Next, I'd be heading into the Red Sands region where I'd hit the level of 50. I would also start to work on maxing out all the standard gear that I have. Along with having to deal with the toughest monolith encounter I've had so far.

While traveling through the Red Sands region on my way to the town of Blackfell. I stopped to do quite a bit of farming of tungsten. I had already farmed a decent amount in the last region. I still however needed massive amounts of it for improvements to things like my motorcycle.

I kind of wish ores in this game had a bit wider spectrum of color. At least tungsten has these giant crystal formations sticking out of them. Making them easy to spot and tell the difference from other types of ores.

I ended up filling up on most of my carrying weight. I even found some gold nodes out while mining as well. Getting some gold ended up being quite a solution to the energy issue I was having for upgrades.

One massive thing I was still struggling with was having enough energy link to upgrade my gear. It turns out I was missing out on something major that would turn things around for me and no longer make energy my bottleneck.

That ended up being taking some base upgrades I unlocked after researching certain level milestones. I had been neglecting to look at them. For the most part, they are random in what you can get. More times than not I'd end up getting stuff I did not care much for.

While some of the choices I got to pick for my base I don’t see myself getting much use. I did end up getting Precious Metal Refining as one of my options. This would let me smelt silver and gold.

Why was that so important? In each safe town, you can sell items to one of the NPCs for energy links. There is also a weekly limit to how much energy link each vendor has.

After Smelting a few silver and gold bars energy was no longer an issue. I ended up with 7 silver that sold for 42k energy links or 6k energy links each. Along with two gold bars that sold for 12k each for another 24k energy link. I now had more than enough energy for upgrades and teleporting around. I now had other resource bottlenecks slowing down my progress.

This was not the only base upgrade I'd be making either that would end up helping me out. I added a third floor to the base. I turned that floor into an indoor growing room. I had enough points to unlock grow lights and some other upgrades in the tech tree.

I also ended up being able to unlock and upgrade to bigger solar panels and more energy generator slots for the base. I was a little disappointed that the higher-tier solar panels only gave five more energy than the small ones. It was at least enough of an upgrade to meet my needs for a while.

I’d even start playing around more with the cooking foods aspect of the game. Since I now could start to grow quite a few different things. Along with already hoarding quite a massive number of seeds. I thought I might as well see what that aspect of the game has to offer as well.

Certain foods give you some buffs. It’s still something I need to invest more into the tech tree on and try out different dishes. At least my character is eating more than just dried-out meat and anything I get for a reward or loot.

I was kind of shocked by how empty some parts of the Red Sands region were. Don’t get me wrong there were some rather interesting and unique locations I'd end up farming at to get the crates and resources I needed.

This place is also a desert and they sure made it feel that way. A lot of winding roads with just nothing to see for a while. This region was even a bit of a pain to get around since it was also on a mountain.

I also went on another massive gear-upgrading spree. I needed to be level 40 before I could use tier 5 of all the gear and weapons I had blueprints for. It also kind of makes me wonder what the level 50 items will be like. Since tier 5 is the highest I've seen on any blueprints I own.

There was then a lot of the same old same old. I went around to each of the hostile town regions on the map and cleared them out for loot and found as many crates as I could. I ended up burning through a lot of healing supplies and getting killed quite a few times in the Red Sands region.

There was at least no shortage of some strange elites to fight along the way. This guy was massive and I had to keep popping the next highest balloon on his head to deal damage to him.

There were also quite a few side quests. None of them stood out. Sometimes when I found myself going into an area that was five levels higher than my current level. I’d go back to other regions and find some random side quest I had not finished yet.

One thing I realized I fell behind on was running bounty silo missions. I did not even realize I was behind till I did a lower-level one. Then I noticed another one had popped up elsewhere.

I kind of lost track of how many of them I even ended up doing. They as always got me even more alarmed that the sheriff issuing the bounties is involved in something horrific. As you finish each one small clues keep slowly spewing out. I wonder for how much longer I'll even be willing to work with him.

At least I was able to get some missions out of the way that I've also had for a while. One was finding a moving house that relocated between four locations. I had been to each location a few times over and ended up going AFK in one spot for a while.

I even jumped in solo to this strange cargo community event. I had to shoot out a truck that was moving around on the map. Then some strange creature broke out and since I was the only player partaking I kept getting picked.

When the creature was on me. I had to run to different strange-looking blob things. It then would collect spores for them and in return I'd end up getting sproutlet which I have no idea what that is even used for.

Thankfully when I got back it was there. Moments after I got into the house it raised the air and started walking to a new location. Kind of odd I had never seen a walking house while out exploring.

After a decent amount of grinding, I ended up giving the monolith boss The Forsaken Giant for the region a couple of tries. While they were each a failure. I ended up learning quite a bit about the fight.

I then went back out and ground some more. I ended up hitting level 50 and made further upgrades to my gear. I then went back into the boss fight and tried a few more times till I had a takedown.

This fight had a lot going on. Sometimes it would sweep its arm across the arena. Other times there were lots of adds. Lots of damage is tossed onto the ground as well.

The thing I noticed right away was if you were not hitting the boss in a weak point that moved around. You were just doing 1 damage. This was however a bit of a bait.

On the platform, you are fighting on. It’s broken into a left, middle, and right. If a single platform takes too many blows from the boss hitting it with its hands. It breaks apart and if you are on it you fall and die.

The trick was to not be so tunnel-visioned on moving around to do the most damage as possible. You needed to try and even out all the platforms taking an equal amount of hits. While still doing enough damage to move along the fight.

That along with some timed jumps to avoid some of the damage he did. Picking up flowers that ended up on the ground and tossing them at him to open up weak spots to shoot. Taking out any adds that were spawning.

It was quite a fun and even a little rewarding fight. I also needed to defeat him to get the storyline to move on to the next region. I was at one point considering just trying to group up with random players for this fight. I’m kind of glad I stuck it out and ended up getting a solo win in the end.

Final Thoughts

Not the most memorable region out of all the ones I've been in so far. I ended up yet again not moving my house. As I just never found a spot I liked. I did at least have a blast in this area.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Once Human.