Terra Nil to pronounce it fun or unfun yet, but for what it’s worth, I’m still thinking about that dumb book that wouldn’t close and how pretty it was. That’s how they get you!
I believe you!
But i’m not subscribing to netflix in order to play a match-3 with kittens, as adorable as that sounds.
Terra Nil is so much cooler when you unlock the remixed maps. Here’s my barren riverbed:
Put in some turbines and water pumps to get a river going:
Detoxify the soil, water it, and get some greenery spread around the map:
Now that we’ve made the land verdant, each scenario requires a certain portion of specific biomes. When you first play through the game, the biomes are pretty conventional. This area would normally just get meadows and forests, but playing the unlocked remixed version also requires wetlands. The three-way pie chart in the upper left corner shows my progress for each biome.
You also get a checklist of climate thresholds:
The later map types can have as many as three parameters, but this one is only concerned with humidity to enable the wetlands. It’s pretty simple to just build humidifiers on the coast to reach the wetlands requirements. However, one of the challenges for this biome is getting the humidity above 70%, which requires making lots of surface water by digging more riverbeds and pumping more water. I haven’t beaten this challenge yet, and this sort of thing is where Terra Nil’s maps get their replay value.
Let’s drop in some salt marshes by salinating the water and some meadows by adding bee colonies:
Now for the forests, which only grow in the rich ash that results from burnt down meadows. So we build some solar gatherers, which are the blue round radar dish looking things. After they trigger some fires, I can grow forests along the northeast edge:
Having satisfied the three biome requirements, now comes the hard/fun/final part: pulling up stakes. Because the point of Terra Nil is that you can’t leave any structures behind! Everything’s gotta go! If you can’t get it off the map, you lose. Terra Nil is about leaving nothing but footprints and taking nothing but pictures!
And here’s my final picture:
My footprints are the unsightly squares where my buildings used to be. Ugh!
I’m really liking this. It’s got some bugs – that damnable book bug at the very start! – but nothing I can’t work around. And although there are “only” four map types, the remixed version of each map is a nice added level to the basic puzzle of matching different tools with different environmental requirements.
Tom you seem to be really good at playing Terra Nil.
Glad to see you having “fun” playing pc games again.
I’m rilly good at Terra Nil.
BTW, here’s an example of how difficult the maps can get, which is arguably a spoiler:
Terra Nil is deeper than it might seem at first.
I’ve been eyeing this - the sale caught my eye. I’m glad to hear the remixed maps add more variety and challenge.
I picked Terra Nil up and I enjoy it. It’s a nice little zen game that’s particularly nice before bed when you want to enjoy the spa-type music and soothing rain sounds. That said, some of the arbitrary game decisions are kind of loopy. Power lines! What a great idea, i’ve been waiting for these! Nope. Power line technology only exists in one biome - no one else knows how to make them. But, like, i see them all over…Nope! Those are lines providing power, totally different thing. Ok, well, at least I have my trusty calcifier…Nope! We forgot about that in this biome! But it’s the same biome, just a different…Nope! No calcifiers! Besides if you had a calcifier, you wouldn’t get to enjoy the fissure/seismic charge/trenching tool/water pump mini-game we have in store for you. I see. But I can drop monorails from the sky wherever I want. Yes! Monorail technology is simple. It’s just one rail. Boom. Mono. Rail. Can’t get any simpler…
I’d go so far as to say, i wouldn’t even mind the arbitrary tool selection if the game allowed you to see what you were going to be working with beforehand. But then you get into phase 2 or 3, having designed your whole ecosystem around having, let say, powerlines, only to find out that now you have to basically do it all over again because you’re gonna need to make lava rocks instead of just having powerlines. It’s…annoying.
Glad you’re enjoying it despite the frustration!
Not being able to see your tools in advance is a fair complaint, but calling the tool selection “arbitrary” is a stretch. Each biome – and later the unlocked remixes of each biome – is a specific puzzle about matching specific tools to specific obstacles and challenges. But, yeah, it can be a pain figuring out how stuff works in Terra Nil, especially if you’re not enjoying it enough to retry maps.
My own complaint is the interface as the tools roll out and are spread over multiple tabs by the end of a map. Having to hunt around among the different tabs is just…ugh. I’m also really disappointed at how slowly – or even whether? – the developers are fixing obvious bugs.
My experience with many of the maps was playing through the first two stages to see how everything fits together, and then restarting with that knowledge in mind. Basically, learning how the pieces interact is part of the puzzle, and it might take some experimentation as you learn the new elements the game is introducing.
But, yeah, for someone looking for a well documented game, or who expects to “beat” a map on your first try, I wouldn’t recommend Terra Nil.
I could never find a “Netflix games” in my Netflix movie account. I did install this, but I’m not sure if it’s going to try and make me pay something att some point of it’s not properly registered to my Netflix account? Or maybe it is and I don’t realize it?
Only the mobile version is published by Netflix. If that’s the device you’re playing on, I think it might authenticate through your Netflix app on the device.
He- I’m playing through my IPad. Thanks!
Not frustration, just garden-variety annoyance.
Maybe arbitrary is the wrong word then. I guess from the viewpoint of the developer wanting to you to solve a particular problem in a particular fashion, it’s not, but from a player’s standpoint, having just completed a mission with a particular tool, it’s strange I don’t have access to the same tool set. Considering that all the different biomes exist in the framework of a shared world that you are working to reclaim, and the obvious connections between them, it’s weird to me that your tool-set would vary between missions.
Ya, i get that, but i think they might have thought through the design a little bit more to get there naturally instead of artificially. For example, i just played through the abandoned quarry map, and I was moving right along, planning things out pretty well. However, I was really just managing my immediate economy and didn’t think about what I would need to advance the conditions of the biome. For example, i didn’t realize I didn’t have trees for bees. Which is fine, i can make trees, but first i have to go through the proper steps of converting waste->grass->dry grass ->ash (including enough fire damage to consume buildings) ->trees ->grass ->bee lands. and this lack of realization necessitated a restart. And this was great! They didn’t take anything away, or even change anything, to encourage me to restart and I enjoyed restarting it with a new eye towards how i would achieve this. This is a lot better to me that restarting because I had no idea i wasn’t going to have power lines this time through (ha ha, you got me!).
This is the same thing though, right? The remixed quarry does take away something – the starting trees that you previously used to create flowers and then fires. The new puzzle makes you look at your toolset again and figure out how you can solve the same problem with what’s left. I feel like this is a core design for puzzle games.
I do agree that some levels are unfair the first time through. I had a setup for the metropolis level that I’m pretty sure was impossible without advanced knowledge of what was going to happen with those radioactive containers, due to a lack of elevated areas near one of the containers.
How long does it take to get to level 2 and then decide to restart?
Is it faster the 2nd time knowing what you know now?
So, for example
Start → 2hrs → restart → 2hrs → back to where I was at
or
Start → 2hrs ->restart → 1hr → back to where I was at
(is it 2hrs or ??)
Whichever way you do it, Terra Nil is a pretty short game. I believe I’d finished the first stage of each of the four basic biomes within a matter of hours. Three, maybe four, tops. Once you do that, you’ve “seen” everything in the game, and what’s left is attempting the remixes (which are arguably the point of the game) an, if you’re a completionist, optimizing the basic maps to meet their climate thresholds (you probably won’t do all those on your first playthrough).
But to my mind, this isn’t really a game where restarting a map is a major setback. I’m sure some people play faster or slower, and of course have different annoyance thresholds for restarting, but I never felt like I had lost time, or been cheated out of my time, or even that I’d played inefficiently. My feeling is that it’s just too slight a game for that, and furthermore the retries are more “fun” because you understand what you’re doing and you’re playing with a new sense of purpose.
Of course, it’s possible I’m just rationalizing because I enjoyed the game!
The devs took a break after launch which is mentioned on the game’s news feed on Steam; it’s one of the reasons I’ve not started it yet!
I dont think so, or at least I dont think of it that way. The environment may be different every single game you play, but your tools should be consistent so you know what you can/not do. In the example, i can create more trees - i cant make power lines.
some of that is randomization too. The first map that i played in urban, i had a great map, I just didn’t know what to do and botched it. On restart, it was a totally different map - and I restarted that a half a dozen times till i got one that I was more comfortable with.
ya, that’s way quicker than me. I’m at 9 hours now, having done the first map in each biome to completion. For me, i just enjoy the quiet serenity of putting everything back in its place and making it precipitate. I just wish it had some cats ;)