Comic Timing: Team Fortress Celebrates Its 17th Birthday

Get your secret decoder rings out, make sure you have access to a librarian with a murky past, and would it kill you to put on some tweed? Team Fortress celebrated 17 years of being Team Fortress on August 24th, which Valve completely missed. To sort-of-but-not celebrate this occasion, they've made a new comic starring everyone's favourite sky-diving CEO, Saxton Hale. Part one is long and here, and there's more to follow. This is typically when Valve pulls some sort of trick on everyone, so I've saved the blogpost, and sent a copy via carrier pigeon to CERN. If they can't figure out if anything's been secreted away, then no-one can. Valve also added a new crafting tool into the game, and it's pretty Strange.

It's a Chemistry Set.

The new item drop works like all good chemistry sets do: you place specific items into in and it'll output a Strangifier, an add-on that will allow you to modify a specific item in your inventory to create a strange variant of that item, making Strange Weapons out of ordinary, boring, beasts. It's another inventory clearing and trading boosting addition to the game.

I find its position in the ever-expanding lore of the game very confusing, and wonder why the same function couldn't be achieved using the current messy crafting system?