*re-reads My Own Story*: Damn This Is Some Good Shit

funny story

Way back in 7th grade english class, we got an old substitute teacher who did his very best to impress us students. He wasn’t successful, but he cracked jokes and made puns that would make everyone sigh in disappointment. That day we were working on poems, but since there was a substitute not much work was being done. I was slacking off by talking to the boy next to me. After a little bit he started jabbing me in the side as a joke and I started slapping his arm whenever he threatened to jab me again. So, the substitute sees this as a great chance to give us some fun “advice”. He says, “You know, when a boy messes with a girl like that, it means he has a crush on her.”

Everyone in the class went wild with laughter and the boy and I started gagging. Because we are twins.

The teacher was mortified when we told him and he turned really red in the face. He didn’t try to impress any of the students anymore, that’s for sure!

Gabriel: If i put the word ‘Dark’ in front of that, will i still be able to transform?

Nooroo: …yes i suppose?

Gabriel: …Cool

So, I've been playing Dwarf Fortress for a while now, and tbh, the game will never cease surprising you with the things that go on. Maybe this is tame to someone, but what happened here in my 4th fort threw me for a loop.

So, I was trying to figure out what was going on with my dyer and why my dying isn't really progressing. I've been paying a little attention to the dwarves going into and out of my nearby clothiers, and notice one is a metalcrafter, which is kinda odd, but I recall authorizing them for that work detail. A moment later I see a notification pop up saying that she just had "Dwarven Babies" to which, I immediately think "Aww cute, I'll check out her twins real quick"

Wait triplets? Oh wow, and sure enough she's got three lovely sons clinging to her. I figure I'll check their names under relations, but wait...

So I look at her on the tile, and see Zasit, Olin, and Reg all there, and they're all 0 years old. I click to see Kulet, and it just takes me to their mother's tile. I glance over the tile. No Kulet. I pull up her mother's relations again, and try again. No Kulet. I've got the game paused, and all it does, regardless of which button I push for Kulet, is show me their mother's location. I have no idea where she is, I can't find her at all. I'm like mildly horrified at the concept that she's just abandoned her daughter somewhere, and I just can't find her.

Well seeing this reminded me of a similarity between Mabel and Stanford. Neither one wanted to be rescued. Granted Mabel didn’t greet her brother with a punch in the face, though one could consider Dippy Fresh to be worse than being punched in the face. (And in addition Mabel did decide to leave willingly as well as on good terms with Dipper.)

I MEAN SERIOUSLY MABEL. THAT’S MESSED UP. YOU CAN’T JUST REPLACE YOUR BROTHER. AND DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT TRYING THAT EITHER FORD.

I cant stop thinking about the walkie talkie. Dipper always talking to it for three days and always finishing with "i am going to find you" ahhhhhhh

that’s probably what kept him going, what kept him being brave and strong when he was all alone dealing with crushing fear and guilt… the knowledge that his sister could be out there somewhere. she might still be alive, so dipper had to stay alive. he hadn’t given up on her. i don’t know if he actually ever would have given up on her. i think you could flash forward years later and he’d still be trying to find her, cause if he gave up on her that’d be like giving up on himself.

and you know who that reminds me of?

The pros of making your own alcohol:

-It’s fun

-You can make whatever you want

Cons:

-Expensive hobby to get into

-Not all ideas are good ideas

-Waste alcohol/fermentation biproducts

Like I like yeast as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to eat the fermentation sediments. I don’t like Marmite, so I don’t want to eat the DIY marmite. Anyways, the end result of this is a… product I’ve dubbed the “Sewer Brew” named in honor of Dwarf Fortress

It’s all the sediment and a small amount of mead, mixed with sediment from a ginger wine batch. It’s somehow still fermenting, so I have to regularly crack the lid, and it smells like straight alcohol.

I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t even know why I collected it in a jar in the first place.

Too long for a reply, but I hope you don’t mind the answer to it:

So actually the difference is kinda straightforward ironically enough. Engraving is skill regarding engraving images into walls and floors. Stone carving is carving of stone into objects, particularly trade goods. Stone cutting is cutting stone into furniture or blocks. The easy way to tell is which station they do it at. Engravers only engrave things through the engrave command. Stone cutters are those who smooth floors, carve fortifications or minecart tracks, and work at the stone mason’s workshop. Stone carvers work at a craftsdwarfshop.

Masons btw are those that build the walls, drawbridges and other structures that need to be assembled if they’re made out of stone blocks or stones

Edit: Stone Carvers carve fortifications & mine cart tracks. Stone crafters work at a craftsdwarfshop. There’s also a recipe on the stone mason’s table that uses stone carving instead of cutting, but I don’t know which one it is. Stone cutters still smooth floors, so that information is accurate. Tbh, just cross-train your stone workers imo, excluding stone crafting. You’d rather have a strange mood on a stone cutter than a stone crafter

Dwarf Fortress is truly the game of all time.

These are all distinct skills. How in gods name am i meant to intuit the difference between Stone Carving and Stone Engraving

Come to think of it, asking a dwarf a question like that is liable to attract some strange looks. In dwarf culture you'd have to be a special kind of idiot to not know the difference between carving and engraving, after all. This is just Dwarf Fortress providing the authentic culture shock experience

GIRL. HOW MUCH SHIT CAN YOU OWN?!

Hey girl...maybe share some shit for the rest of us?

I'd say Wendy still misses Dipper, but hear aim is too good.

Winter for a Pine Tree

Disclaimer: Hey this gets dark real fast (0 to 60) and was written primarily to “Balance out the forces of the universe” After a friend of mine took a join project I’d been involved in and taken it off the rails into Wendip Territory (The stories ended up splitting into 2 stories written by two authors each instead of 1 story by 4). Anyways to balance out the force of the universe (and yes, I’m looking at you Graviti and Futur) I wrote this.

It gets dark so I tagged it as Depravity Falls, and spoiler alert, it involves death. So you’ve been forewarned.

Keep reading

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)

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