Post
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
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
and my scanner is picking up another solitary dot close by, it'd be crazy if my first good artifact hunt ends up netting me not one but two artifacts
a second artifact has hit my inventory
2(!) more artifacts later, I wanna go back for a moment to the 5.56 rifle parenthesis I opened earlier today
I spent this last hour using a kitted out 5.56 with an actually good muzzle velocity and it makes all the difference
it's a variant that claims to be specialized for close quarters but even at medium ranges it SHREDS compared to my old rifle, and that's not even with armor piercing rounds (which I should start investing on)
the only issue I have with it as a "general purpose" rifle to carry when exploring is that it doesn't have a magnifying scope, so while the rifle technically performs damn well past close range, the harder acquisition of further away targets kinda limits its usefulness
still I'm definitely keeping this for when I start venturing into dungeons or when I expect to find myself in tighter spaces
probably due to how far I am along the progression curve, cultists are no longer an exceedingly rare sight on my strolls and I'm currently split on whether or not I should get on their bad side
they're the only faction I'm almost perfectly neutral with, and I'd appreciate having one less group to worry about on top of the insurrectionists and military (and the occasional loner); on top of that, they seem to be quite deadly thanks to the eather weapons they tend to have, so they'd either be a big threat to me or really valuable allies depending on the route I pick
..and the eather weapons are exactly why I'd be willing to add them to my list of inheritors it's fine to kill, I'm really curious about that weapon class
all this depends on one thing though, and that's whether or not they're one of the factions who are aggressive unless you have a decent reputation with them
they don't SEEM to shoot me on sight, but I encountered one earlier and he warned me to back off so uhh yeah not that friendly either, maybe it's cause I was fighting off another group shortly before that
thanks to a stroke of sheer luck I just witnessed a few insurrectionists kill off a cultist, I killed them in turn and upon checking the cultist's body I just got a free eather rifle AND a small eather cell
spares me the pain of making myself new enemies
thanks to steam guides I learned I can sloowly improve my reputation with cultists by sacrificing stuff on exceedingly rare shrines, of which one I just randomly stumbled across while artifact hunting
also I think the game is getting quite hard, military squads are becoming common even in places where they didn't use to show up in and insurrectionists are getting their hands on eather weapons too
finally ventured into the abandoned lab in flood plains (where I died when trying out the game before buying), it was a really tense 1h-1h30m exploration session but I came out with a couple spare pricey guns I got from some loners, and 3 new artifacts to my name, of which one that just. removes 5kg of weight off my inventory. no downside. I'm cool with that
the other two are more situational, there's one I heard is extremely handy for further dungeon exploration as it protects you from bad air at the cost of a bad cough that can alert enemies
4 or 5 more artifacts while roaming, I'm getting the hang of this I think
not selling them all right away cause there are a bunch with effects that could be handy in rare cases, and even then I already made at least 10 grand off the few I did sell, weapon upgrades don't seem like a distant wish anymore
having a ton of spare money also means I can finally start stocking up on ammo without worrying too much about needing to leave enough cash on me to be able to do impulse purchases of rare stuff I want
no idea what I've done but my cultist reputation is now -345 as opposed to the 100something from before yesterday
I know I accidentally killed one after mistaking them for an insurrectionist, but that should NOT be enough to nosedive my reputation that much
guess I'll have to sacrifice an insane lot of meat and whatnot to crawl back to a decent reputation again
tonight has actually been my first proper session in a few days, and boy what a session it was
first and foremost, I finally decided I should buy a heavy plate armor since I can afford it and its hit to my carry weight isn't as bad as I thought
and speaking of armor, shortly after that I randomly came across an insane trade offer for a 6 grand helmet with good stats, a hud AND night vision (compared to my setup until now which was a good helmet with a hud, and separate nvgs without any protection), needless to say I got that immediately
I also figured I'd check out the dungeon in crossroads after eyeing it for so long, and what I expected to be a relatively quick 1h-ish trip underground and back topside ended up being a 2h+ time sink with which I am STILL not done
long story short I underestimated the danger of breathing toxic air and walking next to the most radioactive thing I've seen yet while my geiger counter was screaming at me, and before long I started coughing up blood and taking huge hits to my health
I tried basically every sickness cure in my inventory and it didn't work after 5 minutes, so I figured it was about time I booked it, stashed away my loot thus far and returned another day (preferably with a real gas mask so I don't cough my organs out again) to finish the job
btw the dungeon has some insanely tense moments if you find the way to a connected underground lab from there, with ghostly shadows of bodies that only appear when shined at with a light, to EM disturbances that periodically kill your torches and nvgs leaving you in pitch black darkness surrounded by haunting howls
the horror element is so insanely well done
by sheer luck I happened to finish a task while underground that makes the horror tunnels from earlier safe in terms of paranormal shit and unsafe in terms of ordinary guys shooting at you, which I think is a major improvement
nvgs really shine in places like this cause it seems like enemies don't have nvgs at this point in progression just yet, so they're forced to navigate with flashlights and they instantly give away their position while you're relatively safe lurking in the dark
a neat detail about this is that if you have night vision on, flashlights pointed at your face can block your vision just enough to make things quite dangerous, it's kinda obvious but idk I really like that
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