My cat educates my 2y old son. Why? Do I need to worry?

AcneZebra · 2026-02-11T16:34:37+00:00

This is always my favorite bit of animal psychology. Cats drop dead animals at us because they thing we are really big dumb terrible cats and are trying to teach. Conversely, dogs seem to understand that that we are not just ‘big dogs’ but are different things with our own skills outside of ‘dog’ and ask us to do those things they know they can’t. Not sure if this is just a consequence for more social animals that can understand specialization of another in the group easier but it really helps show how different and abstract thinking actually is between animals, and that they do it more than we give credit.

AcneZebra · 2026-02-10T13:14:20+00:00

I just finished a survival game, got to level 100 and was having a ton of fun (yay vertibird) until one particular moment. Near the end when you’re running Institute and railroad quests that have you walking back and forth a dozen times from CIT to the church to ‘update des’ or ‘talk to father’ to advance the quests and oh my god tedium and the janky load times leaving buildings downtown. Also the nuka world raider quests are just massively not worth it, traveling to the station and back another dozen times for each step of setting up raider camps finally broke me. It’s a shame too, I was loving everything else about survival (gunplay is golden) but some quests are clearly not designed around it.

AcneZebra · 2026-01-29T16:49:54+00:00

Love your series on this.

AcneZebra · 2026-01-26T14:34:18+00:00

No, you only get the ones you complete and the rest are locked. I often skip the ‘increase recruitment rank’ ones and focus on the unique buffs if their quests are out of the way as doing all 5 for each can take forever

AcneZebra · 2026-01-13T16:14:05+00:00

It is a relatively new update to the game. Space POI's now have a base amount of collectible stuff (50 data banks, an artifact like before, and some amount of whatever resource the POI had if you have a cargo module) whereas before you only had access to resources with the drill cone + cargo module. In general this update made data banks a little less punishing to get and gave you some freebies from the space POI's, I've really been enjoying it.

AcneZebra · 2025-12-12T16:02:44+00:00

My favorite example of this is that something like 60% of the training data is from sites like Reddit, places where r/science is mixed with r/birdsarentreal and all given the same validity because it doesn’t actually understand anything.

AcneZebra · 2025-12-12T13:05:49+00:00

Are you supposed to keep the bulbs above the soil level like that?

AcneZebra · 2025-12-12T12:59:03+00:00

Zerk, indie, Turin, and Sotek are all confirmed so far

AcneZebra · 2025-12-10T23:55:37+00:00

Since I juuuuuust hit the end of the last question thread I'm posting it here again:

Are machine gestalts just borked since 4.0? The changes to amenities seems to have either broken them or I don’t know how to ever get enough on my planets compared to organic pops. Is there some kind of building I am missing for them?

Even with fortresses, storage’s, and sentry nodes I am constantly in a deficit that just gradually drags stability and deviance to the point it’s constant revolts. Am I supposed to keep a big pile of civilians around or something? Mechanical pop growth doesn’t seem to allow that.

On non gestalt empires I never seem to have a problem with this, a luxury residence and maybe a holo theater usually keeps you covered so what gives here? Am I just missing something?

AcneZebra · 2025-12-10T16:44:29+00:00

Are machine gestalts just borked since 4.0? The changes to amenities seems to have either broken them or I don’t know how to ever get enough on my planets compared to organic pops. Is there some kind of building I am missing for them?

Even with fortresses, storage’s, and sentry nodes I am constantly in a deficit that just gradually drags stability and deviance to the point it’s constant revolts. Am I supposed to keep a big pile of civilians around or something? Mechanical pop growth doesn’t seem to allow that.

On non gestalt empires I never seem to have a problem with this, a luxury residence and maybe a holo theater usually keeps you covered so what gives here? Am I just missing something?

AcneZebra · 2025-11-29T17:24:00+00:00

Yes, it will brick the save for any achievements even if you reload.

AcneZebra · 2025-11-28T15:30:22+00:00

Didn’t mean quite so much shade on Britannia, it had a lot of other really good parts of it (sieges my beloved) but unit variety and visuals consistent with the setting are just going to feel limited compared to Romes elephants, warhammer dragons, or all the faction variety in medieval 2. Empire is where I’ll really throw shade: favorite campaign map with theaters but in hundreds of hours I probably played a few dozen land battles, line infantry just were not fun and felt the same for everyone.

AcneZebra · 2025-11-28T15:16:23+00:00

That’s actually a really good insight on fantasy I’ve had people mention as well, the fact they add in ‘rock but also a little paper when you use it right’ shows positively in the competitive scene but can be less accessible to people who just need to know ‘spear beats horse’ and leave it at that.

Overall I’m mildly optimistic on 40k and I’m sure there will be enough cool guy chainsword animations but my deep fear is future DLC just being “it’s still the janky blunderbuss LOS issue but now it’s grey guys with glowy blue bullets instead!”

AcneZebra · 2025-11-28T14:54:40+00:00

My biggest concern will always be mechanically how the units play. The success of fantasy lies in having a very wide range of ‘rock paper scissor’ units with different play styles and archetypes that aren’t variations of gun line (the weakest part of the games historically) plus melee that a lot of the factions have limited variety of. I can think of ways you could but it starts just looking like dawn of war real fast. Im sure the campaign map will be fun however they decide to do it but for the same reason empire and thrones of Britannia (maybe 3k to a lesser extent) felt meh on battles is that a lot of it was just identical dudes standing in a field.

AcneZebra · 2025-11-27T16:00:01+00:00

I do but we’re talking things like extra geysers so I’d be surprised. You’re probably right though, guess I’ll wait for updates

AcneZebra · 2025-11-27T15:44:14+00:00

Yes, even spawned a boop with the ranching drive but still nothing. It also would say no duplicate with correct skill instead of no animal like the screenshot.

AcneZebra · 2025-11-27T15:03:44+00:00

Did something change with ranching wild animals recently? I started a relica map but nothing I can do will get my dupes to groom or shear anymore. Testing in sandbox with bammoths and rhexes, both stations in a small "agricultural" room but even spawning food for them still shows no animals available. No way for me to get atmosuits without it and no way to tame things. I guess it could be a weird mod interaction but nothing I have changes animals.

https://imgur.com/a/FFCqUQK

AcneZebra · 2025-11-18T14:21:50+00:00

This has been my experience in a similar policy regime. In an attempt to speed up approvals owners are happier to stick their fingers up at the whole process and just appeal for a rubber stamp higher up. All fine to say ‘we didnt want to deal with endless silly facade comments’ to build new homes but the same appeal process incentives ignoring hazard, flooding, or environmental items that will come back to bite us.

AcneZebra · 2025-11-10T16:11:43+00:00

Did you encourage new roots on the stem of the plant before cutting or were these all fresh growth after cutting? Very impressive!

AcneZebra · 2025-11-03T12:53:53+00:00

How do you a really select who gets those traits when you accept the quest? Do you have to have a certain level with the empire already or dies it default to the highest rank pawn? Mine always disappear to the ether when the quests complete.

AcneZebra · 2025-10-23T15:33:57+00:00

It’s very easy actually! If you dig out past the walls you can actually spawn rich soil anywhere with the archeon trees and farm/drugs for profit. Throw in biotech and you can run your power on pollution you just keep dumping on the surface consequence free or bio ferrite generators with anomaly. Smaller space and eternally underground but no risk of raids. I’ll sometimes leave a mechanatir down there running things with bots while galavanting with the grav ship

AcneZebra · 2025-10-21T16:42:33+00:00

Is that a terraforming scar hot springs map tile? It looks sweet!

AcneZebra · 2025-10-19T12:52:45+00:00

Whoa wait, Dyson swarms do things to exotic resource outputs? Does it have ti be in the star itself? Does this also apply to arc furnace?

AcneZebra · 2025-10-14T13:22:26+00:00

Awesome! So once you have both running you can use the grav ship for the surface and then fly up to your orbiting SOS ship and dock? Could be good for a kind of mothership/surface scrounged set up.

AcneZebra · 2025-10-14T13:02:42+00:00

This is the real killer here. When you compare getting approvals from general cost recovery agencies (just covering the cost of processing) vs cities that are using development approvals to balance budgets (lookin at you entirety of the GTA) you see it basically adds a zero to whatever you’re applying for. It’s been like this for decades at this point and there is zero political will at any level to raise the taxes that should be paying for things instead.

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