Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Pokémon Go: Week 25 + Abyssrium

I haven’t posted about PokéGo in a while, which probably reflects my waning interest. I have, however, reached Level 28, thanks in part to the quadruple points bonus from the Lucky Egg evolves during the Thanksgiving event. I didn’t benefit much from the Winter Holiday event due to being entirely occupied by family in rural Norfolk. It was pretty irritating not to see a single Pokémon within a kilometre of the house. On a couple of brief visits to town, I got a few free incubators. I also caught a large quantity of Santachus in London during December, which were sufficient for me to evolve a Raiclaus. \o/

New to my Pokédex since my last update on Week 18 (!) were: Blastoise, Dodrio, Exeggcutor, Arcanine, Magneton, Raichu (and Raiclaus), Nidoqueen,Ivysaur, Charmeleon, Vileplume (which is a lot cuter than it sounds), Victreebel (which isn’t), Dragonite and Weezing.

I’ve caught a few Dittos, and one was even in Worcestershire and not London. I’m 30 candies from my fourth Gyarados. I am frustrated that I’ve been playing for nearly half a year now and not managed to catch, hatch or even see in the wild a Snorlax, a Lapras or an Aerodactyl.

OTOH, I hatched a Pikachu from a 2km egg recently, which was pretty satisfying! I’ve walked my Sandshrew to sufficient candies to evolve it, and my Nidorino is ready to go at my next Lucky Egg too. I have sufficient Voltorb, Kabuto and Vulpix candies to make walking them to evolution a reasonable undertaking. After that, though, I won’t have many left to evolve, and for those, I have so few candies out of the 100 required that walking them is pointless until there’s another event where the distance required is quartered. I suspect this game is coming to the end of its natural cycle for me.

Abyssrium has been making up for the petering out of PokéGo with its Winter Holiday event. I collected all the Christmas fish in their Santa outfits and enjoyed adorning my Coralite with Rudolph antlers. I also still faithfully feed my Neko Atsume kitties and water my Viridi plants every day. At some point I’ll have to look into acquiring a new adorable phone game.

Gratuitous Abyssrium & Neko Atsume images below.



Featuring the elusive Whiteshadow in the Sugary Style garden. Looking at this, I can’t feel too sad that my first public post of 2017 is about frivolous games.

My plan is to finish off the December Days photo prompts in January. I also have a set of Throwback Thursday photos I shall be posting over the course of the next year. Let it not be said that I don’t have goals.

• I didn’t get to poke as many mons as I would have liked in the USA due to lack of mobile data. After the first hotel, our next two temporary abodes were, frustratingly, nested between Pokéstops but not quite close enough to reach them with the provided WiFi connections.
  
• Although I saw the shadow of a Tauros several times, I didn’t manage to catch one.
  
• I did, however, acquire the following new Pokémon, in addition to the Ekans, Growlithe and Pikachu mentioned previously:
  
  • Nidorino
    
  • Diglett (looks like a tiny happy...tombstone?!)
    
  • Persian (mrow)
    
  • Grimer (horrible purple drippy thing, joint least favourite with the Weepinbell)
    
  • Cubone (why so difficult to catch?)
    
  • Second Pikachu (wooo)
  
  
• My 10k egg from the USA hatched into a Pinsir. It’s a very powerful Pinsir, but I’m still a bit disappointed.
  
• I maxed out the Bug Catcher and Psychic medals. It will now be a long time before I max out any more as I just don’t see certain types of Pokémon very often.
  
• I unlocked the “Pikachu Fan” medal, which has now displaced the Rocker as my Most Pathetic Medal Tally. Yay!
  
• Have finally managed to bump up to Level 23. Will be popping a Lucky Egg & using my Spreadsheet of Evolve very soon.
  
• Thanks to the trip to the USA, I can now evolve several Pokémon I couldn’t have before, including the Abra, Ekans, Machop, Mankey, Meowth (although I’ve already caught a Persian) and Paras. I AM EXCITE.

After meeting up with emelbe in Monterey, she kindly helped to enable me to achieve “relax and switch off” mode by introducing me to two new games: Viridi and Abyssrium. Viridi is aesthetically pleasing and very soothing. It’s even more low-key than Neko Atsume, which I didn’t know was possible. You plant a pot full of succulent cacti, water them, and wait. The plants grow at real-time speed, so you only need to check on them once a day. When you start up the game, a short movie showing the growth progress of your plants is shown. A snail slowly and continuously orbits the perimeter of the pot. My pot is called “Subsumed”.

Abyssrium requires more interaction. You grow a coral reef and populate it with fish. It’s a “clicker” game, but a very beautiful one. I’ve now reached the stage where I have nearly all the animals apart from the dugong, which is effectively “beating” the game. I found this walkthrough by Sir TapTap very useful for strategising and acquiring hidden fish. Now that I don’t have to graft to earn new fish, I have a plan to create a garden full of nothing but jellyfish, sun fish, seahorses and turtles, which are the slowest-moving creatures available, and watching it whenever I feel tense.

My reef a couple of weeks ago, just a few bits of coral and fish:


My reef now, teeming with life:


( A few more soothing reef images, just because. )