Not today

Today isn't the last day of Fallen Earth.

I'm glad of that. If it had been I'd have finished this final run on the very edge of Sector 3, and 6 levels below where I'd been back in 7 or 8 years ago. Bad timing seems to be a recurring theme of my visits to Kaibab Forest. Last time an unexpected update – several days ahead of the announced schedule – had wiped out Monkeytown the day I intended to start on it. Since I'd rushed up to S3 intending to see the place before it was destroyed I was less than happy when the update hit early.

As it is I have 12 days left to revisit Sector Three and – hopefully – move on to Deadfall and beyond. I have a fair amount of potential game time available to me over those 12 days, but how much of it I actually use remains to be seen.

Having reached level 30 – I'm actually a hair away from level 31 now – I've had another flurry of crafting to keep my skills up to par. A distinct absence of frayed synthetic cloth is hampering my armorcrafting somewhat, but I have filled up one of the other elusive resource of S2 – impure bio-chemical – thanks to a succession of kill quests involving giant insects.

Scrap carbon steel and salvaged plastic remain in short supply. I don't doubt I could have stocked up on those, and other materials, if I'd ventured into a couple of the PVP zones, since they almost always offer resource nodes a tier above most of the rest of the zone, but that's too much of a detour.

My guns and armor still feel reasonably effective, though it's becoming more and more apparent that – if this game subscribed to the trinity (and thankfully it doesn't) – I'd be running a DPS build, being fairly hard hitting at range, but disconcertingly easy to kill if I get swarmed, especially in melee. I've died less often during the last 24 hours than I did in the preceding 24, but I'm still very far from invincible.

So it is time to start thinking about new guns again - the best defence is always if everything is dead before it gets close enough to actually do any damage.