If you'd asked me yesterday how I felt about Pierre in Stardew Valley, I think I would have said "fine." I don't particularly like him but I don't have any specific gripes against him, either. My biggest issue is probably that he opens his store at 9 am and I'm up at 6 am every day, so if I head straight to his shop I have to hang around a while for him to open his doors. That can be a bit annoying.

But I was wrong. I clearly have some deep-seated seething hatred of Pierre, because when I saw that there's a mod that lets you open your own shop in Stardew Valley, my first thought was: revenge. I will fill my shop with my seeds and make Pierre come and buy them from me! Then we'll see who is shopping in whose store! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!

OK, it's not the most diabolical revenge plot in history—and may not even qualify as revenge at all—but the mod, called Merchant—Become a Shopkeeper is pretty cool anyway. You purchase a cash register from Robin, place it inside a building on your farm (shed, barn, etc), and that building becomes a shop. Set up tables and place items on top of them, then open your store and villagers will pop in to buy something.

It's genuinely delightful: for once, you're not the one running all over the place to find people, they're all coming to you, and seeing folks like the Wizard or the Bookseller (who will visit if you're selling books the day he's in town) show up in your store is really satisfying. Typically, only a few shoppers will visit at once, but there are special days where there's a big buying rush and you'll see a whole bunch of people come to your store on the same day.

There's a haggling minigame when someone buys something, so you can try to squeeze a few extra coins out of them, and another mod I installed, called Customer Add-On for Merchant, gives villagers' store-based dialogue a touch more personality. For instance, when I tried to jack up the price on a jar of honey for Robin, she said "What do you think this is, a house upgrade?" When the Wizard visited my shop, he said "Ah, Goat Cheese… I foresaw this transaction." Pretty cute.

Anything you can put on a table you can sell (no shade, but Pam immediately bought a bottle of wine) and there are a few things you can do to improve your profit margins. Decorating your shop will make it more appealing and you can purchase increasingly expensive marketing campaigns to drum up business. Your convenience store can be made quite convenient for you, too: one upgrade will re-stock your shelves with items you've placed in a chest, cutting down on some manual labor.

And yes, I eventually replaced everything in my shelves with blueberry seeds I'd generated from my own seed maker and lay in wait for Pierre. He eventually came in and bought a pack. He offered me 32, but I haggled him up to 35, then checked the wiki for what I already suspected: he sells them for 80 in his store. My revenge plot fizzled, sure, but it's still lots of fun to finally have my own store.

I'm sure this fact frequently causes someone at the New York Times to wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, but here's the harsh truth: Wordle is gonna run out of valid five-letter words sometime in 2027. There just aren't that many left that haven't already been used.

It's not great news for us, either. What the hell else am I supposed to do for a few minutes every morning: exercise, enrich myself with literature, or have a conversation with a loved one?

At least there's a little brightness in our grim future. Fast-forward from 2027 to the year 2077, and it looks like we'll still be able to play a bit of Wordle between our visits to the ripperdoc for some new chrome.

It's all thanks to a mod by MisterChedda called Gonkle for Cyberpunk 2077 (via RPS), which gives you a suspiciously Wordle-like word game for you to play on your in-game phone. And even better, it's not so strict on the words you can use, fully embracing all that gritty and silly Night City slang. Choom isn't just a cool thing to call your buddy, it's also an answer in Gonkle.

"Every 24 hours (specifically midnight UTC), you'll get a new puzzle delivered as a text message on your phone—same word for everyone, so you can compare results with others," says MisterChedda. "After installing, you'll receive a subscription confirmation and from then on, daily puzzles arrive via text with a simple prompt."

You're probably familiar with how it works already, prole, but just in case: "Remember you only get 6 guesses and standard Wordle rules apply," says MisterChedda. "Green means correct letter in the right spot, yellow means it's in the word but wrong position, gray means it's not in the word at all."

The wordlist is manually curated and "pulls from Cyberpunk sourcebooks," so you should have some nice five-letter slang words to play with. Preem! "Puzzle data is served from a simple API, so you're always in sync with other players. Miss a day and you miss that puzzle—don't be a gonk!" warns MisterChedda.

Check the mod's page at Nexus Mods for full installation instructions: Gonkle requires a handful of other mods to run.