Daily Dose of English 224
Potions
Daily Dose of English 224
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a daily dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English, your English. The transcripts for all episodes and more are in benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're talking about potions because I have been actually playing a video game in the past couple of days because I saw this game during some of my Czech immersion and I thought it looked really, really cool and I wanted to give it a try. And so I wanna just talk about it for 10 minutes or so. We might get into other potions conversations, but what I really like about this game is how cool the design is, and how creative it is, and how it feels to play. So it's called PotionCraft Alchemist Simulator, and it is what it says on the tin. You are an alchemist who brews potions, and yeah, you brew potions for people. So a potion, by the way, is some sort of magical mixture that has an effect typically on the person that drinks it. It's usually a beverage or a drink. If you've ever seen or read Harry Potter, for example, they have potions classes. Where else are potions well known? Like any like fantasy magical fantasy book or movie is gonna have potions They're relatively well known. Oh lots of video games have potions right if you ever played like an RPG Dungeons and Dragons, there's potions there. So like I'm sure What what are some RPGs the Witcher Elden Ring Skyrim, right? Those are gonna have potions, right? But this is a little bit different because you are playing the role of somebody who makes potions. And you have your little shop and you have only a few jobs. You brew potions, you can pick some ingredients for the potions, you can sell the potions, and there's also something else in the game that I haven't unlocked yet. But that's basically everything. But all of it is essentially in the potion brewing mechanic, which is really creative and cool. And this is what made me want to try it. So in the potions brewing area, you have a couple of different tools. You have your mortar and pestle, which is the little stone bowl that you can grind stuff up in. That's called a mortar and pestle. And then you have your cauldron, which is like a big old pot for cooking potions. We call that a cauldron. Then you have a potion base, which is water in this case for me, which you can pour more into. You have your spoon for stirring. But then you also have this cool potion map. And so imagine that there's this big old map in the middle, and your potion always starts in the middle, the very center of the map. And each ingredient that you add allows you to move the potion from where it is in the middle to somewhere else on the map in a specific pattern. And so this is where it starts to get really interesting. So each ingredient has a different name. I forget the actual names of them, but there's like a fire flower or something like that. And so the fire flower naturally is going to move the potion to the left in a zigzag up and down pattern, but you can grind it up to get further. So by default, it only goes, let's say a meter. I don't know, I'm making up numbers, but it only goes a meter. But if you grind it up, you can get it to go up to two meters. And so you have that control. You can grind up the flower and get it to go a little bit further. So you have control there. Then when you put it into the potion, you can stir it and you don't have to stir all the way. Depending on how much you stir, it moves along that track only a certain amount, which also gives you more control because you can stop a little bit early or a little bit late or whatever it is. You can also combine ingredients, right? So let's say you want to build a potion that is actually the recipe ends up like far up into the left, right? So I think that's where there's a potion of explosion. There's an exploding potion that's up to the left. But you can't really get there just by putting in one ingredient. You have to put in like an ingredient to go to the left, an ingredient to go up, an ingredient to go to the left again, and up again. But you have to do several in a row to create the pathway to get from basic just water to move all the way to the potion. And so you have to combine ingredients, grind them the right amount, plan your route, because on the map, there's also a bunch of obstacles, which is really cool, right? There's certain areas that are death, right? If you hit that part, your potion just fails. It doesn't work. And so you can't hit those sections, right? So you have to go around them. And so the more difficult the potion is, the further away on the map it is, and the more difficult ingredients, or the more difficult pathways you have to find to get there. And that's, so that's just really cool on its own, but there are a ton of different ingredients that you get to use, and all of them have very, very different pathways that they can make the potion go. This is a little hard to explain, so if you are curious, definitely look up a gameplay video of somebody playing Potion Craft. But there's all these different ingredients and some of them go in wild loops, some of them go really far down, some of them go kind of diagonally, there's all these different options. But some of them are really rare or expensive and so you have to be careful with them because you only have one of this special mushroom And so if you waste your mushroom on a potion that doesn't work or whatever, it's lost. The other thing that's also cool is that you don't know where the potions are on the map, right? So for example, I still haven't found where the sleeping potion is. And some customers have asked for a sleeping potion. but I don't really know where exactly it is. And so I'm still trying to find where the sleeping potion is on the map by exploring it. So several times I've made, I don't know if I explained, yeah, because you can't see most of the map. But several times I've made potions that basically fail on purpose or that I don't need just to explore a new section. Right, I wanted to go up here, then over there, and then down here. And oh, look, there's a new potion. I don't know what it does. Let's try making one. But then the other thing that's really cool is that you can make different levels of potions, right? So you can have a weak potion, which just basically touches the location. If you get close enough, it becomes a weak potion of healing, a weak potion of glowing or whatever. But then, if you get a little bit closer, like you're right in there, because there's a little place that you're supposed to line up the potion, yada, yada, yada, that's when it's a normal potion, right? You get a level two potion, but you can also get really precise and specific with where you're aiming, and you can make a strong potion. And strong potions are obviously the best kind, they are stronger, people will pay more for them, And so you want to get those, but they're kind of hard to do because if you mess up just a little bit, you have to add a whole new ingredient and ingredients are kind of expensive. Because that's another layer of the game. That's really fun when you're there's people that come into your store mostly buying potions. They say I Need to cut firewood all day. Do you have something I can help me and you go? Oh, yeah, I can brew you a strength potion So you go and you make them a potion of strength and you sell it to them And I'll pay more if it's a stronger potion pay less if it's a weaker potion And, but then also they, they added a fun little mechanic called the haggling. So to haggle is when somebody says this is worth 10 gold and you go, I'll give you eight. They go, no, no, no, no. It's worth 10. You go, I'll give you eight. And they go, okay, nine. How about nine? They go, okay, deal. That's haggling. And you can haggle in this game, which is basically what's called a quick time event, where it brings up this little slider that's going back and forth. And you have to click on targets, right? You have to click on these little yellow targets. And if you get the targets, you get a better price. And if you miss the targets, you get a worse price. You have to pay the worst price you lost at the haggling. And so that's a very quick, fun way to improve your earnings or lose money. And it can be kind of, It's cool because if you're doing poorly, you get stressed out. You're like, oh no, I have to get these right or else I'm gonna lose money. And then you miss more and you're like, oh no. And so that's a very easy, fun way to try to earn more money. there's a bunch of other little parts of the game that are also cool that you want to let you improve your potion making you can buy new supplies you can buy new materials so yeah that's basically everything about the game I've been having a lot of fun with it I've only played for I don't know, like an hour and a half or something, but it's really fun. It's very simple to understand. So if you aren't a huge gamer and you want like a fun little like discovery, creative, cool little game, I would recommend it. It's also on sale when I got it. So it was like eight bucks and it was definitely already worth that. So if you can get it on sale, it's an easy purchase in my opinion. But yeah, that's everything I have today about potions. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you have any recommended games or anything like that, let me know down in the description below. But other than that, I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one.
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