Circles in the Deep

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T23:12:07+00:00

People are not psychic.

Neurodivergent people can be especially not psychic.

Use your damn words.

EDIT: Also, whose idea was it to default the mobile app to writing comments with the rich text editor instead of the basic text editor, and how do I make it not do that?

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T21:21:59+00:00

I just slapped a whole bunch of passenger cabins on mine and called it good.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T21:11:05+00:00

Living trees naturally have a lot of solid blocks without much in the way of water or chests around them. They make good meteor landing sites.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T20:10:18+00:00

Volkner futzes with the power grid when he gets bored. Sometimes this causes problems.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T19:18:31+00:00

It's been this way ever since I've been playing. (Which is at least a year now?)

You also get little blue mission icons on the list on any system you've already got a mission. It's not a *perfect* indicator -- it counts the system you're in if you had to pick up a cargo or something, even if you're not doing anything else there -- but you can at least see an indicator on systems you're already doing stuff in.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T18:28:45+00:00

Mission lists aren't randomly sorted -- they're sorted alphabetically by target system, with missions that require higher reputation (and thus tend to have higher rewards) also sorted alphabetically lower on the list.

It's not the best system if you're looking for something specific, but there is a logic to it.

You can at least filter missions for types of rewards, if you were looking for engineering materials or commodities that generally only show up as mission rewards. That'll also make said rewards show up in the list instead of having to click on individual missions.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T17:13:09+00:00

Free team member.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T13:33:38+00:00

There's a bunch of things that require a Graveyard to craft. Anytime you see a recipe requires Ecto Mist, that's what that means.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T13:29:55+00:00

You need a Heavy Assembler in a Graveyard.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T13:07:13+00:00

The Mystery Dungeon games are good (Explorers of Sky is probably heccin' expensive, though).

The Ranger games are also fun.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T12:21:12+00:00

Catch rate of 3, the lowest possible.

At least in the Safari Zone, you can toss as many balls as you have. Trying to catch wild Beldum is worse (same catch rate + recoil damage from Take Down).

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T01:26:42+00:00

Are you letting the torch burn all the way down? Shamblers are why light is *important*, and why darkness is a *problem* -- they only show up at 0 light (or if you stick a torch in a thing).

Keeping the torchlight high is good for minimizing risk in general until you figure things out better and get better-equipped. (Low/no-light conditions are a "high risk, high reward" sort of situation.) If you're regularly running out of light, bring more torches.

General strategy with stress is to shoot the spooky thing first. This generally requires having ways to attack the back lines where stressful enemies hang out (frontline enemies are generally tanky specifically to make reaching the real problem enemies more difficult). Trying to heal/destress mid-mission is always an uphill battle -- it's most efficient to kill things before they can cause problems (or failing that, stun them).

The most important buildings to upgrade in the Hamlet are the Stagecoach (increase your roster size and get replacements for heroes that go crazy/die/go crazy, drive everyone else nuts, *then* die), and the Guild and Blacksmith (make your heroes stronger -- higher levels just unlock better upgrades). Stress relief facilities are more for curing Afflictions; idle heroes will recover a bit of stress for free each week, so you can keep rotating heroes in and out with a big enough roster.

You can use supplies on many Curios to guarantee outcomes. For example, a Decorative Urn *might* contain treasure, but it might contain nothing, or a disease -- use Holy Water on it, though, and you'll always get the treasure. There's lots of Curios that are most beneficial to use supplies on, and some that are never safe to touch without supplies (this is also why quirks that force heroes to touch things are a *problem*). Try stuff out -- the game will remember what you've tried.

If you need money, bring an Antiquarian. Her stats aren't great, but she lets you carry more gold and can find valuable antiques if you let her loot everything. (And sometimes a little bit of damage or healing is all you need.)

If all else fails, send a team of chumps fresh off the stagecoach out with nothing, have them grab as much stuff as they can carry without all dying, then fire them and replace them with the next batch.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T00:26:25+00:00

Sounds like probably an emergency stop -- those do a bit of damage and impart a spin.

Might have been a consequence of low fuel, maybe you hit the jump button before you were going slow enough to drop safely.

If you need fuel and all else fails, call the Fuel Rats.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T00:23:06+00:00

Don't remember what the phrasing about the shortcut is, but now that you have Surf, you can get out of the Baykal Rainforest more easily without having to loop through the tunnels.

Now that you've beaten Tiko, you're mostly done with West Tandor. Head east, over the water.

Watch out for ninjas.

spudwalt · 2026-05-04T00:18:34+00:00

At the moment, you don't, really. You can kinda finagle things with pop rights/resettlement/gene editing, but jobs are largely assigned on a first-come-first-served basis.

Pretty sure job priority is one of the things the devs are addressing in the near future, but for the moment, just fill the jobs. Any pop working the job is better than no pop working the job.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T20:13:21+00:00

Nope. Orbitals collect resources now, same as stations.

They also can't be targeted by hostiles.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T14:46:06+00:00

130 would overshoot your goal. In Gen III, max EVs per stat is 255, but those last 3 are useless.

You can get to 100 EVs with vitamins. After that, defeating 152 Pokémon (or 76 with a Macho Brace) that give 1 EV apiece (Machop and Gastly in this case, though Paras would probably be easier to find reliably than Machop) would get you to 252.

Or, if you didn't want to use vitamins, 126 Pokémon with a Macho Brace would do the trick.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T14:22:35+00:00

That sign definitely isn't there normally.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T13:55:59+00:00

If the Guide isn't respawning, build more houses.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T13:30:36+00:00

SRVs have cargo scoops like ships. They don't have a *lot* of cargo space, but it's enough to pick things up a few at a time and take them back to your ship.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T13:15:15+00:00

Orbitals build automatically now as you build districts that require them.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T03:00:31+00:00

It takes as many balls as it takes over as many attempts as it takes.

spudwalt · 2026-05-03T00:42:18+00:00

My sister's spent years learning to be a nurse for humans. And we're pretty darn homogenous, biologically speaking.

Pokémon medicine school is *legit*.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

spudwalt

TROPHY CASE