Tag: RimWorld

An Extra Life Weekend

This weekend was one that I certainly won’t be forgetting any time soon. The Combat Wombat Extra Life team did amazing, and almost reached our total goal. I had a pretty low threshold for my own goal, but I reached it and that makes me happy. After all, every little bit helps. I was raising money for the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation – a place very near and dear to my heart since Leo was in the NICU for three weeks after being born and if we had any issues he would have been sent there. They do great work. Anyway, I streamed some RimWorld and then my husband donned his Daddy costume and played Dream Daddy: A Dating Sim on stream. You can catch the videos of that over on my twitch page and my YouTube channel. It was hilarious.

I’m so proud of our community. We don’t always play the game games or have the same interests but it was absolutely amazing to come together for an event like this. When I wasn’t streaming or watching my husband be silly I tuned in to the other Wombats and friends who were participating. You all did wonderful and I hope everyone had fun.

There’s still time to donate over at my page, and you can also check out the Combat Wombat team page for progress. I’m already looking forward to playing next year. I did intend to get some Fortnite played but I had to quickly change my plans because my Llama Bean had other ideas. Ideas that involved him sitting on my lap, and typically that means one hand to hold him and the other hand to game with. Fortnite is one of those games where you need both hands.

Did you raise money for Extra Life? How was your experience? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Oh, and another HUGE thank you to everyone who donated. You guys, are amazing. This smile I have today is because of you.

How Streaming Helped my Mental Health

I haven’t been streaming for that long, but honestly it couldn’t have started at a better time in my life. Sure, I have a brand new baby boy, my husband is away at depot for 6 months, and I can barely form a single complete thought let alone carry on an adult conversation – but streaming has been one of the best things I could have done.

Why? Because it’s something I’m doing for me.

Four times a week, for an hour each time, I stream video games. I’m on a RimWorld stint lately because it’s pretty easy to play with a toddler in my lap or if I have to randomly AFK. I try my best to stick with a schedule which is currently 14:30-15:30 mon-tue-thur-fri. My streams are not long, and I’m not incredibly popular but I do have an absolute blast every time and I am incredibly thankful to those people who stop in, even just to say hello. At the end of my streams I have the biggest smile on my face and it’s because of each and every single person who has made an effort to be there for me. I really can’t express just how much this has helped me.

When I first started streaming I was in a pretty dark place. I was suffering from Postpartum, and I was very lonely with my husband gone. I tried streaming at night when logically I had more “free” time, but it didn’t work out because I’m on duty 24/7. I wanted to remind myself that I was MORE than just a mother. That I was an actual human being, with interests, friends, and passions. One of those passions is video games and even more than that one of those passions is other people and interacting with them to the best of my introverted capabilities. So I stream.

I feel really good when I stream. I love sharing what’s going on in my small home, I am proud that I’m able to remain calm and collected when something happens either in game or out. I feel like I’m able to transition between watching my llama bean and interact with my stream audience at the same time. I love having discussions with them, I love sharing my enjoying of whatever game I happen to be playing. I love that my little guy babbles into the microphone and shares his thoughts, too.

For that one hour I am something more than just a milk supplying caregiver. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my son, I love my family and I am incredibly blessed to have all of this in my life and I realize that, but you can get yourself caught up in a particular headspace where you’re not feeling very appreciated – and streaming makes me feel appreciated.

So even though I don’t have a lot of spare time, the streams are hectic, and some days I wonder why I’m bothering, I’m really glad to be streaming.

If you haven’t checked out one of my streams yet, please do! You can find me as Stargrace over on twitch and I upload my videos to YouTube after each one. If you happen to be a streamer let me know, I try my best to grow our community and catch other streamers when I can. I realize we should all be supportive of one another, and it really is a lovely community.

Adventures in RimWorld

RimWorld is one of those games that I never get bored of and if I do, I just go download some new mods from the steam workshop and it’s like a completely different game. I’ve been playing RimWorld as my weekly stream game because it’s something that I’m pretty familiar with and it’s easy to step away from the game if I need to here and there. Things are automated, and I find it relaxing. Your millage may vary of course. Especially depending on your difficulty level.

I have been playing on the extreme setting (the highest one) with the randy random scenario, which means all events are random. In my last adventure my colonists only died because of my neglect. I was playing on tribal which is something I rarely do because I really dislike not starting with power. You spend so much time researching I feel like you can’t actually get anywhere. Anyway. I had forgotten which buildings were marked as Ancient Dangers. Maybe there’s a mod that will remind me and cause me to step away from those places. I remembered two, but ended up opening the third one – HUGE mistake.

My colonists who were of course tribal and didn’t even have power had absolutely no means to combat the mechanoids that popped out. By sheer luck we had a single gun (equipped by Scopique) and he was able to take out one of the scythes, but we still had a second one along with a centipede. To say everyone died a fiery death would be an understatement. It was carnage. There was absolutely no way to escape.

So I’ve started the colony over. This time with three crash landed survivors, which means they have power. Welshtroll is also proficient in the Force, so once he works the skill up he’ll be able to choose the light or the dark and use his powers. I’m hoping that this colony survives a bit longer so that I can show off some of the neat stuff you can do – and so I’ve bumped DOWN the difficulty level of the game in order to do that. I’ll still have some awesome events, but maybe every stream won’t end in slaughter.

I won’t be streaming today (Tuesday, October 3rd) as my little guy has immunizations, but I’ll be back at it this Thursday, October 5th, 2:30pm PDT. Catch me over on twitch, and don’t forget to give a follow so you get notifications of when I’m going live.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Streaming Video Games? Sure, I do that!

Today I tried a little bit of an experiment. See, I love streaming but have held off for one reason or another. I was just going to start getting into it when I had my son, and I haven’t really been able to find my groove since then. I started by trying to stream when he was asleep – turns out he’s not the best of sleepers, and he frequently wakes up which means I’m frequently running to check in on him and put him back to sleep.

I thought about it a while and today decided why not try streaming when he’s awake. My computer is in his play area, he’s got a baby gate and can’t get anywhere and it’s pretty easy to watch over him while doing other things. He enjoys wandering around and doing his own thing and playing with his toys so technically speaking there should be no reason why I couldn’t stream an hour or so a few days a week with him wandering about.

I loaded up RimWorld and the Combat Wombat adventures began (episode 2) – and it went pretty well. I did have to run away from the computer and microphone a few times but nothing drastic. RimWorld is one of those games you can play and you don’t necessarily have to pay full attention to it plus you can pause it any time it’s needed. I called it a success and posted the video over to my YouTube channel, then spent a bit of time organizing my videos so they made more sense.

I’m pretty sure I’ll do more. The streams may not always be that long, but I’m going to try to devise some sort of schedule and as always if you miss any of the streams you can watch the VOD (video on demand) as a highlight on twitch, or give my YouTube channel a follow and catch it there. Either way, it feels great to be streaming again. There’s not very many things these days that I “do for me” but getting a little bit of game and stream time in is certainly one. I’m still trying to raise money for a chair, once I get that taken care of I’ll start using the cam while I stream but in the meantime it wouldn’t be much fun to watch me kneeling on the floor as I try to game, or gaming from an exercise ball, lol.

I’m thinking a Throwback Thursday stream may be fun, along with some visual novels, and of course the continued game of RimWorld. W’ell just have to see!

Still Gaming – Sort Of

Life has been kicking me around for so long now I don’t even know what I was doing last, but I do know that I want to get back into the swing of things, back into being me. So here I am. I have done pretty much zero gaming these past few weeks. It’s not that I haven’t had the time, I do, but I’m just emotionally spent and so I end up watching Netflix or reading for an hour and then going to sleep. Or tossing and turning and dreaming about wildfires (that was last night). Either way, I love gaming and I love writing so it’s time to suck it up and get back to it as much as I can with the turmoil that’s going on (if you want to know details you can PM me on twitter / facebook or email).

Yonder – love this game. I’m unfortunately limited to gaming from my MacBook for the foreseeable future, which isn’t completely horrible because I can still stream from my PC to my MacBook, but lets face it, this is not a gaming laptop. I’d love to save up for a proper one but that just isn’t in the cards right now (if you spot a fantastic sale on a gaming laptop that delivers to Canada please let me know). I’d love to get rid of my desktop completely and just use a gaming laptop as I don’t see things changing any time soon for the next couple years. Yonder isn’t compatible with my MacBook but I’ve been streaming it and that works out pretty well.

I’ve also started playing RimWorld again. I downloaded a whole slew of new mods (more details about that later) and happily enough the game doesn’t have to be streamed to play it. So long as I don’t fry the MacBook everything should be good. I haven’t played a lot since the A17 update, a lot of my older mods were broken and I was waiting on them to get fixed, but now some time has passed and the majority (of the popular ones at least) have been updated. I’d love to stream my game play, but for now it’s just not possible (unless I get that gaming laptop, then I will gladly set up some streaming) so you’ll have to live vicariously through my gaming blog posts.

Games coming up? There are a few of them, but honestly I have my hands full with the games I’m already playing. My renewal for WoW comes up soon and I’m still working on my deeds in Wurm Unlimited on the Sklotopolis server. We took down a drake on Saturday and I won another set of gear – but passed it off to the next winner because I’ve already won some and I wanted someone else to get the opportunity. People sort of looked at me oddly for passing, but I felt confident in my decision.

Anyway! This is a post to basically say yes, I’m still here, and I do plan on getting my post counts back up there again. It may not be every day, but we’ll see how it goes. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!