I wish dock A in black lake had a bed cause I can't get myself to NOT go there as the sun is setting, and I inevitably end up having to wait out the night for like 20mins cause going outside in such an open space at nighttime without NVGs is practically begging to get killed by wildlife or some stalker in the dark
Post
other than that I'm really liking the game, I'm starting to get some decent weapons but I haven't been very lucky with wearables yet
still stuck with an armor that kinda sucks against bullets and a helmet without a hud
yesterday I got scammed into buying a wearable creepy deer skull with good stats but a hidden debuff for 3000-something dollars (that could only be sold for 666$)
then I just randomly found a 4000-something bucks gold chain while digging in a graveyard, I got attacked by an anomaly in the same graveyard and my character started tweaking holding his head between his hands (I poked around steam guides after that and I learned that what I was suffering from was "just" nearly maxed out mental fatigue that makes you hallucinate sounds and whatnot)
also I figured out quite late that I should've NOT used nearly all the weapons I looted off bodies for trading, and it would've likely been better to just sell them for money
sure trading seems to net you some rare items and weapons sometimes, but shops have wider selections of things and you'll eventually need to hit them for medical supplies and ammo
anyway yesterday I looted a crazy good semiauto rifle with a good scope and a suppressed sniper which I never used yet cause it's really heavy and has no zoom
I'm really really liking this game
while poking around steam guides I also learned that once you rack up a LOT of money you can invest it all on an eather-flux scanner and start hunting for artifacts inside of or around anomalies, and you can sell most of them for around 1000$ at the right trader (or you can just use them yourself for some wild effects)
update: while the game does run surprisingly great at near-maxed out graphics on my lowly 1650, it does crash from time to time by running out of vram
I tried messing with the graphics settings to lower the vram usage but weirdly enough nothing seems to change that? maybe I need to restart the game cause "excess" vram doesn't get deallocated until the game is restarted? so for the time being I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping the crashes don't come too often
I should seriously start thinking about a gpu upgrade sometime
a couple contracts and a whole bunch of sold weapons later, I finally have enough money to afford night vision goggles
no longer I shall fear the night
..and when I go to check the trader that sells the nvgs, obviously they don't have them in stock
guess I'll have to check again on daily trader refreshes
still I can really feel the improvement in my equipment
it's been a while since my last death and I managed to stay alive on trips that took way longer than I expected while downing several full squads of 4 to 6 guys
if there's any universal truth in project silverfish it's that scoped rifles are 100% the way to go in nearly every occasion
they're handy right from the start in crossroads and flood plains, but they almost become a necessity with the extreme sightlines of the depot and m35
I visited the guy that upgrades weapons to turn in a contract and I took note of a couple upgrades I really wanna do
surprisingly enough upgrades are NOT a nobrainer, as they're not only expensive but most of the time they end up making your weapon heavier and that just goes to bite you later
not to mention you can rarely get those upgraded weapons as random drops
most upgrades feel more like a luxury thing that you should only really do if you have money to waste and want specific cool looking guns for personal preference
I think I reached 15 or 20h of playtime so far and I'm only liking the game more and more
just completed a tricky contract and killed some high ranking military official behind a whole minefield in a barricaded checkpoint, first try, and the game crashed cause of vram again as I stepped inside another area
this is fine
at first I thought I could get it done quick with a sniper rifle but as it turns out, none of the ones I have have a good enough scope to zoom as far as I need
on top of that I don't think the assassination target looks that different than the other guys, so the best course of action is just putting down the two turrets overlooking the checkpoint, tanking environmental damage while walking towards the foot of the hill on top of which the checkpoint resides, and starting a massacre within the checkpoint itself
I'm kinda surprised by how it works at all for how messy of a "plan" it is
still definitely takes some 20mins or so, partly cause I had the Great idea of starting this in the morning (which equals thick haze) which is worsened by rain that lasts a few ingame hours
shockingly enough haze doesn't go hand in hand with sniping turrets with a barely adequate gun
the insurrectionists being referred to by basically everyone as fascists makes more sense when you go look at their bounty boards and see contracts for the heads of virtually every big faction except the cultists (whom they don't trust anyway iirc) and the military (probably cause they're both trigger happy towards everyone) just cause they turned into a different branch of "human" after the apocalyptic event that acts as the backdrop to the game's lore
also a book in a fancy office in one of their outposts is written by a former executive chairman of something, yapping about his aim to dedicate all eather (exotic energy that reportedly caused the aforementioned apocalyptic event) infrastructure towards the "sacred project of Reestablishing Mankind's Former Greatness"
reminds me of someone that's weird
"I must become the sole eather drinker on this earth" from the same book sounds funnier than it's probably supposed to
today I may have kinda overdone it as I reached two of my goals, being the nvgs and the eather scanner
the nvgs aren't remotely overpowered, partly due to plain worse stats than an actual helmet, and partly cause you lose all color perception as you'd expect which makes recognizing factions at a glance way harder (I use binoculars to identify factions anyway 99% of the time just to be sure)
being able to see and act in the dark feels awesome but it's absolutely extremely tense, even when you know that enemies will have a hard time spotting you unless they also have nvgs or you're in front of a floodlight or something
as for the eather scanner uhh I got killed twice while trying to mess with it in far too dangerous of an environment so I guess I'll try it properly tomorrow, hyped to finally start artifact hunting (actually expected that stage of the game to take longer to reach)
with these two costly goals accomplished l guess I'll mostly save up money for armor and weapon upgrades at this point
spent an hour trying to hunt for artifacts but I found a whole lot of nothing
guess it's not that easy after all (which makes sense considering the value you seem to get out of it)
I love the enemy ai so much
it's surprisingly competent and I have been killed at least a couple times by someone who walked from a vulnerable spot all around a long stretch of cover to flank me
just now I downed 3 out of 5 guys in a squad in the middle of a train depot and I hid in a traincar to wait for the remaining ones to get in a position where I could shoot them from the train's windows
little did I know npcs are in fact capable of getting onto traincars even though they're quite tight and I expected their pathfinding to just. never bring them in there
anyway one of the guys got onto the traincar and there was this brief awesome minute of frantic peeking around seats to fire a few shotgun blasts in the hopes of putting him down, and in the middle of all this he got off the traincar while I was behind cover to enter again from a couple doors behind my back to catch me off guard
and this is like, fucking insane for such an obscure indie in early access?????? this last short shootout was one of the most unique moments I ever experienced in an fps
unless beta decay comes out this year and delivers on the really good promises with really good execution I'm afraid project silverfish might just be my goty for 2026
started reading a comically long guide describing all of the game's weapons and only now I come to realize my preferred 5.56 rifle actually has a comically bad - the worst actually - muzzle velocity of all rifles in the game, which makes it kinda awful at taking down enemies (especially when you haven't figured out you should really start using armor-piercing rounds once you hit the mid game) (like me)
suddenly it makes a lot of sense why I've been gravitating towards 30-06 rifles the whole time
FIRST SUCCESSFUL ARTIFACT HUNT