GAMING
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The plan for our first Medieval Dynasty session was about as simple as plans get.
Find a nice spot. Start a little town.
We found a very nice spot. We started a little town: two houses on a riverbank, across the water from Piastovia.
What we did not find was a spot with the right trees.
This was also our first time playing Medieval Dynasty in co-op. We have both played it before - I have been playing since July 2023 - but always on our own. In my Medieval Dynasty review, I said the co-op side was something we would be bringing to AnvilPlays.
This is that.
It was a short session. We had just finished a Subnautica 2 session, and the main job here was getting through the opening quests so that we were allowed to build freely.
Before we started, we changed a few world settings. Fast build, unlimited stamina, and unlimited carry weight are all switched on in our world.
Carry weight was the one I cared about most. On the default settings, you cannot carry very much, so the early game turns into a loop of gathering, walking back, unloading, and walking out again. I called it micro-grinding at the time.
Mr.Pendragon agreed. We both know how that part of the game goes, and we would sooner spend our sessions building a village than walking logs home.
So, a fair warning if you are playing on the default settings: everything below will take you considerably longer. Especially the houses.
I had a spot in mind from memory: just west of Piastovia, the main town, on the other side of the river.
Mr.Pendragon liked it too. The ground was fairly level, there were lots of trees, and the water was close.
What we wanted, as I put it at the time, was beachfront. Riverbank houses.
The river also doubles up as a local water supply, until you have built a well to automate it. You can drink straight out of it with no consequences at all.
Mushrooms are a different matter. According to Mr.Pendragon, you only have to look at a mushroom the wrong way.
One thing Medieval Dynasty gets right in co-op: I could always find Mr.Pendragon. The other player shows up on your compass, so you always know which way to go.
Mr.Pendragon's only question was which marker was me. I was the yellow one.
We had come straight from a Subnautica 2 session, where the game does not tell you where the other player is as intuitively as this. This felt like luxury.
Houses and other buildings need logs. A lot of logs.
Not all trees are equal, though. A birch gives you two logs. A maple gives you four.
I remembered, fairly early on, that one type of tree gives you more wood than the others. It was not the type we were standing next to.
Everything in the immediate vicinity of our lovely riverbank was birch.
In hindsight, we should have picked a spot with maple nearby. We did not.
There is one consolation. Mr.Pendragon noticed that the trees grow back in this game, which is nice, as long as you leave the stump in the ground. Dig the stump up, and that tree is gone for good.
Then came the paperwork.
In The Oxbow, you cannot simply pick a spot and start building. You have to work through the opening quests and get permission from Mirogod, the castellan of Piastovia, first.
The game made me do quite a lot of things before that happened.
Which raised a question neither of us could answer. How does all of this work in co-op?
Did Mr.Pendragon have to do the quests as well, or were they shared? And did the game expect each of us to build a town of our own?
The first answer arrived quickly. Mr.Pendragon's quest log started him at the beginning of the introduction too, so we both had to do the intro stuff.
The second we answered the practical way. We built one village, together.
Eventually, I thought we had permission.
We did.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Mr.Pendragon asked whether I had ever played long enough to get a wife and a child. It is called Medieval Dynasty, after all.
I have. In my last playthrough, I am fairly sure my wife was pregnant.
What I remember most clearly is her telling me to go and have a wash.
With permission granted, the building menu opened up, and so did the benefits of our world settings.
Fast build, according to Mr.Pendragon, is the best thing ever.
We built two houses, and we both worked on both of them. I think I started them off, then went to gather more wood, because of course we needed more wood. Birch, remember.
When I came back, Mr.Pendragon had finished one.
I was rather pleased about that.
He was also already thinking beyond the houses themselves, working out which way the doors of other buildings should face for a road that does not exist yet.
At one point, I reminded Mr.Pendragon about focus mode, which highlights items on the ground so they are easier to find.
The catch is that it only shows what your skills allow. Until you have levelled up your survival skill, it will not highlight things like sticks and stones. By default, it highlights the things you have crafted yourself, such as arrows.
We had not levelled up our survival skill.
Later on, I could not see the stones on the ground.
Then there was the tree.
I swung at it.
Nothing happened.
I swung at it again.
Still nothing.
I could not work out why this particular tree was refusing to be cut down.
I had the hammer equipped.
Not the axe. The hammer.
The trees in this game grow back. They do not, it turns out, respond to hammers.
By the end of the session, we had got through the opening quests, got Mirogod's permission to build, and finished two houses on our riverbank across the water from Piastovia.
We had also chosen a spot surrounded by the wrong trees and tried to chop one of them down with a hammer.
Mr.Pendragon finished off his house and went straight to sleep in it.
We had both come straight from a Subnautica 2 session, so I was not far behind him. We called it there.
For a first session, that feels about right.
Session 02 is about infrastructure.
The plan is a woodshed, a well and a storage building, and perhaps a hunting lodge too. Those let us hire people to take over some of the gathering - sticks, logs, meat and so on - and start to semi-automate the village.
Hiring is not unlimited, either. You cannot just take on a crowd of villagers. That takes reputation, so there will be some quests to do along the way.
We will still be chopping trees ourselves as well as any hired hands, because buildings need a lot of logs.
Ours will be arriving two at a time.
Maybe we should rethink this location.
Before we cannot.
Session 02 starts with a move. We swap our birch-ringed riverbank for the maples, put up two new houses, a well, woodshed and storage. We also take a punt on a hunter as our first villager, then lose the light and discover the materials to make a torch were just put into one of the house roofs. Then there is a suggestion to rename our new resident!
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