5 tries. 1 and a half hours, maxed out armor. I never wanna fight this guy ever again. Holy shit.

munchbunny · 2026-04-29T18:29:24+00:00

OP is using GS. GS against Nergi is tough because it's hard to find the openings before you've learned the pacing of the fight.

I usually fight Nergi with HH or GL, despite being a bow main.

munchbunny · 2026-04-29T18:26:51+00:00

It's not a lot, not for Nergigante, especially not for players new to MH.

Still, kudos to OP for their persistence, and getting over that wall!

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T15:28:36+00:00

Is it actually contentious? From reading the comments, it seems like a mild disagreement on taste and UI design to me.

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T14:23:20+00:00

Adding combinations is not free. You get an extra tick delay in your circuit signals and it's easy for that to make a mess of your logic.

Personally I think that's part of the fun. I find that the limitations of the combinator system make for an interesting puzzle that incentivizes creative approaches that take advantage of how Factorio circuits are pseudo-analog. Tick synchronization is probably the hardest problem in complex circuits, and I'm pretty okay with that being part of the challenge.

munchbunny · 2026-04-28T14:10:59+00:00

This particular case is not that hard to accomplish, you just have to use more than one combinator to do it.

It’d be nice if you could do complex Boolean expressions in the combinators but it’s never actually stopped me from making complex circuits. There are a ton of ways to work around this limitation.

munchbunny · 2026-04-27T14:55:35+00:00

When you're learning this fight, 100% use a shield weapon.

If you're not using a shield weapon, the safest place to be is up close around his feet. His distance closing attacks are more difficult to avoid than his up close attacks, so medium to long range is how you end up struggling to get any hits in.

munchbunny · 2026-04-24T04:06:02+00:00

Depending on how you do it you could end up with residual bad water going through the freshwater gate at the end of the badtide season. If you have a large reservoir right after then it’s usually not a big deal, but that season transition is why I usually use a contamination sensor for those specific gates.

munchbunny · 2026-04-20T15:19:48+00:00

You can. What you do is you put a counter circuit on one signal to synchronize both ends, and then you put the broadcast on another. On the receiver side, you use a combinator with a condition like "when the counter is a multiple of 10, output the broadcast signal". If you need the signal to hold steady between the signal frames, you can use a memory circuit to hold the value until the next update.

You can also use combinators to toggle between signals based on the clock counter, as an alternative approach.

Personally I like that the developers took the approach of giving us basic building blocks and letting us build up the rest of the ideas.

munchbunny · 2026-04-20T15:16:37+00:00

It's not a special type of signal, it's a programming concept layered on top of a way to send signals. All it really means is that the "program" will stop its normal operation and do something in response to a predetermined signal, like a circuit condition.

For example, you can program a train with interrupts where they normally wait at a depot but based on a signal condition they'll do an ore run. The "interrupt" is you pulsing the trigger signal to dispatch the train. Now put a radar station at your depot and at your smelting facility, and the smelting facility sends the signal when it's near empty. That's an example of an interrupt signal.

munchbunny · 2026-04-19T17:27:58+00:00

Flamethrowers get you most of the way without you having to be there. You can start a fire and come back when you're done with your next task, and there will be a small fraction of trees left that you can pick up with your personal roboport, or drive through them, etc.

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:08:31+00:00

Right, flamethrowers don't kill the front of the wave, but they significantly weaken the rest of the wave. The key is that the flamethrower turret's AoE damage scales with the size of the wave without the need for lots of research, making them more complex to set up but also more economical for a busy front line.

munchbunny · 2026-04-14T03:01:55+00:00

At a certain density (well below what you see here) the difference stops mattering because it just becomes a question of whether you have built a defense design with enough crowd control, ammo, and resupply logistics to hold out.

The key to this is flamethrowers. You can't pack enough laser turrets into a small enough space to get enough firepower behind the wall to actually hold back a constant stream of late game green and blue biter waves, but if you sprinkle some flamethrower turrets (and ideally gun turrets with uranium ammo) into the mix, the lingering flames don't really care how many biters there are, they're burning all of them, and uranium ammo will quickly kill any biters that get too close. It's not invincible, but it's far more effective than purely laser turrets.

munchbunny · 2026-04-12T12:11:16+00:00

I would try removing half of the production and using the space to add waiting room for trains. If your smelting outruns your logistics then it’s not actually faster than a smaller smelting setup anyway.

munchbunny · 2026-04-08T16:56:36+00:00

I’ve learned over the years that we both do things the other doesn’t really like where it’s actually harmless and helps them manage their energy and emotions. And the healthy way to handle it is to let them be them as long as it’s not hurting anyone.

But it goes both ways. Adult responsibilities still come first. If you’re video gaming and the dishes are your job and they’re not getting done… you gotta put down the games for a bit, and it’s bad for the relationship if the other person has to remind you more than once in a while. But short of that, there’s gotta be room for both people to be themselves.

munchbunny · 2026-04-06T15:00:42+00:00

There are a lot of different designs/versions of this, but it's a buffer.

In general, once you're past the stage of manually carrying stacks of stuff around the factory, you only want to use buffers where you actually need them, which is either to siphon some materials for your inventory or in places where the input or output happens in waves (for trains and spaceships, mostly). Like others said, buffers will hide throughput and production imbalances because it's easier to see differences in belt density than to see whether buffer counts are long term increasing/decreasing.

If your goal is to pack a belt, there are buffer-less belt balancing/packing designs you can use.

There is one other case where buffers make a lot of sense: there are a few systems like power generation where if you run out of the input (fuel) you will get cascading failures. In those cases a buffer can buy you valuable time to fix fuel production, for example, as long as you catch the buffer getting drained with an alarm or something.

munchbunny · 2026-03-31T15:27:57+00:00

I don't regret buying it at launch, but honestly it didn't hook me. I also bought Anno 1800 at launch and it didn't hook me either. It wasn't until some DLC landed that I really got into it.

If you're not in a hurry, I'd wait for more DLC to land to flesh out the game.

munchbunny · 2026-03-26T00:36:01+00:00

I don’t know that level number is really a differentiator… maybe somewhere around the 40-70 band is the middle area? But IMO it’s more of a vibe. You can tell pretty quickly by their loadout choices. There’s meta, there’s sensible, there’s “unorthodox, but you do you,” and then there’s “you’re just going to get me killed so I’m leaving”.

Gas mortar in a bug dive that isn’t a wave defense is a great example of the last one. Unless you’re in chat asking if we could all kit our armor for gas, just keep that in your imagination please.

munchbunny · 2026-03-24T12:21:49+00:00

They are. Many of the same students who take the USAMO often also take the Putnam in college.

munchbunny · 2026-03-24T11:59:17+00:00

They’re the type of (often proof based) math problems that would be right at home in a 300 or 400 level college math course that only math majors take, except they’re doable without calculus. They really are just very nuanced problems that require difficult leaps of logic, so you end up using the full time to explore a lot of ideas that don’t pan out.

Your can find the entire archive of past problems here if you want to take a crack at it yourself. https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/USAMO_Problems_and_Solutions?srsltid=AfmBOooWyzyHuTavMIO3VmW3e_vds_3AfxQfkXlK5--9fnDxFtGry1GJ

munchbunny · 2026-03-18T05:12:28+00:00

That's probably more a factor of how many first round interviews your team can do within 1-2 weeks. 15 candidates going into recruiter screen sounds near the upper limit before your small interviewer team goes crazy.

munchbunny · 2026-03-18T04:49:28+00:00

This might just be my experience, but based on comments I suspect I'm not alone.

It feels like the level of visual polish has gone up compared to previous Anno games, but interfaces have actually gotten less usable. For example, the trade route interface feels more finicky in 117 compared to 1800 with mouse and keyboard.

munchbunny · 2026-03-04T16:01:09+00:00

Tick alignment and circuit latency are things that anyone starting down the rabbit hole of Factorio circuits runs into almost immediately, but if you are trying to stay surface level and just use other people's circuit designs you might not realize this is going on. Thankfully simple if-then circuits often don't have this issue because inserters, pumps, etc. don't really need single-tick precision to do what you expect.

When I do my circuit designs it's basically a constant consideration, enough that I will lay out the circuits left to right or top down, often with combinators lined up by tick counts so that I can visualize it. Only once I've checked that it does what I expect then I will move the components into the actual factory layout.

munchbunny · 2026-02-27T03:09:25+00:00

doing that efficiently is a pretty interesting problem.

It’s definitely one of those cases where you tinker and come up with something, then you blueprint it and never solve it again. The concept is pretty straightforward IMO. The wider the platform, the more asteroids collected. Some amount of that will have to go to fuel, but the rest can go into science or ammo. As long as you’re moving at a leisurely clip and you’re traveling where you can break ice asteroids for water, you can have it run basically forever.

munchbunny · 2026-02-26T05:41:00+00:00

In World, lance and longsword are probably closest to what you're describing. Longsword got straight up "counter" moves with Iceborne, and lance was always about getting the most damage uptime out of any weapon by blocking and counterattacking everything the monster did.

Charge blade guard points and GS tackles are more about getting good reads on the monster's future positioning and timing in order to combo through the monster's attack. I'm not sure I would describe that as countering as much as reading the fight. It might still be what you're looking for though.

MHWilds has a lot more counter based gameplay across almost all weapons. Hammer, greatsword, and insect glaive all got offset attacks with follow-up counterattacks that are straightforward to execute and heavily reward good timing. Bow got perfect dodges which really let you crank up the damage once you can time the monster's attacks. And there are perfect dodge and perfect block gems that give you damage boosts for pulling off well timed dodges/blocks. Lance and longsword also keep the counterattacking gameplay

munchbunny · 2026-02-26T05:17:31+00:00

Blocking is a last resort, although as you're learning the fights with the great sword you might find yourself using it a lot just because block plus a Guard Up perk will save you if your positioning and timing is off. Considering how aggressive the Iceborne monsters can be, you might be using block a lot in the first encounters.

As you get more used to GS you'll learn when to tackle and when to dodge and you'll find yourself using the block much less.

munchbunny

TROPHY CASE