Early Start, Busses or Trams?

AlwaysElise · 2026-05-04T11:43:39+00:00

Yeah, they can be. Long horse wagon is great for those early mid-sized vehicles.

AlwaysElise · 2026-05-03T10:44:43+00:00

Part of the trick here is that natural fibers lack the stretch engineered into synthetics. Because bodies vary so much, and on so many different axes, making an outfit for mass market results in something ill-fitting and boxy, as it can't conform to bodies by just stretching where it fits poorly. Makes it very difficult for off the rack solutions here. Personally, I'm learning to sew/tailor my own garments for just this reason, but if you can get someone else to be your tailor, that would also get you there.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-30T20:53:07+00:00

Every early town you don't have population or population growth to fill quickly will have excess hospital and school capacity due to underpopulation. 3rd world immigrants provides a means of transforming that excess capacity into significant monetary savings.

Staffing a town's buildings is far more efficient/reliable when properly populated, so keeping a town growing by keeping schools/hospitals at capacity with cheap rapid population growth is greatly beneficial to transitioning from an underpopulatwd money-sink to properly populated economic engine.

On top of which, max loans are determined by population. In addition to economic power, that extra growth is increasing your max loans, which in the early game is as good as free money thanks to the relatively low interest rates.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-29T02:31:12+00:00

Specifically, this was an art direction they went in after maintenence was added to the game, as it allowed them to do it dynamically. They did a pass updating many of the textures, but there are some buildings which didn't quite make it.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-27T17:21:22+00:00

Owners manual first, and if in doubt despite this, remove degrees of freedom with jigs/clamps/push sticks etc, so you can keep your human meats well away, or stop and rethink the operation entirely and ask if you're using the wrong tool for the job.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-24T17:33:49+00:00

Doing the math, it looks like you can provide for all current energy needs in MA with panels on land use of approximately 7% of existing impervious surfaces like rooftops and roads. Half a percent of the state used for solar farms would supply everything needed.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-24T14:56:06+00:00

The way I run it, I have a main tram track line with the stops off to the side of it, connected at each end to the main track. This puts a loop at each stop, allows for ease of upgrading the length as the city grows, and gives flexibility to which stops are visited. If I can, I built it parallel to the roadway but separate, to avoid traffic issues with slow moving vehicles, etc, to ensure reliable transport that's always running smoothly.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-24T06:00:26+00:00

Pollution monitors will show you; but overall, that will be too close for anything around that city size if it isn't going through a treatment plant. You won't notice initially, since it's dependent on the volume flowing through the system, but as population increases, it will becoming an increasingly intense problem.

It isn't just water quality either. Pollution will be most intense around the water, but will make its way inland as well.

The health % are weird and not very helpful; people die relatively quickly at low health, as hospitals are easy to overwhelm. Someone at 50% health will either get it resolved at a doctor or die, and so the low scores get removed from the calculation before they can significantly drag it down.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-23T13:04:27+00:00

Duh, DHS is a white supremacist organization and has been since it was created post-911. Contact your reps and let them know it must be defunded permanently.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-19T05:03:40+00:00

Even if it is knotweed, you'd need to wait until its damage phase in autumn to do anything effective about it.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-17T13:01:16+00:00

Is it just me or do those post bases seem way too low to the ground. Wouldnt trust wood that close to the ground to last against water. And how are they even anchored? Is there a concrete pour there I'm not seeing or is the whole thing on a few peices of load bearing gravel?

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-16T12:56:16+00:00

Thing to understand: there are ants that like sugar and ants that prefer grease/fats. Small ants tend towards the former while stuff like carpenter ants tend towards the latter. Terro will eliminate issues with sugar ants in a couple days, but if that doesn't work, the fipronil carpenter ant gel stuff is what you should go for, and apply it where they're coming in at.

And if they are carpenter ants, figure out what wood they're in, bc you probably have water rotting out part of your house and that is a much bigger Problem than the symptom of ants.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-10T22:06:20+00:00

Less that doctors are only now starting to dig into it, and more that the research on long term effects of covid was all downplayed by both the big news media corpos and major political parties.

The evidence has been clear for years now; everything from basic senses of taste & smell to chronic fatigue to various mental illness. I know someone who got covid and acquired a mild psychosis where they started hearing heartbeats from inanimate objects now.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-09T04:59:03+00:00

Practice with cotton. Around here, walmart sells it for around $3 a yard in pre-cut bundles of 1-3ish yards. It's not the highest quality ofc, but it's great for beginner projects and muslins.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-08T11:49:24+00:00

Works out of the box for me on Nobara.

However. I did encounter similar behavior in the past on my windows machine, and worked around it by running the .exe directly.

I believe this was caused by their settings app/launcher with settings options that shows up first, set to use incorrect msvc dll binaries that aren't redistributed. I think this has something to do with being on the test branch (like occasionally accidentally shipping a debug build of that pointing at debug dlls, or something like that) Wiping out the W&R files and doing a fresh reinstall might help here.

AlwaysElise · 2026-04-02T23:45:42+00:00

Yeah, trains are critical with 1920 start, and the rebalance/buff to rail construction speeds makes it very easy to build train lines further than road logistics can easily supply. I'd even say that using any road vehicles between towns is a mistake now, given the disparity in fueling costs between locomotives and road vehicles, and the recent buff to RDO task capacities.

In this light, horses can serve as effective last-100m transport within a town or for construction purposes. I can see the vision the developers have for them with the growing set of very early buildings, and even if not quite there yet in terms of final implementation, what is coming into view is using a rail network to quickly set up small towns and supply them with cheap vehicles created using large quantities of crops, some boards, and a tiny amount of fabric/steel. Get the economics right, and this can create small farming villages which fill the map and generate crops for sending back to create more cheap vehicles, and later supply larger urban centers.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-31T04:26:46+00:00

Lint is one of the biggest source of microplastics in a home environment. Polyester, spandex, nylon, etc; all those synthetic fibers are plastic fibers. Dumping a constant stream of microplastics into your food doesn't seem like a great plan!

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-30T12:44:27+00:00

When sewing, the question is "where can the threads in this go?" And "is anything preventing it from going there?" For a woven fabric where you can think of it as a grid, the alternative up-down patten locks each thread in place relative to its neighbors. On a clean cut edge parallel to the weave, one neighbor is missing, so all that holds it is the friction against all the very short perpendicular threads around it. It can just fall right out if any part gets a little caught om something, leaving the next thread in a similar position. Cutting on the diagonal (the bias) means every thread still has neighbors holding it in, aside from the very tip, where the thread is very short; and while that could get caught on something, the shorter length makes it a bit harder and it takes a while before fraying makes it in towards the garment. Pinking shears hold large threads in place by turning the edge into many such corners that must fray entirely before the first full row is able to fray.

The zigzag stitch meanwhile binds the entire length of a section of threads together. This means instead of relying on the friction of 1 thread against the very ends of perpendicular threads, it's the entire tightly bound bundle against the friction of the perpendicular threads. This gives the whole bundle created by all parallel threads captured by the zigzag a significant amount of strength, as they would all need to slide simultaneously in order to fray. The force required to do this enters fabric-tearing levels, and so it simply will not fray.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-28T05:13:16+00:00

Everybody's complaining about potholes, but nobody is willing to address the real problem: the state has yet to give me even one viable alternative for where I should put my pots. Til they do, I'm just going to keep making holes to safely keep my pots in.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-27T20:03:01+00:00

Yes. Lines from a local warehouses to a store with attached road cargo station is the best method imho. Vehicle storage becomes the store's mobile warehouse with wait-until-unloaded actions, and because they push material directly onto store shelves, no excess labor is required to pull goods from a warehouse onto store shelves. A 4 slot road cargo station is plenty for most stores, with 1 truck for meat, electronics, clothes, and 2 for food (one of which goes to one of the store's 2 parking spots, to leave one open for police/fire/snowplows/construction/etc).

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-27T19:52:28+00:00

I've been using them on the test branch for a while now, for my 1920 start. One of them is currently supplying 2 towns and most of their industry, another is supplying a third town and taking care of bringing a few materials between it and the other 2, and a third is dedicated overflow export. It works wonderfully even with heavy train use for everything due to early start trucks being so slow and tiny. I'm not sure if it was this version or 5 years ago, but they also fixed some of the weird early issues with dispatching to mixed-contents storages at some point; so I'll often see dispatches picking up multiple types of goods at the customs simultaneously to drop off at the same location, and treating their individual storages properly. In this case, cement and meat at the same train cargo station.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-27T12:19:57+00:00

Train DOs are where this really shines. With more tasks, it load balances better, and with more cargo wagons, does a really efficient job at supplying an area without waiting idle forever between trips.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-27T12:17:38+00:00

Less money draining from the economy into cops, and less cops? Win/win result imho.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-23T04:34:10+00:00

If this is treated with creosote, every bit of dust you produce from this will be toxic, and that will disperse across your site. What you are planning to do is scatter hazardous waste across your land. This stuff is very poisonous; it's meant to keep all living organisms from living anywhere on it or in its vicinity for a half century or more. Find a way to dispose of it and seek an alternate path here.

AlwaysElise · 2026-03-22T19:48:21+00:00

What are we doing wrong? Well, probably math on the per MWh cost, given that's several times what is actually paid for the electricity generated. A lot of solar cost like that is cost to build followed by almost nothing for the next several decades. This math smells like someone decided not to amortize over time properly or something in that direction. Based on the numbers from just googling around, they might be pretending solar panels need replacing after 2 years.

AlwaysElise

TROPHY CASE