Rising Tides? More Like Waiting Tides!

After an utterly chaotic 133rd Devstream in which only two people showed up and one of the developers was drifting back and forth between his own stream and the main stream, the Rising Tides update hit unexpectedly on late Friday night, requiring a huge amount of farming and a huge amount of waiting to get your personal interplanetary battleship built and ready to fly.

Assuming you don’t rush the Dry Dock, it’s a good day’s worth to build the Dry Dock, then two hours to deal with the research for the Ship Cephalon that you then need to replicate the blueprint for and build in your foundry, which then takes 6 hours to build (also assuming you don’t rush it) and then you’ve got six ship components, which all take 12 hours each to build and can’t be rushed in any way because it’s technically clan research.

That’s on top of the farming required to obtain all the new materials needed. Which requires farming Eximus enemies and mining. Oh and you need a ton of rare materials like Orokin Cells and Argon Crystals, on top of the Fieldron and Mutagen Masses and Detonite.

Or, in my case, wait even longer because you spent all your Fieldrons and Mutagen Masses building the Dry Dock for your Clan and then realising you need 5 more of each to be able to start building a ship Cephalon in your normal foundry. And then realising that there are tons of new resources you need to obtain to build the ship parts. And sighing with disbelief as you had literally just turned down 7 day resource boosters the day before, from your 1100th login reward. Typical.

That’s fine though. After all, space ships aren’t built in a day. I mean, landing crafts are, but those are basically fancy drop pods. We’re just going to have to be patient with our spaceships. In the mean time, what else did the Rising Tides update bring?

Well, a lot of it consisted of various smaller changes like Liches now being able to be chased off by downing them three times without stabbing them, and the fact that Liches drop Kuva as a reward for stabbing them. The biggest issue with the Lich hunt – the farming murmurs, the instadeaths and the removal of team mates getting murmur progress should someone be instakilled by their Lich – are unchanged, but it’s a step in the right direction.

There’s also some new cosmetics and a new Steam pack that contains a nice syandana and some Platinum. The cosmetics are mainly the Equinox Antonym collection, which is a nice deluxe skin for someone who desperately needed it, and the really weird Cumulus Collection, a Syandana, Armour Set and Pistol skin that are supposedly like clouds but look and feel more like a cross between Orokin metallics and Infested tissue.

And finally there’s the new blink that has been added to all Archwings. It’s got a 3 second cooldown and goes twice as far as Itzal’s old teleporting blink, but frankly it doesn’t feel as fast – part of Itzal’s charm was that you could spam Blink as fast as you could, assuming you had energy. I do kinda like Itzal’s replacement ability, it’s basically Valkyr’s Ripline except less responsive and not as fun, but I think everyone will miss Blink as a mobility tool.

Anyway, apart from that, everything else is just bug fixes and Railjack stuff. While it’s nice to see an update being pushed so suddenly, it is… mostly just a massive waiting game…