Ushi No Tane Forum

Got a play date with Albert tomorrow. He comes around at least once a week, wanting a play date, but I'm so busy, I've rejected every invitation except from Gust...gotta keep the spouse happy. But I like Albert, and he keeps asking, so...first outing with him, tomorrow. It was also the first time Django was hanging around, wanting to go on an outing with Cricket.

I'm doing pretty good on the South Block development. I'm going to try to finish it today (the IRL 'today', not the game 'today') because I'm increasingly finding I have to psyche myself up to play. It's not that I don't really like it when I'm playing but honestly it's exhausting, and I'm always tired, lol...I just don't have the energy to play MTaP each time I have a gaming period free. Sometimes I really want to play games that don't push me, don't make me multitask or feel at all rushed.

The time slider is great for making things less rushed but there is still SO much to do. At least I've gotten slightly ahead on carbon steel bars! Though that surplus could dry up at any time...you never know when suddenly all your projects together will mean you need three thousand CSBs.

Oh, and it's day 4 of Spring Year 2, for me, and I've managed to get ahead of Higgins. Obviously not by a lot, this early on, but that year end prize was really motivating! I got so many relic pieces, and most of them I actually needed. Plus Higgins is a butt. BTW...the patch seems to have reduced the reputation rewards for main quest missions, making it just slightly harder to win against Higgins. Or maybe that's just because I'm in year 2? I don't know but the rep rewards have definitely lowered.

Ugh. D: How frustrating... I'm so sorry, Murasaki. Is there any way to back up your save file? I know it's doable with Nintendo's online service, but beyond that I'm not sure. That would at least be a way to ensure you can reinstall the game without worry. :/

Kikki wrote:In my game it was Remington who did that, lol. Everyone else just rushed back to town including Arlo and Sam but Remington started whaling on any monster in sight. I don't know why that difference is there...it is just down to whoever gets aggro-ed? Because he went quite far out of his way in some cases!

I think it must be proximity, cause Sam was definitely the closest in my case and she just made a beeline for them.

The mine was definitely a lot easier than I thought it would be. I was a little afraid it would be a Rat King style difficulty spike but I'm a little over leveled so I leapt in and it was no big deal. Having a companion to fight everything with you definitely makes a huge difference.

I wish there was some option to party up outside of these canned sequences, but the companion system in this game makes me pretty happy. They're useful when you need them and it feels like the Civil Corps aren't just pretending to be protecting anything while the MC does everything. (Which is a nice change.)

Upgraded my Assembly Station to Level 3 and am actually pretty disappointed. Next day EDIT: Uuuuuuugh. This has nothing to do with bugginess, this time. Other than the game just not running as smoothly as pre-update (character running more jerkily, menu taking a long time to load and close, etc), I don't really have any complaints so far. But the building in this game is becoming rather un-fun, for me. The wind turbines are killing me. ONE would have taken me a few days to build. THREE of them...argh. I'm gonna finish this game if it kills me but I've got to admit that I'm having less fun now than before. I'm going to build another industrial cutter and industrial furnace to try to take some of the load off.

I wish this game had a bit more cosmetic building...making the area prettier, somehow. (I liked the Green Wall quest.) Everything I build is so UGLY. (I am not a fan of steampunk or industrial aesthetics.)

EDIT 2: Discovered a possible bug with the Day of Brightest Sun, post-update. It's not game-breaking or even all that bad, but this time around, the balloons dropped two huge loads of presents in Central Plaza the second the holiday started, while everyone gathered in Peach Plaza was just starting to run. I got there first and cleaned up, almost...got 11 presents in a minute or less because they were just waiting there. No more were dropped for the rest of the day. I must have gotten almost half of everything available. (Though the first year I got 17, which was nuts...but at least that year the presents dropped all day so there was way more to go around.)

I'm really interested in this game, but with all the talk about loading times, lagging, bugs, and crashes, I'm a little wary of buying it.

Are there any more patches expected to be released soon?

No, unfortunately, there's no word on further console updates so far. They're still looking into a few things...adding new voice acting, the grass texture, adjustable UI font and adding zoom (or something like it). But no promises have been made and no suggested dates given.

The game works pretty well overall for me, now, though it's not quite as smooth as before in that the character movement is slightly less smooth and the menu now has lag. But I haven't run into any crashes or any of the old bugs.

EDIT: Pathea dropped a Tweet to say we should send our feedback to admin@pathea.net. Which I have now done. Here's the tweet:

Wanted to share a nice, sweet screenshot from Arlo's quest, A Strong Man's Adventure. I really liked this quest a lot, and it showed one of the prettiest scenes I've yet to see in this game IMO. Don't open if you don't wanna be spoiled!

That's really cute, ryume. Portia really hits some nice moments in some of these quests. <3

quigley wrote:I'm really interested in this game, but with all the talk about loading times, lagging, bugs, and crashes, I'm a little wary of buying it.

Are there any more patches expected to be released soon?

Coming in late on this but, imo the biggest problem I have with the game is its loading times. They're bad. Everything else can be on occasion grating but is pretty easy to look past. I think what says the most is that in spite of the complaints that have come out of this thread, most everybody on the forum who has played the game has put at LEAST 50 hours into it. If you've played a Bethesda game, any Bethesda game, and been able to look past its BS and enjoy it, Portia's rough edges will be no big deal.


So on my end of things I think I've finally gotten comfortable with my workshop. Maxing out every maker in the shop is giving me basically the whole day off (I've been fishing a lot...funny enough. ) And I actually enjoy the fishing now. I get the occasional crazy fish but even rare catches are reasonably easy. And fast. So much faster than other games.

And, +1 for Mint. He (strangely enough) endeared himself to me while he was bugged on arrival and so far I regret nothing. (It did take a LONG time for him to accept the confession though.)

I also realized today that we can put potted plants outside the house too (whoops), so looks like I've got another area to decorate.

I've put 85-90 hours into Portia so far, and am only in Spring of Year 1, so there's a LOT of gameplay hours in this game...finishing at 80 hours...I guess it could be done? I'm not really sure how, though...I don't think I could have done it. I think I'm about 60% done the main story? Hard to be certain. I've just finished 'Adventures with Mali' or whatever it's called (cleaned out the boss in one go! With some difficulty, but still...whee!) I love that zoom attack where I RUN at an enemy and start swinging my weapon and it insta-warps me to them, then I roll away again quick so they can't retaliate, lol.

Got a few good bits of new armor from the last quest too, and am only half a level too low to wear them (I'm soon to turn Level 40.) They're not pretty but thankfully that clothing revision quest was finished and now I can keep whatever armour I like the look of best and just swap the stats of any other armour onto it, so I don't have to change to wearing something ugly! And I've gotten all the items necessary for the first five commissions that will pop up after the next Fireside Meeting in a day or two, yay...a nice boost to completion speed.

It's a lot of fun when the commissions are throwing out a lot of different items...making you use all your production equipment rather than just churning out carbon steel bar after carbon steel bar. But at times the endless crafting becomes a chore for me, tbh. I think I have to take more breaks to adventure or ruin dive/etc, to break up the crafting.

I also got the yard expansion that costs 80,000 Gols. I can expand again, now...I have the room

quigley wrote:I'm really interested in this game, but with all the talk about loading times, lagging, bugs, and crashes, I'm a little wary of buying it.

Are there any more patches expected to be released soon?

I think I'm the only one in this thread who has sunk significant amounts of time into both the Switch and the PC versions of this game. To be blunt, if PC is an option for you, I highly recommend going that route instead BECAUSE it's been a significantly improved, smooth gaming experience over the Switch. I would not even call it buggy, but don't take that to mean there isn't the occasional glitch here and there. Plus you're basically guaranteed to get any content that's developed down the road, versus console which I personally, for no good reason, feel like won't get all the updated content as time goes on. In my roughly 70 hours of playtime on PC, the game crashed on me twice in the same play session, but that was a while ago and I'm not even sure why it did.

On Switch, I'm with mikodesu. The bugs and loading times are annoying, but the game is still monstrously addictive, and it runs well enough that if you get sucked in, you won't care too much about the glitches at all (unless they happen repeatedly in absurd amounts). Even if the Switch version at full price was my only option, I would still say the game is worth every penny.

(Still extremely curious how it would run on a PS4...)

I don't usually mind the lack of variety - since I'm stockpiling everything as is - unless you get a quest that chews through 50 carbon steel...gr. I think my favorite bit is seeing how things look when they're finally installed. The wind turbines were awesome, very Nausicaa.

Hallelujah for that clothing revision quest. I love having a bunch of different outfits to wear and not having to switch out on the fly. <3

And, I forgot about this... it may be a little more obvious to the patient among us but if you end up with a quest with a really long list of requirements where you can't even see the end of them...you can scroll down with the left joystick. (Assuming that's the same on PS4...) Had to look up what I was missing for the "Letter to the Editor" quest because of that. :/ Oops.

Mikodesu wrote:I don't usually mind the lack of variety - since I'm stockpiling everything as is - unless you get a quest that chews through 50 carbon steel...gr. I think my favorite bit is seeing how things look when they're finally installed. The wind turbines were awesome, very Nausicaa.

Hallelujah for that clothing revision quest. I love having a bunch of different outfits to wear and not having to switch out on the fly. <3

I really like that I can wear what I like the look of, without being forced to swap out for something ugly because it has better defence

I have 105 CSBs on hand right now...but I still hate when the quests pile it all on and suddenly every commission takes 20+ of them. Y'see...I really like the quests that require, say, ironwood planks and concrete and waterproof fabric and bearings, for example...requiring me to use ALL of my machines at once, and each of them needing different ingredients. It feels really smooth and efficient and clever. But if I have a quest that takes raw CSBs and steel frames and steel shells all together, that means I need a HUGE amount of the bars, and all I ever get to do is mine in the same mine for iron and use the same machines and just wait for them to finish the monstrous amount because I don't need my blender or...etc. That feel repetitive and boring and poorly planned.

I just..don't really care for it. The crafting becomes a chore to me really fast if I feel like I'm not doing it efficiently, and I can't feel efficient when everything takes all of the same stuff. But even so, I have three civil furnaces pumping out CSBs non-stop, just to make sure I never have to get stuck waiting a day or two to get enough of them. Those three machines are set aside just for CSBs so I don't have to think about it as much. (And every week I go to the #2 mine and get myself a thousand iron ore, lol.)

The last bunch of quests has been really good, though, as they're requiring ingredients from a different part of the landscape, and some CSB stuff, but not nearly as much. So all my machines are firing at once right now. (The stuff taking up a huge load of my stuff right now is actually a SIDE quest I'm not entirely sure I even wanted to do, lol. Plus gotta save up on money and goods for the level 3 home now that I have the level 5 yard.)

Mikodesu wrote:Ugh. D: How frustrating... I'm so sorry, Murasaki. Is there any way to back up your save file? I know it's doable with Nintendo's online service, but beyond that I'm not sure. That would at least be a way to ensure you can reinstall the game without worry. :/

The save files don't delete when you uninstall the game so they were safe but it's crashed like 3 times since a clean install. Maybe my game files are borky. So very frustrating!

Murasaki wrote:

Mikodesu wrote:Ugh. D: How frustrating... I'm so sorry, Murasaki. Is there any way to back up your save file? I know it's doable with Nintendo's online service, but beyond that I'm not sure. That would at least be a way to ensure you can reinstall the game without worry. :/

The save files don't delete when you uninstall the game so they were safe but it's crashed like 3 times since a clean install. Maybe my game files are borky. So very frustrating!

Maybe you should contact Pathea Games themselves. A game crashing that often is definitely out of the ordinary...no one has had crashes half as often as you, iirc. You can email them (admin@pathea.net) if you'd like to try getting some feedback. They do respond sometimes but admittedly, not always. :/

Mikodesu wrote:And, +1 for Mint. He (strangely enough) endeared himself to me while he was bugged on arrival and so far I regret nothing. (It did take a LONG time for him to accept the confession though.)

How did I miss this earlier/not respond!? I think he's just so stinkin' cute. "Mint Condition" was just too cute for words, as was his reaction to the heart knot! In case anyone else wants to go for Mint, he won't accept the heart knot until you're good friend status (or at least he rejected me every day for a week until I gave up and raised him from friend to good friend). He calls you "darling" via voice acting when you speak to him the first time each day once you're dating in the PC version as well. I just wanna scoop him up and put him in my pocket for safekeeping

Kikki wrote:

Murasaki wrote:

Mikodesu wrote:Ugh. D: How frustrating... I'm so sorry, Murasaki. Is there any way to back up your save file? I know it's doable with Nintendo's online service, but beyond that I'm not sure. That would at least be a way to ensure you can reinstall the game without worry. :/

The save files don't delete when you uninstall the game so they were safe but it's crashed like 3 times since a clean install. Maybe my game files are borky. So very frustrating!

Maybe you should contact Pathea Games themselves. A game crashing that often is definitely out of the ordinary...no one has had crashes half as often as you, iirc. You can email them (admin@pathea.net) if you'd like to try getting some feedback. They do respond sometimes but admittedly, not always. :/

Thanks for the email address! I tried putting in a support request but even THAT form errors!!

I'll try to express my "disappointment" nicely. =)

edit: complained on their Discord now. /headache