Cooking Fire Arrows
Daily Ramble 100: Cooking Fire Arrows
Horizon Zero Dawn is a fun game that I wish I had more time to play. It’s got some interesting skills, a neat story concept, and compelling characters. I know it’s already got some DLC but I’m still slowly making my way through the opening phases of the original game and I can see why so many people put this high on thier list of games from 2017.
As I left off last time, I had just attained level 3 and grabbed my 1st 3 skills – Concentration, Silent Strike, and Gatherer – so it was time to put them to good use. Rost set me up with a couple of tasks and said he’d meet me later after he takes care of some stuff and I gather everything he wants. For now though, I was on my own with Aloy and we started with a hunt for Fire Arrow ingredients.
Going Through My Task List
As I began my search, with Aloy, for the Fire Arrow ingredients I came across a man on the side of the road who’d fallen. Apparently this guy, Thok, tried to kill a scrapper all by himself and while the machine left him alive, his leg was pretty tore up. The creature also took off with a spear in his side that was made by Thok’s dead wife. Unfortunately, Arana, his daughter went after the scrapper herself, to get the spear back, and she’s not much of a hunter.
If I can get the spear and his daughter back, it’d really help Thok out, so I’ll add that to my list of things to do…
- Find Fire Arrow ingredients
- Get food for Odd Grata
- Get a Tripcaster from the merchant Karst
- Save Arana and get her mother’s spear
Fire Arrows
The ingredients should be pretty straight forward and I figure I’ll be able to pick those up as I perform the other tasks so I’m not gonna focus on that one. The others all take place in a fairly close proximity so I should be able to get them done pretty quickly. As I go, I also pick up all kinds of crafting materials so I don’t have to worry about running outta arrows – it’s pretty nice that I can always craft more when I need them.
The metal shards I need for the arrows were easy to come by since most of the machines drop them, but the Blaze had to be taken from the backs of the Striders.
It wasn’t hard to get, but I had to be wary of the Watchers protecting the Strider herds. That, and the rain made visibility crap. Fortunately the water didn’t effect my Focus so I could lock-on to targets and follow them or highlight their tracks so I could avoid them.
It actually became a lot of fun sneaking up on both the Striders and the Watchers after I got used to taking them down. I soon lost my fear of them and knew that even if they did rampage and come at me, I could always dodge outta the way and use my medicine pouch to heal up. I suppose the hardest thing was figuring out that I should use my spear whenever I could get close enough since it did tons of damage, particularly if I attacked from stealth. And once I got the ingredients for the Fire Arrows, they were easy to craft – and better yet, I could start using them.
Scrappers
As I mentioned, my medicine pouch became my best friend and I always made sure to replenish it 1st thing after a fight where I had to heal up. Keeping the pouch topped off save me more times than I can count. I also learned that if you run behind objects or dive into the tall grass, you could actually disengage from a fight. Yeah, those machines aren’t to bright…at least not the one’s I’ve met so far.
Now that I had Fire Arrows, it was time to search for Arana, but like I said, it was good I learned about disengaging since in my next fight I thought it was over once I took down the Scrapper, but one snuck up on me. These guys pack a whalop but luickily there was plenty of tall grass around that I ducked into an eventually he stopped trying to find me.
In any case, I found the girl and she of course was surrounded by machines waiting to get a piece of her. And these were the new Scrapper type. It turns out not only are they tougher than the others I’ve met so far, but they also shoot at me and have some kind of radar that helps them track me. But I had my fire arrows, and they came in real handy.
First Death
Needless to say, no matter how good my fire arrows were, I shouldn’t have taken on 4 of them at the same time. Oh well, I had to have my first death sometime and I think I was getting a bit off my focus. When I looked at my map after I died, I had travelled pretty far from where I spotted Arana and I should have just stuck to the mission.
In any case, I reached level 4 so it was a good time to take a break and figure out what skill I wanted to unlock. I’m sure I’ll finish up helping Arana next time since I already found her.